Yes, I'm aware that the long list of videos I meant to include last week for cool bands I'd seen at SXSW got mostly eaten. I will be trying to figure that out, but in the meantime I'm traveling again. This time to Syracuse, to speak at the university about the relationship of feminism and atheism. But since I'll be taking Amtrak, hopefully I'll be on Panda Party for most of the day. In the meantime, check out this British rapper named Lady Leshurr I saw in the Driskill Hotel, of all places.

I'll be watching her career with interest. She really knew how to work a crowd, so I see big things in her future.

When I was thirteen, there were two things I wanted more than anything else in the world: one was a girlfriend, the other to get my braces off. I assumed the latter would lead to the former, but this was also because I was thirteen, and at that point life is a series of obstacles past each one laying the promised land that so tantalizes you. 

It also helped that the orthodontist gave out tokens for timeliness and hygiene, which you could then use to get gift certificates or other prizes. It may have also been my excitement at getting those (and my willingness to talk about it at length) that prevented me from finding a girlfriend, but let's not hypothesize.

I had an orthodontist appointment one afternoon, and my mother and I were running late. The orthodontist was out in a white suburb of Dayton - you could try to find something resembling a medical specialist in our neighborhood, but it would probably be right alongside the Sublime fan club and the people jogging with small dogs - and a healthy drive away. The leeway was two minutes after check-in to get a token, ten minutes to avoid paying a late charge, the latter of which I couldn't have cared less about. 

We rushed to the orthodontist, and pulled in to the parking lot, right next to the path to the front door. I got out of the car, and noticed another car pulling in behind us. My mom, rifling through her purse, told me to go and check in before I was late, and then shooed me away. "Go! Go!"

As I took a step, I heard a loud voice yell at me, "Get back in the car!"

I looked over, and saw that the car behind us was a black police cruiser. No sirens, no lights, nothing to warn us of any impending trouble. Just a cruiser that pulled in behind us, and was now yelling at me.

I bent over and shot a look at my mom, silently asking what the fuck was going on. She looked up at me, still not aware the cop was behind her, and said, "What? Go inside!"

I stood up, and looked over at the cop, a younger white woman, tense and inexplicably angry, and saw her standing behind her open door, gun pointed at me. "Get. In. The. Car."

I did, and I shut the door. My mom looked at me, ready to tell my knucklehead ass to go inside before she had to pay extra for this appointment, and then she looked in her rearview mirror. She saw the police officer, and went back to her purse, now looking for her license rather than her checkbook.

The officer came to the window, leaned over, and muttered, "Do you know why I pulled you over?" 

My mom, ever-honest and ever-not wanting to pay extra for things, said, "No. You want to let him go inside?"

The cop pursed her lips together, looked at me, and said, "Son, you do not ever want to try to escape when an officer of the law has stopped you, especially at your size." The unspoken coda, of course, was, "That's a good way to get shot."

I plaintively looked at the officer, then at my mom, then back to the officer. "I wasn't trying to escape! I was going in for an appointment."

The cop, pointedly ignoring me, asked my mother for her license and registration. There's a calculus that I believe went on in her head at that point, which was that whatever ticket she was going to get would probably cost as much as the missed appointment. Paying for both, however, was akin to burning money. She asked again, "Can he go inside to his appointment."

The cop, losing patience, yelled, "You keep him in the car until I tell you that he can leave."

A few minutes later, we found out that the officer was giving my mom a speeding ticket. Curiously, the ticket was for a stretch of road two miles away from the lot in which we were now parked, and she had only started following us within the last half-mile or so, but at that point, nobody was in a mood to argue. 

There's a reason that Trayvon Martin's story hits me so hard. When you're thirteen and threatened with a bullet through the chest for getting your braces tightened, it teaches you how the world works, and does it in a hurry. 

Thanks to Kevin B. Lee and Deborah Lipp for adapting a post I wrote on a third season episode of "Mad Men" into a video. I've got a fixed embed code, but I highly recommend watching it.

One of the things I really like about this strategy of TV exposition and criticism is that having the video rolling underneath helps prove the argument. I met with a lot of skepticism when I suggested that the lawnmower accident was a symbolic re-enactment of the JFK assassination, but when you hear the argument over the footage rolling that makes it clear the visual parallels between that awful day and the episode, it's much harder to deny. 

"Mad Men" is coming back on Sunday, and I imagine that I will have some exciting blogging for it. It's been too long since this blog has had a regular series to blog about!

