By now, some of you may have heard about the controversy concerning sexist comments made by New York Times Magazine writer Andrew Goldman. Goldman, who writes the weekly interview column in the magazine, has a history of saying dumb and sexist things to female interviewees. Last week, he asked actress Tippi Hedren the following question:

The worst abuse happened after you rebuffed his advances. Actors have been known to sleep with less powerful directors for advancement in show business. Did you ever consider it?

I thought it was a pretty stupid question, and a sexist one to boot, though on the scale offensiveness it was pretty mild. However, the whole interview was full of this kind of annoyingly obtuse, low-grade sexism. For instance, Goldman characterized Hedren’s going public about Alfred Hitchcock’s sexual harassment of her on the sets of The Birds and Marnie as a form of (presumably petty) “revenge;” he doesn’t seem to get the idea that breaking the silence about these issues is freeing and empowering, not only for Hedren personally but for women in general.

Novelist Jennifer Weiner took to Twitter to call Goldman out on his sexism, tweeting:

Saturday am. Iced coffee. NYT mag. See which actress Andrew Goldman has accused of sleeping her way to the top. #traditionsicoulddowithout

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Financial reporter Chystia Freeland has an excellent op-ed in today’s New York Times. It concerns a very important subject, which is the way that, in highly unequal societies like our own, self-dealing elites destroy their economies and themselves by rigging the system to reward their own and closing off opportunities to talented outsiders and new ideas and influences. A calcified social structure and the equivalent of incestuous inbreeding among elites is the result, and it will eventually drain the lifeblood out of the economy.

Freeland points to 14th century Venice as a historical example of this phenomenon, and cites arguments by economists Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson about why states fail. According to Acemoglu and Robinson:

what separates successful states from failed ones is whether their governing institutions are inclusive or extractive. Extractive states are controlled by ruling elites whose objective is to extract as much wealth as they can from the rest of society. Inclusive states give everyone access to economic opportunity; often, greater inclusiveness creates more prosperity, which creates an incentive for ever greater inclusiveness.

Freeland argues that crony capitalism in the U.S. exemplifies the “extractive” model through the “tilting of the economic rules in favor of those at the top.” American crony capitalism, she says, works in two ways:

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You know, as a humble weekend blogger, I sometimes struggle about what in the world I should write about. Weekends are often slow news periods, and frequently I am at a loss. Sometimes I have what I think are good ideas, but some other every-day blogger gets to them before I have a chance to, and I don’t want to repeat something that’s already been done to death. The search for good material can be a challenge — it doesn’t just fall from the sky, people!

All of which explains why I was delighted when I stumbled upon an interminable interview with Camille Paglia that Salon.com saw fit to publish earlier this week. Oh what joy! It arrived like an early Christmas present, and I knew right away that it would be chockfull of enough stupidity, megalomania, and batsh*t crazy to keep me busy for weeks!

And true to form, la Paglia does not disappoint. She apparently is shilling for yet another of her rubbishy books, which explains her re-appearance on the scene. And actually, there is so much bizarre stuff in that interview that I hardly know where to begin. Paglia is in her high Classic Concern Troll mode throughout; she’s a self-described “feminist” who has never, ever had a single good thing to say about feminism, a so-called Democrat who does nothing but viciously attack each and every (living) Democrat, all the while behaving like a lovesick lapdog puppy to every deranged talk radio wingnut who ever came down the pike.

Here’s a modest sampling of some of her more risible comments in the Salon interview: Mitt Romney is “a moderate — like Nelson Rockefeller” and “an affable, successful businessman whose skills seem well-suited to this particular moment of economic crisis.” Obamacare is ” a massive, totalitarian takeover of the American medical system.” Conservatives are all passionate civil libertarians, and “protest against the surveillance state has, with only a few exceptions, been mainly coming from the Right and not from the Left!”

This is all standard Paglia-esque drivel. Indeed, the single biggest shock in the interview is that nowhere does she mention Madonna, whom in the past Paglia would bring up, with OCD-like inevitability, in every single interview she gave or article she wrote, no matter how inappropriate to the context. Nor does she bring up her previous fangurl obsession, Sarah Palin — who, wrote Paglia in 2008, represented:

the biggest step forward in feminism since Madonna channeled the dominatrix persona of high-glam Marlene Dietrich and rammed pro-sex, pro-beauty feminism down the throats of the prissy, victim-mongering, philistine feminist establishment.

