– Peter Gleick

– This is sort of a win? Maybe? The state can violate your bodily autonomy only on your abdomen and not in your vagina. Yay?

– 100% accurate Oscar picks.

– I think Social Security is stronger than its critics would have you believe, but I appreciate Chad’s take on what the payroll tax holiday might mean for the program.

– I’d also missed that the right wing is freaking out over the phrase freedom of worship.

It’s been a while since I’ve done a good solid metacommentary piece, and I’ve been meaning to get back into it here. So even though this isn’t local, and plenty of liberal blogs made fun of this days ago, I’m going to give this crap a try.

What are women for?

Go fuck yourself. Jesus, I’m not even past the title and I’m just saying, “go fuck yourself.” This could be a long one.

In a simpler time Sigmund Freud struggled to understand what women want. Today the significant battle is over what women are for. None of our culture warriors are anywhere close to settling the matter. The prevailing answer is the non-answer, a Newt-worthy challenge to the premise that insists the real purpose of women is nothing in particular.

Maybe because it’s only a question a jackass would ask. Maybe, and I know this will sound silly, the billions of women are individual, autonomous humans and not “for” anyone or anything.

Also, did Freud live in a simpler time? Didn’t he live through the first World War? Oh, hey there’s a good chance you’ll have children who die before adolescence. Everyone is on cocaine. Simpler, simpler times!

Such an answer may or may not be a landmark in the progress of the human race, but it is anathema to most conservatives of any political party, and for that reason conservative folkways, prejudices, and ideals are once again on trial.

Are those even words? I feel like each of those words are words, but together, I don’t think any of them are, strictly speaking.

Rick Santorum may be easing up on the rhetorical throttle as his fortunes seem on the upswing, but everyone else feels their civilization is in peril, and the bile rises accordingly. On birth control, the Catholic Church is portrayed as the extremist fringe of its own faithful. On abortion, activists labor to extort Komen for the Cure.

Rick Santorum is still as much a jackass as ever, the Catholic hierarchy is out of step with its membership. And the Komen debacle was only about abortion insofar as they decided to make Planned Parenthood’s cancer screenings about abortion. If that’s the sign of civilization in peril, well good news, civilization isn’t in peril.

As MSNBC’s Chris Hayes observes, Republicans are being excoriated for voting against the Violence Against Women Act, for pushing transvaginal ultrasounds, and for holding an all-male hearing on birth control. Conservatives are even being reviled for “slut-shaming” sexy CPAC attendees. “Is there no one in the upper echelon of the GOP establishment,” Hayes wonders, “who can explain to them how all this looks when strung together?”

And, they’re all quite bad on their own. They wouldn’t get excoriated if they acted like women deserve respect and should be allowed to make their own choices. This isn’t a perception problem, it’s a human decency problem.

Alas, Carly Fiorina is not quite upper echelon. But before liberals ritually invoke the glass ceiling, they might want to conduct an agonizing reappraisal of their own. If the conservative movement’s nominal unity is actually belied by a stunning range of right-wing views on the status and purpose of women (and believe me, it is), the left’s alleged philosophical uniformity on the woman question is a complete fabrication — despite the fanatical discipline and norm-enforcement of much of the liberal cultural establishment.

Is the rest of this going to be an honest, thoughtful look at sexism in the Democratic party? If so, Meg Whitman might have been the better choice there. A writer who appreciates crafting a piece might then circle back to the time that she was called a whore. As a Hillary Clinton supporter in 2008, and someone who has tried to call out sexism in my own party, I would actually appreciate that effort. And while the Daily Caller isn’t really the best place to write that, it’s still a legit story. Or I’m wrong about all that and more nonsense:

The purpose of lifting the left’s Potemkin skirts is not to score tits for tats. Anyone serious about thinking through the role of women in today’s civilization is doing worthless work unless they take the controversies on the right hand in hand with the unsuccessfully suppressed tensions on the opposite side of the spectrum, where disagreements far more volatile in their profundity roil respectable liberalism.

OK, well that paragraph certainly feels like it’s only there to push up the word count. But is that a reference to Potemkin villages? The implication that nobody in the Democratic party actually is a woman? That they’re just fake women? Whaaaat?

