The Komen Foundation VP at the center of the Planned Parenthood firestorm, Karen Handel, has resigned.

A few days ago I predicted on Facebook that she’d be gone within a week, but  then retracted the prediction when I learned more about the heavy-Right political leanings of the rest of the board (and the involvement of Ari Fleischer in their strategy development).

On Friday, just before America took its collective brain offline for Super Bowl Weekend, Komen offered up a fake apology that encouraged the public to believe that it had changed its mind and was going to continue funding Planned Parenthood after all, even though its release actually said nothing of the sort. It isn’t clear how many average citizens the ploy fooled, but as I explained on Saturday, it sure as hell clowned the copy desk editors of just about every major news outlet in the country. Full story »

Read. The language. Closely.

Contrary to what Komen’s highly-paid PR crisis hacks and gullible headline writers at newsdesks around the nation would ask you to believe, The Susan G. Komen Foundation does NOT promise to fund Planned Parenthood in the future. They promise to let PP APPLY for grants in the future. Applying and receiving are different things, as anyone who ever applied and got rejected for a job ought to know. Full story »

Actress and lesbian Cynthia Nixon has caused a firestorm in the gayosphere by saying that for her, sexual orientation was a choice.

Obviously, this view undermines the arguments of gay political orthodoxy, and gives the right wingnuts who run “gay rehabilitation prayer camps” support that they were right all along–”See Harold, I told you he was just doing it to be ornery.”  Of course, the truth is  probably like most things: The truth is somewhere in between. It may be for her, but it isn’t for most gay people.

At any rate, this becomes pretty scary when coupled with another news item from the week, news that conservatives are conservative because they are stupid. Full story »

“I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong… No Viet Cong ever called me nigger.” Full story »

Today is a national holiday to celebrate the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the famed civil rights leader.

Government buildings are closed, the post office is closed, most K-12 schools are closed and many universities cancel classes for the day.

The idea behind the holiday was so people could focus on the good works of Dr. King.

Years ago, when I was a faculty member at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, students had protested the fact that campus remained open and classes, except for two hours midday, met, as usual. Top level administrators responding to student pressure decided to change the calendar and cancel classes. The only one objecting was then-Vice President Wilma Ray Bledsoe, the only African American (and, I believe, woman) on the cabinet at that time. Full story »

Along the same lines, the University of Mississippi recently fired its football coach, who on the way out noted that Mississippi’s past contributed to problems with recruiting, particularly out-of-state athletes who have the wrong idea about Mississippi due to movies like Mississippi Burning.

Wrong idea, eh?  Were I a talented black athlete, I wonder if all those Confederate flags that still fly along the road side would bother me. Or the fact  that UM has not been particularly successful in retiring  its mascot “Colonel Reb.”  In case you’ve never seen a UM football game, and they’re dreadful so there’s no reason you’d want to, Colonel Reb is a goateed plantation owner. I kid you not. Nah, I am sure as a young black man it wouldn’t bother me one bit to have a plantation owner standing on the sidelines yelling “Run, boy, run!” Full story »

Ala. GOP leaders have 2nd thoughts on immigration
By PHILLIP RAWLS

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — Alabama Republicans who pushed through the nation’s toughest law against illegal immigrants are having second thoughts amid a backlash from big business, fueled by the embarrassing traffic stops of two foreign employees tied to the state’s prized Honda and Mercedes plants.

The Republican attorney general is calling for some of the strictest parts of it to be repealed.

Some Republican lawmakers say they now want to make changes in the law that was pushed quickly through the legislature.

Sometimes I think the problem is Democrats see the likely results of Republican policies ahead of time and argue against them  rather than just letting these fools go ahead and do dumb stuff and see what happens. Full story »

OK.

I, and most people who think they know something about football, have been pretty vocal about the fact that Tebow sucks as a quarterback. The people who disagree with us insist his intangibles make up for his lack of tangibles, an argument so absurd that we have trouble getting our heads around it. If tangibles don’t matter, maybe I should not have been so quick to dismiss a career as a porn star.

Of course, what drives most of us crazy is that the people who are making the argument for Tebow happen to be not only white, but bat-shit crazy evangelicals, raising the suspicion in our minds that maybe this isn’t about football and logic at all, but about racism or religion. After all, for years after blacks were finally allowed to play professional football they weren’t allowed to play quarterback because they lacked intangibles like intelligence, unlike white quarterbacks like Terry Bradshaw and Kerry Collins, the latter of whom was so smart that he thought his offensive line (the guys charged with protecting him) would enjoy hearing racist jokes. But Kerry failed to notice his O-line was black, and the next game they looked less like football players and more like matadors letting bulls rush by. In other words, the intelligence thing was yet another bit of back door discrimination. Full story »

Penn State students at a candlelight vigil in support of the victims.
Credit: Lawrence Weathers

When I was in grad school at the University of Colorado, there was a riot in a part of Boulder known as The Hill. It’s just off campus and filled with houses that are rented to college students or have been converted to apartments. The riot was over the dumbest reason I could think of to riot over at the time – the supposed right of underage students to break the law and drink alcohol while underage. It was booze fueled, and before it was over the rioters got within a block of my apartment building, several miles from where they started. The result? No changes in police policy toward underage drinking (duh), but a ban on sofas on porches because sofas had been torched during the riots to make toxic bonfires. Brilliant, the rioters were not.

