Category Archives: Short Notes

A weekly feature that collects interesting links and adds a paragraph or two of content.

Demonizing the Girl Scouts

June 11, 2012 – 10:26 am

An outrageous part of the culture war that isn’t getting enough press is the Religious Right’s demonization the Girl Scouts. The gist of the attack (found here) is typical guilt-by-association stuff: If there’s some reason to name the Girl Scouts in the same sentence as Person X or Organization Y, then the Scouts are responsible for anything X or Y can be accused of doing.

Last month, Catholic bishops joined in by starting an investigation. Like Americans in general, about 1/4 of Girl Scouts are Catholic, and many Scout troops are associated with Catholic parishes. What are the bishops worried about? The WaPo explains:

Critics of the Girl Scouts contend their materials shouldn’t have any links to groups like the Sierra Club, Doctors Without Borders and Oxfam, or other groups that support family planning and contraception. Other critics are unhappy that the American Girl Scouting organization is a member of an international scouting association that supports contraception access.

Some parents have reported that when their daughters go out to sell Girl Scout cookies, they have had doors slammed in their faces by people refusing to buy their treats because they think the profits go to support abortion and birth control.

Why would people think that? Because the Right has been linking the Girl Scouts to that demon of demons, Planned Parenthood. (Indiana Congressman Bob Morris called the Scouts “a tactical arm of Planned Parenthood”, and his regional Girl Scout organization responded.) How can anyone argue with logic like this from the Washington Times?

The best evidence that the Girl Scouts have not actually severed ties with Planned Parenthood is that Planned Parenthood has not tried to destroy them.

(Weirdly, the guilt-by-association thing doesn’t apply to the Washington Times itself, which was founded by the Moonies in 1982 and has been owned and operated by them ever since. The Religious Right is fine with the WT being America’s flagship conservative newspaper.)

A good overview of the actual Girl Scouts and why they enrage the Right was published last September on Slate.  From the beginning, Amanda Marcotte argues, Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts were set on different paths.

While scouting for boys was about preserving the tradition of rugged, outdoorsy masculinity, scouting girls looked to the future, shucking off Victorian models of women as delicate flowers and replacing them with physically capable and adventurous women. …

These origins set the two organizations on strikingly different paths, despite their common emphasis on physical activity and volunteerism. The Boy Scouts still employ a nostalgic worldview, while the Girl Scouts focus more on keeping with the times.  …

It’s telling that Christian right critics avoid dealing directly with the group’s “go girl!” brand of empowerment, choosing instead to promote lurid tall tales. Maybe their tactic amounts to a tacit acknowledgement of just how mainstream the Girl Scouts’ feminism is, and just how far from the mainstream the anti-feminist views of the Scouts’ Christian right critics have become. The Girl Scouts focus on building self-esteem, teaching girls to care for their health, and promoting educational opportunities that help the girls’ economic futures. Its Christian right critics cling to a tradition where women exist primarily to serve.

This is part of a larger pattern: Increasingly, the Christian Right is rejecting the traditional American model of a melting pot and embracing a kosher-kitchen view of society, in which everything must be in its proper cabinet, safe from contamination.

Any organization founded on the view that we can put aside doctrinal differences to pursue common goals — Girl Scouts, public schools, public universities, umbrella charities like the United Way, and so on — is targeted either for takeover, destruction, or replacement by a group that has been cleansed and purged. (The most absurd replacement is Conservapedia, which is necessary because Wikipedia is unclean.) The attack is always the same: These groups mix us. They expose us to the views of others. They stir our time, money, and effort into the same pot with the time, money, and effort of people who might disagree with us on other issues.

For example, the Right’s problem with the Susan Komen Foundation wasn’t that Komen funded abortions. (It’s an anti-cancer organization that has nothing to do with abortion.) But by mixing with the anti-cancer activities of Planned Parenthood, Komen became unclean. It has to be purified, destroyed, or pushed beyond the pale before it in turn contaminates the righteous women who want to cure breast cancer.

Girl Scouts is a melting-pot organization. Girls who might have different beliefs or goals or heroines mix together around the common goal of maturity, empowerment, and making the world a better place. But as they color their visions of a better world, girls might discover outside-the-lines groups like the Sierra Club or Doctors Without Borders.

Contamination! Unclean! Unclean!

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Carolina Rules the Waves and other short notes

June 4, 2012 – 10:38 am

Mindful of the warning from Cracked, I try not to get too excited about proposed state laws that haven’t passed at least one house. The 50 states have around ten thousand legislators, so one is bound to be proposing something crazy whenever you happen to look. That shouldn’t be news.