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I haven’t seen much about this in most of the political blogs I frequent, but the Nobel committee’s decision to award this year’s Peace Prize to the European Union strikes me as bizarrely misguided. On the Washington Post’s Wonkblog, Dylan Matthews, a neoliberal contrarian in the classic New Republic mode, predictably cheers the decision, but Naked Capitalism’s Yves Smith is much closer to the mark. As Smith points out, the EU is pretty much synonymous with the Eurozone, and these days the Eurozone is all about inflicting its sadistic austerity policies on the masses:

Admittedly, the EU is not the Eurozone, but with the biggest nations in Europe members of the currency union, Eurozone politics are likely to continue to dominate that stage. And as we and others have chronicled at length, the Eurocrats seem determined to strip periphery countries of sovereignity and put not just their economies but their societies on the rack in a failing plan to save the banks of the surplus countries.

It’s true that the EU is not an entirely malevolent institution; it has done some good, particularly in establishing human rights standards for the continent. But that good is heavily outweighed by the severe damage it is causing, in the untold pain and suffering it is inflicting, and the countless ruined lives it is leaving in its wake, via its punitive austerity measures. Those formerly solidly middle class people in Spain, who now resort to dumpster-diving for their next meal? An epidemic of “suicide by economic crisis” throughout Europe? Folks, those are your Eurozone — and, by extension, EU — policies in action.

That the Prize was awarded to EU at this particular historical moment is very bad news indeed; it appears to be a powerful signal that the European establishment is giving its full backing to ruinous, oppressive austerity economics. Only time will tell if this particular Prize will prove as infamous as the one to Henry “Christmas bombing” Kissinger in 1973 (the great Tom Lehrer famously remarked that when Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize, satire became obsolete).

But really — when you consider all the heroic human rights activists around the globe, who every day put their lives on the line to advance social justice and human freedom — like this heroic, and tragic girl, to take but one example — and consider that the committee chose to give its Prize instead to an institution whose main priority seems to be coddling and enriching the bankers and damning working people to ruin and starvation? That seems utterly morally depraved, to me.

I have to say, one of the most deeply satisfying web posts I have ever read has got to be this one, posted yesterday, in which Gawker’s Adrian Chen unmasks one of the internet’s most infamous trolls, Reddit’s Violentacrez, aka Michael Brutsch. Brutsch, who is a Texas-based 49-year old programmer, is a truly revolting character; he is a hard-core misogynist, racist, and anti-Semite who, under the auspicious of the Violentacrez moniker, specialized in posting sexually suggestive images of underaged girls, most of them photos taken in public, but secretly and without the subject’s permission. This charming section of Reddit was called “Creepshots;” it was (finally!) banned from Reddit this week, following news reports of a Georgia teacher who was fired after posting pictures of his students to the site. Other Reddit sections moderated by Violentacrez included Chokeabitch; Beatingwomen; Jailbait; N—-erjailbait; Rapebait; Hitler; Jewmerica; Misogyny; and Incest.

What is perhaps the creepiest thing about Brutsch is not that he exists; as we all know, there are countless disturbed, hate-filled, and morally depraved individuals out there. But even more upsetting that Brutsch himself is the way he was not just tolerated, not even merely enabled, but actively valorized. And it’s not just that he gained many followers and became a hero to his fellow trolls on the Reddit site, though that of course is nauseating in itself. It’s the way Reddit’s management welcomed the dude with open arms, awarding him the coveted, and (in internet terms, at least) powerful position as volunteer monitor for a number of Reddit threads.

Predictably enough, when Brutsch was told by Chen about Chen’s plans to out him, Brutsch whined: but what about my job? What about my family? Part of what is so fascinating about this post is what Chen reveals about Brutsch the man, and indeed, those details help to humanize him a bit. Brutsch has a job with a financial services company; he also has a disabled wife and a son who is about to go into the military.

I’ve often wondered about what internet trolls are like in real life, so tales of trolls unmasked always fascinate me (you can find another, similarly disturbing and fascinating tale of a troll here). While I imagine trolls to be extremely sketchy, socially marginal characters, Brutsch turns out to be a much more mainstream and functional person than I ever would have dreamed. But though that is part of what humanizes him, it’s part of what is terrifying, as well. It makes me wonder: how many people do I know, who are all smiles and sunny normality on the outside, are actually dark, simmering cauldrons of violent, misogynist, racist, sexually twisted hatred on the inside?

