Colbert explained that one way to combat the neutralization of masculine terms — like changing "Congressman" to "Member of Congress" — is to replace "female" terms with male ones. He'd start things off by replacing "bitchy" with "teste," the better to describe the way white men feel marginalized in a society that's slowly recognizing the existence and power of women and people of color.

This isn't the first time some bullshit right-winger pulled this Communist theory out of their ass. So, a few thoughts.

• Tucker Carlson and all the rest of these assholes are avowed free-marketeers and capitalists. Many of them have opposed health care reform for more than a decade, in part because they don't want to see doctors be able to successfully monetize their educations. That is, of course, unless those doctors are performing abortions, in which case they should be poor.
• Most people who've studied economics understand the theory of supply and demand: when supply goes down and demand remains the same, prices go up. Anti-abortion activists have spent more than 35 years trying to drive abortion practices out of business through extra-legal harassment, intimidation, murder, assault, over-regulation (again, exposing the limits of their love of a free market) and attempted bans on abortion providers and abortion clinics. If abortion providers are getting rich off of their practices — and they've got no evidence other than Tiller's profits, which he had to plow back into providing security for himself, his employees and his patients — they've got no one to blame but themselves.
• The whole stupid concept rests on the idea that since Carlson and his ilk think abortion is immoral, the people who think they're providing a legitimate, necessary and legal medical service for women have no right to make money. I don't think Tucker Carlson would like to be on the receiving end of a national debate over how much money he should be compensated for spewing conservative bullshit and amoral hot air from his piehole.

Now, mind you, Tucker Carlson's compensation for being a conservative talking head isn't a matter of public record, but let's guess he easily makes over $150,000 a year (and likely much, much more) for his work. Technically speaking, then, Tucker Carlson, while appearing on Fox News yesterday as a compensated contributor, just made money off of abortion. And he's not the only one.

While Operation Rescue's non-profit status was revoked by the IRS in 2006 for illegal political activities, it meant that its donors couldn't legally take a tax deduction for their donations — though its website helpfully promises confidential "advice" about nonetheless making suchdonations. What this means is that, unlike much of its competition, it don't have to disclose how much money they pay their directors or staff. But if it's anything like its competition on the right, it's pretty substantial.

Take Focus on the Family, headquartered in Colorado Springs (median household income: $51,227). its employees do pretty well for themselves — hell, you might say that they're "enriching" themselves by advocating abortion. For instance, the organization's president, James Daly, is paid $240,000 per year by its political action arm (which allows it to lobby). Its CFO, Wade Crow, makes $136,000 and Senior Vice President Thomas Minnery makes $150,000. From the strict non-profit side, Senior VP Bufford Tackett pulls in $180,000 every year; COO Glenn Williams $172,000, and 10 other senior VPs make between $120,000 and $147,000. Its 5 highest paid employees that aren't considered officers make between $116,000 and $137,000. That means Focus on the Family has at least 20 employees who make more than $100,000 every year.

Over at the Family Research Council in DC, its President, Anthony Perkins, makes more than $200,000 each year, while its Executive Vice President Chuck Donovan makes $175,000 and its VP of Administration, Paul Tripodi, makes $125,000. Its top 5 employees who aren't officers pull down between $117,000 and $138,000, given them at least 8 employees that make more than double the median household income in the United States today — and that's not including the former board member their political arm continues to shell out more than $100,000 a year to.

In a shining example of the wage gap, the American Life League only pays its President, Judith Brown, $127,000 each year. Her husband, like Todd Palin, is the uncompensated EVP, and no other director makes over $100,000 — but 3 of its top 5 employees do. David O'Steen, Executive Direction of the National Right to Life Committee, and his second-in-command Darla St. Martin both make over $100,000, though they don't pay O'Steen's mother, who serves on the Board.

More amusing is the compensation structure over at the Concerned Women of America, where Board Chairwoman Barbara LeHaye's son, Lee, serves as CFO and makes $115,000, and President Wendy Wright makes $121,000. Barbara LeHaye is the only compensated Board member, pulling in $26,000 herself. But the male Executive Director George Tryfiates, makes $129,000 and the male Director of Development pulls in a cool $135,000 each year ( i.e., more than the female President). In fact, of the top 5 employees outside of the directors, only one is a woman — and she makes under $100,000. No wonder the wage gap isn't on its agenda.

