Otherwise, I don't really see what the papers' editors are thinking, between hiring neocon idiot Bill Kristol and then replacing him with slut-shaming, supposedly new-idea-having former Atlantic blogger Ross Douthat. Having already definitively determined that feminism makes women unhappy by reading one study abstract, today, Douthat turns his attention to late-term abortion.

You see, Douthat totally understands why late term abortions might be necessary, and the courage it took for Dr. George Tiller to continue performing this vital health service for women...he just thinks the late doctor was an amoral baby-killer who didn't understand God. As for all the women who have written testimonials about their experiences with late-term abortions, Mr. Douthat read them, and he thinks they're all assholes.

They help explain why Tiller thought he was doing the Lord's work, even though that work involved destroying something that we wouldn't hesitate to call a baby if we saw it struggling for life in a hospital bed.

And let's not forget the amoral part: Douthat's been listening to the very people who advocated violence against Tiller, his patients, his staff and the clinic, and so he knows that Tiller was just willy-nilly performing late term abortions on perfectly healthy fetuses and mothers all the time. How does he know? Because the anti-abortion movement told him and the state government, over and over again, to try to get Tiller jailed.

But his critics were convinced that he performed them not only in truly desperate situations, but in many other cases as well. Over the years, they cobbled together a considerable amount of evidence - drawn from the state's abortion statistics, from Tiller's own comments, and from a 2006 investigation - suggesting that Tiller abused the state's mental-health exemption to justify late-term abortions in almost any situation.

This evidence is persuasive, but not dispositive. We may never know how many of George Tiller's abortions were performed on healthy mothers and healthy fetuses.

Well, I mean, the courts found it "dispositive," which is why on what few charges the anti-abortion movement managed to gin up against him, Tiller was acquitted. But, by all means, lets continue to smear Tiller as an amoral baby-killer. It'll help strengthen Douthat's argument!

Douthat also understands why, having read the real stories of women who endured the sorts of pregnancies that needfully ended in late term terminations, why pro-choice types think abortions should remain legal. He just thinks we're wrong, i.e. causing needless social strife and even violence. I mean, most abortions are elective, Douthat says! (And even most late-term ones, he additionally asserts without evidence!)

The same is true of the more than 100,000 abortions that are performed after the first trimester: Very few involve medical complications of any kind. Even the now-outlawed "partial-birth" procedure, which abortion-rights supporters initially argued was only employed in the direst of dire situations, turned out to be used primarily for purely elective abortions.

Now that last bit is a careful bit of language on Douthat's part. Because, in reality, there's no evidence even in the Slate article that Douthat links to that the abortions were elective; the best that the article's author Franklin Foer can muster is that the procedure known as "intact dilation and extraction" was "safer and more convenient" than alternative methods (because, really, why would you want to use the method least likely to cause the death of the mother?) and that two newspapers concluded, after speaking to a couple doctors, that second-trimester intact dilation and extractions were "mostly" performed on poor women who were unable to get into a practitioner in time for a first trimester abortion — which doesn't necessarily make them "elective."

Douthat then sets up his pro-choice strawman to knock down: as far as he's concerned, pro-choicers people deny that a fetus has a "claim to life" — i.e., is already a human being — and that's why we don't care whether a fetus is healthy or the mother was simply too lazy to use birth control. And in our zeal to protect the right of every woman to make the best choices for her (and, yes, in some cases, the fetus she is carrying), it's our fault that we've made abortion politics so controversial.

If anything, by enshrining a near-absolute right to abortion in the Constitution, the pro-choice side has ensured that the hard cases are more controversial than they otherwise would be. One reason there's so much fierce argument about the latest of late-term abortions - Should there be a health exemption? A fetal deformity exemption? How broad should those exemptions be? - is that Americans aren't permitted to debate anything else. Under current law, if you want to restrict abortion, post-viability procedures are the only kind you're allowed to even regulate.

In other words, since Roe v. Wade protects women's right to any abortion pre-viability, the "debate" over late term abortions — as epitomized in Douthat's own column by one George Tiller — is so "fierce" because poor anti-abortion activists have nothing else to fight about. Apparently, Douthat has missed the efforts by South Dakota to make abortion illegal, the efforts by Colorado to pass a personhood amendment, the efforts activists in states like Mississippi to drive all clinics out of business (thus, eliminating abortion in the state) through over-regulation and all the other various things anti-abortion activists are actively doing to overturn Roe v. Wade in addition to fueling hate-filled and violent rhetoric against all abortion providers, including late-term providers like George Tiller.

Douthat's final argument is — I swear — that pro-choice people who want to prevent violence against abortion providers should simply accept the end of Roe v. Wade and allow states to make abortion illegal. I wish I was kidding.

If abortion were returned to the democratic process, this landscape would change dramatically. Arguments about whether and how to restrict abortions in the second trimester - as many advanced democracies already do – would replace protests over the scope of third-trimester medical exemptions.

The result would be laws with more respect for human life, a culture less inflamed by a small number of tragic cases - and a political debate, God willing, unmarred by crimes like George Tiller's murder.

To sum up: if we just roll over, accept the end of abortion access, and let them teach us about respect for human life, they won't kill any more abortion providers. Good to know whose hands Douthat thinks Tiller's blood is really on.

