I’ll be leaving this one up as archives, but closing down comments tomorrow.

Please go to the new Pandagon at http://pandagon.net/.

Here’s the new RSS feed.

Here’s a new post at the new site asking for feedback on the redesign.

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’m with Mighty Ponygirl: This article by Rachel Shukert about how Rock Band saved her marriage was a nightmare. I enjoy writers willing to hang out all their personality flaws for the world to see, but it’s also amazing to me how some of them can describe themselves so well and not realize that these are the sort of soul-destroying personality flaws that will cause them massive problems. Shukert realizes, to a degree, that she’s a nagging, clingy mess, but she doesn’t seem to realize that this is something that is a major problem that can’t be fixed with a video game.

It’s too bad, because I was pretty eager to read the story, as I am both a fan of the video game in question and have a fantasy rock band with my boyfriend called Shitbird. We also have a band with a rotating cast of friends called Cleveland Steamers.* I can testify to the fact that there’s something very socially redeeming about the game. But Great Cat, even correcting for hyperbole, Shukert has it all screwed up and it wasn’t a breezy, fun read. She was making me mad.

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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.

Yesterday at TPMCafe, Rick Perlstein kicked off a week-long examination of his new book Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. I’ve been asked to join this week’s cafe (a fun departure from writing about politics through a feminist lens), and I recommend checking it out, because the book is wonderful. And very relevant to today’s post topic: “Reagan Democrats“. The seeds of creation for this group of voters means they’re probably more “Nixon Democrats”, a name that would at least show how fruitless getting them back into the fold might be.

Ezra’s post gently puts to rest the ancient Democratic hobbyhorse of lamenting the loss of that percentage of white working class voters that long ago quit voting their economic interests and started voting against uppity black people and women, and against the “liberal elite”. Interestingly, the “elite” label doesn’t quite cut it when it comes to liberals—the lower you go on the income ladder, the more liberal you tend to be statistically speaking:



So why do Republicans win when (because of Republican policies no less), the number of people falling below the cutoff line greatly outnumbers the people falling above it? In part, because the higher you get up the income ladder, the more likely you are to vote. Also, there’s racial issues (gender a bit less, because while women are more liberal than men, they also vote more regularly, so it probably evens out):

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I’ve been hanging onto this all weekend, because it’s a real Monday morning bit of hilarity. It’s also a good indicator of how the concept of the boycott, wielding so powerfully when used strategically by the civil rights movement, has really devolved into a temper tantrum that’s less about effecting change and more about the boycotter preening over her moral superiority. Observe Rachel Ray’s outfit in a new ad for Dunkin Donuts:

To ordinary people, this is an example of someone wearing the confusing combination of a lightweight summer shirt and a scarf. There are two major possibilities here. One is that this is yet another example of the fashion trend fascists trying to push a stupid idea on the public to see who buys into it. Considering that said fascists have successfully convinced a handful of women to dress like this:

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Once in awhile, you have a moment where you really see how the Equal Rights Amendment would, contrary to the claims of opponents, have a positive effect on our laws. Lily Ledbetter would have won her case, I suspect, because even the most law-bending reactionary justices would have had trouble denying her claims. Same story with Gonzales v. Carhart, or any abortion restriction really, since they’re all based on the idea that women are second class citizens who can legally have fewer rights than men, and in the case of Carhart, can be treated as mentally inferior as a class to men. I have to wonder if it would make it much easier to challenge abstinence-only education in schools, since the materials invariably come from religious organizations with anti-woman and homophobic agendas.

Maybe not. These groups do try to scrub some of their more offensive beliefs about gays’ and women’s inferiority out of the textbooks, with varying degrees of success. Still, it’s a strange situation, as if our government was accepting history textbooks written by SPLC-recognized hate groups, so long as they make a half-assed effort to cover up their more odious racist assumptions. Because once you get into the thick of the Christianist world, where they’re letting their hair down, their jaw-dropping ideas about women (basically, that they’re property) will shock even the hardened wingnut watchers.

