"Friends enjoying music on speaker during rooftop party at terrace against sky."

Ludicrous caption for "The pleasure principle: How the left wins the abortion wars/The right wants to punish sex — so the only way to win the abortion wars is make sex fun again." 

That's a Salon article by Amanda Marcotte. It's a stock photograph, and they just used the stock photo description. I guess they needed a photo of people having fun sex. 

 How idiotic does this look?

 

I'm certain Salon is fine with offending those who morally oppose abortion. In fact, this article aims to insult them. It says so in text: They're not really about saving babies. They "want[] to punish sex." I'm saying the photo (and caption) are ludicrous because they represent Salon's idea of inviting its readers into the world of sex as fun.

Look at those models. They're so beautiful yet slightly drunk. They're sitting on the edge of the roof. They're ecstatic about a miniature speaker. They have a black friend, tucked away as far back as possible, with his head slightly bowed. The man in this foreground — Is he stretching in joy over whatever music emanated from the elongated rectangle wielded by the central figure? Is he the drunkest of the lot? Or is he lying there, arms outstretched, as our flight path into sex? Girl in Hat gazes back at us: Yes, we can join them. We can experience pleasure.

"Getting named to Salon’s list of The 25 Conservatives Actually Worth Following On Twitter is either a grievous insult or..."

"... a certification that you suck. Salon is saying that you’re not a carrier of a hardcore conservative contagion, and that the liberal establishment doesn’t need to worry. At best, Salon thinks you’re no threat. At worst, it considers you a fellow traveler. And some of these selectees really are straight-up Fredocons... The simple fact is that Salon’s list, the mainstream media panels, and the editorial pages don’t want straight-up conservatives... Basically, it’s all part of a campaign to construct a safe space for triggered libs, but their ostrich strategy won’t help them.... About half of America likes what Trump is doing, and if you only read Salon or the NYT or WaPo, or watch only MSNBC or CNN, you have absolutely no clue why. That’s okay with us. We’re always pointing out how, 'That’s why you got Trump,' but they never listen.... So when Trump is re-elected in 2020, their shock and dismay will be that much sweeter."

Writes Kurt Schlichter are Townhall.

Is anyone praising Obama's Oval Office speech?

I'm hearing a lot of negative spin — Obama squandered the opportunity, etc. So I went looking to see if places that would be expected to support him are saying nice things.

I tried Talking Points Memo and the front page is cluttered with all sorts of things but the only Obama-speech-related items are: "Fox Guest On Obama: 'Such A Total Pussy, It's Stunning'" (top left) and (lower down) "Fox News Host: Obama ‘Could Give A Shit’ About The Threat Of Terrorism." That's nothing complimentary about Obama, just the direction to look elsewhere, at how nasty his critics are. 

The Daily Beast front page has that "pussy" guy...



There's also a column by Michael Tomasky, "President Obama’s Challenge to Muslim Americans":

This is the first time Obama has issued this challenge to Muslim Americans.... [I]f other Americans had some sense that Muslim Americans as a group were really working to ferret out the radicalism, then this stalemate might be broken. If anything Obama should have been more emphatic about this. He should now go around to Muslim communities in Detroit and Chicago and the Bay Area and upstate New York and give a speech that tells them: If you want to be treated with less suspicion, then you have to make that happen. That would be real leadership, and a real service....

Sounds like there's a big, daring, additional step Obama would need to take to earn Tomasky's praise.

Vox tried to keep it neutral: "Obama's rare Oval Office address to the nation: what he said and what he meant."

The NYT did put up "President Obama’s Tough, Calming Talk on Terrorism," as I noted last night.

Salon has: "Obama calls for reason: The president’s nuanced take on terror post-San Bernardino." The classic liberal buzzword. I've said it before:

Is everything exploding at Salon?