This post by an anonymous doctor suggesting "civil disobedience" from doctors in response to mandatory ultrasound laws is making the rounds, mainly being forwarded by people who are rightfully outraged by these laws, but---and I hate to say this---don't really understand the issue very well. Both actual abortion providers (using their actual names) and I tried very hard in comments to explain that this post is just missing the point, but alas, we were basically ignored. There's no indication that the doctor who wrote the post is an abortion provider, and in fact good reason to think he/she is not, and so it seems more than a little condescending to act like you have all the answers for solving the abortion crisis that the right is inducing with these laws. If you're a doctor and you really want to fight back against the right on abortion, why not start by providing abortion? Sure, that would mean that anonymity for your political views is stripped from you, but if you're going to scold others to break the law and put themselves in danger, the least you can do is set a good example by being public and providing abortion. 

The anon doctor suggests that abortion providers reject the mandatory ultrasound law by refusing to do it, and doctoring patient files to make it look it was done, if necessary. This is characterized as "civil disobedience", but it's really not in the same way that getting arrested at protests for moral but illegal trespassing is. Civil disobedience works best if it has a public component, to draw attention to your issues in hopes of changing the law. Privately doctoring files doesn't accomplish that. 

While it's always theoretically possible that doctors who do this will get away with it, the result if they get caught will not be that they generate outrage in a complacent public and get the law changed. No, they're probably just going to get their license stripped, and be unable to perform legal abortions. Which is what anti-choicers want. They would be delighted if doctors refused to obey the law, and could be stripped of their licenses. Giving the oppressor what they want most in the world isn't effective action. It is, in a word, counterproducitive. The reason anti-choicers pass laws like this is, I believe, they know that women will jump through any hoop to get rid of an unwanted pregnancy, and they want to maximize the pain and suffering of the whole ordeal. Pro-choicers should take that knowledge and realize that depriving women of safe, legal providers is about the worst possible thing you could do under these circumstances. Yes, a non-consensual procedure is a horrible thing, but if you look at the choices women make, not being able to get a safe, legal abortion is more horrible. 

I pointed this out on Twitter, and some folks asked how doctors would get caught. Which points to another reason that a little knowledge is a bad thing. Someone on the outside probably assumes, for obvious reasons, that women getting abortions are pro-choice and would therefore be complicit in this subterfuge. I don't blame someone for having this assumption, but I do blame them for working off it without doing a little research first. The reality is that anti-choice women seek abortion all the time. They tend to justify it by saying that they're not like those other women---those sluts, you know---who are getting abortions. But because of this, a doctor can't trust that a patient in their office won't use them for the abortion, and then run to the police and squeal about law breaking they witnessed. Depressing, but a reality that people on the inside have learned they have to accept. 

So please, don't keep forwarding this piece. I realize it feels good and makes the reader feel they can exert control in a situation that's been set up to make everyone helpless and victimized, but it's an illusion. 

Now that the media has finally figured out that there's no "Catholic vote" and therefore Santorum isn't winning it by virtue of his Catholicism, Santorum himself is being questioned about this supposedly puzzling phenomenon. His response? One of my favorite logical fallacies: No True Scotsman. 

I think the bottom line is that we do well among people who take their faith seriously, and as you know just like some Protestants, some Protestants are not church going, they are folks who identify with a particular religion but don’t necessarily practice that from the standpoint of going to church and the like, and I think, you know, with folks who do practice their religion more ardently I tend to do well.

Oh yeah, he went there, basically claiming that Catholics who don't vote for him aren't real Catholics. Implicitly, this is another attack on JFK, because JFK a) wouldn't have voted for him and b) believed in a separation of church and state, which makes Santorum want to throw up. It's also an attack on pretty much all Catholics, honestly. Santorum is creating a high bar for the "real Catholic" test. You not only have to believe the same things he does about women's roles and sexuality to clear it, but you also have to believe those issues are more important than war and poverty. I'm not entirely sure the Pope could clear Santorum's bar for "real Catholic". After all, Santorum differs with the Pope on probably more issues than he agrees with him, though it's up in the air whether or not the Pope really believes the "bitches ain't shit" philosophy trumps the "war is bad" one when determining who to vote for. 

