We’re taking a short break tonight and throughout tomorrow to move the website over to the redesigned place. Hopefully by Thursday morning we’ll be up and running at the URL pandagon.net. If you’re using the Blogsome bookmarks, please switch back to pandagon.net. It will be directing to this website but switch over sometime tomorrow or Thursday. You can keep leaving comments here overnight.

For those who make the switch, the RSS feed and other important information will be there. I will post updates here in the meantime until everyone has made the switch over.

I can’t recommend Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America enough, and I’m honored to be asked to be a part of the TPMCafe Book Club discussion of it. Happily, mine is the first post up after Rick’s: Overcoming The Spite Vote.

You’re doing it wrong.

The local Fox affiliate just called Oregon for Obama, 63%-37%…five minutes before another chiron calling Oregon for Obama, 57%-43%.

Nice job, Fox 12.

The word “penultimate” belongs in the same category as the Oxford comma. What that category is, however, is out of my mental reach. Help from the whip-smart Pandagonians?

Am I behind the curve because I’ve never heard of one of these before?

And how does the reporting agency get that information? By that most American of methods:

I’m not crazy, right? This is a frighteningly invasive technique when it comes to employment, right?

Kudos to Catholics for Choice for putting together a report exposing that Bill Donohue is not who he says he is. He claims to be a defender of Catholics against bigotry, but instead, he’s a right wing shill who mainly focuses on partisan political attacks. Scott Swenson has the story. Here’s a taste.

Read the whole thing.

As a single, childless person who intends to stay that way, I have to come out strongly and self-interestedly against giving kids the right to vote. It sounds fair on its surface, but in practice, it’s just giving people extra votes because they have children, since children will vote for whoever they’re told to by their parents most of the time. Let’s face it—those scary men who insist on having 12 children to glorify their mighty cocks satisfy some bizarre religious requirement shouldn’t get 12 times as big a vote as someone like me.

Hat tip.

Republicans vote down a resolution that was basically a gimme for puffing up your own ass: Honoring mothers on Mother’s Day.

No, I’m not kidding. Congressional Republicans all tossed in a “yay, mothers!” vote to get it on the record that they officially liked mothers, and then asked for a revote so they could express their true feelings about the be-vagina-ed hellbeasts. (Yes, I read the whole article and am aware that it was childish tactical manuevering, for those eager to leave a comment before you finish the post. Please finish the post before you correct me.) You didn’t think they’re “pro-life” because life and motherhood are sacred, right? At the end of the day, remember this: Bitches are always trying to get away with something, so come out swinging even on the most mundane things. After all, honoring mothers on Mother’s Day started in the U.S. as part of that hippy-dippy peace movement crap, which resulted in women getting the right to vote. So it’s not for nothing that congressional Republicans think first you respect motherhood, and then you’ll be treating women like they’re human.

The explanation of all this is that it was a tactical move to bring the House to a standstill. But was it purely a coincidence that they took a stand against mothers?

Wow, lest you think the culture portrayed on “Mad Men” is exaggerated, it seems it might be smoothed over to protect our delicate nerves instead.

The one thing about feminism that amazes me is that things changed so fast that we forgot how bad things really were.

Of course, the rest of the story (not the post, but the Vanity Fair article) is unmitigated bullshit, so this might be as well. Let’s hope so.

The plan is for me to be on KVRX live in Austin tonight on “On The Fringe“. It’s right when 91.7 switches from KOOP to KVRX, so Austinites can hear me on-air on 91.7, but for those of you not in the Austin area, you can stream KVRX by pressing the “Listen Now” button on their homepage.

Discussion link: He said he wanted to wait until marriage for Jesus. But what if it was just because he knows you won’t buy the cow when you find out the milk isn’t so good?

Oh god, Matt Taibbi infiltrates John Hagee’s ridiculous church, and pretends to be one of the broken souls that gravitates towards these frightening churches.

Awesome. And if you were unaware of the modern fundamentalist, um, tradition of casting out demons, read the whole thing. It’s fucking frightening.

Blogging will be spotty but resume as normal tomorrow.

Like a complete idiot, I didn’t think to take a picture, so here’s a picture of the cover

I’ve been a fan of Barry’s for a long time, so the thing I was looking forward to most about Stumptown Comics Fest was picking up the aborted-tree edition of Hereville. And it’s great, of course. If you’re in Portland, the second day of the Festival is tomorrow (at the Lloyd Center Doubletree), and if you’re not, and the story (girl meets sword) sounds intriguing (and it should), go order it from the web site - several editions are available.

