Abortion? What a Riot!!!

Bloggers rejoice! What could possibly go wrong with the RAPEublicans' plan to make abortion funny.

“How do you make abortion funny?” That was a key question mulled at a major conservative gathering Friday on how to make social conservatism appealing to young people, after an election where Republicans got trounced in the battle for millennial voters (who are are moving even further and further away from the Christian-right on marriage and other issues).

Abortion has to be made funny, the thinking goes, because funny sells on social media, and that’s where one goes to court young people. “You can engage with sarcasm, it’s hard with the abortion issue, but you have to,” said Students for Life president Kristan Hawkins at a breakout panel at the Faith and Freedom Coalition Conference in Washington today on how to win millennial voters. “Unfortunately we have to, because this is the generation that we’ve been dealt.”

If there's one thing conservatives cannot do, it's humour. And, as we know, the fetus fetishists among them are the most humour-impaired.

This is gonna be a gas. And not in the way they intend.

The RAPEublican Train Wreck

While all the paid pundits are huffing and puffing about what went right for Obama and wrong for Romney, I'd like to offer my humble opinion.

The RAPEublicans' social policy was idiotic and DOOMED.

Federally, and in many state houses, they've been waging a relentless War on Women, culminating in an astonishing attack on contraception.

Elsewhere, several of their Neanderthal candidates fatally flapped their yaps on rape and magic lady parts.

They doubled down on Teh Geys, just as support for equal marriage grew to be the majority view.

They ignored all demographics except angry white men -- among whom, admittedly, they did well -- characterizing the rest as 'takers, not makers'.

They continued -- or didn't refute -- the moronic Tea Bagger demonization of Democrats in general and Obama in Islamic-atheist-babykilling particular.

Romney himself lied and lied and lied. And when he wasn't lying, he wasn't forthcoming with any details -- or tax returns.

In short, the RAPEublicans wrote off or pissed off just about everybody but white men.

Deliberately.

(The Democrats weren't such geniuses themselves, but made some smart moves. This is a fascinating account of both campaigns and what they did and didn't get right.)

There's much hoo-hawing on the toobz today about shifting demographics, but there's one demographic that has not shifted. Women still make up just over half the population.

And they voted for Obama. The so-called gender gap was 18 per cent, up from 12 per cent in the 2008 election.

For me, the Republican campaign was the proverbial slow-motion train wreck. It couldn't succeed.

As far as I could see, they had only two aces in the hole: REALLY low voter turn-out and/or MASSIVE vote tampering.

As the WaPo story details, the Dems had a brilliant get-out-the-vote strategy and it worked a treat.

But despite that good work, I think some of the turn-out can be attributed to voters mortally offended at being dissed so thoroughly.

I think millions of Americans said to selves: 'OK, mutherfuckers, you don't want me and people like me to vote? I've got something to say about that.'

And they did.

Or as luna said last night:

Nobody can beat a coalition of Big Bird and big vagina.

— Luna (@Heading_West) November 7, 2012

Image source

Is Sarah Palin Secretly Pro-choice?

In another instalment of 'DJ! Visits the Dark Side So You Don't Have To', here's the latest on $arah.

She's secretly pro-choice.

Sarah Palin may be America's pro-life sweetheart, but a story making the rounds on conservative websites paints a different picture. It turns out Palin might actually be pro-choice.

Conservative news website Free Republic made their case against Palin's pro-life claims. They say that while governor she appointed a former Planned Parenthood official to the Alaska Supreme Court and that she supports the use of the abortion drug RU-486.

One of the most damning pieces of evidence against her is her continued claim to be "personally" pro-life. This phrase is generally used by pro-choice candidates to make their views seem more palatable to the conservative Christian voting block. It amounts to agreeing that women should have the right to choose but that the candidate wouldn't personally opt for an abortion.

In Sarah Palin's first book, "Going Rogue," she mentions that when she found out she was pregnant with her youngest child (a son who was born with Down's Syndrome) she briefly considered an abortion.

Additionally Sarah Palin has never supported so-called Personhood amendments, which are attempts by conservative lawmakers to grant personhood to fetuses, thus making harming them (such as would happen during an abortion) illegal.

That link cites Free Republic -- and yeah, I went there too -- but the ultimate source is ProLife Profiles, sponsored by American Right to Life.

And woo baby, this gang is Fetus Fetishists on Steroids! They slam National Right to Life for its 'immoral' incrementalist strategy and offers its own strategy.

ARTL Three-fold Strategy

1. Criminalize: recriminalize the intentional killing of the unborn and other innocents through state and national personhood efforts.

2. Demoralize: create unbearable social tension and ensure that there is no child killing with tranquility in order to coerce the government to correct the injustice of shedding innocent blood.

3. Evangelize: persuade individuals by education and evangelism to honor the God-given right to life.

Is this just FF infighting? Who's holier, more fetus-worshipping, panty-sniffing, slut-shaming, woman-controlling than thou?

Or is it just politics, über-whacky Rethuglican-style?

A commenter at FD named smallLliberal speculates:

Interesting stuff.

What I take from this, the GOP knives are being sharpened to make sure she stays out of the race.

There are all kinds of quotes from Rove, Roger Ailes and the other GOP bigwigs attacking her. They clearly think if she is the GOP nominee then Obama will crush her.

If she does not announce soon that she is not a candidate, this will get uglier. Mark my words.

Woo-hoo!

Deflection, spoof, rebuttal or attack?

The choice of words depends on one's vantage point when observing how a Democratic pro-choice organization is responding to Sarah Palin's tactics.

EMILY's List, the feminist organization that works to elect pro-choice, Democratic women to office, has launched a campaign countering Sarah Palin's "Mama Grizzly" shtick, which the former governor has used to promote conservative women candidates. But because the group's response blurs the line between parody and rebuttal, its messaging is mixed.

Nicole Allan staff editor and political writer at TheAtlantic.com is ambivalent though supportive.

Here is Stephanie Schriock explaining the rationale behind the campaign:

"I know Sarah Palin doesn't speak for me - or for millions of women and men across this country.

I'm a westerner myself - I'm from Butte, Montana - and I've watched with concern as Sarah Palin tries to co-opt the independent frontier spirit and patriotism of my part of the country, and turn it into a sort of national movement for backwards-looking, extremist politics. The strong western women who raised me and who are my role models would be horrified by the radical views of Sarah Palin and her candidates.

And then there's Forbes' Joel Kotkin outlining the reasons he calls Sarah Palin the Republican Party's Poison Pearl:

[...] if conservatives really want evidence of Palin's limitations, they only need to talk to people in her home state of Alaska. "She represents a constituency that is rural, but that's it," says Jim Egan, executive director of Commonwealth North, a local think tank. "What she says and does makes little sense in the urban environment that most Americans live in." If it does not sell across the board in Anchorage, home to almost half of Alaskans, you wonder how well her message will play in Omaha or suburban Houston, much less New York or Los Angeles.

See for yourself; here's the "Sarah Doesn't Speak for Me" video.