Left opinion is no longer defined by the comfortably careworn liberal consensus that Sandra Day O’Connor conveyed in the abortive plurality decision of Planned Parenthood v. Casey. There, the metaphysical trouble kicked up by the elective killing of fetuses was relegated to the realm of life’s cosmic mysteries — a place liberals contemptuously deride as beneath human dignity when referenced in terms of the suffering of the crucified Christ. No judge, O’Connor and company concluded, could judge what it so much as meant to end fetal life.

I’m starting a band called “Abortive Plurality.” Also, is a Reagan appointee who was often the swing vote on the Supreme Court part of “the comfortably careworn liberal consensus” or is she a Potemkin skirt?

Lurking beneath this procedural non-judgmentalism was a stubbornly conspicuous judgmental end. Roe couldn’t be overturned, the plurality argued, because Americans might think the Supreme Court was bending to public pressure. The court’s solution was to bend to the public reality that millions of women had altered what it meant to be a woman — and what status that meaning conferred — by having or supporting abortions. On the bogus theory that all linear change is progress, the plurality embraced the immoderate view that a descent into barbarism is impossible.

I’m pretty sure the point of that argument wasn’t that we should all be barbarians.

Continued on Page 2 >>

Oh fuck, fine. I’ll press on.

Liberals, of course, generally and characteristically deny that abortion is barbaric. But the Casey decision substituted a progressive passivity for that very active moral claim. Today, the left is increasingly torn between old-school modern liberals who think like O’Connor and new-school postmodern liberals who find their cognitive elders in thrall to a haute-bourgeois conventionality that the deep premises of their own thought seem to strip of authority.

I. Well. Huh? You know. Um, use an editor next time.

So postmodern Cynthia Nixon, who used to be straight but now isn’t, tells The New York Times Sunday Magazine exactly what establishment liberals don’t want to hear when it comes to the sexual politics of women — “you don’t get to define my gayness for me.” As Laurie Essig understated it in The Chronicle of Higher Education: “Such talk is heresy among some people in the gay advocacy and the reaction was both immediate and predictable.” Nixon was swiftly accused by the left’s cultural policemen of “aiding and abetting bigots and bashers.”

I’m not sure what makes Cynthia Nixon postmodern, but whatever. She and the gay rights advocates all want the same thing (gay rights), so hell of a rift. She can define her sexuality however she wants, like any adult.

The piece forgot to define what the other side wants for her. Maybe say why it’s heresy instead of just quoting someone who says that it is. Then we can see for ourselves if these disagreements are actual disagreements on the left, and maybe how to resolve them.

Lip service is often paid to the impression that the point of empowering women is to empower them to do whatever they want, but much of the left stops well short of the more radical implications of that easy answer. The left’s culture of celebration is hamstrung by the very assertions of should and shouldn’t that contemporary women have inevitably come to make — as the ongoing debate over the advisability of marriage reveals. Reihan Salam has hinted that typically left-wing implications of academic theories like “erotic capital,” including mainstreaming prostitution, point in directions quite at odds with the dominant but failing framework of liberal sexual politics.

I don’t know what erotic capital means, but how about this: women do what you like. If you want to get married, great! If you want to stay single, great! If you’re for monogamy, great! If you want to still see other people while you’re in a relationship, great! If you want children, great! If you don’t, great! You know, like women are autonomous humans who know what’s best for themselves.

To the growing discomfort of many, that framework hasn’t come anywhere close to answering even the most basic questions about what women are for — despite pretty much universal recognition across the political spectrum that a civilization of men, for men, and by men is no civilization at all, a monstrously barbaric, bloody, and brutal enterprise. A few inherently meaningful implications about what women are for flow naturally from this wise and enduring consensus, but no faction of conservatives or liberals has figured out how to fully grasp, translate, and reconcile them in the context of our political life.

WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU EVEN TALKING ABOUT? Anyway, how about using ironically in a way that’s guaranteed to piss me off and then finish up with nonsense:

Ironically, one of the best places to look for a way out of the impasse is the strain of left feminism that insists an inherently unique female “voice” actually exists. That’s a claim about nature. Much good would come from a broader recognition that women have a privileged relationship with the natural world. That’s a relationship which must receive its social due — if masculinity in its inherent and imitative varieties (including imitation by quasi-feminized males of quasi-masculinized females!) is not to conquer the world.