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Datarock - Fa Fa Fa from nettwerkmusic on Vimeo.

Hat tip to my internet Luddite friend Kiki for burning this band’s disc for me. To quote him: “Like Devo meets disco!”

Nina Simone remixes, which never get old:

(Hat tip.)

The Skepticality podcast has been doing a real bang-up job of covering the controversy over “Intelligent Design” propaganda piece Expelled, mostly be interviewing the various scientists touched directly by the controversy. The most recent interview was one of the most frustrating—Dr. Randy Olson, who moved from being a biologist to being a filmmaker. Dr. Olson has a lot of criticisms of people he calls “evolutionists”, but I got the feeling he was more interested in knocking heads than really being right, and he might do well to reconsider some of his own ideas. Even though he agrees with people who accept the theory of evolution, he insists throughout the interview in using the term “evolutionist”. This is short of calling someone a “Darwinist”, but it’s still falling for a right wing frame. The right wing frame is to suggest the the controversy is over a clash between two belief systems of equal evidential validity: Christianity and “Darwinism”, much like their other favorite clash, between Christianity and Islam. And that the battle is merely to be won on faith. But evolutionary theory is not a belief system, and nor is it necessarily in conflict with Christianity, since most mainstream Christian churches accept it the same as they accept that the Earth goes around the Sun, contrary to Biblical claims otherwise. It’s a well-established theory with no real evidence against it, and mountains of evidence for it. Mind-boggling, impossible to tally amounts of evidence for it. Using terms like “evolutionist” undermines this reality. Dr. Olson would not call people who accept the reality of gravity “gravitationalists”, so why buy into the right wing frame on this one?

Obviously, you can’t just call the defenders of evolutionary theory biologists, because more than biologists defend it—the larger scientist community and non-scientists like me are avid defenders of the importance of accepting reality. And of course, this group has religious and non-religious people in it. So what to call them? I suggest “reality-based community”, which has more syllables than “evolutionists”, but rolls off the tongue more easily. The best part about it is that it reframes the debate in more accurate terms: As one between people who accept evidence and appreciate knowledge, and people who insist on viewing the world through a magical lens.

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Animal people looking for good organizations to give your money to, I beseech of you, please ignore PETA, who seems to spend most of their budget getting young women to get naked in public as publicity stunts. If you love both animals and people, look instead to less sexy but much more humane organizations like the Humane Society, who actually have done a bang-up job of using their issue of animal welfare to highlight the problem of domestic violence. From Salon, I see that the effort from organizations like the Humane Society, PAWS, the ASPCA, and the Humane Association (and no doubt many other animal organizations that don’t see the need to parade naked women around to make a point) to improve the public’s understanding of the link between animal abuse and domestic abuse have led to an article in O about the link.

For people who understand how domestic violence really works, this link is not surprising. Abusers use any leverage they can to terrorize their victims and break their will, and will happily resort to abusing and killing pets for that end. There’s also the added incentive of using the pet as leverage to keep your victim from escaping, because she knows that fleeing without or even with the pet might result in the abuser retaliating by killing her pet. In order to make pet safety less of a barrier to women fleeing abusive homes, the Humane Society has put together a list of 170 safe haven programs, where both the victim and her pets are cared for by the shelters, using various methods.

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Ten songs at random from your iPod or other MP3 playing device. Leave yours in comments.

1. “Peel Back The Moon, Beware”—Elf Power
2. “You Don’t Smile Anymore”—Mr. Suitcase
3. “Fire Sign”—The Gossip
4. “Country Feedback”—REM
5. “My Juvenile”—Bjork
6. “Teri Sadi”—DJ Rekha
7. “House of Cards”—Radiohead(this is who I was out of town to see last weekend
8. “You’re The Kind of Girl”—Mixel Pixel
9. “Girls On Film”—The Living End (Duran Duran cover)
10. “Crimes and Nightcalls”—Femme

I always liked this REM song the most of all of theirs. Stipe gets his voice to break in that perfect country break form. He does that in a lot, but in this song, the weepy nature of the break is absolutely perfect. Hank Williams would be impressed.

