Via Kaili Joy Gray

Mark Morford of the San Francisco Chronicle says that whereas we’ve been extraordinarily docile about having both our personal data appropriated by enterprises both private (Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerburg) and public (NSA wiretaps, strong-arming ISPs and phone companies for call data) we’ve finally started to collectively call bullshit when eyes and hands start reaching into our pants.

Nothing, apparently, sets us off more than some unhappy TSA worker — an increasingly unenviable job, you gotta admit — yanking you out of line and giving you the delightful option of getting your entire body X-rayed from ass to nipple, or being groped all over in case you might be carrying something explosive in your pants.

Is that not amazing, by the way? That a solitary “Christmas underwear bomber” has now changed the complexion of the entire country and inconvenienced tens of millions with a single failed attempt? Yes, all this groping is because of one guy, and he’s not even Justin Bieber. How incredible is that? Who says an individual can’t make a difference? Who says the terrorists haven’t already won?

Source: San Francisco Chronicle

I’m still feeling even more gloomy about this — despite long, long standing privacy concerns among progressives, and the fact that “nude” x-ray backscatter and 152 millimeter-wave machines have been around since at least last summer (my family and I went through one in Boston last August) the issue’s sudden “discovery” by conservative bellwether Matt Drudge and its subsequent liftoff in the media has felt a little too coordinated. (Evidently there’s a clause in the authorization bill that begins allowing both privatization and unionization of TSA beginning… oh… sometime this month.)

Still, as apologists say about venal, corrupt, and cynically hypocritical televangelists, “light will shine through any window.” The coordination of criticism really might have risen out of an initiative to privatize TSA* the issues themselves have been both well-known and bitterly criticized for years. If it takes a marketing ploy to finally get the conversation moving then… hey, maybe so. (I don’t think the privatization thing is going to get a lot of traction. Certainly not from the groping story.)

* Remember, it’s not a crime if you’re imprisoned in a shipping container by a private security firm after its employees have drugged and sexually attacked you so how could it possibly be a privacy invasion if a private security firm merely squeezes your genitals till you flinch?

Just in time for the election I found a Facebook link to Republican Sex & Marriage Advice, a good competitor to Nikol Hasler’s now largely-dormant Midwest Teen Sex Show video series. (Think of it as the Middle-Age Teen Sex Show.)

The links in the site banner includes the pitch-perfect “For Men” followed by “For Female Problems.”

The, um, evocative Republican elephant logo is brought home by the tagline in most of the videos: “The penis is nothing other than the telephone through which God speaks.”

Even better? The site’s authors respond in character to any hint that the site is anything but dead-serious.

Best one so far is the poignantly whacky portrait of misanthropic man-hating self-doubt in the video “I am Afraid of Marriage: An engaged couple struggles with the man’s pre-wedding jitters.”

It’s a nice subtle reminder of who really owns and operates the bogus Two Rules of Desire Hint: It sure ain’t the woman in the couple. It’s not really the man either. It even more subtly illuminates who’s really responsible for the “women as gatekeepers” ideology.

All around good stuff. Figleaf says check it out.

Via Amanda Hess, Rebecca Traister of The Washington Post says of ‘winger extremist candidates like Christine O’Donnell, Michelle Bachman, Sharron Angle, and Sarah Palin

Even if you don’t like them, it’s not fair to suggest that their presence on the ticket represents a step backward for women. ... In the pursuit of true gender equity, people across the political spectrum need not only women to vote for, but women to vote against.

Source: The Washington Post

Yup. Sort of like “the answer to unpleasant speech is more speech,” the answer to gender and sexual equality isn’t fewer asshole women in politics, the answer is larger numbers of honest ones.

I have to say it took me a really, seriously long time to get that. Waaay back in the old days (like, the 1970s) back when both popular, academic, and even some feminist culture still really did imagine women were essentially more peaceful, cooperative, virtuous, and superior by nature instead of by lack of opportunity, whenever I’d hear about a woman getting into a position of authority and then abusing it I’d just shrug my shoulders and say it made sense. Real equality, I’d say ruefully, means more assholes too.

While that was and is technically true it’s also bloody defeatist. Which is why I’m really happy to pass along Traister’s far more optimistic point.

So a headline glimpsed through USA Today vending machine said it looks as though tomorrow will be the biggest “wave election” turnover in the House and Senate since the post-Watergate 1974 election.

Some very good progressives are on the verge of being cast out of office. As are some pretty lousy ones. All to be replaced by those who’s ambition is not only to enact the Ten Commandments but also to repeal the Sermon on the Mount and repudiate his sermon at the Last Supper.

They’re viciously committed to at least two relevant policies: First, not just to withhold funding but to actively outlaw all abortion — even in the case of rape and incest (hey, conservatives want grandchildren just like people do.) Second, to make sure that the minute such children are born that they receive no healthcare beyond what the mother can afford.

Just think what a lesson liberal/lefties are going to teach that nasty Barack Obama by sitting this one out!

Or you could do the right thing and not only vote yourself but volunteer in your neighborhood to get out the vote. As I will be doing. For the first time.