– The wealthy aren’t like you and me.

– You guys, the urbaniest hell hole of all urban hell holes.

– If we’re getting a couple new sports teams, this would be the thing to do. Of course they would be existing teams rather than expansion teams so you’re not starting from scratch. And the NBA and NHL don’t, as far as I know, have the same sort of history of fan involvement as soccer, so I don’t know what the challenges would look like.

– Austerity doesn’t look so great.

– If there’s one thing we can all agree on, it’s that Darrell Isa is basically the MLK of hating women.

– As an expat Knicks fan, it’s nice to see the team doing well. On the other hand, the Lin puns have to stop.

The Washington caucus is coming up in early March [in the comments N in Seattle points out the GOP caucus is March 3 and the Dems are April 15], and it seems to me that liberals and moderates who want to get involved have a few options:

First, caucus for Obama. You’re not going to decide the nomination, but it’s still worthwhile to show your support.

It’s also your only real chance to change the platform. While most of the platform will be whatever Obama wants, there will be a push for a marriage equality plank. It probably won’t be a floor fight or anything like that, but every vote for delegates who support that plank is helpful. In any event, you don’t get to have your say on the final product unless you show up.

The second option is the chaos option. Goldy outlined it here. Vote for Santorum, and hope that it gives him the momentum to eat up Romney resources. The fight will ultimately hurt them.

I’m not convinced that this is a good idea for a few reasons. Primary elections are generally good for the party that has them. They get to test their message, they get to build organizations early. While this year may be different, it doesn’t seem like we need to take that chance with Obama already ahead in the polls. The other reason is I really don’t want Rick Santorum to win Washington. Even if he loses the nomination, every state he wins mainstreams his horrible philosophy. I for one, don’t want to say I helped increase his speaking fees, got him more TV time, or made outright opposition to birth control more mainstream in this country.

So if you’re looking to move the Republican party with your caucus vote, I’d like to recommend a third option: Fred Karger. No, he isn’t going to win. But voting for him sends a much more clear message than voting for Satorum, or even Obama. It says to the GOP enough with demonizing gay people and trying to push women’s rights back to where we’re arguing about birth control.

So I’m probably going to show up for Karger. Who knows? In Seattle, there might be few enough delegates that I can take that message to the next level.

Toward the beginning of this ridiculously condescending (even the parts I agree with) piece by The Seattle Times about Obama coming to town, we get this paragraph:

Never mind that Obama’s National Labor Relations Board went after Boeing a few years ago for moving part of its operation to South Carolina, looking stridently anti-business. It all worked out and last fall’s landmark labor agreement was win, win, win for workers, the company and the Northwest.

Of course we should mind it. It was one of the best things to happen because we elected him. The Seattle Times needs to get over this great thing that happened for the region!

– This so-called birth control battle is about a lot more than contraception…it is about not having to beg, negotiate, or endure a forced public confession to get access to services and medicine denied based on some employer’s morality glitch..

– They should call it PolitiCowersToConservatives.

– Caring Across Generations in Seattle. (h/t)

– God Hates Checkered Whiptail Lizards

– $105 for permission to use one of my images is the average amount that keeps me clothed, fed, and housed enough to continue producing more images.

– And as long as I’m linking to copyright pieces: Authors Have a Moral Right to Profit From Their Works

I know I’ve been complimenting the legislature a lot recently. It feels quite strange. But fortunately, the state Democrats are back to being gigantic pissants who’ll fuck over their constituents for no reason.

The senate passed a compromise teacher evaluation bill this afternoon, 46-3. Republicans and moderate Democrats had been pushing a teacher evaluation bill for a couple of sessions now, but liberals had balked, echoing union concerns that it was unfair to teachers, who’ve already seen K-12 funding cut by $2.5 billion during the recession and who have already been working on district-by-district pilot projects to determine evaluation criteria.

…

However, Sen. Ed Murray (D-43, Seattle), with an eye on counting moderate Democratic and Republican votes necessary to pass his budget, resuscitated the bill, triggering negotiations between the reform contingent and the opponents.