Of course, I can't help but have mixed feelings about this. If Santorum gets his way and the test for how Catholic you are is based on how much you hate Teh Sex, that means there aren't very many Catholics indeed. Which would, if taken seriously, basically mean they're a tiny cult with no real political power. Which would probably work out for the best, honestly, because right now their political power is being wielded to destroy women's rights and let people contract HIV and die. But Santorum, with thoughts of theocracy flitting through his head, doesn't really grasp this conundrum.

The only real question that comes to mind for me when Santorum says things like this is, well: stupid or evil? I mean, he's abandoned the pretense of the dog whistle and is basically saying that he's running openly as a theocrat. And that the only true Christians are also theocrats. He bleats constantly about how he wants to bomb Iran, but his philosophy of governance is the same as theirs, especially with regards to corraling people who claim to have the same church as you. Does he know that he sounds like someone who rejects the First Amendment, wants to create a Christian theocracy, and then start a holy war with Muslim theocracies? Or is he just incapable of controlling himself? I have no idea. 

On a lighter note, the return of "Mad Men" is nigh, and to celebrate, my dude Marc Faletti and remix artist Elisa Kreisinger made a video celebrating the ladies of "Mad Men" in their moments of assertiveness.

It's set to "You Keep Me Hanging On" by the Supremes, but if for some reason, you can't watch the video, here's a transcript:

Chorus:

Set me free, why don't you babe

Get out my life, why don't you babe

'Cause you don't really love me

You just keep me hangin' on

You don't really need me

But you keep me hangin' on

Betty: You don't listen to me.

Rachel: You don't want to run away with me, you just want to run away.

Joan: You don't-/Betty: You don't-/Bobbi: You don't-

Trudy: You don't speak to me that way!

Jane: I'm just trying to do my job.

Peggy: I'm just trying to do my job, and you're making it very difficult.

Peggy: That's my job?

Lois: I'm good at my job.

Peggy: I do my job.

Suzanne: Do I have to worry about my job?

Chorus:

Set me free, why don't you babe

Get out my life, why don't you babe

'Cause you don't really love me

You just keep me hangin' on

You don't really need me

But you keep me hangin' on

Rachel: You were expecting me to be a man. My father was, too.

Peggy: I never expect him to be any other way than what he is.

Joan: I forgot for a second that you're incapable of doing something nice without expecting something nicer in return.

Faye: It all comes down to what I want versus what's expected of me.

Set me free, why don't you babe

Get out my life, why don't you babe

Set me free, why don't you babe

Get out my life, why don't you babe

Carla: You best stop talking now.

Rachel: If I weren't a woman, I'd be allowed to ask you the same question.

Joan: I am not your darling and I don't want your kisses!

Peggy: Is that a threat? Because I've already taken somebody up on one of those tonight.

Faye: I chose to be where I am. I don't view it as a failure.

Peggy: And I am not scared of any of this.

Chorus:

Set me free, why don't you babe

Get out my life, why don't you babe

'Cause you don't really love me

You just keep me hangin' on

You don't really need me

But you keep me hangin' on

America loves paranoia. 

We're a country fascinated with ghosts and the paranormal, mind-reading and angels. A long streak of extensive conspiracy theories dots our national landscape: the JFK assassination, Obama's birth certificate, the "real story" behind 9/11, Freemasons, a dozen different Jewish plots, and so on. Richard Hofstadter wrote about this nearly forty years ago, and it bears repeating: in America, paranoia is gold.

When you look at Trayvon Martin's killing, it's easy to simply say that George Zimmerman was racist, his actions were motivated by racial fears, and the subsequent police response stems from a wholehearted indifference to the life of a black teenager. I'd argue a lot of that's probably true, but as Ta-Nehisi says, "[T]his is about race along with..."

That "along with" is paranoia. In this case, it's the sort of paranoia that leads to Florida's rather expansive Castle doctrine, which has the rather delightful effect of making "anywhere you have a right to be" your castle. It means that every legally armed individual retains a measure of protection against responsibility for shooting and killing another person, expanded by the scope and scale of their own personal paranoia.

George Zimmerman managed to call the police department 46 times in the past 14 months to report various crimes. The two explanations for this are that he's the unluckiest man on the face of the planet, doomed to forever witness crime but never stop it (until now), or that he's a paranoid vigilante with a fixation on black men who got sick of having the police do nothing about his repeated, meritless complaints. 

I'd bet on the latter, but the InTrade value on the former is really great right now.

