However, at the moment I don’t feel conquered. A bit tired, but not conquered.
Speaking of wars — history tells us that at the end of the first day of the Battle of Shiloh, Confederate General Pierre Gustav Toutant Beauregard telegraphed Richmond that he had won “a complete victory.” History also tells us that Union General William Tecumseh Sherman also assumed the Confederates had won. He sought out his commanding officer, General Ulysses S. Grant, to receive his orders for retreat.
Sherman found Grant hunkered under a tree, in the rain, smoking a cigar. “Well, Grant, we’ve had the devil’s own day, haven’t we?” Sherman said. And Grant, after another puff of the cigar, said, “Yes. Lick ’em tomorrow, though.” There would be no retreat.
The next day Union troops routed the Confederates and won the day, and the battle. Beauregard’s premature assumption of victory haunted the rest of his military career. Although, truth be told, his association with the Confederacy ended up being a worse career move.
I always think of General Beauregard whenever people declare victory a bit prematurely. At the Village Voice, Roy Edroso describes rightbloggers taking virtual victory laps and even performing psychological post-mortems on the conquered Left.
[Rosen’s] comments are a symptom of an underlying intolerance for values that exist outside pockets of liberal majority,” claimed Right Speak. That is, they represent (deep breath) “the mindset that traditional, conservative culture is bad as it exists outside the two coasts and other liberal centers of thought, such as higher education, it is dangerous, because the more it is allowed to be considered as mainstream, the more acceptable it will seem to all when legislation is passed one step at a time that eliminates and erodes many of the values the rest of the country holds.”
“I feel the left is riddled with insecurity,” explained AJ Strata. “They are intimidated by the rich, the powerful (see our military), the successful (another form of rich), and the happy. They thrive on sustaining the moment they revolted from parental oppression (be it religion, sexual orientation, taste in clothes, whatever). Why they even consider having or raising kids is beyond me. Maybe it is more of that lashing out and trying to prove they were right when they went full anarchist to leave the nest.” Whoever would imagine there were enough such people to elect a President? America must be in a very grave state.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Mittens is calling Hilary Rosen’s remarks an “early birthday present.” So far, neither Mr. nor Mrs. Mittens have told us why Mrs. Mittens has been deprived of the “Dignity of Work.”
It may be a few days before we know if the “mommy war” flap put any dent in the gender gap working against Mittens, or if the rightbloggers are pulling a General Beauregard. But if things work out the way I suspect they will, I have some advice for them:
He probably thinks he has found the key for winning back women’s votes by piling on the old “mommy wars.” But then Chris Hayes found this, from January:
And Chris Hayes reminds us that for years we’ve heard that poor and single mothers must be pushed into the work force so that they aren’t lazy and dependent. But wealthier women actually enjoy tax benefits for staying home. If you want to see more of this morning’s program, see the Chris Hayes page.
Most of us who had to work to support ourselves and our children had it up to here with the “mommy wars” years ago. Yes, raising kids is work, but raising kids while working full time is more work. A lot more work. Especially when you can’t afford housekeepers and cooks and nannies.
I think Mittens may be about to find out that the “mommy wars” aren’t the opportunity he thought they were. Let’s see what Mr. Etch-a-Sketch has to say about his welfare policies in the next few days.
The Wall Street Journal wants us to know that Republicans can win the War Against Women. Seriously. I like this headline so much I screen captured it before some dweeb at WSJ wakes up and realizes what it says —
Anyway, WSJ thinks Romney should let the world know how Democratic policies are hurting women:
Rarely noted in the “women’s” debate is that most of this country’s major institutions and laws were developed at a time of one-earner households. In 1950, only 12% of mothers with children under the age of six were in the labor force. That number is today more than 60%. Yet many women who now work are penalized by outdated policies that haven’t kept pace with these big shifts in American society.
Exhibit A is a progressive tax code and the penalty it imposes on earning marginal, or additional, income. Most married women are second earners. That means their income is added to that of their husband’s and thus often taxed at a high marginal rate. This “marriage penalty” has never fully been adjusted for in the tax code. A married woman working on an assembly line keeps less of her paycheck than the unwed man who does the same job. That’s real inequality in pay for women.
You won’t hear Democrats admitting this punitive tax burden—particularly when combined with child-care costs—is a reason many women can’t afford to work, even if they wish to.
I’ve never heard the “marriage tax” described this way, but let’s go on — in all my years I’ve never heard a woman complain that taxes are keeping her from pursing her career. Have you?