Yes, as part of an effort to make deeper cuts to education, Ed Murray has decided to fuck over teachers by imposing an arbitrary evaluation system. This will be more teach to the test instead of quality learning in an effort to punish the teacher’s union.

Rich Wood, spokesman for the teachers’ union, the Washington Education Association, complained that the union was left out of the negotiations and didn’t see the bill until a few hours before the vote. He said: “This new legislation must not derail, short-circuit or otherwise interfere with the evaluation pilot work that is already underway, and educators must be allowed the flexibility to meet the unique needs of students in their local schools.”

You know what, I can’t say it strongly enough: if you don’t give teachers a spot at the table when drafting legislation, you obviously don’t give a shit about education. You obviously want it to fail. That any Democrat would vote for that is a fucking disgrace.

There are ways to have testing that let teachers know what they need to work on, and how they can improve. This is clearly not that.

– Who could have predicted that Obama’s birth control compromise wouldn’t placate conservatives?

– A joint press release from Metro, Sound Transit, Community Transit, Pierce Transit and Kitsap Transit on the awful transportation bill.

– Neighborhood greenways

– Conservatives are good at articulating the complete visions of the society they want; we aren’t so great at that.

– Both left Congress under reasonably disgraceful conditions and were soon rewarded with millions of hard-earned dollars by our meritocracy. When you hit the bricks, new whips, money ain’t a thing.

– Happy Anniversary Shaun

Obviously, the big news is that Gregoire signed the marriage equality bill into law. While we’ve known it was going to happen for some time, it’s still quite amazing. Very recently this seemed like an impossibility, and now it’s a reality. Of course there’s a real possibility that it will come before voters in November, but for now, it’s just wonderful.

Also, even though the bill info isn’t updated in the legislative web page [sorry, I linked to the senate version, here’s the correct link, and it works fine. I remain an idiot], I’m getting a press release from Washington NARAL that:

This evening the Washington House stood up for women’s health and passed the Reproductive Parity Act (HB 2330) by a vote of 52-46. This legislation, sponsored by Rep. Eileen Cody (D-34), requires all health insurance policies that cover maternity care to cover abortion care. NARAL Pro-Choice Washington thanks the representatives who voted to protect women’s access to basic reproductive health care coverage.

And it looks like it’s going to pass the state senate.

And I’m not.

So on the one hand, who cares about the inside baseball stuff? But on the other hand, here’s a story about how the Rick Santorum campaign still feels like it’s amateur hour.

On Friday, I heard that Santorum would be in the area, so I went about trying to find a press person. First, to the campaign website. None of the tabs were a press person, and it looked like there were only a few offices, none in Washington. But! There was an 800 number.

So I tried it on Friday night, but it was pretty late. I tried it again Saturday morning, and was on hold for quite a while, before I decided “fuck it, it’s just not that important that I go.” So the end, right? There have been plenty of campaigns and elected officials who don’t get back to me. I also emailed Romney about his campaign appearance, and they also didn’t get back to me. I assume they see Horse’s Ass, and are like “fuck it, it’s just not important that we have him at our event.” That’s really fine. This blog is written by people in our free time and we don’t have time or the staff to follow up on this sort of thing like the professionals.

So, why am I writing this? Well, about 7:00 on Sunday I get a call back from the Santorum campaign (I didn’t leave a voice mail; I was just on hold for a while). I told them I was a blogger here in Seattle, and would very much like to attend Santorum’s rally. They said, I’d have to contact Nathan, their contact in (I think, but I didn’t write it down) Colorado, but that they’d love to have me. So fine, I left him a voice mail yesterday and again this morning. I called several other times and he never picked up. So I wasn’t making a trip to Tacoma if there was no WiFi or no electricity, and thus am heading home.

I know it’s a minor thing, but, don’t tell me I’m going to be able to attend and then not get back to me with any sort of arrangements. And really, nobody could direct me to someone in Washington who might be able to answer questions?

Now, compare that to when I saw Hillary Clinton 4 years ago. A few calls and I’m on the list, no problem. Compare it to Obama who could organize the Key Arena quickly and who had bloggers (although not me, I had to work) attend. Both of those were on almost as short notice as the Santorum campaign.

– Blue-green alliances.

– I’m as big a McGinn supporter as you’ll find and I agree with most of this. But I don’t think either the business community or Occupy Seattle are very happy with his handling of Occupy Seattle.

