But it’s a sideshow. The status of Assange’s guilt is irrelevant to the importance of the information that Wikileaks has released about secret detention, covert wars, diplomatic espionage, and the covering up of war crimes. As citizens, we can do something with that information. We can hold our governments accountable.

If we gave a shit.

Juan Cole continues to separate the wheat from the chaff. Amanda Marcotte has two great posts on the knee-jerk sexism and appealing for more complex thinking about this case. (Can’t seem to get a working link to that last one allasudden. Will try later.) Also Kate Harding’s piece does a great job of tackling the poor quality of source material used by Assange’s defenders: “What a fantastic show of research, critical thinking and, as always, respect for women.”

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But you were wrong. WaPo knows it’s all about the hairdo.

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The Swiss government this morning announced that it has rejected the U.S.’ request to extradite the director back to Los Angeles so that he could finally face up to the charge he fled the country over back in 1977—namely, having sex with a 13-year-old girl.

Um, actually it was rape. He raped a 13-year-old girl. There is a pretty broad distinction between consensual sex and rape. I am stickler for these kinds of details, see, especially in my relations with other people.

Anyhoo, Ruben Bolling captured this denouement presciently last year.

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But that’s not how politics works. It’s certainly not in the business interests of the National Enquirer to withhold a scandalous story. Anyone who hates Gore is predisposed to attack him with the allegations. Anyone who supports Gore is predisposed to attack the accuser. Gore trashing is predictable, so I haven’t even bothered to look far for it. But I have been looking to see what the feminist community has had to say, and so far Jessica Valenti at Feministing is the only one to comment on the story. Read the whole thing, even if I blockquote her worthy conclusion here:

So I hope that no matter what comes of this, those of us who have supported Gore and his work in the past can write and talk about this accusation without falling into hackneyed victim-blaming narratives. Because liberal dudes assault women too. And if we treat this story any differently than another sexual assault accusation, we’re doing this woman – and all women – a great disservice.

True that. It also disserves truth. The public has a right to know if its powerful elites are up to no good, but it does us no good if we can’t get to the facts due to a cloud of rumors and biases. It’s tempting to speculate (I find it odd that the Enquirer puts out this story in connection with the recent divorce between the Gores) but it’s not responsible nor worth doing.

I could say much of the same about all of the rumors following another recent case in Portland that went national — the disappearance of Kyron Harmon. Again, much to speculate. But do it in private. Why pollute the information stream with ignorant bullshit? Don’t we have enough? Yeah, I know, nature and nattering nabobs abhor a vacuum.

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The only way I read the funny pages these days is through the Comics Curmudgeon, which probably has some influence on my interpretation of this strip. I don’t know the specific story line for this week’s LuAnn, but the strip has been around long enough, that I know the basic motif of Gunther’s unrequited love for LuAnn and her mixed feelings about his advances.

All together now: “He’s a nice guyyyyyy.” Gunther does not get the message. After years of failing pursuit, you’d think he’d hang it up and see if someone else might take a shine to him. If I were writing the strip, that’s what I would do. That’s called normal behavior of a healthy human being. But I’m not writing this strip. Greg Evans is. He has created Gunther out of “nice guy syndrome” cloth, posing the possibility that one day Gunther will follow advice like this, turn himself into a Gender Stereotype and win LuAnn over with his Powerful Masculinity. Cuz LuAnn has nothing better to do than wait for Gunther to conform to her desires. Or for Gunther to tell her what her desires are.

See, what’s messing me up here, actually, is the mother. “Why do you need to feel romantic toward anyone?” “Well, mom,” my version of LuAnn would respond, “because I want to fuck. I want more than that, of course, but fucking is a big part of it. I don’t find Gunther fuckable. Maybe someone else does; bonnie for them. But I don’t. So I don’t want to hold his hand. Or kiss him. Or get to any number of bases with him. I definitely don’t wanna fuck him.”

This is a reasonable response. Just because Gunther has the self-esteem of a beaten dog does not obligate LuAnn to either give him a mercy fuck, as some Nice Guys™ would have it, or to suppress her own romantic and sexual desires as a reward for Gunther’s self-negating supplication to his object of love.

What the mother is suggesting — and parents in these strips tend to be The Voices of Reason, so I suspect Evans is suggesting it, too — is that LuAnn’s notions of romance are frivolous, silly, the kinds of fancies only the immature would entertain themselves with. That is, until they grow up and Reality places them in a marriage of mounting responsibilities and subsequent compromises, while their bodies age and decay, and the thought of shtupping anyone seems too much effort, might as well read a good book, zonk znorrrre.

Such is the mom’s perspective here. On the funny pages, where discussions of adult and young adult themes are usually verboten, the suppression of youthful sexuality is common sense. As with the eventual union of Lizard Breath and Anthony in For Better or For Worse, the union of LuAnn with her unromantic nice guy stalker Gunther is, if not inevitable, the course of events preferred by nervous editors and the moonbat readership who plague them. Abstinence until marriage, then breed, then hands off. What would a young woman like LuAnn want a hottie for, anyway? Gunther is dependable, good marriage material. Why would he want to marry some slut who is sexually attracted to him? He has bread to earn! She has babies to birth! If only we reproduced through spores, we wouldn’t have all this messy romance stuff in the first place.