An expansive self-defense doctrine turns the expression of paranoid activity into a socially acceptable, excused form of vigilantism. Hunting down and murdering a teenager visiting his father because he "looked suspiciously at houses" and "walked slowly" - teenagers being known, of course, for their otherwise purposeful, focused strides - becomes a he said, he dead proposition. The paranoiac who fixates on black youth is protected, because feeding a certain form of majoritarian paranoia bears rather awesome political fruit.

The issue is not simply that a non-black man has a problem with the existence of young black men. It's that the law in Florida is structured in such a way that the former can use the latter for target practice, and says nothing so long as one is afraid of 140-pound teenagers for the right reasons.

Of all the stories that I've only been half-following because of SXSW, the one that frustrates me the most is the case of George Zimmerman, who, by most reasonable accounts, chased down a 17-year-old kid walking back from the store with candy and a drink and shot him in cold blood. The kid, Trayvon Martin was a stranger to Zimmerman, but he was black, and so the police are simply just not arresting Zimmerman, and allowing the "self-defense requires me to chase down an unarmed teenager and shoot him even though the 911 operator asked him not to" excuse to stand. This, even though Zimmerman is clearly a paranoid public menace and strikes me as highly likely to reoffend. Colorlines has rounded up the evidence, and insofar as it's possible to be more upset at the cold-blooded murder of an unarmed teenager, this will do it. Now, Zimmerman needs to go to jail for life simply for the reason of justice, but it's increasingly obvious that it's also because letting someone unhinged and armed like this roam around free is a really stupid fucking idea. 

There's the 911 call itself, which makes it really clear that Zimmerman was following and scaring Martin, and then when Martin did what you do when you're being menaced---run---Zimmerman used that as an excuse to kill him. Someone who would do that is a dangerous fucking person, and likely to reoffend. There's also the fact that Zimmerman calls the cops constantly---seriously, it's like every time he sees a black man---totaling 46 calls to the police since January 2011, meaning Zimmerman's calls to the cops were 2.5 times as frequent as actual crimes in the neighborhood. Additionally, Zimmerman was already causing complaints from his neighbors because, despite his posturing as some kind of citizen cop, he actually reads like an asshole whose paranoia caused him to harass his neighbors.

At an emergency homeowner’s association meeting on March 1, “one man was escorted out because he openly expressed his frustration because he had previously contacted the Sanford Police Department about Zimmerman approaching him and even coming to his home,” the resident wrote in an email to HuffPost. “It was also made known that there had been several complaints about George Zimmerman and his tactics" in his neighborhood watch captain role.

Now that Zimmerman is emboldened in his paranoia by having the cops basically bless his behavior by not arresting him, I can't imagine this situation getting any better. If justice doesn't compel the police department, then concerns about future violence should. Additionallly, the levels of paranoia on display from Zimmerman suggest that one can't rule out some kind of paranoia-inducing mental disorder, which is clearly going to go untreated if he isn't dealt with. But the ugly fact of the matter is that right wing idiocy and paranoia has gotten so out of control that it's hard to tell if a paranoid delusion like Zimmerman's is due strictly to ideology or if there is a mental health component to it.

I'll be traveling today, but completely back tomorrow for normal working and blogging. Thanks to everyone for hanging in! It's funny, but it does seem that when I'm traveling and away from blogging, it's when a whole bunch of stuff goes down that I could probably comment on but don't have the time to do so. This is what happened during SXSW that I mainly just got to bullshit about with friends while watching bands set up, but couldn't blog about:

1) Jason Russell losing his mind and masturbating in public, amongst other things. What's interesting is right before that all went down, I saw some "Kony 2012" stickers downtown and was told all about the weirdness of the "Invisible Children" film and all the hoopla around it. At this point in my life, when I hear that self-aggrandizing evangelical Christians are making a name for themselves in any field, I fully expect that some kind of sex crime or sex scandal is in the immediate future. Thus, I wasn't remotely surprised that Russell was running around naked and masturbating in public. I'm still waiting for the other shoe to drop with Tim Tebow, in fact.

2) Mike Daisey lied to and is called out by "This American Life". The most troubling thing about this is, in the end, it's going to make it very difficult for more honest journalists to put a spotlight on ugly labor conditions, especially overseas. There's already a lot of incentives not to care or to blow off these stories, and believing that it's probably exaggerated just adds more to the pile. I haven't listened to Glass call him out on this, but from what I've read, it's incredible. I do think there's a lot of value in programs like "This American Life" owning these stories. Showing that there's limits to fact-checking will, ironically, put more value on it. It's shameful that shows like "This American Life" do all their background work, and then you flip on cable news and there's yet another right wing pundit lying his head off, and no one bothers to correct him. 