Not All Abortions Are Equal [NY Times]

Related: Bill Kristol Spews, America Heaves [Wonkette]
Faerie Tales And TheModern Neo-Con [Wonkette]
Fear Of Reese Witherspoon Look-Alikes On the Pill [Brad DeLong]
Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class And Save The American Dream [Amazon]
Ross Douthat [The Atlantic]
Abortion Apostate [Slate]
Antiabortion Efforts Move To The State Level [Washington Post]

Earlier: Feminism Makes Women Unhappy, And Other Tall Tales

Although, I suppose we should give Douthat a break. It is a 45-page academic paper comprised of nearly 40 years worth of data subjected to regression analysis and filled with statistical and sociological jargon. It's so much easier to just read the abstract and then judge the ongoing battle for social equity as ultimately harmful for women! That abstract states:

By many objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years, yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women's happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men. The paradox of women's declining relative wellbeing is found across various datasets, measures of subjective well-being, and is pervasive across demographic groups and industrialized countries. Relative declines in female happiness have eroded a gender gap in happiness in which women in the 1970s typically reported higher subjective well-being than did men.

From that, Douthat extrapolates this:

But all the achievements of the feminist era may have delivered women to greater unhappiness.

It's the new Feminine Mystique! Only, you know, not.

The authors do, however, offer explanations more plausible than Douthat's idea that the attainment of something approaching gender equality makes us poor dames so unhappy. (Douthat would only have had to read to page 4!)

For example, if happiness is assessed relative to outcomes for one's reference group, then greater equality may have led more women to compare their outcomes to those of the men around them. In turn, women might find their relative position lower than when their reference group included only women. This change in the reference group may make women worse off or it may simply represent a change in their reporting behavior. An alternative form of reference dependent preferences relates well-being to whether or not expectations are met. If the women's movement raised women's expectations faster than society was able to meet them, they would be more likely to be disappointed by their actual experienced lives.

In other words, if we come into the world — work, domestic, social — expecting equality and then don't get it — which many of us don't — and we start comparing ourselves to men, of course we're going to be pissed. It's the old bait-and-switch, and who the fuck likes that?

The authors add:

The second possibility is that broad social shifts such as those brought on by the changing role of women in society fundamentally alter what measures of subjective well-being are capturing. Over time it is likely that women are aggregating satisfaction over an increasingly larger domain set. For example, life satisfaction may have previously meant "satisfaction at home" and has increasingly come to mean some combination of "satisfaction at home" and "satisfaction at work". This averaging over many domains may lead to falling average satisfaction if it is difficult to achieve the same degree of satisfaction in multiple domains.

In other words, when women had no reasonable expectation of being able to achieve happiness at work (due to lack of jobs or proscribed labor market possibilities), they didn't count their expected-dissatisfaction at work as part of whether they considered themselves happy and, once the possibility of being happy is there (regardless of whether the equality to achieve it is translated into practice), they count their dissatisfaction as part of their overall happiness. I guess I sort of fail to see where that's such a terrible thing, but, then again, I'm not Harvard-educated.

In addition, Douthat ignores this little gem about what the phrase "subjective happiness" means in practice.

However, it should be noted that subjective well-being is both a function of the individual's personality and his or her reaction to life events. As such, correlations between life outcomes and happiness may not be causal. For example, one reason that married people report substantially greater happiness than unmarried people in a cross-section is because happy people are more likely than unhappy people to marry (Stevenson and Wolfers, 2007)

The authors also note that self-reported happiness correlates with social expectations of when one ought to be happy.

Self-reports of happiness have also been shown to be correlated in the expected direction with changes in life circumstances. For example, an individual's subjective well-being typically rises with marriage and income growth and falls while going through a divorce.

In other words, if ones thinks one is supposed to be happy (or unhappy), one reports that, making subjective well-being both a measure of what one thinks one ought to feel and what one actually feels. I'll leave it to other people to extrapolate whether or not there might be reasons that women would be more likely feel they're supposed to not be happy when they are, or why men might be more likely to report being happy when they legitimately aren't.

Or, quite frankly, women might have been lying all along.

It has been recognized that an individual's assessment of their well-being may reflect the social desirability of responses and Kahneman (1999) argues that people in good circumstances may be hedonically better off than people in worse circumstances, yet they may require more to declare themselves happy. In the context of the findings presented in this paper, women may now feel more comfortable being honest about their true happiness and have thus deflated their previously inflated responses. Or, as in Kahneman's example, the increased opportunities available to women may have increased what women require to declare themselves happy.

Not surprisingly, Douthat ignores the fact that the study shows that the subjective happiness of African-American women is actually much higher than that of African-American men.

An important exception is that this phenomenon has not occurred similarly across racial groups. African-American women have become happier over this period in parallel with rising happiness among African-American men, implying little change in their gender happiness gap. This rise in African-American women's happiness has occurred as part of an overall rise in the happiness of blacks, a rise that has eliminated two-thirds of the black-white happiness gap (Stevenson and Wolfers, 2008b).

Douthat actually deliberately ignores this, stating in his piece:

But this can't be the only explanation, since the trend toward greater female discontent cuts across lines of class and race. A working-class Hispanic woman is far more likely to be a single mother than her white and wealthy counterpart, yet the male-female happiness gap holds in East Hampton and East L.A. alike.