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Homophobes are concerned with only one thing: who is putting what where. More specifically, they are really concerned with the unregulated interaction between the penis and the anus. Consider two recent examples. Barb Davis White has a little quip she uses to argue against the legitimacy of same-sex marriage as a civil rights issue:

“Rosa Parks did not move to the front of the bus to support sodomy.”

Technically, this is true. Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to an arrogant white man. She had had a long day at work and simply did not want to stand up just so this obnoxious asshole could express his social supremacy. True, this act of resistance was not wholly spontaneous — Parks was active in her church and in the NAACP. But while she had an awful lot of issues on her mind at that moment, sodomy was probably not one of them.

All of which is totally irrelevant to the question of social equality for sexual minorities. Yet to an anally fixated teabagger like White, this is a trump card.

“I’m here today to tell you that homosexuality and lesbian behavior is unhealthy,” claiming that gays and lesbians have higher rates of STDs than anyone else in the world, including “gay bowel disease,” an ailment that does not exist and is often used by religious right figures to paint gay men as diseased.

Okay, until I read the above quotes at Pam’s House Blend, I had never heard of “gay bowel disease” or “gay bowel syndrome.” For one thing, it’s discredited junk science. For another, the origin of the term goes directly to the heart of my thesis: GBS is the figment of the anally fixated.

In 1976, a group of physicians in private proctologic practice in New York City coined the illness “Gay Bowel Syndrome” in reference to a constellation of gay male anorectal disorders. Through analysis of biomedical discourse and popular media, it is apparent that Gay Bowel Syndrome is an essentialized category of difference that is neither gay-specific, confined to the bowel, nor a syndrome.

To be clear, there is nothing wrong with anal sex. There is something wrong with being so preoccupied with the anal sex habits of complete strangers that one becomes a deranged proponent of punitive social policies and irrational discrimination.

So you know that expression, “Get your head out of your ass”…?

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Still, even some of the most florid trash-talkers — Hirsch included — also said that other lines do get crossed. And that’s where things get tricky. With so many bitch, asshole and cocksucker stories already flying, of course, it can be hard to pinpoint exactly when that happens; that’s the problem. But some women do say they’ve felt it like a sucker punch when everyday chain-yanking makes the leap from “process” to personal. Just one example of many, from an experienced female writer: Once, in the writers’ room, she told a couple of jerky ex-boyfriend stories she thought could be good script fodder. This prompted another writer to start ranting — angrily, not riffing — about how women “always date jerks.” Another narrowed his eyes at her. “A guy acting like an asshole?” he said. “That’s what makes you spread your legs?”

Her observation: “When a guy tells a story about an ex-girlfriend screwing him over, he gets laughs and maybe sympathy. When a girl tells a story about a guy screwing her over, she gets a lecture, or worse. The whole discussion becomes a referendum on women’s sanity,” she says. “I call this ‘nice guy misogyny,’” she goes on. “Overt sexism is easy to deal with. Someone zings you, you zing him back. The real problem comes from the supposedly ‘nice married guys’ who secretly resent women for being on their turf and take it out on them in various subtle ways.” In a place where personal misery becomes professional hilarity, everyone brings a back story of pain — mommy issues, a nasty ex, hatred for the head cheerleader — so perhaps it’s especially easy to become a lightning rod when you’re the only one in the room with two X chromosomes.

Emphasis mine. The rest of the article is worth a read.

The parts I emphasize in bold reflect two continuing strains of misogyny — doubting women’s authority and integrity, resentment from male entitlement — running headlong against the aspect of comedy that most attracts me to it: “personal misery becomes professional hilarity.” Comedians are drawn to humor, because it is cathartic, an “exorcising of personal demons” that can serve the comedian and the audience through a direct and honest confrontation of pain, stupidity, fear and loss. With humor a comedian can take control, trivializing the terrible, reducing it to a manageable size; or at least putting it at a distance, achieving some breathing space, or perhaps thinking space, to analyze the source of one’s pain, to (hopefully) understand it.

Of course, the flip side is that comedy can also be a means of inflicting pain, of trivializing others, of humiliating and attacking people we don’t understand and fear. Either way, it also requires carrying around that “baggage,” keeping in touch with that part of you that hurts. Confronted by a woman’s personal misery, the “nice guy” lashes out with his own, denying her the right to laugh at her own pain, because he feels he is somehow the target of her humor. But he’s wrong, of course; he forgets the important distancing function of comedy, the ability to abstract oneself from the target. She’s talking about her ex-boyfriend, dude; not you.