– And keep in mind; we’re not talking about abortion anymore. We’re talking about birth control.

– Obama’s Spotify playlist is pretty pedestrian.

– United States Bureau of Chronology

I have some errands to do, so nothing substantive here, but here are the results if you want to talk about them:

Willard “Mitt” Romney ………….39%
Ron “Mitt” Paul ………………….36%
Rick “Mitt” Santorum ……………18%
Mitt “Newt” Gingrich ……………..6%

During the Tacoma teacher strike the Tacoma News Tribune had by far and away the best news coverage of any mainstream media source. But man alive were their editorials brain numbingly awful. Well, congrats to the Trib for keeping up that fine level of nonsense. In an editorial about how we need the kind of bullshit education reforms that haven’t worked in other states, they serve up this gem:

As usual, the Legislature’s powers-that-be crouch like defensive NFL linemen, ready to tackle anything that might challenge the failing trade-union model of public education.

I don’t have clue one what “trade-union model of public education” even means. Most of these reforms seem to be just ways to commodity children and sell them to charter school corporations regardless of performance. The rest seem to just be ways to break the union. If the I-saw-Waiting-For-Superman-and-now-I-hate-teachers crowd were serious about reform, they’d work with the teachers: they are among the most interested parties after parents and possibly students.

I mean the idea here seems to be that politicians (and editorial board writers) demagoguing the issue or bureaucrats administering tests are the ones who really care about education. Yet those politicians who’ve spent far too much time cutting education funding and the ed boards who cheered them on at every tax cut that made those cuts inevitable continue to attack, attack, attack the unions. They have far less credibility than teachers unions that have been fighting those cuts and the bullshit reforms at every step of the way.

And yet instead of working with the teachers’ unions to both fund K-12 education and make reforms that make sense, it’s attack, attack, attack. No, let’s trust teachers.

Also, “defensive NFL linemen” for serious is how you’re going to construct that phrase? Not “defensive linemen” and trust your readers to know what that means? Not “NFL defensive linemen” that at least has the advantage of not putting NFL in the middle of what the position is called for no reason?

Earlier today, I linked to Goldy’s piece about caucusing for Santorum. While I think that there’s a case to be made that the negative campaign and the extended primary hurt the GOP, I’m not as sold on that as he is. And Goldy is hardly unique among commentators who think that it’ll be bad for them.

In general though, I think primaries are good for the party that holds them. The continued free media for Romney and the GOP’s ideas (such as they are) are not what I’d consider wonderful. And it’ll give them time to test their messaging and build their organization in various states.

That’s more or less how it played out in 2008. I remember Democrats fretting that if Hillary Clinton didn’t drop out that the nasty campaign would destroy Obama. That obviously didn’t happen. So take it with a grain of salt when those same people talk with assurance about what a primary will do to the GOP.

The biggest thing about the 2008 primary was it got a lot of people excited about Obama or Clinton. And that excitement stayed through the election. But that really hasn’t happened in 2012 so far. I see for example that fewer people are showing up for the GOP contests, and given that the only action is on the GOP side this year, that bodes quite ill for them. I mean, who the hell is excited for Mitt Romney or Rick Santorum?

– You’ll all be shocked to learn that the Weekly Standard are a bunch of war mongers.

– I’m not thrilled with Obama’s decision to give his blessing to a super PAC to support his reelection. Of course I’m not a fan of campaigning with one hand tied behind his back. But I think given American’s dislike of them (and the fact that he will be well funded anyway), he could have spun his not having one for more value than I think it will add. But I don’t think it’s hypocrisy to oppose them in principal and have one when the other side already has several.

– Goldy has picked up on the idea of messing with the GOP Caucus. I’m leaning toward Fred Karger, even though I’d vote for Obama in a general election between the two of them.

– New Ventures Facility

– Planned Parenthood has a lot of allies.

– And it’ll need them, because there is a hell of a lot of anti-choice crap at the state level.

– I’ve been thinking for a couple days now about the athlete I’d have play for my soul and the best I can come up with is it would have to be in an individual sport. What I’m saying is I’m not very good at this game.

– Oh, look what they’re doing with spider webs these days.