This, by the way, is just a sampling of the people (and the ways) that anti-abortion advocates enrich themselves while serving God's supposed will. Conversely, the mean annual wage for all obstetricians and gynecologists is about $200,000 — and most of those people don't have to hire armed body guards and buy bulletproof vests and armor their cars to go to work. So, maybe people like Tucker Carlson ought to stop getting paid for flapping their lips about how doctors have the audacity, in a capitalist society, to make money for providing a legal and demanded medical service, or stop bitching about how other people make their money doing things they disagrees with.

Tucker Carlson Decries Doctors Who "Get Rich Performing Abortions" [Huffington Post]
Focus on the Family 990 2008 [GuideStar]
Focus on the Family Action 990 2008 [GuideStar]
Family Research Council 990 2008 [GuideStar]
Family Research Council Action 990 2008 [GuideStar]
American Life League 990 2008 [GuideStar]
National Right to Life Committee 990 2008 [GuideStar]
Concerned Women for America 990 2008 [GuideStar]
Occupational Employment and Wages, May 2008: 29-1064 Obstetricians and Gynecologists [Bureau of Labor Statistics]

Related: Video of Jon Stewart's Epic Takedown of Crossfire [About.com]
Operation Rescue [RH Reality Check]
Donate [Operation Rescue]
Colorado Springs, Colorado [US Census]
Undermining Women's Choices [Concerned Women For America]

Earlier: How The Anti-Abortion Movement Demonized George Tiller

But there are conservative Christians in the world who think that sex should be a mutually satisfying sexual experience every time for both partners. Joy Wilson, of Book22.com [NSFW] is one of those people. She runs a Christian marital aid shop that caters to conservative Christians looking to maximize the sexual pleasure in their marriage without porn or products that advocate "immoral" acts. And, a couple of decades ago, Tim and Beverly LeHaye encouraged Christian couples to see mutual orgasm as mutually beneficial (unlike Dennis Prager, who thinks that women's insistence on having one every time is responsible for the decline of the American family).

Here's the thing. Is it easy to mock from a secular perspective? Sure, as my choice of photo demonstrates. But the pro-sex (even if it is only pro-sex-in-marriage) Christians are doing the, um, Lord's work. They are, in effect, reframing feminist arguments about sex and women's sexuality and women's sexual pleasure in a language and a belief system in which a good part of this country fervently believes. They are encouraging people — within the context of marriage, which, okay, they're not going to talk about it pre-maritally — to view mutual sexual pleasure as not only an okay thing, or a good thing but as an important think and a required thing and even a gift from God.

And, not only are these Sex Crusaders encouraging men to think about sex in those terms, but they are encouraging women to open up about their sexuality to their husbands and with themselves and to be fully engaged, happy and comfortable with their sexuality. Is it so terrible for Christians to run around telling men that female orgasms are a gift from God that they should be helping their wives find? Hell, no. In fact, we need hundreds more of these men and women running around and shouting down Dennis Prager and Tucker Carlson and Ed Young every time they open their yaps and talk about submission and frigidity and male desire and the lack of female desire. If everyone was having more regular orgasms, don't you think the world would be a better place?

The Joy of Christian Sex Toys [NPR]
From the Crap Archives: The Beauty of Sexual Love [Village Voice]

Earlier: Which Flavor Of Ice Cream Would You Swap For Sex?
Tucker Carlson's Guide To Not Getting Divorced
Conservative Dennis Prager Knows It's Not Rape If His Wife "Submits"
Dennis Prager Still Thinks Women Should Just Give It Up Already

Image "David 4" via Zach_ManchesterUK

Tucker starts off his piece by just throwing it out there that the real problem is that all us coastal elites hate evangelicals:

Let’s concede right up front that you hate evangelicals. Most affluent, educated people do. Where I live, they're the most unpopular group there is.