I happened to stop by Salon yesterday because someone at Facebook had pointed me to "Jonathan Franzen is guilty of 'extreme intellectual dishonesty,' according to the Audubon Society/Franzen hit first, but the National Audubon Society hit harder." Notice all that hitting and the ugly words "extreme" and "guilty." Something terrible must be happening, right? No, Jonathan Franzen just had an article in The New Yorker saying that the Audubon Society is letting the big issue of climate change divert its attention from practical things that can be done now to conserve birds. I ended up blogging the New Yorker article, but I'd left open the tab to Salon "extreme intellectual dishonesty" article. Looking at that page this morning, I'm noticing the sidebar of "most read" articles, and I'm seeing way more emotion than makes any sense. I'll add boldface to make my point:

I called him pathetic, he accused me of ruining his life: What children did to our marriage...

Boomer parents destroyed us: I needed rules and boundaries, not parents who want to be friends...

These seem to be routine articles about the challenges of living in families, but somehow it's all ruination and destruction. Absurd!

The right's made-up God: How bigots invented a white supremacist Jesus

Republicans' "Hitler" idiocy: Why their hysterical Iran pushback exposes a secret

Why I left the GOP

That last one is calm. I'll just assume "I" left the GOP because the GOP is a bunch of hysterical, bigoted, delusional, pushy, racist idiots.

Yelp users hilariously revolt against Indiana pizza shop that refuses to cater same-sex weddings

Funny or Die skewers homophobic businesses in pitch-perfect Indiana spoof

Here, the metaphorical acts of violence — revolting and skewering — are presented as wonderful comedy because they punish citizens who deserve it for not achieving the right level of acceptance of gay people.

America's angriest white men: Up close with racism, rage and Southern supremacy...

"They're human beings!": David Letterman blasts Indiana over anti-gay law...

Ted Cruz goes ballistic over "radical" idea that gay people should enjoy equality

Michelle Obama absolutely kills it in the "Evolution of Mom Dancing Part 2"

Apparently, everything is exploding. I guess Salon has its internal research showing this is what people click on. To me, it looks inane. I wish readers would develop resistance to this kind of manipulation. We should laugh at this desperation. Or — I don't know — look at Salon's evident belief that we slaver over violence and have a nuclear meltdown of outrage.

"Jon Stewart’s expiration date: Why liberalism needs to outgrow the snark."

Headline of a Salon article that ends: "If liberals want to see more of the kind of direct action that’s characterized the Occupy Wall Street and #blacklivesmatter movements — if they really want to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable — they’re going to have to embrace a political vision that has grown beyond the idiosyncratic limitations of Jon Stewart."

"This may be the worst race-baiting campaign ad since Willie Horton."

Says Salon's Luke Brinker about this new ad from the National Republican Campaign Committee:



Here's the famous Willie Horton ad for comparison:



Here's a New Yorker article from 2 years ago about Larry McCarthy, the man who created the Willie Horton ad. Excerpt:

McCarthy knew that showing Horton’s menacing face would make voters feel viscerally that Dukakis was soft on crime. Critics said that the ad stoked racial fears, presenting a little-known black man as an icon of American violence....

McCarthy has rarely spoken publicly about the ad. But in a sworn deposition, given in 1991 to the Federal Election Commission, he theorized that there were two subjects guaranteed to move voters: the economy and crime. “People, they take crime real seriously,” he explained. He later told a reporter that when he first saw Horton’s mug shot he said to himself, “God, this guy’s ugly.” He added, “This is every suburban mother’s greatest fear.”....

According to Floyd Brown, the conservative operative who hired McCarthy in 1988, the Horton ad “was incredibly effective.” Brown maintains that Dukakis’s lead over George H. W. Bush collapsed after the ad began airing. Tony Fabrizio, a Republican pollster and strategist who also worked on the Horton ad, argues that McCarthy was relatively restrained — there were no photographs of Horton’s victims, for example. And Brown says that the ad became a scapegoat after Dukakis lost. Both men use the word “brilliant” to describe McCarthy. “Larry is not just one of the best ad-makers these days,” Brown says. “He’s one of the best advertising minds this century. You go into a studio with Larry, and you’re watching art. It’s beautiful.”