Granted, I have heard some women make the same mistake, confusing a gripe about one woman as slander against women in general. Love and romance can be touchy subjects, and adults into their thirties and forties can still feel embarrassment about perceived inadequacies (if male enhancement commercials are any indication, adults into their senior years, too) as lovers or some aspect of the Hetero Norm we’re expected to adhere to. Yet the boy’s club of comedy — including my own tree house of cartoonists and comics creators, which is thankfully and FINALLY (!) seeing a larger influx of women — is especially touchy, precisely because it has been for so long a place for white straight men to escape to, like Fred and Barney heading to the Water Buffalo Lodge. It’s ridiculous for men to expect this status quo to last. As Harris observes, the male dominance of late night writing staffs is already out of touch with social demographics. I wonder what comedy will look like when those demographics overtake the staff roles. What is the harbinger? Ellen? Chappelle Show? Wanda Sykes? It’s something to look forward to. Keep an eye on how all of this pain that roils comedians becomes mediated through humor — on how it changes the nature of humor itself.

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An unfortunate part of the health care reform legislation passed by the House of Representatives this weekend denies coverage of abortion procedures for subscribers to the so-called “public option” and receivers of federal subsidies to purchase health insurance.

This rule effectively robs women of the right to exercise reproductive rights upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court for almost four decades. Poor and lower middle class women do not have the means to pay out-of-pocket. We should not tolerate the creation of such a caste system for women’s rights.

This rule also affects the coverage of women who have health insurance. Any woman who works for a small business mandated to purchase insurance through one of the exchanges will not have access to abortion procedures. Currently most health insurance companies cover abortion; yet these companies will have to create separate plans that only women who do not need public assistance can afford. This could become an increasingly small group and potentially wipe out health coverage for abortions altogether.

This is not what you promised in your run for President; indeed, you promised to uphold the reproductive rights of women. So live up to your promise. As the Senate debates health care reform, defend women’s reproductive rights and fight against the inclusion of legislation that would deny coverage for abortion procedures.

Thanks for reading,

Link found via Tara Dublin.

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Or perhaps this shooter cracked under economic pressures. And this other shooter cracked under anti-religious racism and the pressures of war.

Whenever these violent outbursts occur, I never feel that the explanations for them are adequate. Yet how we explain them — and our arguments over which explanations are better than others — say more about our prejudices and biases than the horrible events themselves. Certain factors come up again and again: mental illness, economic struggles, war trauma, religious extremism and racism. Not all of these elements are present in every case — and based on the two most recent events, I have neglected to list other forces that strongly influence “active shooter” cases, such as misogyny and homophobia. I think a big mistake some folks make, especially those in the punditry profession (which is congenitally given to conclusion-jumping), is latching onto one of these factors in isolation from the others. Those with an axe to grind against Muslims have seized upon the Ft. Hood shooting as a case that proves all their other condemnations of Islam as a religion, political correctness, multiculturalism, and, for good measure, Barack Obama and the “liberal media.” None of that is very helpful, but it isn’t much better to cite the other factors of war, racism, mental illness, etc. without considering them all together as systemic forces that will eventually combine to produce random acts of violence, whether of the active shooter kind, or in cases of rape, domestic abuse, and/or suicide. After all, most people with mental illnesses (a nebulous category that we should refrain from generalizing upon, anyway) do not go on shooting rampages. So far Marc Armbinder is the only high profile media professional who has urged restraint:

Does shooter story today focus on Islam, on the man himself and his demons, on the Army and war? Lots of data points = context needed.

This event, like the Columbine shootings ten years ago, will be endlessly pored over. I still have not figured out Columbine, but there is at least the positive influence of The Columbine Project to help teens address the kinds of issues that were brought to light by that awful event. Armbinder is right, however: context is needed, and to fully appreciate it, we need time to think before we speak.

So, ya know, STFU.

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Under the agreement, anti-abortion Democrats will be permitted to offer an amendment on the House floor to the health-care overhaul bill. The amendment would prohibit a new government-run insurance plan created by the health-care bill from offering to cover abortion services, congressional sources said. It would also block people who received federal subsidies for the purchase of health insurance from buying policies that offered coverage for abortions.

Link found via August. Despite a U.S. Supreme Court ruling written almost 40 years ago, reproductive choice remains effectively a class privilege, not a right a woman can exercise over her own body. Too poor to pay out-of-pocket for an abortion? Well, just be glad you’re not an undocumented worker, missy; they get bupkis.

Not that any of the above surprises me. But it does get me wondering: What impact does such a rule have for the health insurance plans of women who do not receive subsidies? Will private insurers create a separate plan for publicly assisted subscribers? Will abortion-covered plans cost more? I don’t know much about health coverage for women, save that companies have treated domestic abuse as a “pre-existing condition” — a loathsome practice that doesn’t bode well for reproductive choice.

UPDATE: Barry has more info on this compromise, including an answer to my questions above.

Because many small employers are expected to switch to using the exchanges, this means that women who currently have abortion coverage through their small employer, will have their coverage replaced with insurance that doesn’t cover abortion.

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