3) The continued meltdown of Rush Limbaugh. Saw that he's hiding behind his role judging some beauty pageant to dismiss claims of misogyny. Since one of his original offenses that's caused all this was demanding that women turn over sex tapes to him in exchange for him allowing them to use their own insurance to cover contraception, I don't think there was any confusion from his critics on this front. One can wish to fuck women while hating them. In fact, wishing to fuck women is often a prerequisite for the mind-boggling levels of hate that misogynists like Limbaugh have for women---at the end of the day, straight male misogynists can't stand that mere women have, legally at least, control over how their own bodies are used when it comes to sex and reproduction. They don't see women as people, but sperm receptacles, and just are livid that the law might see it any other way.

Good morning! I'm still at SXSW and so blogging is slow, but I thought I'd check in share some stuff with you, as well as invite you to Panda Party. I've seen a lot of awesome bands so far, but the biggest is probably Gossip. 

The good news is that it was a tiny venue (maybe 150 people?), and so an experience you don't often get with them. Beth was amazing, as usual, and returned to old school form in that she's still stripping down to her skivvies and daring you to take issue with it. The bad news is they're really pushing their new stuff, which just isn't as good as their first three albums. But the crowd seemed to like it, so who am I?

I've gotten some writing done, believe it or not! "Community" returned last night, and here's my piece on why we deserve closure, as fans. "Portlandia" also finished out its season, and I responded by saying that the show demonstrates that tedious hipster-bashing is finally not hip. Embrace the cool! Orrin Hatch is taking swipes at hipsters now, which means hipster-bashing is what it was always meant to be: snottiness by the jealous and the conservative against the hip and the liberal. The response I've received suggests that there are still some bitter geeks who want to feel cool by bashing hipsters, but I've always found this behavior a bit strange. After all, most people that get labeled "hipster" were geeks in a former life, which is why the byways of the modern hipster are similar to those of geeks: blogs, social networking, obsessiveness. Perhaps it's the similarity that causes the hate.

Here are some great bands I've seen so far:

Hope to see more of the same!

In all the chaos of SXSW, I very nearly missed the embarrassing overreach by Jane Fonda, Robin Morgan, and Gloria Steinem, who are pushing for the FCC to pull Limbaugh from the airwaves. These women do good work in the world, but this is a classic case of feminist narrow-mindedness, where devotion to feminism without considering intersectionality can make us look stupid. Government censorship is something feminists really need to shun, on moral grounds and because, as the crackdowns on Occupy show, because it rarely works out for our side anyway. Going after his advertisers, and using shunning to show that he doesn't speak for "real America" is working great. Why rush it? 

Jill and Lindsay have more to say on this issue. I just want to say that this is a more complex issue than I think many people really see. There's a tendency on the left to just get upset and want to shut it down when bigoted fucks like Limbaugh say the things they do. I definitely get that; it's true that Limbaugh's hate-spewing legitimately recruits new bigots and gives aid and comfort to others. But that's not all that's going on. Limbaugh is also giving voice to opinions that people already hold, and that they share in more private forums like social networking, email, and old-fashioned person-to-person communication. That stuff is powerful, but it's hidden from view. It makes it easier for conservatives to pretend to be interested in, oh, "religious liberty", when they just hate women. When Limbaugh gets on air and says what he and those he speaks for really mean, that is clarifying. In this case, it basically killed off the faux concerns about religious liberty and even David Brooks is now playing the "contraception is a serious problem because women abuse it" card. In a sense, they did us a favor. Now we can have an honest conversation about what's really going on, and in honest conversations, I do think liberals have a leg up.

Thus, I'm a bit torn on the Limbaugh thing, and think that the best strategy is to keep shaming anyone who advertises with him. If he's on air, giving voice to what conservatives are really thinking, but being shunned for it? That strikes me as the best of both possible worlds.

I guess my first blogged impressions of SXSW Interactive will be most of them, since today's really the last day I'll be doing this part of the conference. Lots of great stuff at this conference; in a lot of ways, I feel it's the best yet. For instance, Elisa Kreisinger is debuting her first "Mad Men" remix, where Don loves Roger here:

My panel on pick-up artists vs. feminists went really well, and you can read some observations here. I also went and observed a class of pick-up artists, and it was really quite strange. I'll talk about it some on the next Opinionated.