I usually hate the cell phone camera videos of concerts, but this one of The Gossip doing “Fire Sign” really captures how great one of their shows is:

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You’re doing it wrong.

Saw this ad at Salon. I like Laura Dern, so I may have to figure out how to operate the DVR thingamabob to record this.

Other people who saw through “states’ rights”

God, I couldn’t be more sick of the disingenuous “states’ rights” argument, now being whipped out on the gay marriage decision in California. It’s bizarre watching wingnuts get into a self-righteous huff about the all-important rights of states, when they only care about it when dismissing the fundamental rights of people. Which of course is never explicitly said, but that’s the point of it: “States’ rights” only seem to matter to people who feel the states can do a better job of oppressing the people than the federal government can. Should the federal government take the opportunity to wield power against individual rights—as they did with the federal ban on certain kinds of late term abortions—nary a peep to be heard from the people who have great love for the right of states, but not for people.

It just so happens that I started reading Nixonland by Rick Perlstein. In it, he quoted LBJ’s speech supporting the civil rights movement on March 15, 1965. I thought Johnson’s contempt for the “states’ rights” argument has some relevance right now.

There is no issue of state’s rights or national rights. There is only the struggle for human rights.

Blunt and to the point, as was his habit. With the gay marriage debate, you have the opposition forever arguing that the institutions set up to serve the people should take precedence over the people they’re meant to serve. The institution of marriage—at least the conservative definition of it—is supposed to be so sacrosanct that it can’t be modified to serve the very people marriage is supposed to serve. The government is not about serving the interests of the people, all of the people, but about just mindless oppression in the name of rights held by institutions that have no reason to exist without the people.

I mean, it’s obviously bullshit. But it’s such tenacious bullshit, and I have to wonder how many people who spout off about “states’ rights” honestly think the state is something that exists for its own sake and that it has rights above and beyond the rights of the human beings it’s meant to serve. 5%? 2%? 80%? What’s the stupid to evil ratio on this argument? How many of them realize that they’re echoing an argument that was reinvigorated to deny black people the right to vote? How many of them feel twinges of guilt, and how many would probably get on board with the idea that the state should be able to deny the right to vote on the basis of race? I am honestly curious about this.

I suppose we should have seen this coming, but still: Oh my god. (Hat tip.) The headline is pure scare tactics.

‘Sex and the City’ Fiend: Show Turned Me Into Samantha

I’ve never understood the nation’s paranoid obsession with that show. Well, I do, but I also don’t. This headline really gets at it—there’s a real fear that women across the nation are going to watch the show and start getting ideas about how it’s not only okay not to get married and start having babies fairly young, but that being single and living independently is fun and exciting. Because no matter how some of us feminists wrung our hands because the characters on “Sex and the City” weren’t empowered enough (i.e., two of them openly yearned for marriage and one was somewhat disorganized and compulsive in her life choices), there’s no denying that the show did really portray single women with independent incomes as exciting, fun people. (With flaws, of course, but good lord, if every show portrayed all women as pillars of strength at all time, they’d be too damn boring to watch.) From the point of view of some of us who’ve tasted the life of independent living, we don’t see what the fuss is, but the show was wildly popular with women who went straight from the home to perhaps a college/young adulthood situation with roommates to marriage without ever having that part of your life where you answer to no one but yourself. And it’s those women that are feared might get ideas.

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The biggest pinch.

Brad has a post up about the alarmingly high prices that gas could reach in the future, and he asks people how they’re coping.