And now we come to it …
And the expiration of the Bush tax cuts would compound this problem. To the extent Mr. Romney is offering a flatter tax code, with lower marginal rates, he is offering millions of women greater choice and a shot at more economic freedom.
That goes beyond merely off the wall or out of touch; that’s downright depraved. Any woman wealthy enough to benefit from the bleeping Bush tax cuts has plenty of options to work or not to work as she pleases. And if she does work, it probably won’t be a the cash register of the local Piggly Wiggly for minimum wage.
Here’s a campaign issue I really do want Romney to run on:
Mr. Romney might note the damage done to women by antiquated but still operative labor law, such as a provision in the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act that requires hourly workers who put in more than 40 hours a week to get overtime.
Please, Mittens, add that to your speeches. Please.
While some women like overtime, a 1990s poll found that 81% said they’d rather pack more hours into fewer days and receive compensatory time off. The phrase for this is “flex time,” an invaluable option for many mothers attempting to juggle work and family. Not in this Democratic war.
“Flex time” and overtime pay are two different issues. In the real world, the only thing keeping many women hourly workers from being forced to work more than a 40-hour-week is the overtime pay requirement. Without it, they’d be in the same boat as many salaried workers, being expected to tack additional time onto the workday with no additional compensation, including time off. In all my years of working I had only one job that gave comp time, and that was when our business travels ate up a weekend. And I was on salary.
The idea behind “flex time” is not fewer hours, but the ability to start and end the workday at something other than 9 to 5, like maybe 8:30 to 4:30. Assuming one is working hourly, of course. For salaried workers that would be more like 8:30 to 7:00.
Government creates myriad roadblocks for women’s economic progress, but Republicans largely have failed to make that case. They’ve instead let themselves be dragged into the tired debate over “equal pay” and “women’s rights” and “gender equality.”
Oh yes, so tired.
Democrats love competing on these terms because it allows them to argue that the remedy always lies with more government, no matter the adverse consequences.
Instead, we should eliminate all employment and workplace regulations and live at the tender mercies of our employers? Oh, yes, run on that, Mittens. It’s the message the nation is waiting to hear.
It’s no accident that the first piece of legislation Mr. Obama signed was the Lilly Ledbetter Act. Purporting to snuff out wage discrimination, this is mostly a litigation bonanza for trial lawyers.
Yes, Mittens, run against Lilly Ledbetter. You know you want to. Lilly wants you to.
One of the distasteful things about the tendency to label all sorts of debates or initiatives as “wars†is that in real wars, people die. But the reality is that a shockingly high number of American moms are dying for preventable reasons. The U.S. Maternal Mortality Ratio (the number of maternal deaths per 100,000 live births) is shockingly high, well above the average for the developed world, and higher than virtually all of Western Europe as well as some countries in Asia and the Middle East. Even more troubling, U.S. maternal mortality has increased in the last two decades, and is now more than twice as high as it was in the late 1980s. The Affordable Care Act included provisions designed to help stop this scary trend—not just by expanding health care access (many maternal deaths could be prevented with proper care)—but also through the Maternal, Infant and Early Childhood Home Visiting program, created as part of ACA, which provides nurses and social workers to work with high-risk moms, starting before they give birth, to help them have healthy pregnancies and deliveries and support their babies’ health and development after birth.The program is modeled after programs, such as the Nurse Family Partnership that have a strong track record of improving maternal and child outcomes, preventing abuse and neglect, increasing fathers’ involvement in their kids’ lives, improving kids’ school performance, reducing crime, and saving the taxpayers a boatload of money over the long term. But all that could go the way of the dodo, if ACA is struck down or repealed (and some of the right wing fear-mongering about this program must be seen to be believed).
For all we hear about “family friendly†conservatives promoting traditional families to keep us from going the way of G-d-forsaken Europe, the reality is that the U.S. actually has a higher percentage of infants and toddlers in childcare (as opposed to home with mom) than all the OECD countries except Denmark, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden (and we’re closer to Sweden than we are to the OECD average). That’s the direct result of policy choices we’ve made, including the total absence of paid parental leave (for which we stand alone among developed countries, in a small and shrinking field that includes Papau New Guinea, Swaziland, and Lesotho). And even as the recession has increased the number of moms of very young children in the workforce, states have cut funding for child care and made it harder to get in other ways as well.
But, y’know, if we could just make the Bush tax cuts for the rich permanent, everything will be right as rain. Yeah, campaign on that, Mittens.
