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The healing continues
Yet another reminder about the people who President Obama is certainly going to come to common ground and find reasonable solutions with to our nation's largest problems:
[Rep. Pete] Hoekstra last week introduced a bill in the House to amend the U.S. Constitution to permanently "enshrine" in American society an inviolable set of parents' rights. The bill had 70 co-sponsors, all Republicans, including Minority Whip Eric Cantor and Minority Leader John A. Boehner....Michael Farris, the Christian conservative founder of the Home School Legal Defense Association, see in it a dystopian future in which "Parents would no longer be able to administer reasonable spankings to their children"; "A child's 'right to be heard' would allow him (or her) to seek governmental review of every parental decision with which the child disagreed"; and "Children would have the ability to choose their own religion while parents would only have the authority to give their children advice about religion," as he puts it on his website parentalrights.org.
70 Republican members of Congress are sponsoring a constitutional amendment to secure the rights of parents to beat their children and force them to believe in a particular god. But no, I'm sure we're going to get a health care compromise out of these people.
Beyond Bechdel's Law
A really good article from Campus Progress about the common stereotypes of women in American film.
This would probably be an ample opportunity to remind everyone to watch Sita Sings the Blues, by the way.
"The prime directive"
It is very important to understand that right-wingers have a prime directive that supercedes all other responses to any of their actions. It is embodied in right-wing blog posts, right-wing blog comments, right-wing talk show rhetoric, and yes, right-wing legislative ideas. And the prime directive is, does it piss off liberals?
Atrios has mentioned this before. This is why "Joe the Plumber" exists. He's wrong. He's stupid. His ideas are in fact negative assets to Republican Party agendas. But he pisses off liberals. So he is on television. Ann Coulter makes millions of dollars making liberals angry. She will never be elected to anything, and anything she actually suggests will never actually happen, like killing people because liberals are in control of the government now oh oops sorry about that.
Commercial industry exploits this. In fact, it's why the phrase "politically incorrect-" a term that is only ever used when dismissing it sarcastically- exists. The Hummer exists because they printed magazine articles saying that buying it pisses off liberals. 99% of gun owners will never fire one, nor will it actually protect them from a crime when they are victims of one. But they brag about buying guns to piss off liberals. Exxon-Mobil has convinced Republicans that raping the last bit of pristine earth in American hands will piss off liberals, so Drill, Baby, Drill.
And because it's the prime directive, it overrides things that are detrimental to themselves. The guys at RedState, to whom I acknowledge the caveat are also simply idiots, "protested" a mostly-meaningless Earth Day ceremony by deliberately wasting resources and increasing their electric bills. They will never care about losing money, losing an election, losing actual power, or losing their minds. If they are convinced a complete stranger who voted for Obama on an internet message board is angry because of what they just said, then they have followed the Natural Order.
If you told anyone at RedState that severing their own penis will make Keith Olbermann cry, they will take a Slap-Chop to their junk and Twitter about it with their own severed Hindrocket. Though hopefully it will not be that many more successive generations of them that they outright forget how fucking works altogether.