While cruising around the website Stuff Nobody Likes, I have to admit that this post about members of the doucheoisie who walk around talking on their Bluetooth earpieces cracked me up. I have, on more than one occasion, mistaken some dude talking on his earpiece for a dude doing what some creepy dudes all too often unfortunately do, which is start talking to random women for no real reason and to the benefit of no one. When dudes start to talk to me in public like this, I usually pointedly ignore them, which is a different thing than just plain ignoring someone. Which means that if I’ve been standing around or walking along and a dude with a Bluetooth earpiece starts talking in it behind me, and I found myself pointedly ignoring someone who actually took no notice of me in the first place. Then I feel bad, like I insulted this dude whose major crime was low level phone douchebaggery, instead of the higher level douchebaggery of treating women like we’re public property. At what point I feel I should return to just plain ignoring him instead of pointedly ignoring him, but that’s actually a much harder trick to pull off than it seems. I’d suggest that the solution is that people who are talking on phones in public should actually talk on phones so we know what they’re doing, but then that seems awfully close to blaming the victim of pointed ignoring behavior. Not sure what the solution is, because being open to any asshole talking to me is also not a solution.

The reading went really well. There was an active and interesting Q&A/group discussion afterwards. I even got to talk up one of my favorite subjects, which is why reproductive justice is a more productive framework than plain old reproductive rights.

Alternet has an interview with me and an excerpt from the book.

7PM at Bluestockings. I read about asshole bleaching and Nice Guys® last time, so I’ll be doing something different tonight. Should be fun, especially if we take the party onwards afterwards.

Thanks to everyone that came out! We had a good time all around, and I expect Thursday at Bluestockings will also be a blast. Different atmosphere, and more tempting books for sale besides mine and two others.

New York Pandagonians! Come out to the KGB Bar tonight for drinks and a reading from It’s a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments. If you can’t make it tonight, though, there’s a reading at Bluestockings on Thursday. Or, hell, come to both! I’ll be reading something different each time.

I wrote a rousing defense of the immediately notorious “abortion art”. Enjoy!

The Platonic ideal of paranoid wingnuttery in sentence form?

It’s better in context,

The comment thread is even better, though I have reason to think this guy is just funning with them:

Aliza Shvarts’ little hoax-art is really doing a bang-up job of compelling people to indulge their misogyny. Check out the comments at Alternet. Everyone is immediately “diagnosing” her as “attention-seeking”. Which says more about society’s expectations of female behavior—that women are best seen and not heard—than about her mental health.

At least she’s making a political statement. G.G. Allin was just an asshole, he was openly violent towards others, and I still have never heard him diagnosed as “attention-seeking”.

This is Teh Fucking Awesome.

I was interviewed for the Seal podcast series. It’s second from the top if you want to check it out. I think I got a couple good jokes in there, which, of course, is the best you can hope for.

Reminder to the NYC readers: I’ll be reading at KGB Bar on Tuesday and Bluestockings a week from today.

Apparently, some people are asserting that calling someone “boy” (as Rep. Davis from Kentucky controversially did to Obama) is just friendly, buddy-buddy stuff in the South. I see no reason to concede that point. Now, I’m from Texas, which is not the Deep South, but we have our fair share of inbred rednecks spouting Southernisms (I’m like 40% redneck myself, and prone to saying things like “fixing to” and “all y’all”), and I have never heard any redneck ever call someone a “boy” without meaning it to demean that person. Every single time. Even when you call a bona fide boy “boy”, it’s about asserting your superiority over him. Even if it’s used in a genial manner, it’s still an insult. Like you see someone taking a piss outside and you’re like, “Boy, what are you doing?”

There’s the watered-down version, as well, which is “young man” or “young woman”. It’s still asserting authority over the person addressed as such, but unlike “boy” or “girl”, it implies that the person addressed has some cognitive faculties, though minor and in need of correction. Like a kid who stayed out past curfew might get addressed as “young man/lady” while receiving a dressing down.

Then again, I’m far from Kentucky, so I asked a friend from a bordering state, and he said it’s used in exactly the same manner in Kentucky as it is in Texas. Pam maybe could ring in and let us know how East Coast Southerners use the term, though I suspect it’s in the exact same way. Which means quibbling over whether or not it’s racist is ridiculous. Of course it is.

I’m guest blogging at PEEK for the next two weeks. It’s a great opportunity to share a bunch of stuff I read but don’t comment on as a general rule, so if you’re curious about that, I recommend checking it out. You can also subscribe to their newsletter and get it bundled in your inbox once a day.

So, is Starbuck right? Who’s the first Cylon?

TWOP has a photo gallery about the pluses and minuses of each possible Cylon. I vote no on Lee or Bill Adama, Roslin, Callie, or Starbuck. I doubt Ellen is coming back, and Helo is the father of the first human-Cylon hybrid, so he’s off the list.

So I get this weird trackback suggesting that I enjoy getting abortions, which is something I can’t attest to, not ever having had one. Apparently the wingnuts are going crazy because I suggested women who get abortions shouldn’t be ashamed. I’m not sure why they continue to be surprised that I don’t hate women. I guess they think women’s suckiness is self-evident, but I disagree.

But anyway, Melissa Clouthier has concluded that I think abortion is great (her words) because I wrote this:

There is only one thing to conclude from this.

Melissa Clouthier enjoys getting a Pap smear.

Honestly, if they were less anxious about sex, they could do it like normal people and quit having to find bizarre and frankly perverse ways to enjoy the touch of another human being.