But compared to the Penn State rioters who went apeshit over Paterno’s firing, the CU rioters were brainiacs. Full story »

When we were putting S&R together in 2007 I hunted down Gavin Chait and begged him to join us. He’s one of the smartest guys I know, a relentless, good faith thinker and someone you can count on to hit you with a perspective you hadn’t thought about. He wrote our very first post and also penned at least one of our absolute very best posts.

We don’t always agree, though. (Which is good – how boring would it be if we did?) In a recent post, Gavin addressed the topic of the latest Discworld novel in a post entitled “Terry Pratchett and the redemption of the Orcs.” If you review the post and the comment thread you’ll see that I take Gavin to task for misrepresenting Pratchett. Gavin’s reply (@2) neatly gets to his overarching point: Full story »

by Hannah Frantz

Before I came to Rwanda, I spent a week following The New Times, Rwanda’s online newspaper, to get a sense for where the country is today. The impression that I reached was that in the 17 years since the genocide, all conflict between the Hutu and Tutsi had been resolved and that everyone was making a collaborative effort to move towards peaceful relations. In my mind, Rwanda was this utopia where, through collaborative efforts, everyone could live in harmony. I’m realizing slowly that this isn’t necessarily the case. Full story »

You know someone who lives in poverty. You may not realize it, but you do. Given that one of every six Americans lives in poverty, someone you know suffers from one of the most punishing and oppressing of all human conditions.

Too many of us blithely consider poverty to be limited to certain geographical locations such as the “inner city.” Too many of us believe poverty is limited to, perhaps, mostly a certain skin color. Too many of us attribute poverty to the lack of an “appropriate” work ethic, a lack of ambition, or a desire to “cheat the system.” The poor live in cities, they’re not white, they’re lazy, and they’re sucking up my tax dollars unfairly.

Discard that attitude. It’s disgusting. Poverty privileges no race, no gender, no occupation, no geography.
Full story »

Yesterday, we introduced Rick and his companion Spotty. Today, we will get to know a typical Rick Perry supporter, Jane, and tomorrow, we will spend some time with Rick’s special friend, Jesus. On Thursday, we will compare Rick to the rest of the Republican field, and on Friday….well, Friday’s a long way away, we will think of something by then.

See Jane vote.

Vote, Jane, vote!

Jane votes for Rick because he is tall.

“I am tall, too,” says Mitty the Kitty.

Jane votes for Rick because he has big hair.

“I have big hair, too,” says Mitty.

Jane votes for Rick because he hates gummit.

“Say what?” says Mitty. Full story »

The sense of awakening in The Souls of Black Folk is impossible to miss. Published in 1903, when the new century itself was just awakening, Souls seemed to blink away the veil for a people looking for their own cultural and historical legacy. What W.E.B. Du Bois saw—and helped others see—was nothing short of amazing.

Perhaps it’s because I am now just awakening to Du Bois’ work that I see the book in such a light. Perhaps that awakening colors my view, giving me wide-eyed wonder to a text that’s over a century old. Perhaps my middle-class, middle-aged whiteness, and my historical place in the Twenty-First Century, makes Du Bois’ work seem exotic and wonderful.

Perhaps. Full story »

Last week, Sady Doyle published a protracted rant against George RR Martin’s Song of Ice & Fire series at TigerBeatdown.com. My initial reaction was that while her piece was certainly stylishly composed, the level of intellectual rigor informing it was lacking. Acacia Graddy-Gamel, commenting in an online discussion thread earlier this afternoon, put it this way: “the Doyle piece is everything I absolutely hate about feminist or postmodern critique in that it is just as insular, smug, narrow-minded and condescending as the hegemonic structures they’re railing against.” I don’t want to be that harsh, but I can understand her frustration.  Full story »

Today we offer a nod to the music of America by paying tribute to our past and to our future. First, Woody Guthrie reminds us: this land is your land, too.

Full story »

A few days ago, Phoenix Suns president Rick Welts revealed that he is gay. And the whole sporting world exploded yawned.

Okay, that’s not precisely true. There has been a bit of comment and analysis. But so far, no controversy. No homophobic ranting, no athletes stepping up to say that Jesus doesn’t approve, none of that. This is a wonderful thing. That the public response so far has amount to a collective shoulder shrug is evidence that America is finally getting over the idea that sports just isn’t ready for gays in the locker room. Full story »

I wish the Republicans would slow down. It’s no fun being prescient when you’re proved right as soon as you hit the “publish post” button.

• In this case, in earlier editions of GOP Madness, I suggested Pawlenty would have some trouble getting away from previous positions of his, and sure enough I saw him on TV a few days ago, admitting he’d made mistakes and begging for a mulligan. Well, the latest polls are out and it looks like the voters will give him a mulligan, but they ain’t gonna elect him president. As expected, he’s dragging up the rear, way behind Romney, Gingrich, Huckabee and the real contenders.
• I also suggested that Trump was the clown in a little car sent out to warm up the crowd before the real acts entered the ring. Full story »