The Upside-Down World of James Taranto

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This is unintentionally funny:

An odd recent New York Times op-ed by sociologist Amy Schalet touts the rise of, as the headline puts it, “Caring, Romantic American Boys.” Schalet, who studied American high school sophomores (along with Dutch ones) for a forthcoming book, reports that “boys [are] behaving more ‘like girls’ in terms of when they lose their virginity,” by which she means they “are becoming more careful and more romantic about their first sexual experiences.”

Maybe her book will flesh out that claim, but in her op-ed the boys sound downright terrified: “American boys often said sex could end their life as they knew it. After a condom broke, one worried: ‘I could be screwed for the rest of my life.’ Another boy said he did not want to have sex yet for fear of becoming a father before his time.”

If “I could be screwed for the rest of my life” is what passes for a romantic sentiment at the New York Times, the editors’ Valentine’s Day cards must be a laugh riot.

Without checking out Amy Schalet’s piece, as I’m pressed for time, I assume she defines “romantic” in some sociological way that makes more sense in context, or else Taranto is just picking up the word from the headline writer and Schalet didn’t use it at all.

But let’s consider that U.S. teen pregnancy rates are lower right now than they’ve been in decades. Well, except in Texas. I’ve been saying for years that if you really want to put a dent in teen pregnancy, stop slut-shaming girls and put some Fear of Real Consequences into boys. Sounds like this is happening, which IMO is a positive development.

It’s called “responsibility,” Taranto.

But Taranto is blaming feminists for making boys “afraid” of girls. “Respect” might be a better word, I say. Taranto continues,

Since most people agree that teenagers should abstain from sex anyway, isn’t the trend Schalet notes a healthy one? Not necessarily. After all, if adults abstain from sex too, mankind is doomed:

Just ask young women about men today. You will find them talking about prolonged adolescence and men who refuse to grow up. I’ve heard too many young women asking, “Where are the decent single men?”

That’s Bill Bennett, in a CNN.com column we criticized two months ago. Our surmise is that the “decent single men” are missing because Schalet’s “romantic” boys do not overcome their fear of sex, a fear whose rational basis is no less powerful after the age of majority. Women’s trouble finding husbands is only part of the problem: Men who aren’t interested in marriage also have less incentive to be productive workers or responsible fathers.

And, of course, there’s the usual bilge about how women can duck parental responsibility through abortion, but if she chooses to carry the baby to term, he’s on the hook to help pay for it. Like the fact of an actual baby that needs taking care of is just a technicality.

The business about boys remaining perpetual adolescents and refusing to commit has been a common complaint for a few decades now. It didn’t just happen. It’s a long-standing trend. It’s even been a common gag on situation comedies since at least the 1980s. Only asshats like Bennett and Taranto could have gone this long without noticing it before.

If you go back a few more decades you find all kinds of books and magazine articles about “frigid” wives. Seems our per-feminist mothers were afraid of sex. And sociologists proposed this was because women spent their adolescents being taught that sex is shameful, and that deeply ingrained attitude couldn’t be turned off by marriage. So fear of sex can be a real problem.

However, the reality is that if you have sex, a baby might result. For way too long males have been allowed to not be concerned. Again, there’s a big difference between being “afraid” of women and sex and being “respectful” of women and consequences. And that respect, and acknowledgment of consequences, might be just what’s needed help some of our perpetual adolescents to grow up.

Probably too late for Taranto, of course.

This Is What Grasping at Straws Looks Like

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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.

And now the GOP is pushing “war on moms” bumper stickers and coffee mugs! Yeah, there’s nothing like a slogan on a coffee mug to make me re-think my priorities. (/snark)

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.

ALEC Flushed Out

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One of the more encouraging current developments is that ALEC has been flushed out into the open, and many of its corporate sponsors are bailing out — “Wendy’s, Intuit, McDonalds, Coke, Pepsi, Kraft Foods and the Gates Foundation.”

And, y’know, it’s kind of stunning that ALEC has been off everyone’s radar for so long. They’ve been around since 1973, founded by the same over-moneyed heirs to vast wealth that gave us the Heritage Foundation and so many other bricks in the rightie firmament. It’s not clear to me whether they’ve been doing something different in recent years that caught our attention, or if we were just too distracted to notice it.

Sorta kinda related — Krugman takes on Chris Christie.

Update: Also don’t miss “Big Companies Collecting State Taxes From Workers And Keeping The Money.” (Thanks Bill B.)

The Struggles of Ann Romney

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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.”

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.

Maybe We’ll Get a Sane Trial

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So many high profile trials turn into media events, with grandstanding lawyers and flaky judges, and I’m hoping for something more sane and sober for George Zimmerman’s trial. Well, assuming it goes to trial. There’s still a possibility that a magistrate will toss the case because of the “kill at will” law.