But seriously: we need to solve this problem because it’s not getting better. I’m fortunate in that my current job allows me to work from home once or twice a week, although I’m still spending around $50 a week on gas. I’m trying to organize a group of my fellow employees to pitch in for a shuttle service that will take us from the commuter rail to the office every day; how are the rest of you coping?

Luckily, I barely have to drive, since I work from home and live in the city, which means I can walk or bicycle almost everywhere I go. I even braved bicycling to the dentist and back to get a filling done. (My first cavity ever, and my reason for concern was I had no idea how scary it would be and whether or not I’d have to be sedated. Luckily, no. I’m not that big a weenie.) I think I drive to Marc’s studio more than any other place, and even that will probably not be an issue after we move even more central in a couple of months. I often seriously consider selling my truck, but a pick-up truck is a useful thing to have and I just know that if I did sell it, then the next month would be when I started to have need to haul shit around. In fact, the new place has a garden, so I’ll soon have a more immediate need to haul large amounts of compost and mulch, so there you go.

My main concern at this point is inflation of everything else, especially food prices. I don’t drive much, but I eat a whole lot, and food is getting expensive, and I think transportation costs are a big part of it. And of course, oil costs affect the cost of growing or raising the food in the first place, so rising oil prices hit food production at every point in the process. Americans are doing a lot better than people in other parts of the world, but still, it’s a belt-tightener.

What are your concerns? Not everyone can do what I do and just bike everywhere they need to go. What creative solutions to high gas prices have you come up with?

Monogamy: Made for a woman, like fancy jewelry.

Update: I just want to make sure this post is understood not to be talking about marriages where the sex life has actually dwindled inside the marriage. Both men and women can and do suffer from a spouse who loses all interest in sex, a problem that I think compounds itself over time, because if you don’t use it, you’ll lose it. This article is more another whine from a guy who wants to screw around and wants his wife to “understand”, i.e. tolerate it without demanding her own right to screw around.

Women cheat nearly as much as men. This is not an unknown fact.

Survey takers guessed that twice as many people are having extramarital affairs as really are, estimating that 44 percent of married men and 36 percent of married women are unfaithful. The reality is it’s not as rampant as we think, with 28 percent of married men and 18 percent of married women admitting to having a sexual liaison, the survey found.

I’m always shocked at people who act like adultery is basically a male-only temptation, because who the hell are men cheating with? Prostitutes, sometimes. That might be enough to explain the gap, sadly. But I suspect—especially in our day and age where the older-men-preying-on-younger-women model has had a wrench thrown in it by feminism—that mostly men who cheat do so with peers. Which would probably be mostly equally married women.

I bring it up, because Salon blogged this maudlin “woe is men” story that claims, among other things, that evidence is growing that the need to cheat is hard-wired in men. Interesting, the only “evidence” that is growing that men are hard-wired to cheat, rape, and act like pigs is the number of times a single hack psychologist named David Buss is quoted. Sure enough, the author goes sniveling to Buss to give him “science” to prove to his wife and women of the world that he has to cheat, and Buss complies. Buss admits women cheat, but has to hedge, implying that men just roam around fucking anyone, whereas women just like to keep an extra boyfriend in reserve so they’re never going without should the current husband croak. You’d think the combination of male desire for variety and the supposed oodles of scientific evidence would cause one of the writers who tackles this subject to talk to someone besides Buss, but maybe full-blown hackery of his sort is hard to come by.

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I’ll make you an offer you can’t refuse.

I’m trying really hard to stay out of the rancor of the primary, because it’s making people really stupid, but good lord I can’t just ignore this.

One of Sen. Hillary Clinton’s top financial supporters offered $1 million to the Young Democrats of America during a phone conversation in which he also pressed for the organization’s two uncommitted superdelegates to endorse the New York Democrat, a high-ranking official with YDA told The Huffington Post.

Haim Saban, the billionaire entertainment magnate and longtime Clinton supporter, denied the allegation. But four independent sources said that just before the North Carolina and Indiana primaries, Saban called YDA President David Hardt and offered what was perceived as a lucrative proposal: $1 million would be made available for the group if Hardt and the organization’s other uncommitted superdelegate backed Clinton.