It’s long been observed that the uglier a woman is, the more likely she is to be a feminist. And it was always logical, too, that women who couldn’t compete with other women in the traditional manner would seek to change the rules of the game. But now there is some scientific evidence supporting both the logic and the observation, and it could be very useful in helping counteract the feminist propaganda that inundates young women from the time they are girls, encouraging them to waste their youth and fertility in chasing careers rather than families.
The message is a simple and straighforward one: feminism is for female losers in the game of Life.
Losers? This boy belongs under a bell jar in the Loser Museum.
One of the distasteful things about the tendency to label all sorts of debates or initiatives as “wars†is that in real wars, people die. But the reality is that a shockingly high number of American moms are dying for preventable reasons. The U.S. Maternal Mortality Ratio (the number of maternal deaths per 100,000 live births) is shockingly high, well above the average for the developed world, and higher than virtually all of Western Europe as well as some countries in Asia and the Middle East. Even more troubling, U.S. maternal mortality has increased in the last two decades, and is now more than twice as high as it was in the late 1980s. The Affordable Care Act included provisions designed to help stop this scary trend—not just by expanding health care access (many maternal deaths could be prevented with proper care)—but also through the Maternal, Infant and Early Childhood Home Visiting program, created as part of ACA, which provides nurses and social workers to work with high-risk moms, starting before they give birth, to help them have healthy pregnancies and deliveries and support their babies’ health and development after birth.The program is modeled after programs, such as the Nurse Family Partnership that have a strong track record of improving maternal and child outcomes, preventing abuse and neglect, increasing fathers’ involvement in their kids’ lives, improving kids’ school performance, reducing crime, and saving the taxpayers a boatload of money over the long term. But all that could go the way of the dodo, if ACA is struck down or repealed (and some of the right wing fear-mongering about this program must be seen to be believed).
For all we hear about “family friendly†conservatives promoting traditional families to keep us from going the way of G-d-forsaken Europe, the reality is that the U.S. actually has a higher percentage of infants and toddlers in childcare (as opposed to home with mom) than all the OECD countries except Denmark, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden (and we’re closer to Sweden than we are to the OECD average). That’s the direct result of policy choices we’ve made, including the total absence of paid parental leave (for which we stand alone among developed countries, in a small and shrinking field that includes Papau New Guinea, Swaziland, and Lesotho). And even as the recession has increased the number of moms of very young children in the workforce, states have cut funding for child care and made it harder to get in other ways as well.
Oh, but the Romney campaign has pro-mom bumper stickers!
And the Republican National Committee has pro-mom coffee mugs!
Mittens is convinced he can erase the gender gap by exploiting the phony “war on moms” issue. Weirdly, he even dragged Ann Romney onstage to talk about the glories of mommyhood at the NRA convention yesterday. One suspects this was not a predominately female audience.
Republicans actually have declared the “war on women” to be over, now that they have a “women’s message” they think will overcome the negatives. It’ll be a few days before the polls show us anything, but it’s hard to believe the younger college-educated women who have been driving the increasing “gender gap” are going to be fooled by pro-mommyhood messaging. An appeal to emotions doesn’t erase Mittens’s largely anti-woman agenda.
Desperate to distract the nation from the fact that their presidential candidate is an upper-crust twit with less personality than Saran Wrap, righties have seized upon an alleged insult to womanhood on the part of a Democratic operative and are struggling mightily to make a controversy out of it.
Good luck with that, chumps.
Mittens, you might recall, has been trying to pass as a friend to women by telling the world he is married to one. And Mrs. Mittens tells him what women really are concerned about, which is the economy, and not all that stuff about their lady parts.
So a guest on CNN named Hilary Rosen called bullshit.
“What you have is, Mitt Romney running around the country saying, ‘Well, you know, my wife tells me that what women really care about are economic issues. And when I listen to my wife, that’s what I’m hearing.’ Guess what: his wife has never really worked a day in her life. She’s never really dealt with the kind of economic issues that a majority of the women in this country are facing in terms of how do we feed our kids, how do we send them to school, and why do we worry about their future.â€
Mrs. Mittens took to twitter to let the world know that she was a stay-at-home mom with five boys, which means she worked plenty. After all, she’s also got three mansions to manage, plus all those swimming pools and stables to clean. Shoveling out the stables alone must be a full-time job. I can’t imagine how she does it. (/snark)
Exactly what Hilary Rosen’s connection is to the Democratic Party, or consulting, is a bit murky. But never fear; now that she’s a target, a large part of the rightie blogosphere is busy playing Six Degrees of the White House and finding all the many ways she must be a BFF of the first family.