Last night I did a bit of browsing through comments threads on right-wing sites, and the consensus is that as soon as Zimmerman is found innocent the entire state of Florida and probably other places will be consumed by race riots. Some are also certain that Zimmerman’s new attorney, Mark O’Mara, already is getting death threats, although there’s been not a word about that in the news.

Both the prosecution and Zimmerman’s new lawyer have said that further facts about the case will not be made public before the trial, which is as it should be, so I think further arguing with righties about who might possibly have done what is even more pointless now than it was before. So let them believe that all the witnesses swore Zimmerman was getting beat up by Martin and that voice identification technology is worthless. I have some hope that the trial could get the story straight.

I also agree with Joan Walsh:

There’s an element of hysteria that makes me think that right-wing whites are afraid that if black people get any real power in this country, they’ll use it to treat whites as badly as some whites have treated them. Fox’s Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly emerged as shrill Zimmerman defenders, as though he was a white Everyman being menaced by a mob simply for defending himself against a dangerous black man – the facts of the case be damned. “First they came for George Zimmerman…”

I have been impressed by the fact that the movement to defend Martin mostly stayed away from demands for vengeance or punishment. For the most part, people were demanding information about the apparently shoddy police procedures; some, like Sharpton, advocated that Zimmerman be arrested. Sure, people seized on and promoted any evidence that made Zimmerman look guilty. That’s part of making clear that an injustice has occurred. But the loony right focused on four New Black Panther buffoons and their racial threats rather than the reasonable demand for answers by Martin’s parents.

Righties will no doubt swiftly remind us of the New Black Panthers (who are they, four guys in Pittsburgh somewhere?) issuing a bounty for Zimmerman, and Spike Lee’s boneheaded tweeting of George Zimmerman’s address that wasn’t even the right address. But on the whole most people have just been calling for the criminal justice system to take the shooting seriously. Now that it has, I hope everyone can be patient and go back to making fun of Mittens.

See also Jonathan Capehart.

Chris Christie’s Very Bad Week

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The GAO says that Gov. Christie’s reasons for nixing the Hudson River tunnel project were, um, misstatements. So to speak.

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.

Charles Pierce:

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.

Oops! Zimmerman’s Lawyers Can’t Find Their Client

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The Associated Press is reporting that George Zimmerman’s attorneys are withdrawing from his case because they can’t locate George Zimmerman. They haven’t spoken to him since Sunday. They also say that, against their advice, he contacted the special prosecutor who may bring charges against him.

Update: Another little tidbit emerges — Zimmerman spoke directly to Sean Hannity at some point, his former lawyers say.

Update: Here’s a video of the attorney’s press conference from MSNBC.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

GOP Denial and the Gender Gap

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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.

See also Ed Kilgore.

Oh, and Frothy is suspending his campaign.

The Grand Jury Decision: Something That Means Nothing

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I wasn’t going to write anything about the decision to not take the Martin-Zimmerman case to a grand jury, because it doesn’t mean anything. But yesterday I kept running into people on the Web who were wailing that it meant the prosecutor will let Zimmerman walk. No, it just means she’s not going to seek a death penalty.

But then this morning I read this, by Tim F. at Balloon Juice:

It seems likely that George Zimmerman will walk for shooting an unarmed teenager. The special prosecutor has more or less thrown up her hands and I can hardly blame her, caught between that stupid law and the absolute hash that Sanford PD made of their initial response. That, at least, might go punished. I have some hope that the Federal investigation into their department will at least shame the Sanford PD into doing a better job next time

I would have just left a comment at Balloon Juice, but I seem to be on the twit filter there as none of my comments ever show up on the threads. So here goes — grand juries are only required in Florida in capital murder cases. The prosecutor doesn’t need a grand jury to charge Zimmerman with second-degree murder or voluntary manslaughter. Further, I’ve read this particular prosecutor, Angela Corey, has a history of not bothering with grand juries when the law does not require them. Her decision to not use a grand jury doesn’t tell us anything about where she might be headed, one way or another.

But a grand jury outcome would have been unpredictable, and it’s also my understanding that Trayvon Martin’s family had preferred the case not go to a grand jury.

My understanding is that the original prosecutor — the one who was trying to sweep it all under the rug — scheduled a grand jury after the public outcry began. No doubt he thought dumping the case on a grand jury would take the heat off him. No doubt it didn’t work.

In other Zimmerman news, it appears the Zimmerman family has put up a website soliciting donations for Zimmerman’s defense and featuring a photograph of the vandalized black cultural center at Ohio State University (click to enlarge):

click to enlarge

Charles Johnson asks, “Could Zimmerman really be this dumb?” That would be my guess, yes.

Speaking of dumb, alleged pastor Terry “Islam Is of the Devil” Jones, who likes to draw attention to himself by pulling stupid Koran-burning stunts to get U.S. troops killed, led a rally in support of Zimmerman. (“Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.” — Matthew 7:20, King James Bible)