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The anti-abortion movement has had many triumphs; one of the most unfortunate ones is that they have driven the millions of women who have had abortions back into the closet. Women who have had abortions have not always been so silent; during the second wave of the women’s movement, many women spoke out, for the first time, about their abortions. For example, when Ms. magazine made its debut in 1972, one of its most talked about features was a statement entitled “We Have Had Abortions,” which was signed by a number of prominent women, including Gloria Steinem, Nora Ephron, Lillian Hellman, and Billie Jean King.

Sadly, in today’s political climate, a similarly brave and powerful gesture would be most unlikely. Can you imagine a promising young starlet or up-and-coming female tennis star going public about their abortions? Exceedingly few women would be courageous enough to put their careers at risk, let alone themselves up to the cauldron of private threats and public hatred that would inevitably result.

And yet … in the U.S., abortion is the single most common surgical procedure for women. By the age of 45, more than one-third of American women will have had an abortion. Almost half of pregnancies in the U.S. are unintended, and about 40% of those unplanned pregnancies are ended by abortion.

Clearly, millions of women are having abortions. And yet, we almost never hear from them. The enormous disconnect between how extraordinarily widespread the practice of abortion is, and women’s overwhelming public silence about it, is shocking. When abortion is discussed publicly, it is almost always treated as an abstract, philosophical or religious issue, and the discussants are usually older white men (the recent vice presidential debate was a fairly classic example of this).

And yet, the more abortion is treated as a an abstract issue about “when life begins,” the further it is removed from the physical realities of women’s lives. An individual woman’s right to make the most basic, urgent decisions about what goes on in her body and her life are intellectualized away.

All of which is to say that it is vitally important that we women take charge of the terms of the abortion debate by making it about our bodies, our lives, our dreams, and our freedom to plan our families and control our reproductive destinies in any way we see fit. Breaking the long. shame-filled silence and speaking honestly about our own experiences with abortion is one of the most powerful weapons we can use to re-center the abortion debate back where it belongs: in the everyday lives and realities of individual women.

If we are to have any hope of reversing the creeping anti-choice tide, speaking about our own abortions is crucial. That’s why I think it’s so important that everyone list to this Ted talk by Aussie feminist Leslie Cannold, about breaking the shame cycle that leads to the public silencing about women about our abortions. As Cannold points out, shame silences us, then isolates us, thus severing all possibility of connection and solidarity, and by extension, political power. We must break that cycle. Cannold’s talk is a start.

Looks like we’ll barely be finished with This Week’s Debate before speculation about Next Week’s Debate begins. As a writer, I love close elections; as a citizen, not so much.

Here’s some final items for the day and week:

* Kevin Drum adds his emphatic voice to the worthy crusade to draw as much attention to Medicaid as to Medicare.

* Hillary Clinton has Biden’s back on characterization of what administration knew immediately following Benghazi killings.

* Some classic Charles Pierce: “You know what’s the difference between Sarah Palin and Paul Ryan? Lipstick.”

* At Ten Miles Square, Jonathan Bernstein argues Joe Biden is in fact in a pretty strong tradition of Senator who failed in presidential runs but then flourished in other roles.

* At College Guide, Daniel Luzer gives poor grades to increased state evaluations of colleges that have accompanied reduced resources.

And in non-political news:

* Michael Vick a dog owner again.

That’s it for me this week, with three-and-half weeks until Election Day, and early voting picking up steam. I plan to review my mail ballot this very weekend, and then make sure I don’t get harassed by True the Vote (joke! joke!).

Kathleen Geier is back for Weekend Blogging, so wake up fairly early tomorrow and attend! We’ll have more polls to examine on Monday, and who knows? maybe some actual news.

Selah.

I’ve been wondering ever since Moderate Mitt came out of hiding after five years to beat his chest during the first presidential debate whether there’d be some serious conservative blowback. There wasn’t much, because (a) Romney didn’t really change any positions, but just postured as moderate and “bipartisan,” and (b) he “won,” and got a polling surge over the hated Obama.