"Why Uber must be stopped/The touted start-up is proving to be the embodiment of unrestrained hyper-capitalism. What happens when it wins?"

Hysterical headline at Salon, illustrated by a photoshop of Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko and Leonardo Di Caprio as the Wolf of Wall Street, together at last, glaring at us rapaciously.

Here's Power Line's attack on Salon.

"I’m not in your bedroom... Obama’s in your bedroom."

Said Michael Potter, founder and CEO of Eden Foods, straining to try to stave off the bad press and threats of boycott in a phone call with a Salon reporter (Irin Carmon) who had reported on his company's Hobby Lobby-type lawsuit about contraception coverage.

Did he worry about the impact on his bottom line? “Oh my god,” he said, “from what we’ve seen the last couple of days, it’s a big deal.”

But he isn’t prepared to back off. “I worked my ass off at figuring out what to do on it. I worked hard on it and I made a decision,” he said. “The federal government has no right to do what they’ve done. No constitutional right, no standing.” Apparently, his apology only goes so far.

That "apology" business refers to the fact that Potter began the phone call with an apology for not responding to Carmon's request for a comment when she was working on the first article — "Organic Eden Foods’ quiet right-wing agenda/A crunchy, natural food company marketed to liberals discreetly sues to stop covering employees' contraception."

If your business is all about massaging minds with concepts like "organic" and the notion that good old cow's milk should give way to something milked from a bean, you need to know your customers. These are folks with manipulable minds... womanipulable minds.

"Salon became a hardcore racist mag so gradually I barely noticed."

Observes Instapundit, linking to a Salon article titled "Why I can’t stand white belly dancers."

The article is written by a novelist named Randa Jarrar. And there's this twee notice at the end of it: "This piece is the latest in a series by feminists of color, curated by Roxane Gay."

Here's my post from last month where we were talking about this use of the word "curated" (a propos of Ryan Seacrest "curating" a fashion line.) LordSomber (a commenter) said: "'Curate' is one of those overused words that hipster artist wannabes have ruined."

Maybe Salon thinks that it's more feminist and of color to eschew the word "edited," which suggests a superseding authority and intervention. Maybe it's a crafty way to deny responsibility for the thing published: It's not edited, it's merely collected and presented "as is."

But what about that racism? How bothersome is it for a person of authenticity to express exasperation for the appropriation of some attribute of her culture for re-presentation by an outsider to that culture?

Perhaps if these white lady belly dancers asserted that what they are doing is curating dance we could all love one another (or at least wink knowingly).

"NYT's Bill Keller thinks he's enlightened for endorsing palliative care. Here's how he's affirming right-wing mania."

The subhead at Salon. The headline is: "How Times columnist Bill Keller aids Sarah Palin’s 'death panel' smear."

It's not a smear if it's true, but Salon's Brian Beutler asserts that "death panels" is "the single most contemptible lie about Obamacare."

What about the famous lie-of-the-year "If you like your plan you can keep your plan"? Must we have a contemptibility face-off between these 2 lies? Is the battle to be the most contemptible lie different from being the least true assertion of fact? Different from being the lie with the most clout in the political process? And if it's a contemptibility contest, who's the judge? Whose mind is feeling this contempt? Brian Beutler's?

More subtly, we need to distinguish the form of expression from the substance. "Death panels" was a hotly emotional way to express concern about something that was real — that there will have to be rationing and denials of expensive treatments to some older/sicker patients. It is contemned because of its power to replace close attention to the facts with instinctive, quick commitment to a political position — opposition to Obamacare.

"If you like your plan you can keep your plan" was a deliberately cool, seemingly unemotional way to assert something that was absolutely not true. It is contemned because it was an outright, knowing falsehood, and it reassured and pacified people who would have been lit on fire with opposition if they'd understood what was coming their way.

