Tripling Down on Women's Rights

The US Congress seems to be having a competition over who can come up with the most outrageous anti-choice legislation.

Most recently, there is the Let Women Die Bill.

And now there's the You Can't Talk About That Here Amendment.

Seriously, radical misogynist TeaBagger Jim DeMint has just come up with a doozy.

Anti-choice Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) just filed an anti-choice amendment to a bill related to agriculture, transportation, housing, and other programs. The DeMint amendment could bar discussion of abortion over the Internet and through videoconferencing, even if a woman’s health is at risk and if this kind of communication with her doctor is her best option to receive care.

Under this amendment, women would need a separate, segregated Internet just for talking about abortion care with their doctors.

Spiteful, misogynist, hoop-hopping and, for extra bonus points, sneaky.

Amanda Marcotte has a great post at RH Reality Check on the War on Women today. Here's a sample (emphasis mine):

Both the activist and political behavior of anti-choicers lately has made one thing excruciatingly clear: shame is the name of the their game. The vague principle of “life” has always been a farcical cover story for anti-choice sentiment, of course, and much of this website lately has been dedicated to drawing a line between recent anti-choice antics and how little relationship they have to this cover story about “life”. If anything, however, the response to being so exposed hasn’t caused anti-choicers to retreat and look for new ways to convince people that they aren’t the anti-sex misogynist obsessives that they are. They’ve just been doubling down lately, as two recent news stories show.

The two stories are the Let Women Die Bill and the outing of an anonymous abortion doctor by Troy Newman and Operation Scumsuckers. Effectively targetting her as they did Dr. Tiller.

Amanda should have waited a few hours. Make that TRIPLING down on women's rights.

Too Far, Baby

I lived in Florida -- one of the states progressives had great hopes for -- for a lot of this bullshit.

I was managing a donut shop. (Don't ask.) Arguments raged. Everything Rachel talks about: unisex bathrooms, homosectuals' rights, women in combat, destruction of the fambly. . .

My assistant manager was 20, looked 12. She had thick blond hair she wore in braids. She was living with another employee that most customers knew and liked. (They were engaged, so it was mostly OK.)

She also had the absolute best stupid deadpan I've ever seen on a non-professional actor. I used to send her out to deal with angry customers. They'd be raving about something, she'd listen, nod sympathetically, tell them how sorry she was, and they'd immediately calm down.

She looked like a really dumb Heidi. Who could argue with a really dumb Heidi?

One day, the bathroom issue was being debated.

She interrupted: 'I don't get it.' People stopped to listen. 'Larry and I share a bathroom. What's wrong with that?'

Silence. The rednecks looked at each other and realized what dipshits they were being.

She made it back into the kitchen before exploding into giggles.

I wonder what the arguments will be this time. . .

Will he or won't he? But the more interesting question is . . .

Will Faux News really abstain from covering the Quran BBQ bunfest?

Fox News is the only [network] so far to say it will not. It did so in an interview Thursday with The Baltimore Sun.

"We do not cover every flag burning that happens in this country. We don't run every hostage tape," Michael Clemente, senior vice president at Fox News, said in a phone interview. "If we tried to cover everyone who wants us to stick a camera in front of them, we'd run out of cameras pretty fast each day. But this is really about just using some judgment."

Clemente summarized that judgment by saying: "He's one guy in the middle of the woods with 50 people in his congregation who's decided to try, I gather, to bring some attention to himself by saying he's going to burn a Quran if he gets the permit. Well, you know what, there are many more important things going on in the world than that. I don't know what they will be this weekend, but I am sure they will be more important than that."

Clemente said there will be no live coverage, "video" or "still pictures." He was unequivocal in saying Fox News will not cover the burning or the event.

Unequivocal, eh?

I, for one (as the letter-to-editor writers like to put it), will be gob-smacked if Fox News South does not cover whatever happens tomorrow.

The No. 1 Abortion Story

For the past few days, whenever I search for 'abortion' at Google News, the story of Rick Pitino is all over the place.

Who is Rick Pitino, you ask?

A USian university basketball coach. Seems he had sex with a woman not his wife, at a restaurant (I've read 'on a table', 'in a booth', and 'in the restroom' -- but then I'm reading this crap really really fast). She came to him later saying she was pregnant. He offered or actually paid $3,000 for her to get -- are you ready? -- an ABORTION. There's more about her allegedly trying to extort him or something. I lost interest.

So, apparently, has the guy I linked to above:

Given the fact that the documents detailing Rick Pitino's statements to police include the word "abortion" in them -- whether or not Pitino offered to actually pay for this abortion is at this point only a matter of semantics -- this was probably bound to happen. A University of Louisville anti-abortion group is publicly calling for Pitino's dismissal. Of course they are.