Plus, OMG, she’s a lesbian who has raised children with two mommies! Just watch; she’s about to become the new Ward Churchill.
The Right is trying to make Rosen out to be an enemy of stay-at-home moms and not, in fact, a woman who has walked the walk, so to speak, which privileged and protected Ann Romney has not. But Mrs. Mittens got on Fox News to tell us that she has struggled, oh lawsy sakes, you do not know how she has struggled …
Ann Romney on Fox News Thursday morning said, “I know what it’s like to struggle.” She admitted that she may not have struggled financially as much as others in the U.S. “I would love to have people understand that Mitt and I have compassion for people who are struggling,” Ann Romney said. “We care about those people that are struggling.”
Seriously. I bet for Christmas she gives lovely fruit baskets to all the hired help, too.
I’m not saying the rich are immune from suffering. They have sorrows and sickness and losses and fears like the rest of us. Ann Romney has been diagnosed with MS and breast cancer, which can’t have been easy. But … struggling? Give me a break. She doesn’t know the meaning of the word.
And with her health conditions, in the U.S. if she weren’t wealthy she’d be dead. That’s a sad fact.
The famous perpetual rivalry between career moms and stay-at-home moms is mostly limited to the 1 percent these days, since most women with children don’t have the luxury of choosing to stay home. This is a point obviously lost on the Mittens family, though.
Republicans tried to make hay with stay-at-home moms back in 1992, when Marilyn Quayle addressed the Republican National Convention and proudly let the world know that she gave up her law practice when she had children, unlike that harridan Hillary Clinton, because of her superior values. The fact that her husband was wealthy and the family didn’t need her income had nothing to do with it.
Moneyed Republican women didn’t get it then, and it appears they don’t get it now.
The report by the Government Accountability Office, to be released this week, found that while Mr. Christie said that state transportation officials had revised cost estimates for the tunnel to at least $11 billion and potentially more than $14 billion, the range of estimates had in fact remained unchanged in the two years before he announced in 2010 that he was shutting down the project. And state transportation officials, the report says, had said the cost would be no more than $10 billion.
Mr. Christie also misstated New Jersey’s share of the costs: he said the state would pay 70 percent of the project; the report found that New Jersey was paying 14.4 percent. And while the governor said that an agreement with the federal government would require the state to pay all cost overruns, the report found that there was no final agreement, and that the federal government had made several offers to share those costs.
Canceling this much needed project made Christie a rock star on the Right, however, which of course is why he did it.
Also, the Times piece has paragraphs that begin, delightfully…
Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey exaggerated…
Mr. Christie also misstated…
There’s a word for this kind of thing. It’ll come to me eventually.
Steve Benen also points to a report from the Newark Star-Ledger that says Christie is cribbing his bills from the infamous ALEC. The Star-Ledger:
A Star-Ledger analysis of hundreds of documents shows that ALEC bills are surfacing in New Jersey, where Republican Gov. Chris Christie is trying to remake the state, frequently against the wishes of a Democrat-controlled Legislature.
Drawing on bills crafted by the council, on New Jersey legislation and dozens of e-mails by Christie staffers and others, The Star-Ledger found a pattern of similarities between ALEC’s proposals and several measures championed by the Christie administration. At least three bills, one executive order and one agency rule accomplish the same goals set out by ALEC using the same specific policies. In eight passages contained in those documents, New Jersey initiatives and ALEC proposals line up almost word for word. Two other Republican bills not pushed by the governor’s office are nearly identical to ALEC models.
The governor’s reaction?
Christie’s spokesman, Michael Drewniak, said there is no connection between the efforts spearheaded by Christie and ALEC.
“Our reforms have no basis in anyone’s model legislation,” Drewniak said. “The governor said to me, ‘Who’s ALEC?'”
There’s a word for this kind of thing. It’ll come to me eventually.
The gender gap is real, and it’s bigger than it’s ever been since the dawn of political polls. So says Steve Kornacki.
Republican and their media sympathizers respond to this challenge by either denying the gender gap is real or by mistaking us for caterpillars. And then there’s the Michael Gerson route, in which Gerson admits the gender gap is real but denies it has anything to do with Republican maneuvers on contraception or other “women’s” issues.
The media — ever drawn to simple explanations that reinforce their own cultural expectations — have diagnosed Romney’s gender-based electoral weakness as the result of his opposition to the contraceptive mandate. This is both initially plausible and demonstrably false. More than 60 percent of American voters don’t even know Romney’s position on the mandate — a topic they rank near the bottom of their political concerns. And when pressed, a majority of women affirm that religious institutions should be exempted from the mandate.