Now, I'm a coastal elite, and most people who are educated and affluent don't hate evangelicals. We might, say, resent that their leadership has attempted to use its political opportunities to impose its particular religious world view on the rest of us, but I don't hate individual evangelicals except for the people at the subway stations who keep cursing my pagan soul. Those people suck. But, already, he's missed the point: the story isn't amusing or creepy because it's about evangelicals — replace Ed Young with a rabbi, a priest, an imam, or a Lutheran minister (I'm pretty sure that's how most jokes start anyway) and it is, in fact, equally creepy if not more so. It's one thing to suggest that people take time out of their hectic schedules to engage in intimate acts with their partner — which include but are not limited to penetrative vaginal intercourse, by the way — in order to improve their marriages and another to order everyone to bone for 7 days straight while lounging on a bed in a church. One is solid pastoral advice, and another is using your religious beliefs to try to force you to do something you don't actually want to do.

Tucker then goes on to add that it's really just a public health issue:

Once you factor out venereal diseases, there’s almost nothing better for you than regular sex.

Oh, well, gee, once you factor out the risk of death and infertility, among other things, it's all good? What kind of advice is that for people — especially the women quoted in the Young article whose husbands were unfaithful? Fuck him anyway, just "factor out" the disease risk? It also ignores the many men and women who suffer from some form of sexual dysfunction, which can range from an inabilty to get a non-chemically-enhanced boner to women that cannot engage in intercourse without pain — let alone the many, many women that simply can't achieve orgasm or have difficulty enjoying sex due to psychological trauma. For those people, no, it's not the best thing for them and it's unfair to place upon them the burden that they are not doing right by their marriages or God to try to make it so.

Tucker adds to his thesis that Americans aren't having enough sex, and that religious women have better orgasms, supposedly. While it's a bit foolish to cite one study as evidence that religious people enjoy sex more — I am far from religious and I'm happy to take the challenge of who has better orgasms pretty much any day — the real problem is that assuming that people should want to have sex more. Maybe they do, and maybe they don't. I would like to have sex more, perhaps Tucker would like to have sex more, Ed Young apparently prefers to have more sex (but, if the time his wife tried to ask him for it and he turned her down is any indication, on his schedule alone), but that doesn't mean Americans are all unhappy with the frequency of their sexual contact. There is no standard for how much sex a married couple (or a single person) "should" have — they should have as much consensual sex as they and their partner mutually agree to have and on the schedule they agree to have it.

Tucker engages in a little marital therapy at the end, offering his sage advice for those couples in bad relationships: just fuck, it will keep you in the relationship.

Let’s say your marriage was falling apart. Alienated, angry, frustrated with couples therapy, you decide to divorce. But before you do, you agree to try one last thing: Every day for a month, you'll have sex. You don't particularly want to, but you will, and you'll be disciplined about it: half an hour minimum, naked, both striving for orgasm.

Let’s say you actually did that. Do you think by the end of the month you'd go through with the divorce? Maybe you would. Likely you wouldn't.

Ed Young is right. Sex is medicine. It’s worth doing, whether you feel like it or not.

Great, so, his advice is to let fucking keep you in a relationship that leaves you angry, alienated and frustrated because between the social aspects of how you're "supposed" to feel about the person that you're having daily sex and the oxytocin your body produces when you do, you'll stick around. That's not even to discuss the vaguely humiliating prospect of forcing oneself to engage in penetrative intercourse with a spouse one doesn't love anymore every day for 30 days. Little is less sexy or less of a bonding experience than having coercive sex, even if the coercion is mental or emotional or self-inflicted. And then that's not even to mention the divorces that are occurring because of abuse, addiction or just plain incompatibility that means two people probably shouldn't stay together for 60 years, religious teaching aside.

Sex isn't going to fix a relationship: it might paper over the holes momentarily, but a bad marriage can't be saved with sex, and it shouldn't. And a pastor should try counseling his parishioners about mutual respect, fidelity, emotional intimacy, honesty, trustworthiness, thoughtfulness and quality time spent being in a partnership, as those are the things that make a lasting, fulfilling marriage — not daily sex.

Why Are Christians Having Better Sex Than the Rest of Us? [The Daily Beast]

Earlier: Which Flavor Of Ice Cream Would You Swap For Sex?
There's A Reason The Name Tucker Rhymes With…

Let's start with the name itself. Is there something intrinsically assholic in those two syllables? It's an Old English name, meaning "garment maker" or "cloth cleaner." Some famous Tuckers throughout history include Preston Tucker, an automobile designer behind the "Tucker Torpedo," the production of which was suspended because of stock fraud accusations. He sounds like kind of a dick! However there's also Jonathan Tucker, who did a sex scene with Josh Lucas in the 2001 film The Deep End. We are not mad at him.