King Canute orders the tide not to come in

Still, this might pass if sane people don’t pay attention: North Carolina is trying to regulate the rise in sea level.

OK, that’s not exactly true. Scientists say sea level is rising at a slow-but-exponentially-increasing rate. So by the end of the century it will most likely be 1-to-2 meters higher. That’s important if you’re building coastal infrastructure that’s supposed to last a long time, like a bridge or a highway. You don’t want it to be underwater in 50 years.

But North Carolina’s 20 coastal counties (and the beachfront developers who dominate politics there) want to reject that reality and substitute their own. So Replacement House Bill 819 says:

Rates of seas-level rise may be extrapolated linearly to estimate future rates of rise but shall not include scenarios of accelerated rates of sea-level rise.

As Grist’s Jesse Zimmerman explains, linear estimation

will lead to predictions that are much less catastrophic, and much more reassuring for people building resorts in the Outer Banks. The predictions will also be flat-out wrong, but that’s nothing new for North Carolina.

So North Carolina’s planners could consider seas rising 8 inches, but would be legally bound to ignore science’s 1-2 meter best guess. Any sane North Carolinians might want to notice RHB-819 and do something about it before it becomes law.

Help a befuddled female make good decisions for her uterus. Join SponsorAUterus.com

So imagine you’re a pregnant woman and your boyfriend deserts you. You get so depressed you attempt suicide. The ER doctors save you, but not your fetus. What should happen next?

Well, in Indiana you get charged with murder.

An unexpected consequence of having an African-American president: People’s opinions on race are starting to affect their opinions on everything, even the president’s dog.

At the end of a fascinating New York Magazine story about turmoil at the top of the New York Times Corporation, we find this:

That has led to speculation, and not for the first time, that Mayor Bloomberg, a long-fabled white knight for beleaguered Times staffers, could swoop in and save the paper from itself

According to the story, the current market capitalization of NYT-corp (which also owns the Boston Globe) is about $1 billion. So if you’ve got a billion dollars jangling around in your pocket (as Mayor Bloomberg does) you can remake two of the most prestigious newspapers in the country however you want.

Komen continues to suffer from its dip into partisan politics. Participation in the Race for the Cure is down.

The unconstitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act is working its way up the ladder. A 3-judge panel of the Court of Appeals in Boston unanimously upheld a lower court’s ruling in favor of legally married same-sex couples who are being denied federal benefits. Next stop: Supreme Court.

Insurance mandates have been part of the healthcare reform debate since the early 90s, when they were a conservative alternative to single-payer proposals for achieving universal health care. So when did the idea that mandates might be unconstitutional surface for the very first time? July of 2009, a few months after President Obama proposed his plan. Until Obama got involved, nobody published any doubts about a mandate’s constitutionality.

Nicholas Kristof is also interested in Michael Sandel’s “What Money Can’t Buy” (book, article), which gave me the Sift quote two weeks ago, and I discussed in “Citizen of the Highest Bidder“.

Follow-up to last week’s “Food-eaters Are Not a Special Interest Group“: John Robbins asks “Why are twinkies cheaper than carrots?“.

24 states have considered taxing sugary drinks. In the face of massive lobbying by Coke and Pepsi, only one proposal passed (in Washington state). It was repealed after an expensive and deceptive referendum campaign financed by the big beverage companies.

What if we taxed unhealthy foods and subsidized healthy ones? Nobody would be forced to eat brocoli, but the incentives would change a little.

About that big increase in federal spending under Obama … it never actually happened.

The list of former Republican senators critical of their party’s radical turn is getting longer: Alan Simpson, Chuck Hagel, and John Danforth, in addition to the recently defeated Dick Lugar.

Glenn Beck never went away. He’s just behind a paywall.

You know who are uniquely qualified to discuss women’s health issues? Men.

By weeklysift | Tagged | Comments (1)

Slinging Mud at Clean Energy and other short notes

May 28, 2012 – 12:02 pm

For years, the worst thing you’d hear about wind, solar, and biofuels was that they were impractical; fun to dream about, but when you got serious about energy you’d come back to fossil fuels. Now, though, as more and more farmers plow around the windmills in their fields and businesses and homeowners see real savings from the solar panels on their roofs, the dirty-energy industries realize they’re going to have to get nastier.

The Guardian recently published an internal memo from the American Traditions Institute (a shadowy non-profit apparently funded by the fossil-fuel industry) planning (as the Checks and Balances Project put it) “a coordinated national disinformation campaign against wind energy”.