Actually, no, it doesn't show that at all — particularly because the authors had no data on self-identified Hispanics prior to 2000 and were forced to make some pretty hinky extrapolations to come up with the conclusion Douthat cites as established fact. But to admit that would cut against Douthat's thesis which is — to those who rememberwhat Douthat thinks about "sluts" — unsurprising. Douthat thinks that women are unhappy because society doesn't do enough slut-shaming!

[Feminists and conservatives] should also be able to agree that the steady advance of single motherhood threatens the interests and happiness of women. Here the public-policy options are limited; some kind of social stigma is a necessity. But a new-model stigma shouldn't (and couldn't) look like the old sexism. There's no necessary reason why feminists and cultural conservatives can't join forces - in the same way that they made common cause during the pornography wars of the 1980s - behind a social revolution that ostracizes serial baby-daddies and trophy-wife collectors as thoroughly as the "fallen women" of a more patriarchal age.

No reason, of course, save the fact that contemporary America doesn't seem willing to accept sexual stigma, period.

Right, the problem with single motherhood is that it — on its own — makes women unhappy and they're not remotely unhappy because, unlike in, say, Europe, there aren't enough social structures or government services to mitigate the difficulties of achieving professional success and responsible single-parenting. Nope! If we just slut-shamed women (and, to Douthat's credit, some men) more, then they'd have fewer children out of wedlock and would totally be happier! Except for the women who have children outside of matrimonial bounds, who would be slut-shamed for irresponsibly having sex, an ironic statement from a guy who prefers to sleep with women not on birth control. There's no word on whether women who are single parents after a divorce would also be shamed for having driven off their husbands.

But, even further to that, the authors of the study specifically investigated the potential for single motherhood being the cause of the decline in female happiness, and disproved it.

Along with the decline in marriage has come a rise in single parenthood, both through growth in out-of-wedlock births and through divorce. Thus, we disaggregate the fertility results to consider trends in happiness separately among single parents and married parents, and, to account for the duel burden of working parents, between employed parents and non-employed parents. Once again, we see similar trends in happiness across these groups, casting doubt on the hypothesis that trends in marriage and divorce, single parenthood, or work-family balance are at the root of the happiness declines among women.

And, just for good measure, let's throw in what women have to say about what they think they've gained from the feminist movement (page 25):

Moreover, women believe that their lives are better; in recent polls asking about changes in the status of women over the past 25 or 50 years, around four in five adults state that the overall status of women in the U.S. has gotten better (and the remaining respondents break two-for-one towards "stayed the same" over "worse"). Additionally, the 1999 Virginia Slims Poll found that 72% of women believe that "women having more choices in society today gives women more opportunities to be happy" while only 39% thought that having more choices "makes life more complicated for women." Finally, women today are more likely than men to believe that their opportunities to succeed exceed those of their parents.

Ah, Douthat. But there are other reasons, besides intellectual laziness, ideological blinders, an utter failing to understand any nuance in female sexuality and a 10-year case of blueballs not to blame him for having failed to parse the research he cites as a reason for society to get behind him on the slut-shaming bandwagon. I mean, there must be, because the New York Times gave him a column!

The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness [University of Pennsylvania]
Liberated And Unhappy [NY Times]

Related: Yes, This Was Published In A Major Newspaper In The Year 2009 [Pandagon]
Fear of Reese Witherspoon Look-Alikes On The Pill [Brad DeLong]

Wockner, whose bio says he's been reporting for LGBT outlets for 25 years, conducted a long interview with Prejean and, in between her stock answers about being sandbagged by Hilton and belief that marriage is a religious institution meant for a man and a woman, manages to get out the real reason she doesn't believe in gay marriage:

Rex: I understand that you were raised to believe that marriage is between a man and a woman, and I understand that you grew up knowing that you were always going to marry a guy, but you're heterosexual. Um, some people are born gay, maybe, you think?

Carrie: No, I don't think so.

Rex: OK, so now we're getting somewhere.

Carrie: I think it's a behavior that develops over time.

Rex: Why would someone choose it, given that if you choose that, you get discriminated against?

Carrie: Um, because obviously Perez Hilton doesn't think that there's anything wrong with it.

Rex: No, but if being gay is a choice, rather than something you're born with, why would you choose something that's going to lead to your being discriminated against? What would be the motivation?

Carrie: I'm not sure what the motivation would be.

That "behavior" is not loving someone of the same sex, or being attracted to people of the same sex; Prejean is strictly talking about sexual acts. In Prejean's apparently very limited mind, if you just randomly decide that you love discrimination and have no moral compass, you can train yourself to engage in and (one assumes) eventually even enjoy sex acts with people of the same sex, and thus you are a homosexual.

Yes, Prejean just reduced LGBT Americans to the actions of their genitals. Sexuality is, apparently, about intercourse — if you're gay. It's a choice rooted utterly in "behavior" rather than anything more innate — which, naturally, doesn't apparently apply to heterosexuality. Heterosexuality can manage to encompass to whom one is innately attracted and with whom one chooses to spend one's life with, and the feelings of love and attachment one has for another person. Homosexuality, though, that's just behavior.What a revolting point of view.

Pam Spaulding at Pandagon has a response that's a lot nicer than the one rattling around my head.