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Creepy bastard Rulon Jeffs poses with his newly acquired wives shortly before he died of old age.

William Saletan has two posts up about the slippery slope threats made by conservatives regarding gay marriage—basically, that if we allow that, then polygamy and incest are next. Saletan agrees with the slippery slope argument, but doesn’t think it’s a bad thing to switch from the taboo model of managing human sexual relations to the harm reduction/privacy model that he thinks is the groundwork for homosexuality. I’m not saying that he’s strictly wrong in his views on tolerance of cousins marrying or polygamy—consenting adults and all that—but I think his assumptions about the groundwork that made same-sex marriage possible is all off, and it taints his argument.

I don’t think that same-sex marriage is becoming more socially acceptable because people are more interested in privacy. I think it’s a matter of increasing egalitarianism and feminism especially. And so I strongly disagree with him that the tides are turning towards more social acceptance of cousin marriage and polygamy.

Cousin marriage doesn’t really seem to be a feminist issue, but the implication that Saletan is trotting out—that there’s some tide turning in favor of allowing it—goes against history in a big way. Saletan has got to know this, since he trots out cousin marriers like Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein. In half the states of the U.S., marrying your first cousin is legal, and those are the sort of laws that hang on from the past, and are not recent innovations that stem from increasing tolerance. The incest taboo in American and Western European cultures has recently expanded to cover first cousin incest,* and my sense of it is that it’s a result of people’s greater mobility and urbanity. We just meet a lot more people than in the rural past. We have high school, college, and internet dating now. Cousin marriage has become a marker of severe social isolation and backwardness.

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One of the ongoing issues in this election is going to be waking people up to the fact that John McCain is a grade A, totally not moderate social conservative. This is critical for that swing vote, especially those swing voters that say, “Well, I don’t think abortion should be illegal, but it’s bad to use it as birth control.” Translation of that sentiment: “I want to be able to have an abortion if I so desire, but I reserve the right to gossip about others in tones that indicate that I’m so scandalized.” These people would shy away from a ban, of course, but they probably can be convinced to vote for someone they erroneously believe talks the anti-choice talk but won’t do the anti-choice walk.

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The question, “What exactly did Neville Chamberlain do to piss off wingnuts so badly?” is on everyone’s lips, everyone being defined as “those who watched that awesome video of Hardball getting interesting for once.” Some would say that it has something to do with Hitler and Czechoslovakia, but that’s not in the talking points memo and for a good reason. After all, if merely capitulating to the demands of fascist dictators with genocidal tendencies were appeasement, then what’s arming said dictators, training them, funding them, and giving them a bevy of economists on the job to spin everything? That would be like super-appeasement, which would make the Republicans like the best most appeasingly appeasing appeasers in the world, and so that can’t be it.

It’s never a bad time for this picture.

So what did Chamberlain do to earn himself such a poor reputation, especially compared to Winston Churchill? Well, his first and most important act of appeasement was to let his parents name him “Neville Chamberlain”, a pussified commie lib name with overtones of pure frogginess that meant he was only good for a lifetime of letting Hitler force him to perform ass-to-mouth rituals.

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This is extremely bizarre. A Staten Island high school has banned girls from the prom if they don’t have a male date. It’s a girls-only school, which probably means that proms generally have a huge number of girls and not that many guys. Maybe the principle is pitying the boys at the prom, feeling they shouldn’t be outnumbered. There’s other speculations.

“That makes sense only because it probably controls the chaos,” Valente said. “You know you’re there with somebody, you’re less likely to go crazy.”

So, there’s a grave danger of high levels of squealing and circle dancing. I say, good practice for the weddings the principle presumably wants them to have in the future.

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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?