Among its main recommendations, the proposal calls for a national PR campaign aimed at causing “subversion in message of industry so that it effectively becomes so bad that no one wants to admit in public they are for it.”

ATI denies that the memo is official — no conspiracy, just an ATI senior fellow acting as a lone gunman — but adds “we would be pleased to be part of any education campaign to inform the public about the problems with expensive, unreliable wind energy”.

Put this together with the efforts to manufacture a scandal out of the Solyndra bankruptcy, the twisting of research to claim that windmills actually cause global warming, and congressional Republicans’ attempt to end the Pentagon’s bio-fuels projects. (Some Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee must have sided with Republicans in a closed-session 13-12 vote agreeing with the House.) It’s looking like alternative energy is about to join global warming in the culture wars: If you believe that clean energy is actually clean and provides energy, you must be one of those radical Marxists.

This Memorial Day, I’m proud of Vice President Biden. Speaking to a group of family members of fallen American troops, Biden recalled the day he heard that his wife and daughter had been killed in a car accident.

For the first time in my life I understood how someone could consciously decide to commit suicide. Not because they were deranged, not because they were nuts, but because they’d been to the top of the mountain, and they just knew in their heart that they’d never get there again. …

There really is hope. … I promise you (and you parents as well) when the thought of your son or daughter or your husband or wife brings a smile to your lips before it brings a tear to your eye — it will happen. … The only thing I have more experience than you in is this: I’m telling you, it will come.

On the surface, it looked like President Obama was doing nothing substantial for same-sex marriage: He said he favors it personally, but that it should be a state issue rather than an action item for his administration.

Sometimes, though, that bully-pulpit thing really works. It’s not obvious how much influence Obama’s statement had on the NAACP passing a resolution framing marriage equality as an “equal protection under the law” issue, but between the two of them, they seem to have dramatically shifted the opinion of the African-American community.

Middle Class Economist observes: “Romney to Replace Obamacare with…Essentially Nothing”

Mitt Romney seems to think that criticizing his record as a vulture capitalist is the same as criticizing the free enterprise system.

Grist calls attention to the way the fossil-fuel industry games the academic system. A fracking-is-getting-safer report from the University of Buffalo actually came from somewhere else:

Large chunks of the report appear to be lifted verbatim from a document previously published by three of the report’s four authors for a conservative think tank called the Manhattan Institute. This matters because the university study fails to cite the think tank. In this case, it’s very relevant: The Manhattan Institute receives financial support from oil and gas companies heavily invested in fracking, like ExxonMobil. Instead, the study released this month is stamped only with the University of Buffalo’s academic imprimatur.

Kevin Connor, director of the Public Accountability Initiative, put it bluntly:

The report’s inaccurate and biased analysis and the authors’ conflicts of interest suggest that the University at Buffalo is being used as an academic front for gas industry misinformation, rather than as a venue for independent, informative analysis.

I’ve talked about this kind of thing in more detail before. There needs to be a name for it, preferably something related to money laundering: information laundering? research laundering? I’m still working on it.

By weeklysift | Tagged | Comments (3)

196 People and other short notes

May 21, 2012 – 11:33 am

79% of Super-Pac money in 2011 came from 196 people.

Grist collects climate-change-denying quotes from all the likely Republican VP candidates. My favorite is by Virginia Governor Bob McDonald:

Too often in the debate it’s missed that the Earth has been warmer in the past

That’s like: “I don’t have to worry about falling off the Empire State Building. I’ve been at street level before and it was fine.”

Say, Europe, how’s that austerity thing working out?

Well, at least they didn’t try something like Obama’s stimulus. Imagine what a disaster that would have been.

An NUI Galway economics professor sums up the current proposal that Ireland double down on its austerity policy:

Take a country at the bottom of a depression. Force it to run budget cuts and tax increases year after year after year. Force this same policy on its neighbours and trading partners. Run this into the foreseeable future and hope it results in stability, confidence and recovery. This is emphatically not the safe option. This is a dangerous experiment, completely without historical precedent.

Why the Right really hates Obama: They don’t want to be this cynical about America, and it annoys them that Left doesn’t have to be.

Pat Robertson tells a viewer to destroy a friend’s Buddha statue. His resemblance to the Taliban gets stronger and stronger.

So you know how much money the Koch brothers spent to influence the 2010 elections? About $50 million more than anybody thought. It was funneled through a string of front groups with names like the American Future Fund and Americans for Job Security.

Another great article from Cracked: 6 Ridiculous Lies You Believe About the Founding of America.