This makes it obvious that she doesn't have close friends who are gay or lesbian and in committed relationships back home. Same-sex couples simply want all the legal rights that Prejean would have if and when she chooses to marry sometime down the road. That they could decide to marry someone of the opposite sex (something always tossed out by the right), would not change the fact that who we partner with is about who we love-and the desire to nurture and legally protect that relationship-not about coddling the anti-gays by closeting one's self in a heterosexual fraud marriage, or submitting to "reparative therapy."

Prejean swears she has gay friends, though.

What Prejean also has now, according to Dan Gilgoff at U.S. News & World Report, is a new PR flack — Christian PR guru A. Larry Ross. Ross is a close friend of Prejean's pastor, Miles McPherson, who yesterday gave Prejean her own metaphorical crown., anointing her the new Queen Esther (man, is Sarah Palin gonna be pissed to lose that one) because, apparently, announcing herself as an idiotic, reflexively anti-gay American will save her chosen people (other idiotic, reflexively anti-gay Americans) from total annihilation at the hands of the Persians. Or something.

Interview With Miss California, Carrie Prejean [Wockner]
Engaging Miss California With Reality-Based Questions About Equality [Pandagon]
Miss California, Carrie Prejean, Signs With Top Christian Publicity Firm [US News & World Report]
Miss California's Most Revealing Interview Yet, With Her Pastor [US News & World Report]

Related: Sarah Palin and the Jews [The Nation]

Trimble, 26, appeared on the British tv quiz show "University Challenge," and consistently blew the other contestants away, Ken Jennings-style, with her ability to answer nearly every question on the board. She led her team, from Corpus Christi College, Oxford, to victory by scoring nearly 2/3 of their points, and has been called "the brainiest woman on British television."

Yet some viewers find Trimble's intelligence annoying, dubbing her "cocky," "smug," and, as India Knight of the Times of London notes: "brain-rupturingly irritating." Her brain isn't the only thing viewers seem to be interested in, as her looks have also gone up for debate: "I'm glad that people are being nice about me rather than nasty," Trimble says, "but... I very much think this would not be happening if I was a man. People would not feel it necessary to comment on my looks so much."

Knight explores the Trimble phenomenon by asking where the other Gail Trimbles of the world have gone; surely they are out there, Knight argues, but society doesn't value them, and so they remain overlooked and underappreciated. The Gail Trimbles of the world are hard to find, Knight argues, "not because they don't exist, but because braininess is no longer considered much of a female virtue or even an asset. So they've been tucked away."

My friends and I often have this discussion: when did it become so cool to be dumb? Perhaps it's just because I'm a big nerd who ran with a crowd of big nerds, but my school experience was much like Knight's: "Everyone I knew felt the same way: the acquisition of knowledge wasn't regarded as naff or nerdy; being clever was seen as cool, and being thick as embarrassing." It wasn't considered a badge of honor to be a complete idiot; being smart, or at least working hard in school, meant that you had a better shot of getting the hell out of my shitkick town, and people respected that.

Knight argues that women are currently going out of their way to hide how smart they are, lest they be judged like Trimble; nobody wants to appear "stuck-up" or "smug," when one can be like, totally awesome and whatever, you know? In a world where Paris bloody Hilton is seen as a role model to teenage girls, the incentive to study hard and be proud of your smarts gets drowned out in a sea of baby-voiced dreams to become the next American Idol. God forbid you open your mouth and be branded an elitist, Smarty McGee!

Trimble, by the by, has been offered numerous makeovers and even a photoshoot with a magazine called Nuts (classy!) which, I believe, is a Maxim-esque magazine that would surely feature her in the standard sexy librarian pose with a headline like "Brains and Booty!" or some stupid crap like that. Trimble has turned such offers down, preferring to concentrate on her studies and continue living her life as awesome smart kickass Gail Trimble, no makeover required.

The "makeover" offers are an insult as well: this incredibly intelligent woman is being asked to sex herself up a bit, to make herself more palatable to the general public. Her brains, clearly, aren't good enough: a message that is being sent to young girls, who, like Knight suggests, will continue to find ways to hide their intelligence in order to appear more "fun" and "sexy", as the media seems to believe that women can't and don't have both.

So how do we fix this issue? How can we teach young girls to stop hiding their smarts and be proud of their intelligence? For the world has millions of Gail Trimbles out there; we just need them to stand up and be seen.

University Challenge: Gail Trimble Leads Corpus Christi College To Victory [Times of London]
Why Don't We Like Clever Women Anymore? [Times of London]

Senators: Mary Landrieu, Diane Feinstein, Barbara Mikulski, Dennie Stabenow, Patty Murray, and Maria Cantwell

Representatives: Doris Matsui, Lynn Woolsey, Jane Harman, Grace Napolitano, Laura Richardson, Lucille Roybal-Allard, Hilda Solis, Ellen Tauscher, Diane Watson, Loretta Sanchez, Jackie Speier, Shelley Berkley, (the newly-elected) Dina Titus, (the now deceased) Stephanie Tubbs Jones, Darlene Hooley, Allyson Schwartz, Sheila Jackson Lee, and Tammy Baldwin.

Governors: Ruth Ann Miner and Jennifer Granholm

Superdelegate Endorsement List [DemCon Watch]

• Yes, obviously, women are just like fried chicken, insofar as they can be reduced only to the assets men like. Also, for the record, have you gotten a good side shot of Hillary's breasts? They're not small, not that it matters, but I prefer accuracy in my insults. Plus, if people (mostly men) are going to demean me and think I'm stupid for having large ones, I really think they ought to get their shit together and tell us all what size breasts we ought to have to be taken seriously even though I know the answer is, obviously, "you need a penis."
  