I know I’m supposed to find the character of Pepper Potts in Iron Man offensive and sexist. As the main female character in the movie, she’s, well, a servant. From one perspective, she’s like a fantasy wife-for-hire—hot, devoted, thoughtful, and submissive. She never brings the coffee cold and relieves Tony Stark from his duties for running the dull, domestic parts of his life, freeing him up to conquer the world. But I liked Pepper a lot. She was smart, wry, and professional, and her attraction to Tony seems to be a result of her being a workaholic, and she snaps out of it at the end of the movie. She’s brave and clever under fire. But I was ashamed to put it that way, because none of that really addressed the fact that she’s still a personal assistant.

And then I read this thread, where a discussion about whether or not Pepper is negatively portrayed as materialist hinged on her purchase of an evening gown with Tony’s money for her birthday. I actually thought the dress incident had nothing to do with materialism, and Pepper’s choices were cast in a flattering light. I’d say the dress incident in the movie has two plot functions: to show that Pepper has really good taste like she always said (we usually see her wearing all black) and to show that she has this whole inner life that Tony wasn’t aware of. There was no intention to shame the character for materialism.

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Ten songs at random from your MP3 collection. Leave ‘em in comments.

1. “Your Eyes Are Liars”—Sound Team
2. “Run For Cover”—The Dells
3. “Let’s Get Small”—Trouble Funk
4. “Tennessee emmpp”—Silver Jews
5. “No Comply”—The Studio
6. “We Were Born The Mutants Again With Leafling”—Of Montreal
7. “There’s A Ghost In My House”—R. Dean Taylor
8. “She’s Gone”—NOFX
9. “Murder Me Rachel”—The National (I haven’t decided if I hate this band or not. Probably.)
10. “We’re All Stress”—The Illuminoids (a super huge mash-up based around Bowie’s vocals on “Starman”, which could make a music box sound awesome)

I’m trying to get all my videos from Vimeo now, because it’s just a lot better layout and quality than YouTube. Let’s see if lazy conformity takes over. It labels it for you and everything, so you don’t have to offend people who are at work or have dial-up and can’t watch videos but are dying to know what they’re missing out on. Unfortunately, it’s not nearly as comprehensive, so it’s hard to find stuff.

of Montreal - “Rapture Rapes The Muses” - Debaser - Malmö, Sweden - May 5, 2007 from ofmontreal on Vimeo.

That said, this person had cool shit up.

joy division - 9-15-79 transmission from cicolini on Vimeo.

Wow, this headline reads like something in the Reader’s Digest circa 1970, wedged between articles on why kids don’t appreciate waltzing anymore and how smoking marijuana cigarettes will cause your daughter to become a streetwalker: “Catcalling: creepy or a compliment?” (Via.) The article isn’t nearly so bad, and gives full voice to women who grasp that a man yelling sexual (and insulting or threatening) things at you on the sidewalk is insulting you for being a woman, not complimenting you.

But just like those articles of old from Schlaflyites (”I love getting hooted at on the street, and husbands have a right to rape wives!”), this one is full of women the reader is supposed to take cues from on how to be less of a grumpus pain in the ass who thinks she has dignity worth defending.

On the other hand, some women appreciate the attention in certain cases, like Jessica, a 31-year-old health-care educator in Los Angeles who declined to use her last name to protect her privacy.

“Yeah, it’s objectifying and all, but you know, if I walked down the street and didn’t have men looking me up and down and catcalling, I’d think, ‘Boy, I must really be getting old and dumpy,’ ” she said.

She’s gotten catcalls just walking her parents’ dog in baggy sweats. “I thought it was hysterical, like, ‘Boy, doesn’t take much to impress you, does it?’ “

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7PM tonight at MonkeyWrench Books , which is in one of my favorite parts of town, the North Loop area, which is like the hipster central shopping district. If you haven’t come out to a reading yet, try to make it to this one, because that might be the last for awhile.