Two respected political scientists have written a book about their research, which shows that political polarization and gridlock is overwhelming the fault of the Republicans. Their article in the Washington Post went viral. How much discussion did that garner on the Sunday major-network talk shows? None.

Easter Island heads have underground bodies. Who knew?

A new way to describe privilege to people who can’t hear the word privilege: In the Game of Life, white straight male is the lowest-difficulty setting.

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Does Romney’s bullying matter? and other short notes

May 14, 2012 – 11:43 am

The second most-talked-about story of the week was the Washington Post’s report on Mitt Romney’s days at the exclusive Cranbrook prep school, and in particular on his bullying of a gay underclassman.

The biggest debate was around whether anyone should care. Liberals hate the attempts to make scandals out of Obama’s distant past. Isn’t this the same kind of hit piece?

Not entirely. It’s much better sourced than the typical Obama-went-to-a-madrassah story. The sources are named; they were Romney’s classmates; and one of them was his best friend and roommate. Hit pieces come from people who are rewriting history to make themselves look good. Mitt’s roommate knows he’s making himself look bad. He’s telling the story because he feels bad; he’s regretted his role in the bullying incident ever since it happened.

But even if the WaPo’s story is 100% accurate, why should we care? It was a long time ago. Don’t we all have high school memories that make us cringe?

After telling his own high school cringe story, Steve Almond says that’s exactly the problem: Romney shows no signs of cringing. He says he doesn’t remember, that “I did some stupid things in high school, and obviously if I hurt anyone by virtue of that, I would be very sorry for it and apologize for it.”

I would be sorry, if I hurt anyone (like a bunch of my friends remember me doing).

A few weeks ago in The Narratives of November, I talked about the stories that each campaign is trying to establish in the minds of voters. Incidents like this only matter politically if they find a place in those stories. Like the dog on the roof incident and “I like being able to fire people“, this one does.

Mitt Romney’s policies, like Republican policies in general, impose sacrifice and suffering on Americans who are already down on their luck: people who need food stamps, unemployment benefits, or help paying for medical care. You can spin that two ways. Positively, Romney is a decisive leader making tough choices in difficult times. Or negatively, he just doesn’t care.

It matters a lot which way that spin goes. In the 1980s, was Romney the business visionary who realized how corporate America needed to change? Or was he the vulture capitalist who gave no thought to the lives and communities he might wreck? Today, is he the grown-up in the room, who overcomes his sentimental reactions to do what needs to be done? Or is there nothing to overcome, because he has no feelings for anyone but himself, his family, and his super-wealthy peers?

If he can’t even respond to the WaPo story with something as simple as: “I’ve felt bad about that incident for years, and I wish John were still around so I could apologize to him face-to-face”, then the he-doesn’t-care spin gets a big boost.

A real mom lays out what she really wants:

Obama’s support of same-sex marriage is brave, but it’s not in the same league with LBJ’s speech supporting the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

Bad as Johnson’s delivery was, I always tear up when he gets to this:

Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.

Maurice Sendak’s last interview with Stephen Colbert was a good way to go out.

Paul Krugman predicts the endgame in the long-running Euro crisis.

Just as the Mayan calendar starts running out, somebody finds another Mayan calendar.

Or from the Left: “Obama caves on high-fructose corn syrup.”

Senator Richard Lugar was never exactly a moderate, but at least he would listen sometimes and think about the national interest rather than his party’s interest. His message after losing a primary to a Tea Party challenger:

Ideology cannot be a substitute for a determination to think for yourself.

A very sophisticated quiz to help you figure out which party lines up with your views. I came out Green, probably because it doesn’t ask: “Do you want to vote for somebody who has a chance to win?”

Salon looks at the cost of college and concludes: As government spends less on higher education, students have to spend more. And what government does spend is more and more likely to get siphoned off by exploitive for-profit institutions.

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Where the Jobs Are and other short notes

May 7, 2012 – 11:24 am

Here’s a comparison between the Bush recovery of 2003-2005 and the Obama recovery of 2010-2012. The original author’s three circles emphasize these points:

  • The Bush recovery was aided by an increase in government jobs, while government has been the biggest job-losing sector during the Obama recovery. (Didn’t see that coming, did you?)
  • The sector where the Bush recovery had its second-biggest advantage was construction. These were largely housing-bubble jobs.
  • The Obama recovery shows a sizable gain in manufacturing jobs, which was a losing sector during the Bush recovery.

Balkinization’s Jonathan Hafetz comments on an appeals court ruling that John Yoo can’t be sued for his role in the conspiracy to torture American citizens, because his torture-justifying legal opinion wasn’t “beyond debate” at the time he wrote it.