Anyway, let's commence with the four terrible Tuckers currently sullying the nation's discourse:

Tucker Max
Claim To Fame: Has built a career out of being the asshole of the century. He started a blog about being drunk and hooking up with girls in the halcyon early days of blogging, and rode his tales of jerkdom to moderate fame and mild fortune. His continued popularity — his book, I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell, has been on the New York Times bestseller list for years — only proves that there are a TON of assholes out there, which is completely depressing! Thanks for depressing us further, dick.
Trademark Tucker:"My mom told me when I grew up I could be anything I wanted. So I became an asshole."

Tucker Bounds
Claim To Fame: Bush media aid turned McCain spokesman, Bounds has had the unfortunate task of defending McCain's media manipulations and sometimes, outright lies. As Gawker noted, Bounds has become a "human piñata like Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan before him." He was even told off by a Fox News anchor. Now that's an accomplishment, when you're a Republican flack.
Trademark Tucker: Of Palin's foreign policy experience, Bounds said, "She's been the commander of the Alaska National Guard that's been deployed overseas. That's foreign policy experience." Only slightly more coherent than I can see Russia from my house.

Tucker Carlson
Claim To Fame: Republican talking head Tucker Carlson used to co-host a show on CNN called Crossfire until Jon Stewart appeared on that program in 2004 and told Carlson he was a "partisan hack" who was "hurting America." Tucker was fired shortly thereafter, and he's since gone on to a tepid Dancing with the Stars performance in 2006 and a steady gig offering his partisan hackery to MSNBC.
Trademark Tucker: "Anybody with any ambition at all, or intelligence, has left Canada and is now living in New York. Canada is a sweet country. It is like your retarded cousin you see at Thanksgiving and sort of pat him on the head. You know, he's nice but you don't take him seriously. That's Canada."

Tucker Eskew
Claim To Fame: As previously noted, Eskew is the South Carolinian Republican who helped Karl Rove with those delightful smears against John McCain in 2000. You remember those, the ones where everyone accused McCain of having a black baby? Well McCain is apparently one to forgive and forget, since Eskew was the puppeteer behind Sarah Palin. According to ABC News, Eskew was brought onto the Straight Talk Express to "help Palin prepare for her Wednesday night acceptance speech at the GOP convention and for her stump speech as she hits the road, brief her on policy matters, and help her handle the media scrutiny a lifetime in Alaska does not necessarily prepare one for." Policy matters like race baiting!
Trademark Tucker: He didn't say it directly, but according to some pundits Eskew is the mastermind behind Palin's "pals around with terrorists" speech.

Are there any Tuckers fucking up your life? We'd really love a fifth to round out our list.

McCain Hires GOP Operative Who Helped Smear Him in South Carolina in 2000 [ABC News]
Palin, Alone Aboard the Bus [GQ]
Dirty Tricks, South Carolina and John McCain [The Nation]

Related: McCain Spokesman Told Off On All Networks [Gawker]
Field Guide: Tucker Max [Gawker]

Earlier: Jessicas Are All Pretty Bitches

• Maybe no.. But he would have, if loyal advisers had not protected him from himself! Loyal advisers who are now telling the Times all about it? (Loyal advisers who wish he had left the GOP? Seems poss!) Vicki Iseman. A youthful-looking 40. Pretty! Deny deny deny. Gary Hart was his groomsman, you know! The "miracle" Huckabee's been waiting for? [NYT]
  
• Let's be clear, Bill O'Reilly doesn't want to "lynch" Michelle Obama. Not until he has enough "evidence." He will "track it down." [Media Matters]
  
• Tucker Carlson just said he thinks she's got a "chip on her shoulder." Not that there's anythign wrong with that.
  