First — the issue is bigger than just the contraception mandate. It seems that for the past several months there has been one “women’s” issue after another the GOP has bungled. Second, the gender gap is being driven by one particular slice of the demographic pie — college-educated women under the age of 50. They are stampeding to Obama in droves. And you can bet your Jimmy Choo spike-heel booties that those women understand the contraception issue (and everything else) better than Gerson does.
Hilariously, Gerson thinks Mittens can win women back by taking a page out of Dubya’s 2000 playbook, which was co-authored by Gerson …
In 2000, George W. Bush campaigned — in both the primaries and the general election — on increasing the quality of education for poor children, on humane immigration reform and on expanding care by faith-based organizations for the addicted and homeless. These issues were personally important to Bush. They also signaled to independents and women that he could think beyond normal ideological boundaries. This form of “compassionate conservatism†is now broadly reviled among conservatives. The need for an analogous agenda, whatever it is called, remains unchanged. To secure a decent shot at this election, Romney will need to offer some positive vision for the common good.
In other words, the guy already famous for his off-the-cuff remarks about the thrill of firing people, ending Planned Parenthood, and telling financially squeezed college students that they just need to find a cheaper college — and let us not forget the dog — will figure out how to fake caring? Well enough to fool anybody? Right.
Just as Mitt Romney was making the case to Newsmax, that paragon of journalistic integrity, that the so-called Republican war on women is entirely concocted by Democrats, Republican Scott Walker was quietly signing a law that repealed Wisconsin’s Equal Pay Enforcement law, which made it easier for women to seek damages in discrimination cases. Driven by state business lobbies, the repeal passed the GOP-dominated Legislature on a strict party line vote, and Walker signed it, with no comment, Thursday afternoon.
President Obama, meanwhile, was hosting a White House summit on women and the economy Thursday. Predictably, Republicans howled that the president is merely courting another “interest group†and playing politics. There was no doubt some politics at play during the summit; at one point participants chanted, “Four more years!â€
But really, when Republicans are repealing equal pay laws and proposing federal budgets that disproportionately hurt women, as well as restricting funding for contraception, who’s playing politics with women’s issues?
I read about what the leaders of Fitzwalkerstan did to Wisconsin’s women yesterday, and once again I was astonished at how tone deaf these jerks are. It isn’t just that they dissed women; it was that they couldn’t restrain themselves from dissing women at a time when the dissing of women by Republicans is headline news. They couldn’t even wait until all those caterpillars were distracted by something else.
And as for women being an “interest group” — yes, it’s the default norm syndrome. In their heads white maledome is the default norm, and any part of the population that deviates from the default norm exemplifies some kind of exceptional circumstance that doesn’t require serious consideration.
If you understand that’s how righties think, that they view the world through “default norm” syndrome, then you might see how they could see women as an interest group and the President’s recognition of women’s issues as nothing but “playing politics.” Walsh continues,
We know that most women who use the pill, for instance, use it for a health reason other than contraception only. Republicans are the ones fetishizing birth control and putting it outside the boundaries of women’s health care.
Mitt Romney and the GOP just don’t get it. Everything about the way they’re approaching these issues is backfiring.
Of the tone-deaf wonders who influence conservatives, possibly the most clueless of all is Rushbo himself. He honestly seems to have no idea why women would not want to vote for Republicans.
Women like being free, don’t they? Women love liberty. See, we’re being asked to accept the notion that women are monolithic. That all you have to do is approach every one of them with a lie that Republicans want to take away their birth control pills and just like the independents who don’t like confrontation, women, when they hear Republicans want to take away their birth control pills, make a mad dash to the Democrat Party and looky here, we got a poll to prove it.
Closing Planned Parenthood clinics really does amount to taking birth control away from a great many women. That’s not a scare story; it’s happening. The Blunt Amendment threatened to put contraception out of reach for many other women.
Yes, women do like being free. But for women, if we don’t have control over our own reproduction, none of the rest of the freedoms are going to do us much good. There’s a reason the phrase “barefoot and pregnant” stands for the subjugation of women. IMO it takes a particularly pernicious level of narcissism for a man not to be able to see this at all.
Polls show that most of the independent women who are running from Republicans and toward President Obama are college educated, says Steve Kornacki. These women are primarily concerned about reproduction rights. Might stunts like Walker’s raise the consciousness of blue collar women? If they hear about it, maybe.