The “debate” over torture, such as it was at the time, was largely manufactured by John Yoo and others precisely to engage in conduct that the law prohibited. The court thus takes what might be described as part of a conspiracy to commit torture as the reason to insulate those responsible from liability.

Click for a larger version:

Guilt-by-association is a variant of the ad hominem fallacy:

This Sarah Palin BBQ has a big mouth and smoke coming out of her head. Who says sculptors don’t do realism any more?

Media Matters does a great job of tracing the spread of a bogus story: the claim that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt was about to legalize necrophilia for bereaved husbands.

When it comes to making serious issues both amusing and understandable, Cracked’s David Wong is getting right up there with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. His latest: 5 Ways to Spot a B. S. political story in under 10 seconds.

Henry Aaron was the intellectual godfather of Paul Ryan’s plan to replace Medicare with vouchers for private health insurance. Now he thinks it’s a bad idea.

When Ezra Klein questioned the wisdom of Mitt Romney reassembling Bush’s economic team and re-proposing his policies, he thought he didn’t need to remind everyone how bad the Bush years were for the economy. He was wrong.

Nicholas Kristof doesn’t usually go off over nothing. If he’s worried about endocrine disruptors, maybe we all should be.

Canada, always more sensible than the U.S., is doing away with the penny.

In 2009, three terrorist wannabees planned to put homemade bombs on the New York subway at rush hour. They were serious — collected stuff to make the bombs, picked targets, and so on.

They got arrested before they hurt anybody, were held in ordinary jails, and charged with breaking actual laws passed by Congress. The ringleader was convicted Tuesday in the same federal court in Brooklyn that any other federal offender might see. (His two friends pleaded guilty — without torture — and testified against him.) He faces the possibility of a life sentence in the same kind of penitentiary any other criminal would go to.

Somebody want to explain the Gitmo military tribunal thing again? We needed to circumvent the whole American system of justice because …

Funny or Die lets Republican women tell us where they want government: Not in their banks or their classrooms — in their vaginas.

I think it was Picasso who said, “Photoshop is a lie that makes us realize the truth.” Original Patrick Stewart knighthood photo here.

Two popular novelists joined opposite sides of the partisan divide this week. Stephen King minced no words in his Daily Beast op-ed pleading for higher taxes on the rich: “Tax Me, for F@%&’s Sake!”

Meanwhile, Orson Scott Card wrote in favor of a North Carolina constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage (which is already illegal in North Carolina).

No, legalizing gay marriage is not about making it possible for gay people to become couples.

It’s about giving the left the power to force anti-religious values on our children. Once they legalize gay marriage, it will be the bludgeon they use to make sure that it becomes illegal to teach traditional values in the schools.

… The left is at war with the family, and they want control of our children’s education. That’s what those signs on the lawns are about.

I’m not making this up – it’s already happening wherever the left has complete control of education.

Regular Sift readers can easily guess that I found the King piece delicious and the Card piece horrifying. But I’m sure one reader comment is being echoed by partisans on both sides:

It’s too bad when an author I like just goes off the deep end.

Remember: Books don’t get to choose their authors. If you like the Dark Tower or Ender novels, they haven’t changed.

This is too true:

This week the moon was unusually big and bright, due to the full moon occurring at the closest point in the moon’s orbit. Here’s how it looked in Morega, CA.

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Bad Arguments and other short notes

April 30, 2012 – 10:45 am

This week’s articles are so wordy that I’m going to focus the short notes on images.

Don’t know your ad hominems from your slippery slopes? This poster can help.

Or you can show your opponents where their response falls in the pyramid of refutation.

Here’s how democracy works:

Most editorial-cartoon flow charts are funny. This one is just accurate:

I keep hoping that Obama’s pop-culture appearances will tempt Mitt Romney to prove that he’s cool too.

Obama’s stand-up routine at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner was pretty good too.

Taking on the nuns at the same time they’re challenging Obama on contraception may not be the Catholic hierarchy’s greatest idea.

I don’t know what possesses people to go on TV shows where they are bound to be humiliated. Here, former Texas Board of Education Chair Don McLeroy gets interviewed by Stephen Colbert — in a segment that promotes a documentary critical of McLeroy.

The marketplace gives you great power to decide which corporate octopus will take over the world.

Rachel Maddow continues her reporting on Michigan’s loss of democracy. In this chapter, a petition to put Michigan’s controversial Emergency Manager Law up for referendum is rejected it used the wrong font size. Or did it?

