This brings back memories of the early 2000s. It was so obvious that the Bush Administration was a complete cluster-fuck barreling toward disaster. I loved Paul Wellstone. His death was such a tragedy, coming when it did just as American politics was in short supply of dissenting voices.

Two things:

Yeah, I realized that the laws were at two different policy levels. My point was that both laws will be part of the same Fox News diatribes about how Obama is playing politics with the VAWA and perpetuating the lies about the "war on women," while Republicans are busy doing the important work of protecting all of…

Does anyone else think this sounds like a petulant, cynical intervention in the US Senate's upcoming debate on the Violence Against Women Act? See! The Republicans actually do care about women! They're passing tougher legislation on hate crimes against (brood mares?)—er, uh—women of reproductive age who have missed a…

I'm kinda with Hastings on this one—"only good news, no politics." Just what does she think journalists actually do? Does her idea of "making a difference" involve eschewing the thorny political problems that lead to inequalities and suffering—in lieu of showcasing self-aggrandizing philanthropy? I agree that…

Your mom sounds great. I also appreciate your point about dads taking on more of the shit that falls to moms. My mom worked building my dad's business, but then had to make her own career as a nurse after they divorced. This meant she was a lot less available for us. So we were happy when she re-married our step-dad,…

Definitely. Her smile also looks /horribly/ stale and insincere. Unfortunately, that's how she nearly always looks in photographs. It's a bit ironic for a reality star to be so irredeemably unphotogenic.

Well said. This was one of the criticisms of second-wave feminists, who were mostly white and middle-class. For them, entering the workplace was a choice they were fighting for. But for women of color, entering the workplace had never been a matter of "choice." Now, of course, working is not a choice for middle-class…

If you add in other white supremacist and anti-immigrant groups like the Christian Identity movement and Minutemen militias, you get much bigger numbers. The Southern Poverty Law Center tracks this and found over a thousand active groups in 2011.

That's an interesting question. For me, this young woman's reaction says less about her than it does about our instrumentalist view of education as something you pursue to get skills to make money, rather than as a valuable experience in and of itself. Learning about history, cultures, and communities outside one's…

True. But it might actually force her to think beyond the context of her rich Dallas suburb.

Yeah, education and learning stuff is so totally useless unless you're going to make lots of money off of it.

While I agree with most of your assessment, I think equating Don's past with Megan's past is not exactly accurate. Don's past involves a marriage that failed at least partly due to infidelity. We don't know much about Megan's "past," but if it just involves sleeping around a bit, that's a much smaller betrayal than…

I don't think it would be legit for even her husband to take issue with her face. The point of her piece is that policing women's looks is sexist. One would hope that he married her for the type of person she is. If he loves her, the only scenario in which he should be concerned about changes in her face would be if…

This woman has contradicted herself in every interview I've seen of her. Here she says she's "a girl's girl"... who's hated by other "girls"? The only way I can account for this is that the article was written and submitted in the midst of a meth binge.

Oh, cynical me. I thought she was trying to get pregnant so she could collect all of those fat welfare checks and cruise the ghetto in a Cadillac.

The irony here is delicious. Leave it to Marie Antoinette to rise from the dead notify us that the guillotine needs sharpening.

*anticlimactic*. ugh.

Most definitely. I guess the delivery method is what's getting me hung up. It just feels too passive to put it in the mail after so much work. But I also don't have much experience with knitting—I never finished my first scarf, so this seems like an out-sized amount of labor for an anti-climatic conclusion.

Exactly. Hopefully the daughter will start therapy in adolescence because she will probably need it through her thirties, as it'll take that long for her to develop a healthy relationship with food. Also, does this book feel like reality television to anyone else? In thinking about the publishers' vision of what would…