Baratunde Thurston's keynote speech on the power of satire was inspiring and hilarious, and I hope they put the entire video online soon.

I've seen a lot of great panels, on topics ranging from women on the internet to internet drama, but I think my favorite so far has been one on the state of comic journalism, i.e. people telling real life, journaliistic stories through the medium of cartooning and comics. You can read about the panelists here. I walked away really feeling like this is a form that's already amazing and has a ton of potential to expand our ideas of journalism and reach audiences that aren't currently being reached. I had to sneak out for the last ten minutes because I had to make an interview (which you can read here), but it was a riveting panel. If you're interested in the form, Cartoon Movement is a great source for reading tons of editorial cartoons and cartoon journalism.

I won't be able to Panda Party, because I'll be out at SXSWi, getting smarter and better educated so as to be a better writer for you. But that doesn't mean you can't have fun. Panda Party!

After the Blunt amendment went down, I figured that, policy-wise, Republicans were out of options in their desperate bid to separate middle and working class women from simple access to contraception. It was their single best shot, after all, and it frankly wasn't a very good one. Unfortunately, the war on low income women who don't have access to health care benefits through work continues at a rapid pace; with the pretense about "abortion" or "religious freedom" falling away during the Slutstraganza, Texas is cheerfully cutting 130,000 women off their access to contraception and cancer screening cuz SLUTS. 

Republicans should have let the story die over the weekend, but in part because of the right wing media, that wasn't going to happen. So even though the right is actually out of realistic options, the debate over whether or not 99% of American women are worthless sluts has continued on, and every day it continues is a bad day for Republicans. So it looks like Senate Republicans are taking action to speed up the demise of this debate:

From one top GOP senator openly lamenting the fallout of the ongoing fight over contraception, to the author of the controversial legislation at the heart of that fight effectively conceding defeat in the upper chamber, signs mounted Tuesday that suggest Senate Republicans want to put the birth control controversy to bed.

“You know, I think we’ve got as many votes as I think there were to get on that,” Senate GOP Conference Vice Chairman Roy Blunt told TPM Tuesday afternoon after a weekly Capitol briefing. “I think the House side may take some further action. That debate will go on for a long time, though I don’t know that there’s anything else to happen in the Senate in the near future.”

The concession marks a departure for the GOP leadership, which as recently as last week insisted that Republicans were on the right side of the issue and would fight on.

Last Thursday, after his amendment was narrowly tabled 51-48, Blunt vowed that, “The fight is not over.” He had maintained that he wants to tack it onto legislation the president cannot veto. But on Tuesday, after a meeting with his caucus, he dialed down expectations for any further action in the Senate.

The question is can they really get Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Bill O'Reilly to stop  hyperventilating about their brand-new discovery that there's this thing called the "birth control pill", and it's been considered a standard part of women's health care for about 50 years now? I'm not sure. 

So why did Republicans think this was going to work in the first place? I think it's because they think that some feminist gains are more controversial among the general public than they actually are. The Beltway media aids in this; they look at all the Bible-thumping nonsense pouring out of red states and overestimate the actual on-the-ground enthusiasm for the no-fucking rules. Never underestimate the capacity of people to compartmentalize, and believe fucking is wrong on Sunday morning, but by Monday night, believing it's oh so right yet again.

Beyond that, I think the whole situation is a result of many on the right and in the Beltway media not understanding that social justice is a piecemeal thing. It's not like feminists just flip on a light and suddenly the contention "women are people" is understood and accepted by all across the board. Some rights, such as the vote, are universally accepted now. Some, such as who does what amount of housework and whether or how much right women have to reject male attention, are still hotly contested. And some have widespread acceptance, but Republicans just haven't gotten the memo yet. I think that this is where they screwed up. They believe two things are still controversial that aren't, and they just found out the hard way how wrong they are:

1) Equal pay for equal work.

2) "Good girls" can.