What was the single most contemptible lie about Obamacare?
	Death panels.
	If you like your plan you can keep your plan.
	Something else or neither is a lie, at least not a contemptible lie.
pollcode.com free polls

"10 signs that religious fundamentalism is going down" — a badly headlined item at Salon.

Badly headlined because "going down" is only intended to mean in decline, but it has (presumably unintended) alternative meanings: 1. the violent sense, implying that attackers are taking it down (as in the phrase "You're going down"), and thus evincing dicey hostility, and 2. the sexual sense, which is silly, but the photo under the headline is of Phil Robertson — famous for graphically expressing his preference for classic penis-in-the-vagina sex — so that mental detour is easier than usual.

Anyway... it's a listicle at Salon, compiled, I suppose, to cheer up the kind of people who hope religion will die out or at least turn into something not fundamental, something bland and pliable. This deathwatch has gone on for an awfully long time. From the debate in the House of Representatives over the Bill of Rights:

Mr. Scott objected to the clause in the sixth amendment, "No person religiously scrupulous shall be compelled to bear arms."... There are many sects I know, who are religiously scrupulous in this respect; I do not mean to deprive them of any indulgence the law affords; my design is to guard against those who are of no religion. It has been urged that religion is on the decline; if so, the argument is more strong in my favor, for when the time comes that religion shall be discarded, the generality of persons will have recourse to these pretexts to get excused from bearing arms.

When the time comes that religion shall be discarded... When did he imagine that time to be? I doubt if Valerie Tarico, the listicle author at Salon, is any more prescient than was Congressman Thomas Scott in 1789.

ADDED: Damn the headline writer for making me remember that awful, old Bruce Springsteen song "I'm Goin' Down" ("I'm sick and tired of you setting me up/Setting me up just to knock-a knock-a knock-a me down/Down, down, down/'m going down, down, down, down...").

"My Tumblr was once a collection of evidence, convincing the world that something very strange actually existed, but now everyone believes..."

"... and everyone has seen, and Thorning-Schmidt has the evidence on her phone. So it was time to do the only sensible thing: It was time to declare victory, to revel in drawing a line from the bottom to the top."

The creator of the blog Selfies at Funerals declares victory and ends the project after Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt gets British Prime Minister David Cameron and U.S. President Barack Obama to pose alongside her in the selfie she made at the Nelson Mandela memorial service.

AND: There's a strange amount of talk about Michelle Obama's look of seeming disapproval (caught not in the selfie but in the photograph of the selfie getting taken). At Salon, Roxane Gay collects and reacts to the reactions to the First Lady's reaction.

More than anything, the response to these latest images of Michelle Obama speaks volumes about the expectations placed on black women in the public eye and how a black women’s default emotional state is perceived as angry. The black woman is ever at the ready to aggressively defend her territory. She is making her disapproval known. She never gets to simply be...

But none of the responses Gay quotes refer to race or talk about Michelle Obama as anything other than one individual reacting to one particular thing on one occasion. But Gay seems so sure that it's those other people who are failing to perceive Michelle Obama as an individual: "On and on the punditry goes, ascribing very specific, historically racialized narratives to what Michelle Obama is thinking and feeling in one candid moment."

Now, it's not just the selfie. At The Daily News, there's a whole string of photos showing Michelle looking grouchy while Obama seems to be enjoying his interactions with the pretty Danish Prime Minister. But still, there is no reference to race. The closest reference to race is at the rather scurrilous website Gawker:

[T]here is a new sexy spy prime minister in town... and she is maybe kind of pretty if you are into “tall” and “blonde” and “pretty.” You know who does not seem to be that into “tall” and “blonde” and “pretty”? Michelle Obama, that is who! That is some side-eye not seen since the one time John Boehner grabbed her ass at lunch and slurred something about shayna tushies before falling face-first into his organic grassfed triple martini lobster bisque.