But last night, it wasn’t the perpetually weasely Mitt who was doing the Moderate Mambo, but the Hero of Movement Conservatism, Paul Ryan, the man whose elevation to the ticket was designed to satisfy activists once and for all of Romney’s ideological bona fides.

And perhaps there are some stirrings of conservative dismay, as reflected in a reaction from BuzzFeed’s chief wingnut-watcher, McKay Coppins:

In the spin room after the vice presidential debate Thursday night, Republican operatives gamely described the face-off as a battle between good ideas and bad ideas; common sense and nonsense; forward-looking solutions and backward-looking defensiveness.

One thing it was not: a defining battle between conservatism and liberalism.

Paul Ryan’s addition to the Republican ticket in August was supposed to reshape the presidential race into a sharp clash of ideologies — a battle of ideas that would present the electorate with a clear choice between the free-market ideals Ryan championed in the House, and the Obama administration’s government-centered populism.

But after a short, buzzy week of excitement immediately following his pick, Ryan’s reputation as a conservative movement leader was buried under a pile of disciplined talking points and running-mate grunt work. After effectively vanishing from the national stage, Ryan re-emerged Thursday not as the intellectual leader of the right, but as passable debater with a slightly crooked necktie.

Much as conservatives want to beat Barack Obama by any means necessary, they are also as likely as liberals to want this to be a clear choice of agendas yielding a big mandate. I’m not privy to their private reactions to all of Ryan’s talk about “bipartisanship” last night, but they couldn’t have been happy. Ryan the Hero is shrinking before their eyes, and at some point they may wonder if they, like Ryan himself, have traded their birthright once again for a mess of moderate pottage.

In non-ideological terms, Dave Weigel had a nice encapsulation of Ryan’s diminishment:

On Thursday morning, Rep. Paul Ryan was the guy who bow-hunted for fun and posed for pictures of his P90X workout. On Thursday night, he had been unfairly bullied by an old guy.

Yep, this is something to watch between now and November 6—and definitely afterwards, no matter who wins.

There’s a fair amount of buzz today about a Bloomberg column by Josh Barro that conducts a definitive smackdown on the Romney’s tax proposal and the idea that Mitt can somehow get his precious cut without increasing the deficit or increasing middle-class taxes.

Barro gets pretty far down in the weeds in rebutting the various “studies” (mostly op-eds and blog posts) the Romney campaign touts as defending its point-of-view. But here’s the part that may be most important in terms of public understanding of the mendacity of the Romney/Ryan “bipartisanship” pitch: the claim that negotiations with Congress will supply the missing details, and/or is the reason the candidates are refusing to supply them right now:

There are only meaningful “alternatives” to discuss with Congress if Romney can pick and choose from a pool of tax preferences for the wealthy that far exceeds the $250 billion annual cost of his rate cuts for them. If the pool of available base broadeners is just large enough to finance his tax cuts, then Romney actually is dictating a plan to Congress: if they don’t eliminate exactly the set of preferences he proposes, his plan will either have to raise taxes on the middle class or grow the deficit.

In other words, you can’t “negotiate” something that does not in the real world actually exist. So if like me you don’t much believe in R&R;’s interest in bipartisanship to begin with, this is a double dose of dishonesty at the very center of the GOP ticket’s closing pitch to voters.

I’ve probably yelled enough about the mendacity of Mitt Romney’s claims last week that he’d “sit down with Democrats” the day after the election and start charting a bipartisan path for the country. But Paul Ryan was up to it again last night, arguing that he couldn’t tell us how he’d pay for an across-the-board tax cut because that would be up to bipartisan negotiations in Congress (as though they could repeal the laws of mathematics!).

Most readers here are probably familiar with the relentless demonization of bipartisanship as “surrender” throughout the Republican primaries, and the specific pledges Romney made to remain faithful to policies guaranteed never to attract a single Democrat (from a repeal-and-reverse approach to health care, to the cut-cap-balance meta-pledge, to the many promises never to accept a tax increase). The most important pledge Romney made, in my opinion, is to sign Paul Ryan’s budget resolution as is if Republicans manage to whip it through Congress using reconciliation procedures, which would mean revolutionary changes in the structure and purpose of the federal government, adopted swiftly on a party-line vote.