  
• Unflattering picture? Check. Reference to her book It Takes a Village which Republicans somehow hated despite the fact that it was about family values and shit? Check. Insult to her intelligence? Check. Insult to her home state? Yup. Humor? Oh, shit, guess they forgot that.
  
  
  

• Never mind, the last one was funny in comparison. She's so stupid! Hardeeharhar! Gosh, I love me some jokes about how the ladies are dumb.
  
  
  
  
  

• Hillary's a bi-itch! Hillary's a bi-itch! I mean, does anyone take this seriously as an insult anymore? I got called this in the 7th grade, it lost its power over me pretty quick and, besides, like, all it really means is that the person who is calling you it has some outdated stereotype about how women are all supposed to be peaches and sunshine and sugar and spice, which I think makes the person who buys that crap about women my bitch.
  

• Ah, back to the stereotype that all Democratic women are man-hating lesbians. Just because I'd rather fuck a woman than a dude that was wearing this button doesn't make me a lesbian, I don't think, it's just that some choices in life are easier than others.
  
  

• Actually, I'm failing to see how this is an insult to Democrats. It's basically admitting that Republicans are uncreative lovers who suck in the sack and are all about showing dominance rather than having great sex. Seems about right, although I swear the only guys more into anal sex in D.C. than my gay friends are Republicans.

• Because Monica Lewinsky is the only person to ever give a blow job, ever, in the history of the world (or, at least that's what the unfellated dudes that would buy this pin know in their heart of hearts), it's apparently totally cool to forever more associate her image with shit like this. Can't she sue or something? There have got to be some Jezelawyers on this shit.

Anyway, so, it's hard to decide whether Adler's one racist pin trumps his many, many sexist pins, but it only took 2 days for that one to go away and these get to stay. Betcha they do pretty good sales, too.

Vendor Who Sold Racist Obama Pin Apologizes [Dallas Morning News]

MOE: Ummmmm is it just me or is today, like, all about POLICY??
MEGAN: It does seem like my jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none brain when it comes to policy issues might come in handy this morning! Where do you want to start?

MOE: Maybe with the incredibly astute words of McCain economic adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin:

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, chief economic aide to Republican candidate Sen. John McCain, dismissed the Obama strategy as "classic industrial policy which shows a lack of faith in private markets."

MEGAN: Obama's got this part right though: "How much you pay in taxes as a corporation a lot of times is going to depend on how good your lobbyist is."
MOE: I mean, what have the private markets done to instill faith in you lately? Are we supposed to be like Job with these things?
MOE: right.
MOE: This isn't something I would mind seeing: "Americans with incomes above $2.8 million would see their after-tax income decrease by 11.5%."
MEGAN: Hardly anyone pays the actual income tax rate because of loopholes. If I heard my now former boss say it once, I heard it 15 times, if you eliminate deductions and credits, you could reduce the corporate rate to, like, 25% without losing revenue. You could lower personal rates even further and eliminate taxes for a percentage of the population. It's an incredibly inefficient system.

MEGAN: I did an analysis of the candidates' tax plans on young single women. Obama's is better.
MOE: Did you see this handy graf on the rebirth of the plutocracy? Just before the Great Depression the top .01% of households averaged 892 times the household income of the households in the bottom 90%, and that number of course plummeted and only really began steadily rising in 1980 to the point that it's now 976. These are imperfect numbers, of course — how big is the top .01%? How about the top .1%? Etc. etc. But it's a nice visual aid!

MOE: The income required to make the Top 400 list of earners has tripled since 1992, AFTER ADJUSTING FOR INFLATION.

MEGAN: I mean, the question is, from a policy perspective, is whether that's truly undesirable and what can be honestly done about it. Given the nature of the international financial sector and personal and currency mobility, would heavy taxation be effective? Can we limit income? Can you create or force businesses to create better oversight and board systems to protect shareholder interests, say, with a mandate that multimillion dollar compensation packages that aren't effectively tied to long-term performance are considered not in shareholders' best interests? I don't think either of the candidates has really talked about serious policies aimed at resolving income inequality because it's such a squishy issue to get your arms around let alone resolve from a policy perspective.
MOE: A few things: 1. Well yeah I think income inequality is truly undesirable from a policy perspective. 2. And the only way to deal is tax the everliving shit out of capital gains and use that money to beef up the SEC and education. Because the people who set executive compensation, the people who "look out for the interests of shareholders," the people who monitor the people allegedly looking out for those interests, the people who kick out executives for underperformance and are charged with luring in a new guy to "clean house" — all those people are part of this racket. And one, their version of "long term" is at most five years. And two, they set the yardsticks, the standards. They're all friends and acquaintances and they all know exactly how much everyone gets paid and they've pushed the baseline up up up.
MEGAN: What is "taxing the shit" out of capital gains? Back up to 25%? Higher? Won't they just try to pull some work around if that happens, the way private equity funds are just an elaborate way around taxation?
MOE: Well every policy creates loopholes, and certainly you'd probably see some money shift to less taxable assets, not that we didn't see that already with the real estate bubble, but none of the hundreds of executives indicted on backdating their stock options worked for a private company, you know? I mean, eventually the big payoff in private equity tends to come from the public markets, right? Or an acquisition? The thing that people need to get through their thick fucking heads is that yeah, there's always a greater and greatest fool losing out here, and we've missed out on a lot of the fundamental zero-sumness of corporate earnings growth because our standards of living are being propped up by artificially low standards in China, which China maintains as part of its INDUSTRIAL POLICY.