I had to go to the "that one time" link to see what that John Boehner incident was and was highly amused to see that Michelle Obama reacted to John Boehner with exactly the look look I described in the previous post as the best response to someone who makes a sexist remark in a social situation.

"9-year-old slams Rahm over Chicago schools."

Drudge has been linking to this item at Salon:

"We are not toys, we are not going down without a fight ... This is racism," boy tells mayor over closures

We're expected to think wow, what a great kid.

I've watched the video, and my reaction is: Adults taught him a speech. He's being used as a political puppet. I've seen far too much of the use of children in politics — click my "using children in politics" tag — and I don't like it. I think it's especially bad to teach a child to yell angrily at another person and to exhibit hostility, and it's bad for us to express enthusiasm about a child who's good at giving the scripted performance. This is not how children should be taught. Ironically, the topic under discussion is education.

I've seen this before, in Wisconsin, with children taught to chant or sing the adults' hostility toward Gov. Scott Walker. I don't like when children are used to sing the praises of a politician either. We all know the absurd children's choirs singing about Barack Obama as if he's a divinity. But teaching children to perform hatred is another matter. Children need to learn about policy and politics over time, so that they understand the substance of the issues and can make their own choices.

It's really awful to see a 9-year-old used as a political mouthpiece and cheered as he yells rudely at an adult authority figure. He's also been taught to believe that he is hated because of his race — "this is racism" — and that the proper reaction is violence — "we are not going down without a fight." What a truly sad appropriation of youth!

"[I]f the bomber ends up being a white anti-government extremist, white privilege will likely mean the attack is portrayed as just an isolated incident..."

"... one that has no bearing on any larger policy debates. Put another way, white privilege will work to not only insulate whites from collective blame, but also to insulate the political debate from any fallout from the attack."

Writes Salon's David Sirota:

It will probably be much different if the bomber ends up being a Muslim and/or a foreigner from the developing world. As we know from our own history, when those kind of individuals break laws in such a high-profile way, America often cites them as both proof that entire demographic groups must be targeted, and that therefore a more systemic response is warranted. At that point, it’s easy to imagine conservatives citing Boston as a reason to block immigration reform defense spending cuts and the Afghan War withdrawal and to further expand surveillance and other encroachments on civil liberties.

This is just about exactly the opposite of what Rush Limbaugh was saying yesterday.

Is "horses and bayonets" Obama's new thing — after Big Bird and Binders Full of Women?

Salon's Mary Elizabeth Williams says these things aren't working:

Where are those glorious debate memes of times gone by?...

There was Battleship. And there was the night’s biggest winner, Obama’s smooth dis to Romney, “You mentioned the Navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military’s changed.” Faster than you could tweet “Oh, snap!,” the inevitable Tumblr was born.

Yet the whole thing felt less fun this time around, and a lot more forced. 

Big Bird and Binders Full of Women were words that came out of Romney's mouth. "Horses and bayonets" was inserted by Obama. It's one thing to have fun with Romneyisms, quite another to accept a faux-Romneyism cooked up by Obama... especially when Obama is making fun of the military and what comes out of his head is an old children's game — suggesting that he thinks this real-life killing and dying is some kind of game — and an image of the historical military — which seems to be about the movies he's watched, not anything that about Romney.

Bob Schieffer was a little doddering, but couldn’t match Jim Lehrer for FAIL worthiness. Josh Romney did not make with the crazy eyes. In short, as we all learned long ago from “Mean Girls,” you can’t make a thing a thing any more than you can plan for spontaneity.

Speaking of movies, I've never seen "Mean Girls." I don't get the reference. I'm not in your "we all." Is it the making a thing a thing thing or the plan for spontaneity thing?

But back to the landscape of Obama's mind — where kids fiddle with plastic Hasbro toys and old war movies play, from which he concocted a Romney gaffe that Romney never gaffed — why is there no picture there of the horse soldiers of the Afghanistan War?