But what happens if Romney wins and Republicans fall short of getting control of the Senate? Would this scenario enable him to break his promises and perhaps unleash that secretly moderate Mitt who’s been lying through his teeth the last five years or so?

I don’t think so. Even if Romney is so inclined (and I so no particular reason to believe he is), he’d be dealing with a highly mutinous House GOP and the bulk of a Senate GOP Caucus that would insist the new president use his leverage not to cut deals but to break skulls. Depending on the margin of Democratic control of the Senate, and the identity of the Democratic Caucus, there would almost definitely be an effort to buy a vote or two to put them in operational control of Congress, and with items like the repeal of Obamacare and the enactment of the Ryan budget on the table, they’d pay a pretty high price for treason. If that didn’t work, the combination of Republican control of the House, the presidential veto, and GOP filibuster power in the Senate would be used to squelch any Democratic legislation on even the most quotidian matter. With the entire bipartisan commentariat and the business community screaming for action to avert a “fiscal cliff,” Republicans would probably get their way on that set of threshold issues simply by way of superior leverage. And even without congressional support, a new administration could probably paralyze implementation of Obamacare via executive action and inaction.

Perhaps that’s as much as they could accomplish, but beyond that, you’d find a powerful sentiment among Republicans to withhold bipartisan action pending the midterm elections of 2014, when a more favorable electorate (in terms of turnout patterns) and another positive landscape for GOP Senate gains would make the final conquest of Congress a solid betting proposition. And on one big priority of the conservative movement—the final reshaping of the Supreme Court and the reversal of Roe v. Wade—the odds would be very good for a Romney appointment that would survive the Senate on traditional grounds of deference to the president.

More generally, from Romney’s perspective, the certainty of a wholesale uprising by his party’s “base” and its dominant congressional faction in the event of genuine “bipartisanship” would be a much bigger strategic problem than finding ways around a narrow Democratic margin in the Senate. Besides, if Romney does win, it will almost certainly be due to a tilting of the electorate that also makes a Republican Senate more likely than it appears to be today.

In any event, as I’ve said often, Obama and his entire campaign owe it to the country as much as to themselves to demand as many public concessions as possible, in advance, if Mitt and Paul intend to continue right down to Election Day professing their love for bipartisan negotiations. I doubt any real concession will be made, and perhaps it will finally dawn on the media if not the public that there’s really no way around a stark choice between two very different parties and agendas.

Just did an appearance on KCRW’s fine show “To the Point,” and tried to make the point that Joe Biden’s accomplishment wasn’t just a matter of “aggressiveness,” but of a determination to leave no point unaddressed, while challenging the phony “moderate” framing the Romney-Ryan campaign is trying to use to re-present its agenda and particularly Ryan’s own budget proposal.

I don’t know how well I did, but Jon Chait put it well in a piece I just read:

The contrast with Obama lies not merely in their very — very, very — different energy levels. Obama approaches debates with the same intellectual method he uses in his books, his speeches, and his policy discussions. He instinctively tries to find common ground first, trying to work within the framework his opponent has established and acknowledge what he agrees with before delineating his disagreements.

Biden does not bother. He simply casts aside his opponent’s frame and works within his own. He did not ignore Ryan’s arguments, but he barreled over them like an enraged truck driver plowing over orange cones, before moving on to his own intellectual turf. Sometimes he barreled so fast his points were wrong or incomprehensible — most notably when he appeared to attribute the financial crisis to Bush-era fiscal profligacy, and seemed to set the bar for who should pay higher taxes at $1 million a year, not the $250,000 line Obama has labored to align his party behind. But it was a highly effective way to handle the smarmy evasions that Ryan predictably served up.

Biden met his audience at a gut level. Over and over he appealed to them to settle the debate by falling back on long-held prejudices about the two parties. Taxes? Biden set out to utter the phrase “middle class” as many times as he possible could, and to tie Romney and Ryan to the class interest of the very rich. On entitlements, he pulled out of the weeds and reminded voters that Democrats were the party of Social Security and Medicare - “Folks, follow your instincts on this one.” On defense, he repeatedly invoked the possibility that Romney would start another war, which is probably the only real way that foreign policy might enter the thinking of a low-information undecided voter. And three times Biden invoked Romney’s disparagement of the 47 percent, using it to frame the entire Romney-Ryan economic philosophy.