MEGAN: Hypothetically speaking, then, not that this is in my personal best interest as a homeowner, one of the ways to keep people from transferring assets into real estate to reap tax benefits would be to reduce the tax preference for home ownership and for real estate more generally.
MOE: Right. Although I don't know if you'd do that in the middle of a housing crisis?
MEGAN: Which, by the way, would probably have helped slow the bubble, and would slow the growth in home prices because creating a tax preference creates a market for people seeking to exploit it and it pretty quickly gets built into the price
MOE: Well yes.
MEGAN: Well, why wouldn't you? I don't know that it could hurt anymore now. If you wanted to be fair you could grandfather it or give some sort of one-time rebate payment or something and call it a fucking day.

MEGAN: The mortgage interest deduction and state and local tax deduction (which includes property taxes) are two of the largest deductions in the tax system, that are taken advantage of almost exclusively by people earning above the median income. They're also, along with having kids, the main reason people in the so-called "middle class" end up paying the Alternative Minimum Tax, though "middle class" is kind of a stretch for someone making $100, $120K/year when median income is $45K, but I'll accept that definition. Obama's willing to go up to $250K.
MOE: I wonder if there is like, a rich folks CPI that tracks the rising costs of… luxury real estate, private education, corian countertops, that sort of thing.

MEGAN: Not, by the way, that this bears any relationship to the conversation at hand, but coffee may be helping us live longer. I'm hoping alcohol consumption offsets that.
MOE: Okay so I'm creeping through his interview and, you know, the Journal basically says "well Clinton said a lot of this stuff but then he became obsessed with the deficit and it's not like THAT'S not a problem right now" and Obama says like "well now we have energy problems too so there's that." Like there's this meme out there that alternative energy is going to become this huge new sector of the economy but like who is going to lead that?

MOE: Ha I like how it ends

WSJ: A lot of folks would say cutting corporate tax rates are equivalent growth.
Sen. Obama: I don't want a distorting effect of our tax code on corporate decision making. But that's different from just saying you know, let's run up the deficit another couple of trillion dollars …

MEGAN: And after all those bonuses, too!
MOE: Yeah they're only on track to get $19 billion this Xmas sad sad world. But I don't know, can we really make the argument that it would be societally optimal for that money to …maybe find other uses for itself?
MEGAN: Ooch, Obama is co-opting the Republican small government ethos, but with a delish Democratic twist — making it, you know, actually effective.

I think the danger is always to equate size of government with effectiveness, and I don't. It's not clear to me that we want a larger government, but we certainly want a government that is setting more intelligent priorities and using taxpayer dollars more wisely and structuring tax policies that are conducive to long-term economic growth. As I mentioned during the speech, there may be programs that no longer work. There's certainly all kinds of previsions in our tax code that are antiquated and are not spurring economic growth. We've got offices like the patent office that are outdated to take advantage of new discoveries here in the United States.

Republicans have gotten so focused at starving the beast or cutting off the snake's head that they've forgotten they can actually do proactive things to reduce gov't. Or, in the case of this administration, they haven't wanted to reduce its size.

MOE: Thomas Frank doesn't have a new column out yet I guess that happens tomorrow but he changed the name to "The Tilting Yard." Weird.
MEGAN: Is it, like, a Cervantes reference? Is he Don Quixote?

MOE: Well he had the same column name, "Fighting Words" as Hitchens, whose last column on Hillary and sexism is the most Hitchens thing Hitchens has ever written, right down to the Juanita Broaddrick ref:

Posterity may well remember the Hillary Clinton campaign as the nearest that a member of the female gender had thus far gotten to the nomination of a major political party. But the episode will be recalled for many other salient features as well. The first time that the wife of an ex-president had leveraged her first-lady status into a senatorial seat and then a bid for the presidency. The first time that the candidate's spouse (and campaigner in chief) was a person who had been disbarred for perjury and impeached for—among other things—obstruction of justice.
MOE: The first time since the 1960s that a Democrat seeking the nomination had implicitly relied on a "Southern strategy" of appealing to the rancor of the "white working class." The first time since the lachrymose Ed Muskie that a candidate's eyes had welled up with tears in New Hampshire. The first time that a woman candidate was married to a man who had been believably accused of rape and sexual harassment (see my book No One Left To Lie To). The first time that a candidate had said of her half-African-American rival that he was not a member of the Muslim faith "as far as I know." The first time that the loser in the delegate count had failed to congratulate or even acknowledge the winner on the night of his historic victory.

MEGAN: I tried to write something about it, but it's so hard to respond to stupid sometimes.