It's clear that the Republican party still finds equal pay for equal work to be offensive---which is why the Supreme Court ruled against Lilly Ledbetter---but what they fail to understand is that while some excuses are still being made for the wage gap out there, the public at large really does reject paying women less just because they're women. They may not understand why it's a problem that women get less pay because of child care issues and things like that, but open discrimination  where women do exactly the same work as men but get paid less for no other reason than gender has reached the point where it's nearly as offensive as denying women the vote. Republicans still labor under this delusion that men want women who have no aspirations but to be housewives, and while that does exist, I don't think it's as common as they think. A lot of men see dependent women as a burden, and want to form dual-income marriages because duh, that means more money and a more comfortable living. Unfortunately, it's much easier for men to prefer to marry working women because they know women will still do most of the housework, but nonetheless, I think both men and women see that their lives are better if women work. And since they've accepted that, they're not going to be keen on bringing in less money for no other reason than discrimination. 

The contraception mandate is, at its core, about equal pay for equal work. Under the Affordable Health Care Act, all of men's preventive care is covered, so it's only fair to cover all of women's. That Republicans demand that employers have a right to give women fewer benefits simply because they're women is no different than Republicans demanding the right to pay women less simply because they're women. This crosses a big line with most of the public. 

As for the second one, this is where the Republicans really misfired. They really overestimated public antipathy towards privileged adult women having sex while single. I can see why they made this mistake; they watch a lot of Fox News, and Fox is always on about "girls gone wild". What they forgot is that Americans don't see single women as an undifferientiated mass. When it comes to middle class or upper class women who eventually want to marry and have children, there's widespread acceptance of premarital sex. There's also complex racial politics in play here, where women of color still face more shame for being sexual than white women, even when all other things are equal, but I think that's one of those things that's fading away, especially with women like Michelle Obama living up to the modern ideal of sexy-but-wholesome. Right wing media thought that they could label someone like Sandra Fluke a "slut" or a "semen demon" for no other reason than she's 30 and unmarried, and this is where they misfired. Americans are still uptight about poor women having sex, teenage girls having sex, queer women having sex, and women who openly reject the path to marriage and motherhood having sex, but they're just fine with the Sandra Flukes of the world having sex. Cohabitation before marriage is the national norm, and not just for my generation. I'm from Texas, for god's sake, and I can probably count the married couples I know under 60 who didn't live together before marriage on one hand, and in all my life, I've never known anyone to have a fight with their family about that. 

I can see how this fact gets lost in the shuffle, because the anti-choice movement is so loud and has so much power over Republicans. But if you think about it, most of their victories only come when they focus on pushing their extremist anti-sex agenda on the disempowered: the young, the poor, lesbians, women of color, and women who are perceived as being a little too hostile to marriage and motherhood. Even their extremist abortion restrictions have to play on hostility for these less-beloved groups of women: restricting financing, parental notification, and regulations that basically play on the belief that some women just need a little push towards marriage-and-motherhood tend to go over more easily than restrictions that are seen as legitimate obstacles for "good girls".  

Democrats played this well. They could have been more cowardly and found a married woman with health problems to testify, but instead they gambled on a woman who isn't married. In doing so, they really exposed this gap of understanding between Republican politicians and pundits and the rest of the country on how acceptable it is for relatively privileged women to be single and sexually active. In fact, this really succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. I doubt that even in Nancy Pelosi's best case scenario feature the self-destruction of Rush Limbaugh, with bits of slime sticking to Mitt Romney. 

None of this means our work is even close to done. Americans are wildly sexist still. There's a ton of women you can unironically call a "slut" without getting tons of backlash, i.e. see above categories. But this was a case where Republicans completely misjudged how ordinary Americans of all political stripes feel. Perhaps there are some political lessons in this that can be paid forward.

I feel it needed an all-caps title, because it's SUPER, you know?

As usual, you can find real-time feedback from myself and Jesse on Twitter. I take cracking smart ass jokes about Republicans on a contested primary night very seriously, y'all. It's cutting into my pre-SXSW preparation time, after all. Time that could otherwise be spent tweaking and re-tweaking my schedule will instead be dedicated to hoping Callista Gingrich comes on screen so I can make more "Dark Crystal" jokes.

Prediction for tonight: Since the Republican base is all ablaze with their recent discovery that 99% of American women are "sluts", Rick "Barefoot and Pregnant" Santorum is going to do really well tonight. Even though Romney did try to win over the neanderthal vote by tacitly agreeing with the content of the argument, i.e. that pretty much all women are immoral, while merely objecting to the language, I just feel that the base doesn't think he hates women enough. His heart doesn't seem to be in it, like it is with Santorum. With the Slutstraganza going on, Santorum is really going to have the wind at his back.

Feel free to offer your predictions in comments.