The point about Biden’s reminders of the two parties’ legacies was especially insightful. When Ryan dragged the debate into green-eyeshade land on the most sensitive points of his tax and budget proposals, Biden was basically saying: Do you really believe this guy is devoted to Medicare and doesn’t want to cut upper-income taxes? Even low-information voters are at least dimly aware that’s not credible, particularly after four years of talk about how the Tea Party movement has crafted a more conservative and militant GOP.

So when you hear anyone call Biden a crude bully in how he approached this debate, forget it. He knew exactly what he was doing, and while his performance was hardly perfect (it would have been nice had he found a way to convey that Ryan’s biggest fans love him for trying to decimate the entire New Deal/Great Society legacy), it got the job done.

So shortly after I decided to “adopt” the Bay Area teams in the MLB post-season, the Giants made the cut but the A’s didn’t. And while I’m not an obsessive Yankee-hater like so many folk out there, I was an Orioles fan in the Earl Weaver era, so hope the Birds can prevail later today.

Here’s some mid-day news morsels:

* So you thought Biden was “aggressive” last night? Check out video from Sherman-Berman debate in California. And both these guys are Democrats. Thanks a lot, Top Two system!

* Salon’s Irin Carmon notes that last night’s discussion of abortion policy was light on references to women and their rights.

* RCP’s Sean Trende runs numbers and suggests a one-in-three chance of a divergence between the popular vote and electoral vote winner if the margin is under one percent. At this point, Obama more likely to be the beneficiary.

* But—Jon Chait reminds us that Republicans have enormous built-in advantages in congressional elections, at least for next eight years.

* Latest Gallup daily tracking has Obama approval rating back down to 50%, with Romney holding two-point lead in 7-day-rolling average w/ LVs.

And in non-political news:

* Microsoft said to be moving into hardware business, impatient with partners’ handling of post-PC environment.

Back after I appear on KCRW’s “To the Point,” with Karen Tumulty and others.

So right in the middle of all the yelling and screaming over polling methodologies, Gallup responds to long-standing criticisms (particularly from Mark Blumenthal) and changes its ways of choose its base sample of adults in ways that will likely make its assumptions closer to the U.S. Census breakdowns of demographic groups, and perhaps its findings closer to those of other traditional polling firms.

In announcing these changes, moreover, Gallup’s Frank Newport offers one of the more succinct critiques of partisan ID “weighting,” and makes it clear Gallup’s LV screen is based on questions about likelihood to vote, not assumptions about the makeup of the electorate:

As has always been the case, we do not attempt to weight the composition of the likely voter sample in any way — such as by political party or race or age — to approximate some guess of what we or others think it should look like demographically on Election Day. That approach is precarious given that the electorate can look quite different (especially looking at political parties) from one election to the next. Also, party identification estimates are often based on exit poll results, which themselves are surveys using totally different methodologies, and we generally do not rely on judgment calls to predict what the ultimate electorate will look like. Our basic underlying sample of national adults is weighted to known population parameters on demographic and phone use variables, as noted, and the likely voter pool derives from that, based on how our randomly selected respondents answer the likely voter questions.

You can expect conservatives to claim Gallup has caved to “liberal” pressure and is counter-weighting its samples, but that will confuse an effort to keep the base sample close to the actual demographics of the country with the conservative demand that pollsters guess which party will succeed in turning out its voters.

Assessments of the overall debate aside, a fun aspect of watching it was to look for Eddie Haskell moments where Paul Ryan tried to fool Mrs. Cleaver.

“I just think Paul Ryan is the Eddie Haskell of American politics, with this transparent two-facedness,” says Paul Glastris, a former speechwriter for President Bill Clinton and editor in chief of The Washington Monthly, referring to a smarmy character on the 1950s sitcom Leave It to Beaver.

The really obvious moments of mendacity for Ryan involved his “we’ll-get-back-to-you-on-this evasions” on the Romney tax plan’s financing and his rationalizations for asking for stimulus money for his district. But there were lots more: Igor Volsky of Think Progress counted 24 “myths” Ryan promoted during the debate.

What did you think? What were your favorite moments of smarmy prevarication from the Wisconsin radical? You can respond in the comment thread. And here’s a video for those of you too young to have watched old Eddie.