• All she was talking about was the record turnout! [CBS News]
  
• And let's go back to the chip thing for a sec. As Chris Matthews so helpfully pointed out this morning, slavery was in the Constitution. She grew up bound and determined to succeed, flung herself into an Ivy League bastion of entrenched privilege and classism and survived. Better than can be said for some of us but whatevs. [WSJ]

• So...stats on Cindy McCain: only child, affluent, high school cheerleader, rodeo queen, Theta at USC, met John at a military reception when he was still married. Married him, several miscarriages, three kids, volunteer work in disaster areas, SCANDALE...stress stress ... can't ... find ... receipts...PILLHEAD!...stealing pills from volunteer work. Adopts Bangladeshi child, two kids join military, innocuous. Gratuitously cold and snippy re Michelle! (Also gratuitously blonde; neither here nor there.) [Wikipedia]
• Ann Coulter's credit score = patriotic? [Page Six]
• Hillary is actually better off for losing nine states in a row because now all the indecisive ladies of Texas and Ohio will feel sorry for her and vote for her. [Slate]
• Also: Hillary hunts, is a better shot than you know whose eighth cousin! [NY Daily News]
• Another union full of Birkenstock wearing trust fund thespians goes endorses Obama. [AP]
• Jesse Jackson doesn't necessarily want Hillary to quit, he just wants her entire campaign staff to quit. [Politico]
• I want to have his babies of the day: Jon Stewart is on Larry King. (Actually Jon was my first-ever celeb crush, when I was 13 or 14 and he was in Seventeen promoting "You Wrote It, You Watch It." At the time I was 5'4 so I thought he actually seemed tall enough. Le sigh.)

TUCKER: They don't believe in individual choice...If they did, then how about this? I want to make the choice not to buy health insurance. That's not allowed. I don`t have a choice. It's mandated. I mean...

FENN: Tucker. You're making...

TUCKER: This doesn't give you the creeps?

FENN: Let's — let's get real here.

TUCKER: Am I living in a parallel universe?

FENN: You would never make a choice like that for you and your family.

TUCKER: I have made a choice like that for me and my family.

FENN: To never have health insurance?

TUCKER: No, not to never have it. But I — you know, people live.

FENN: But look, let me just

CROWLEY: It's getting worse right now. The status quo gets worse year after year. I mean you — I'm sure your premiums are rising as fast as mine are.

FENN: Tucker...

CROWLEY: We`re paying for it every month.

(CROSSTALK)

(CROSSTALK)

TUCKER: So doctors love Medicare?

FENN: Let me just...

TUCKER: Is that what you're saying? I mean come on.

FENN: They do! (CROSSTALK)

FENN: But Deamonte Driver, 12-year-old kid who had a frigging toothache in Prince George's County. His mother tried to take him around to get medical...

TUCKER: And he died.

FENN: And he died.

TUCKER: So is that...

FENN: And let me just say...

TUCKER: So that's the excuse that I should be forced to buy health care?

FENN: No. We now have 47 million people without it.

TUCKER: What do you — what does that mean?

FENN: And that's a seven million increase under this administration. Over eight million of these are kids.

(CROSSTALK)

FENN: And this is...

TUCKER: That's doesn't mean anything.

FENN: Yes, it does...

TUCKER: (INAUDIBLE) something.

FENN: ...because the system is not working.

TUCKER: Should — this is a philosophical question and it's also a practical issue. Should people — because people do die under our current system of care — should everybody be forced to — that is, have the choice taken away from them...

FENN: Tucker, let me say something.

TUCKER: ...about whether to participate?

And you're saying yes.

FENN: They — the number of people...

TUCKER: I think that's authoritarian.

FENN: ...who would decide not to have health insurance, you could put in this studio in this whole country.

TUCKER: That is not true. That is totally not true.

FENN: That — you're telling me...

TUCKER: If I am — that's a total lie. If I am 25 years old and I'm a healthy person, I might make a rational decision not to get health care.

FENN: Well, if you...

TUCKER: The chances I'm going to need it are infinitesimal.

CROWLEY: And would you sign a contract saying that if you got gravely ill, you would relinquish free emergency room care...

TUCKER: That right there...

CROWLEY: ...if you couldn't afford it?

TUCKER: That is an interesting question and I think that's — right there. That's an interesting debate right there.

CROWLEY: I mean maybe...

TUCKER: Would I?

Yes, I probably would. Maybe I wouldn't.