And while it is a step forward for a liberal woman like Rachel to get an occasional seat at the Meet the Press table, how long will it take for male conservatives to treat her like an equal?

The tussle took a more personal turn when Castellanos told Maddow, “I love how passionate you are. I wish you are as right about what you’re saying as you are passionate about it. I really do.”

“That’s really condescending,” Maddow replied. “I mean this is a stylistic issue. My ‘passion’ on this issue is actually me making a factual argument.”

Department of Corrections: In last week’s short notes I balanced the report that high-fructose corn syrup causes autism with a link to an article by the Corn Refiners Association. Here’s a better counter-argument:

If you find yourself near Concord, MA Wednesday evening, come hear me talk to the Concord Area Humanists on “A Humanist Approach to Death”.

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Working for the Man and other short notes

April 23, 2012 – 10:27 am

Our 24/7 news media covers fires and hurricanes pretty well, but does a bad job on major stories that develop over decades. Thursday, Salon published an article that deserved major-media attention, but didn’t get it: 21st Century Chain Gangs by Steve Fraser and Joshua Freeman.

What they’re pointing to isn’t news because it isn’t new: NewsOne.com connected many of the same dots in October (Big Business or Slave Labor? What Prisoners Make in Jail). Vicky Palaez (The prison industry in the United States: big business or a new form of slavery?) was on the story in 2008. Nobody noticed then either.

Here are the dots:

  • Compared to other countries, the United States jails an incredible number of people: 2.3 million in 2010, about 25% of all the prisoners in the world. The prison population continues to increase, even as all forms of violent crime are going down.
  • Prisons are increasingly privatized. More people behind bars means more money for corporations like CCA.
  • Through organizations like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the private prison industry lobbies for legislatures to jail more types of offenders and lengthen prison sentences. The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik describes CCA as: “a capitalist enterprise that feeds on the misery of man trying as hard as it can to be sure that nothing is done to decrease that misery.”
  • Increasing numbers of prisoners (about a million, currently) are leased out to private industry. They work for wages that are sometimes less than $1 an hour, and the workers are in no position to complain if they aren’t treated well. The old trend was to move call centers to India; the new trend is moving them to prison.

Victor Hugo’s Jean Valjean was sentenced to row the galleys for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his family. (How else are you going to get people to row galleys?) We seem to be headed back in that direction. Why should companies pay real American wages when they can get real Americans to work for less? And as legitimate jobs dry up (or lose their purchasing power) due to competition from rightless workers at home and abroad, crime becomes more tempting.

An elaborate parody imagines what the Bank of America should say on its web site. The parody comes from Yes Lab, home of the Yes Men.

The Vatican is cracking down on American nuns, who worry too much about social justice and not enough about the culture wars. The solution? Put a man in charge: Seattle Archbishop Peter Sartain.

Nuns need to learn to take their political cues from male leaders like Peoria Bishop Daniel Jenky, who this week compared President Obama to Hitler and Stalin.

I didn’t expect the revolution to be started by Citigroup shareholders.

A USA Today reporter investigating illegal Pentagon propaganda activities mysteriously becomes the target of an info op.

Attack those who are attacking the status quo (as James McWilliams does in “The Myth of Sustainable Meat“) and the major media (like the NYT) will beat a path to your door.  Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms (who you may remember from The Omnivore’s Dilemma) answers.

Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick reports that conservative judges are feeling increasingly unfettered by standing precedents. Bush-appointed Circuit Court Judge Janice Brown recently wrote an opinion calling on the Supreme Court to return to pre-New-Deal interpretations of the law, an issue that ought to be way beyond her pay grade.

An ad by Californians for Populations Stabilization features an attractive and sensible-looking young man making this argument against immigration:

Immigrants produce four times more carbon emissions in the U.S. than in their home countries.

Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? We don’t hate Mexicans, it’s just that letting them into California is killing the planet.

But where does that argument come from? ThinkProgress traces the 4-fold-increase calculation to a report by the anti-immigration think tank, the Center for Immigration Studies.

Here’s everything you need to know about the Center: They gave the 2004 award for “excellence in the coverage of immigration” to Lou Dobbs, for the same CNN program The Nation summed up as “nightly nativism“.

And here’s the logic of their report:

this study postulates a broad correlation between a person’s annual income and his or her annual CO2 emissions

In other words, immigrants have a bigger CO2 footprint in the U.S. because they make more money here. So this isn’t just an argument for keeping immigrants out of the U.S., it’s an argument for keeping poor people poor.