The U.S. special operations teams that led the American invasion in Afghanistan a decade ago did something that no American military had done since the last century: ride horses into combat.

"It was like out of the Old Testament," says Lt. Col. Max Bowers, retired Green Beret, who commanded the three horseback teams.

"You expected Cecil B. DeMille to be filming and Charlton Heston to walk out."

It was like a movie, but it really happened, and those men were heroes. Is it so hard to call them to mind, now — in these days of unmanned drones, who kill when you point at a name on a card, or hover overhead and watch as — it can't be real — our ambassador fights for his life for 7 hours?

"And when Ryan riffed on the handful of jobs he briefly held, his Ayn Randian roots were clear."

Writes Joan Walsh at Salon. Here's what Paul Ryan said that Walsh thinks is "straight out of Rand, and ’50s anti-Communist paranoia":

“When I was waiting tables, washing dishes, or mowing lawns for money, I never thought of myself as stuck in some station in life... I was on my own path, my own journey, an American journey where I could think for myself, decide for myself, define happiness for myself. That’s what we do in this country. That’s the American Dream. That’s freedom, and I’ll take it any day over the supervision and sanctimony of the central planners.”

If you believe the individual can think and decide for himself and pursue happiness as he defines it... you're delusional — in Walsh's view. You see what she's saying? She's saying you didn't build that — the very phrase Obama is straining to disown. You didn't build that, you can't build that, and you're psychotic if you imagine that you can. She's deeply into the collectivism the Democrats don't want to openly embrace.

But she doesn't think she's openly embracing it. She thinks Ryan is paranoid to imply that the Democrats favor "the supervision and sanctimony of the central planners." Pressed, she might — I assume — assert that it's fine for individuals to try to come up with their own ideas about what they want to do with their lives and to set out to achieve their goals, but that it's inaccurate to portray this enterprise as solitary and in defiance of the larger efforts of government and society (which they depend on no matter what they do).

But that's not what Walsh says. She's stirring up partisan discord and not inclined to concede that our differences, in the United States, are only a matter of leaning toward individualism or collectivism as we mostly keep to the middle of the road.

"I hope people remember George, and I think they will, for having the determination and the toughness and the persistence..."

"... to be able to see... our country through such a very difficult time after the terrorist attack," said Laura.

"There was never a taint of scandal around his presidency," said Bush the Elder. "And I think we forget the importance of that. But they'll remember him for being a good, honest president that got a lot of things done, but I think the thing I take pride in is integrity."

Video at the link. It's the video that was shown at the GOP convention last night, a convention where the party's last failed candidate spoke at great length. The party's 2 living Presidents appeared only in a charming, modest — overly modest — video. Sad. Almost shameful.

Was the Elder correct? Never a taint of scandal around W's presidency? Here's a Salon article, published in 2005 (before the second term), listing "34 scandals" from the first term — "every one of them worse than Whitewater."

Imagine if Salon were committed to maintaining a single standard for the meaning of "scandal" and had to make an equivalent list for the Obama administration. How many scandals would it list? It too absurd to imagine. Holding Obama to the insane standard that was imposed on Bush?!

Ironically, this is one of the reasons I voted for Obama and I won't apologize for that vote. I anticipated that Obama would have to own many of the policies that Bush — with his "determination and... toughness and... persistence" — followed. The Democratic Party would not be able to continue standing on the sidelines, calling everything outrageous, "a scandal," with the press amplifying each charge. They would do many of the same things and preen about their toughness on terrorism, and the press would boost them along.

And so now we are here in the fall of 2012, and that has been accomplished. Can you imagine where we would be if McCain had been President and the carping on the sidelines had continued all these 4 years? Would McCain even be attempting to get reelected?

"Obama’s race to save the Rust Belt."

A headline at Salon that has us wondering if maybe, just maybe, Obama's race is the cure-all for everything.

"Over at Salon, they’re worried about Obama’s sudden polling crash."

And, "The New York Times caught cocooning in public."