MEGAN: This is, after all, the same dude that ejaculates at the thought of Bill Clinton. Granted, it's at his humiliation, but I don't think that makes him any less of a gay, S&M fetishist with a hair trigger. I feel sorry for his wife.
MOE: So maybe Tilting Yard was a dig at Hitchens who I bet 1. gets it and 2. has had on more than one occasion, like, epically tilted into something mid-rant at a party or something, but that is just my guess.
MEGAN: Well, if by "tilted" you mean "stuck his small British peen into the vagina of a 19 year old with hero worship in her eyes," then, yes, he's done that at parties.
MOE: So guess what, I totally missed talking about torture again, or the Army official who claims he was fired for refusing to approve a billion dollars in shady fees to KBR, or like, drilling in the wildlife refuge or whatev. Do you have anything to say about this shit?
MEGAN: Oh, McCain doesn't want to drill in ANWR, he wants to drill along the CA/FL coasts, something that Bush and Jeb Bush and Charlie Crist and Arnie and the Republicans from all those states have opposed because it will ruin the views of Republican voters who hate high gas prices and environmentalism but love them their views.

MEGAN: Also, the KBR thing is just confirming what everyone already knew, which is that pressure was applied at some point. I am amazed that no one caught the part where the Administration recently signed a 10-year contract with KBR to provide services to our troops in Iraq. That's, you know, until 2018.
MEGAN: We also didn't talk about the floods will raise food prices or the Chinese expat newspaper article about Obama's skin color, but shit happens.

It fell to Neville Chamberlain in one of the supreme crises of the world to be contradicted by events, to be disappointed in his hopes, and to be deceived and cheated by a wicked man. But what were these hopes in which he was disappointed? What were these wishes in which he was frustrated? What was that faith that was abused? They were surely among the most noble and benevolent instincts of the human heart-the love of peace, the toil for peace, the strife for peace, the pursuit of peace, even at great peril, and certainly to the utter disdain of popularity or clamour. Whatever else history may or may not say about these terrible, tremendous years, we can be sure that Neville Chamberlain acted with perfect sincerity according to his lights and strove to the utmost of his capacity and authority, which were powerful, to save the world from the awful, devastating struggle in which we are now engaged. This alone will stand him in good stead as far as what is called the verdict of history is concerned.

As she sipped her bloody mary, she quietly listened to two men, neatly dressed in suits. For a second she thought they were going to compare that day's horrifying attack to the Japanese bombing in 1941 that blew America into World War II:

"This is just like Pearl Harbor," one of the men said.

The other asked, "What is Pearl Harbor?"

"That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War," the first man replied.

At that moment, Ms. Jacoby said, "I decided to write this book."

We are all complete dumbasses incapable of even the most moderate level of knowledge retention, much less concentration. The computer on which you are reading this blog is rotting your brain. We have fooled ourselves into believing there is no piece of information worth knowing that can't be distilled into a pithy blog entry, because no piece of information longer than a pithy blog entry seems capable of finding a viable market of readers these days, and the market always knows best; this country certainly did not come into the position of consuming 25% of the world's resources on 5% of its population by ignoring that.

But hey! We can still make this a post that mainly hates on men: do you think dude culture is more hostile to knowledge, or lady culture? Dudes definitely have the "arrogant" market cornered. But our magazines are so much dumber.

Dumb And Dumber: Are Americans Hostile To Knowledge? [NY Times]
The Dumbing Of America [Washington Post]

Gains among the Gennifer Flowers set aren't surprising—Hillary has doggedly pitched programs (which are obviously unappealing to a conservative like me) such as universal healthcare, universal paid leave, and even $5,000 "baby bonds" to rally the low-income, uneducated women she enjoys strong support from. Her campaign even has a special name for them: "women with needs." Labels like this make me think Hillary is the woman in "need". As in, she "needs" taxpayer money to give to the women she "needs" votes from.

Annnnnyhow, obviously this bitch is a total cunt, and please don't be offended by that word, not that I care. I would say I don't understand how they convince women to become Republicans, but that would be a lie because I totally do; the plain fact is that some women are totally evil and evil people like becoming Republicans, and I would say that explains this one. I don't, for the record, think that explains Coulter, who is somehow fun for me. No, this chick is just your run of the mill racist pretty Satanist Christian airhead born without the empathy gene, I'm pretty sure, though that could be fun for me too. Whatever! I'll think about it on Monday. TChristIF!

Glamocracy

Sorry if I'm getting out of the realm of the "point of view of young women" here, but uh...why else was I supposed to care about that guy's widow?

I mean, she is pretty.

Anyway, on the plus side they have tapped Rebecca Roberts, a satellite radio broadcaster and daughter of Cokie, has been tapped as on of the bloggers. And if the latest entry from Glamour dating blog "Man Needs Date" is anything to go by, Glamour is having a Come-to-Jesus moment:

For the last couple of weeks, while not fantasizing about eating Turkey and stuffing, I have been struggling with writing a blog that is more real.....It's like every time I sit at the keyboard to write about my true feelings, it is either too difficult to face or define or maybe it's easier to crack a few frat-boy jokes and tell you what we had for dinner and how many times we rocked the casbah!

I really don't know how I feel about [a woman in the White House]. I see the positive parts of it. But, you know, I think there's something incredible about a First Lady. That, to me, is a woman in the White House. It's sort of like being parents to the United States, and she takes on the role of mother and confidante and care-giver. Standing behind every powerful man, there's a powerful woman...I don't want to say no, because that doesn't sound very open-mined. But do I want it to be Hillary? No, I don't think so.