What if we applied the same logic to other groups? “Don’t create jobs, because the unemployed have a smaller carbon footprint.” or “Raising taxes on the rich will shrink their carbon footprint.”

Or why not go all the way? “We want to cut CO2 emissions by starting a worldwide recession.” But no. In any context but immigration, the message we get from the right is more like this:

Two groups that need help with their messaging. (1) a religious group:

(2) a university (click for bigger image)

I hesitate to link to this because (1) the study sounds very preliminary, and (2) the public got burned so badly by false reports of an autism/vaccination link. But a new study links autism to consumption of high fructose corn syrup.

A dissenting view comes, naturally, from the Corn Refiners Association.

Anders Behring Breivik is on trial for the murder of dozens of teen-agers at a camp run by the Workers’ Youth League of Norway’s Labor Party. A chilling article in the respected journal Foreign Policy sees him as “the tip of the iceberg in a rising sea of radical Islamophobia in Europe.”

The kids were mostly blond Norwegians unconnected to Islam, but Breivik blames the Labor Party for Norway’s increasing multiculturalism.

The Writing Center at St. Mary’s University gets schooled:

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Girls Heart Republicans and other short notes

April 16, 2012 – 11:25 am

In case you were having trouble figuring it out, Herman Cain explained the Obama/Romney gender gap to the Fox News audience:

Yes, President Obama is very likable to most people, if you just look at him and his family. But if you look at his policies — which is what most people disagree with — it’s a different story. And I think many men are much more familiar with the failed policies than a lot of other people.

Which leads Digby to ask: “Who are those ‘other people’ (besides men) you speak of?”

You know, Digby: Girls. Those darling little ladies who swoon at pictures of Obama’s cute kids and don’t worry their pretty little heads about manly subjects like health care or the trade deficit. They say all kinds of silly things to pollsters, but come November their menfolk will set them straight and they’ll vote for Romney. (They’ll probably pout about it for a week or two afterwards — and their heads-of-household might want to be careful about eating the meatloaf on Inauguration Day — but they’ll do what they’re told.)

I’m glad Cain explained it so clearly. Otherwise, I’d have no idea why girls might not like Republicans. Well, there’s the whole we-want-you-to-carry-a-dead-fetus-to-term thing. But that’s yucky. I’m sure girls don’t think about stuff like that.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is another Republican girls ought to love. He dismissed the whole war-on-women theme by pointing to female Republican senators who agree with him:

There is no issue. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison and Kelly Ayotte from New Hampshire and Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe from Maine I think would be the first to say — and Lisa Murkowski from Alaska — ‘we don’t see any evidence of this.’

Except … well, they actually say the exact opposite. ThinkProgress observes:

Three of the four women McConnell names have already come out against the GOP’s war on women — Sens. Olympia Snowe (R-ME), Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK). In fact, Murkowski specifically pushed back on claims like McConnell’s, saying, “If you don’t feel this is an attack, you need to go home and talk to your wife and your daughters.”

Doesn’t that make you want to elect some more Republican senators so that McConnell can be majority leader?

You might think that a Republican woman who gets herself elected senator (like Murkowski or Snowe or Hutchison) might finally get some respect, that the men might listen to her (on women’s issues, at the very least) and not just use her as cover in a some-of-my-best-friends-are-dames way.

Think again.

A new study links conservatism to “low-effort thought”.

when effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases.

It makes a certain amount of sense. In situations where you don’t have two brain cells to rub together, you default to stereotypes and justifying the status quo.

If I’m stressed or tired, it’s much harder to think compassionately or generously. Much easier to think like this: Is there a problem? Somebody ought to find out whose fault it is and kick their butts.

As ego-boosting as this study is for liberals, there might be more to learn than that: When somebody who ordinarily seems to be a good person repeats some ridiculous conservative talking point, maybe the right response is just to say: “Seriously?” Don’t slap them down, just encourage them to think a little harder.

Jim Robinson, founder of the conservative community blog Free Republic, announces an anti-Romney revolt.

I’ve stated many times since Romney started running for the presidency way back when that I’d never vote for him and I will not. … There will be no campaign for this Massachusetts liberal liar on FR!!

Uh, Jim, why?

Romney is a pathological compulsive liar. Lie after lie papered over with more lies. Doesn’t even flinch when caught in bald faced lies, simply tells another big whopper to cover up or dodge the issue. Funny thing, the man actually seems to believe his own latest lies and simply ignores the glaring record of his past actions/lies.

Check out the comments Robinson gets: overwhelmingly positive, with only the occasional “Are you nuts?” thrown in.