Another edition of “What’s Cary Tennis been smoking?” He’s been a lot better lately, so there’s not been any reason to write posts wondering about the potency levels of his preferred smoking materials, but today’s column is a doozy. The guy who writes in has a Bible-thumping friend, and the letter writer is an atheist, and they have fun with their contentious differences. It’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt, right?* Now his friend, who teaches at a church school, is being pressured to teach young earth creationism to the kids, and the guy is fixing to do it, after going through a hefty process of convincing himself that he’s really considered the evidence, which is impossible, because honest engagement with the evidence in this case leads to one conclusion—evolution is the reality. I don’t say this lightly. We all have biases and prejudices that color our views and in many cases, the evidence is hazy enough that people can have real disagreements with no real conclusion. This isn’t true in the contentious debate between evolutionary theory and Adam and Eve. Objectively, one side has marshaled an irrefutable amount of evidence and the other is blowing smoke out their asses.

So what his friend is doing is that he already decided to bend over for the bullshit and is looking for a rationalization for it, so he doesn’t have to admit that he’s a wanker. Our letter-writer, however, is livid. He thinks teaching creationism is a form of child abuse, and while I think the term is overheated, I agree that using children in service of whack-a-doodle ideologies is cruel to children, especially in cases where your lies to them could have serious, long-term negative consequences on their job prospects. (The whole classroom, for instance, is automatically seeing any chance of going into sciences plummet through the floor because of this stuff.) Tennis, however, has one of his goofier answers, which is for this friend to dispassionately treat the misuse of these children as if he’s reading a book on anthropology.

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So NARAL endorsed Obama, in a move that was sure to create what you laypeople call “controversy”. The bloodletting at their blog comments is disturbing. You’d think they endorsed, oh, McCain or someone anti-choice, when they instead endorsed a pro-choice candidate they’ve had a long and fruitful relationship with.

It’s not a crazy choice, or even necessarily a badly timed one. NARAL has long thought of itself as a strategic organization, and I suspect that they think that Obama’s the better bet for beating McCain in November. And beating McCain is more important from a pro-choice perspective than the choice between Obama and Clinton, who have pretty much identical views on reproductive rights. Or maybe they think that an endorsement released now will help hurry up an end to the primary season, so the party can focus its energies on fighting McCain, who has pretty much promised to spike the Supreme Court with justices hostile to women’s rights.

In fact, they said as much in their press release.

NARAL Pro-Choice America PAC is making our endorsement now because every day that passes, Sen. McCain gets a free ride on the issue of choice. That free ride ends today.

It’s about moving onto the next stage, the most important stage: Getting a pro-choice Democrat into the White House.

There’s a scent of sour grapes in the air around the Clinton campaign, and from a feminist perspective, I’m boggled. Sure, I understand that it’s disappointing if “electing a female President” was a major priority for you and that’s getting thwarted. But if you support women’s rights, you need to put your support behind the Democratic nominee, even if it’s Obama and it’s likely to be. McCain can’t even support equal pay for women! He’s going to continue the assault on reproductive rights that the Bush administration started. If you support women, have some pity on us in our fertile years living in red states who sorely need a political break in our direction right now, namely a pro-choice Democrat in the White House. Which Obama is, in case there’s a whiff of doubt created by this needlessly contentious primary season.

If you haven’t seen it, here’s the highlight reel of my last reading at Book People.

Amanda Marcotte book reading from Marc Faletti on Vimeo.

It’s a good time! Luckily, for those in Austin who missed the experience the first time around, I’ll be reading at Book Woman tonight at 7PM. Show up and buy some books, yo. Feminist bookstores were the backbone of feminism for a long time, and we’re lucky to have one of the remaining ones in Austin, and they could use the support. I’m sure readers of this blog will find many tempting tomes at Book Woman. I won’t make it out alive with my hands empty, I’m sure. Much to the consternation of those who have to share my living space, because the piles of books around here on my “To Read” list is getting insane.