Also, we learn Angie is married to a former football player with whom she likes to vacation in Las Vegas, was discovered by David Hasselhoff — "please don't make it sound cheesy, because that's not what it was" — wears silk pajamas that are lined in cashmere, took the stage during the Republican National Convention, loves to shop, would like to have another child but is "waiting on God," has a four-year-old daughter with a pet gecko that totally grosses her out although she is "confident that at any point she will be into Christian Louboutin instead of the lizard," and credits her high school cheerleading coach with instilling in her the confidence to realize she was "not a complete idiot."

Just because I'm friendly, and I like to guffaw when I laugh, and have a cold beer and hang out with my husband and my girlfriends, doesn't mean that I'm not just as intelligent as someone from, let's say, Manhattan.

Anyway, the writer, Amy Spencer, mysteriously fails to mention Fred Thompson, which could be because she, too, is just as intelligent as someone "from Manhattan," or more likely, because she asked Angie about the election and Angie was like, "huh? Oh no I was planning on endorsing Pat Tillman..."

and why yes, they did! According to this source, 9/11 hijacker Nawaf Alhazmi actually "spent a lot of time at the San Diego State University library, surfing the Web.." And learning to hate us? Um, yeah. All but one of these fine young scholars is a woman, probably one who is late for her tanning salon appointment right now, sort of like we are realllly late for our Jim Beam.

All these girls are grown girls, but they sure dont act like it. They are all imature and need to grow up. I hope yall aren't planning on starting a family, because your kids would grow up in a mean world.

ok to all the jealous girls out here

this is for you

i am not stupid

that question that i got at miss teen usa was not the easiest question and with ten million people watching me LIVE, i was nervous

yeah like you wouldn't be

so to you girls out there.

get a life and stop being so mean

i did not even have time to think about it

i am smart, not a dumb blonde like you think

kthanks

I personally believe the U.S. Americans are unable to do so because some people out there in our nation don't have maps and I believe that our education like such as in South Africa and the Iraq everywhere like such as and I believe they should our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S. or should help South Africa or should help the Iraq and Asian countries so we will be able to build up our future for us.

Wall of Meanness Sarah Womack Today at 7:59am Report Message

Are you the dumb bitch that humiliated America? Do us all a favor and write an eloquent apology to the nation and then quit the whole stupid blond beauty queen thing and start studying harder.

This one if from a really mean girl who thinks i humilated America. Well guess what hon, you just humilated yourself. I am putting this up on my blog where two thousdand people can see it everyday and think about how mean you were to me. If you mess with me, you get what you deserve. =)

Another really mean girl
this one is my favorite.

in like, South Africa...
Between You and Natali Wind
Natali Wind
9:09pm August 25th
Report Message
You're a stupid whore.

ok wow
so this loser just messaged me out of the blue
can we all say jealousy
this was really mean but guess what
i dosen't hurt me
it only hurts yourself
what goes around comes around
this one is also going on my blog where thousands of people look everyday
kthanks
=0

this really isn't funny. the question wasen't to identify the US. obviously i could do that. what is with yu girls these days. why do yall feel like you have to be mean to other people to make yourself feel better.your not hurting anyone but yourself. i dont care about your little messages. they dont hurt me. so leave me alone and live your own life. stop trying to change myn.

SO this guy also randomly messaged me. and yet again i did asolutely nothing to him.

Matt Slade
10:53pm August 28th
Report Message
You are so stupid...How the hell did you get 4th...must be because you are blonde twit and thats what Donald like...fuck!!!

ok so you saw two min. of my national tv meltdown. you have never talked to me, seen me in person, or even met me, so how can you say i am stupid. can you honestly say you have never made a mistake in your life. serisously. and my hair color has nothing to do with it. dont judge me when you dont even know me. and stupid. i am anything but. i have a 4.0 grade average and a full academic schlorship to ASU. yeah, im real stupid. get a life. your not hurting me, only yourself

[Los Angeles, June 14. Image via x17]

Earlier: Jennifer Aniston Is The Next 50 Cent
Related: Aniston Gets Smart About Saving Water [Radar]

• Karl Lagerfeld has commissioned 15 contemporary artists to create works inspired by his iconic quilted Chanel bag for a two-year touring exhibit. Kind of interesting how iconic handbags are like the Virgin Mary of now. Maybe in twenty years people will be seeing Hermes Birkin bags in their grilled cheese sandwiches and selling them on eBay. [WWD, sub req'd]
  
• The dress will remain the dominant fashion trend through Spring 2008, according to the owner of luxury retailer Louis Boston, who makes some weird reference to American global hegemony. [WWD, sub req'd]
  
• Dooney & Bourke releases a line of bags named for Emma Roberts (Julia's niece and current star of "Nancy Drew"), with prices ranging from $210 to $235. Remember how when you were reading Nancy Drew, you thought $215 was like, enough to buy a house? Ah, kids today! [WWD, 1st item]
  
• It's a boy for supermodel Eva Herzigova and her Italian businessman common law husband. Remember how she did all those Wonderbra ads, haha? Lactation jokes never get old! [Vogue UK]
  
• Fashion muse Isabella Blow's widower Detmar hopes to create a museum to house his late wife's extensive clothing collection, is "hoping all the people she helped in her life will cough up some money to get this up and running." Ooh, subtle! [Vogue UK]
  
• Why should European luxury brands expand in China and India when there are still soooo many [brace yourselves! Fave word alert!] aspirational middle Americans stuck with Coach? [Fashion Inc.]

[Cosmopolitan, July 2007, page 128]