That “liar” meme is catching on. Steve Benen is up to #13 in his ongoing series Chronicling Mitt’s Mendacity. Most of it isn’t spin or shading; it’s real that-never-happened stuff.

Crazy Congresspeople #1: Missouri’s Todd Akin explains to a constituent why his fellow Republicans in Congress hasn’t impeached President Obama yet:

I can’t speak for the other 400 and some congressmen, but I believe when they take a look at impeachment the question is do you have the votes to do it?

You don’t need, like, grounds to impeach a Democratic president, just (as Hunter at Daily Kos summarizes): “You know, stuff.”

Crazy Congresspeople #2: Florida’s Rep. Alan West knows how many “card-carrying Marxists” are in Congress: 78 to 81. He later clarified that he was referring to every member of the Progressive Caucus.

Hey, Alan: They did away with cards years ago. It’s all biometrics now. And sub-dermal computer chips. Have you checked for those? Communists have their alien allies insert them into your body while you’re asleep.

Crazy Congresspeople #3: North Carolina’s Virginia Foxx, who has

very little tolerance for people who tell me that they graduate with $200,000 of debt or even $80,000 of debt because there’s no reason for that.

She knows there’s no reason for it because she and her husband graduated with almost no debt back in the 60s, when states gave more support to schools like her alma mater UNC and tuition was much lower. (I’ve already told you what I think about student debt.)

Let’s add a crazy state legislator to the list: Iowa’s Mark Chelgren proposed that child-support-paying Dads should be able to demand that their ex-wives take a drug test. (No War on Women here.)

You know who’s not conservative enough now? Orrin Hatch. Not so long ago he held down the far-right end of the Senate, but the Tea Party has moved past him. “I despise these people,” he says.

Teen pregnancy is down, but it’s still highest in the states that encourage abstinence-only sex education.

A 72-year-old grandmother tells the story of her abortion in 1978 in No One Called Me a Slut. It was a difficult decision, but she was treated with respect and she hasn’t regretted what she did.

I have five grandsons and three granddaughters, and I passionately want each one of them to be responsible and have the same legal right to choose that I had.

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Too Racist for the National Review and other short notes

April 9, 2012 – 11:45 am

It’s rare to see white racism this explicit. National Review writer John Derbyshire (writing for Taki’s Magazine, not NR; the traffic nearly brought Taki’s web site down Saturday afternoon; you may still have trouble raising that “white racism” link to the article), wrote a “non-black version” of “the Talk” parents give their kids about race. (Various black parents had previously published their version of the Talk, for example Daryl Owens.)

Among other dubious advice, Derbyshire tells his son to avoid events that are likely to attract a lot of blacks, and to leave if an unexpectedly large number of blacks show up. He should also not “play the Good Samaritan” to blacks in distress or settle in a town where black politicians are in control. And of course:

Before voting for a black politician, scrutinize his/her character much more carefully than you would a white.

(I guess that’s why we all had to see Obama’s birth certificate and listen to his minister’s sermons — things I don’t recall ever doing for a white candidate.)

Derbyshire lays it on the line that “The mean intelligence of blacks is much lower than for whites.” And of course they hate you anyway, so always use the white clerk at the DMV if you have a choice.

Finally, on the rare occasions when you can find an IWSB — intelligent, well-socialized black (Derbyshire’s acronym) — make friends with them, because

In addition to the ordinary pleasures of friendship, you will gain an amulet against potentially career-destroying accusations of prejudice.

For some reason, that amulet didn’t save Derbyshire this time. National Review fired him. That’s what happens when you forget to use your dog whistle.

Daily Kos’ Bill in Portland puts two and two together:

The Supreme Court says corporations are people. The Supreme Court also says that people can be strip-searched for any reason whatsoever. Therefore, corporations can now be strip-searched for any reason whatsoever. Let’s start with…[Snaps rubber gloves]…oh, how ’bout Koch Industries.

Alternet’s Sara Robinson sees conservatives mobilizing for an all-out attack on state universities.

Democrats introduced an amendment to the FCC Process Reform Act of 2012 that would have allowed the FCC to block FCC-regulated companies from requiring employees to reveal their Facebook passwords. It failed, because all Republicans in the House voted against it. I haven’t found any reason beyond a general distaste for workers’ rights.

Nicholas Kristof’s Easter column “Learning to Respect Religion” is worth reading whether you are religious or not.

Executive pay: Obscenely high and still rising.

Large numbers of journalists continue to believe that it’s not their job to question whether what a candidate says is true.

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