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Are you ready for some misogyny? Yeah, me neither. But if we must… read on for an update on the kidnapped Nigerian schoolgirls, to see why Jezebel made my list of terrible people, and for a healthy dose of venting courtesy of our friends at Pajiba. (As usual, trigger warnings for pretty much everything apply.)

Unfortunately, there’s no good news to report about the Nigerian schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram (unless you count the fact that the news is finally covering the kidnapping). The groupreleased a video in which the leader brags about taking the girls and says that Allah has commanded him to sell them. Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan has finally spoken out against the group and has said he’ll accept assistance from the U.S. and other countries to try to get the girls back, but it’s likely that they’ve been split into smaller groups, which will hamper recovery efforts. Boko Haram militants have also killed 310 people in the regional capital that has served as a staging ground for the search. The kidnapping has finally caught the attention of social media; #BringBackOurGirls and has been trending on Twitter and #RealMenDontBuyGirls has been circulating again, though many have scoffed at the idea that hashtag campaigns actually help.

Ouch. But… true.

Multiple West Virginia junior high students were punished for reporting that they’d been sexually assaulted by two boys at the school because both boys were related to members of the school board. The school board is now under investigation for threatening the girls and covering up the allegations.

Occupy Wall Street activist Cecily McMillan was found guilty of assaulting a police officer because she thrust her elbow back instinctively after he grabbed her breast from behind in the crowd; she was denied bail and could face up to seven years in prison. Molly Knefel from The Guardian outlines the evidence suppression that meant the jury wasn’t shown pictures of her bruises or told about other police violence against Occupy protesters, including acts committed by the officer she elbowed.

Republicans on a New York State Senate committee have blocked a bill that would haveexpanded abortion access in the state.

Fox News’ new show Outnumbered is terrible in pretty much every way possible. Sure, there are four women hosting the show with a different male guest in each episode, but of course the title is a joke from the man’s point of view. The dress code forbids the women from wearing pants, because then their legs wouldn’t be on display. And it’s Fox, so the content is predictably awful too.

Jodielynn Wiley was refused admittance to a Dallas Salvation Army-run long-term housing shelter because she’s transgender and has not undergone gender confirmation surgery. She’d been forced to flee her hometown of Paris, Texas after police refused to deal with the death threats and harassment she’d received for being trans.

The maternal mortality rate in the U.S. is worse than many other developed nations and the number of women dying in childbirth rose to 18.5 deaths per 100,000 births last year. Only eight countries have had their maternal maternity rate rise over the last decade, and 2013 had one of the highest rates in the U.S. in the last quarter century.

New York may be changing the law that allows police to confiscate condoms from suspected sex workers and to use the fact that someone is carrying multiple condoms as evidence that they’re a prostitute.

Yahoo is being pressured to follow Google’s example and drop ads from crisis pregnancy centers; no word yet on whether they’ll do so.

Terrible people of the week!

Texas State District Judge Jeanine Howard, who sentenced a man who confessed to raping a 14-year-old girl when he was 18 to only 45 days in jail (because the victim had previously had three sex partners and had given birth, so in Howard’s opinion it wasn’t that big a deal and didn’t deserve a longer sentence, and besides, she thinks he’s not a “typical sex offender”) and then 250 days of community service at a rape crisis center. He must also spend the anniversary of the rape in jail until his probation ends in five years, but will have his record wiped clean if he complies with the terms of his probation. The crisis center in question refused to allow him to volunteer there, so he will be given an alternate assignment by anew judge, but the sentence is still infuriatingly light since he could have been given 20 years behind bars.

Matt Bevin, who’s challenging Mitch McConnell in the Kentucky Republican senate primary, managed to get in two big doses of terrible this week. First, for running on a platform to repeal Obamacare even though his family was once denied coverage for the pre-existing condition of having adopted children (which, you guessed it, isn’t allowed under Obamacare). And second, for saying that the potential Democratic candidate in the race, Alison Lundergan Grimes, is only running on being a nice young woman and that she has no experience or ability to speak on the issues. She’s the Kentucky Secretary of State and a lawyer.

The Louisiana Senate Committee on Health and Welfare, which passed an omnibus anti-choice bill that would impose a ton of unnecessary restrictions on abortion and coul lead to the closure of all but one of the state’s five clinics.

South Dakota Rep. Steve Hickey, who wrote a “gay sex and trans people are gross!” op-ed that was so graphic that the state’s biggest paper refused to print it. So he posted it to Facebook instead.

Iowa congressional candidate Monte Shaw, who said that the contraception mandate violates religious institutions’ religious rights in the same way that it would be wrong to force Jews and African-Americans to do business with neo-Nazis and the KKK.

Athens, Georgia Mayor Nancy Denson, who in response to a forum question about sexual assault on college campuses said that she wished she “knew the answer to get guys to behave themselves and girls to behave themselves so we don’t have problems.” How many times do we have to tell people that women don’t deserve to get raped if they go out drinking??

Ukip candidate Roger Helmer, for trying to clarify his previous controversial comments about rape by saying that it isn’t the victim’s fault, but that women shouldn’t put themselves in a position to raped. Just like how you shouldn’t leave your house unlocked when you go on vacation because it makes it easier for burglars to get in. Not helping, dude.

The Las Vegas Metro Police Department, which co-sponsored an event that told teens and their parents that “premarital sex will lead to prostitution, sex trafficking, drug abuse, and death.”

The police department in Prince George’s County, Maryland, which announced plans to live-tweet a prostitution sting.

Jezebel, for fawning all over the video of Michael Fassbender, Hugh Jackman, and James McAvoy dancing to “Blurred Lines.” One, you know that song is terrible; you even admit it in the article that you don’t like it (and a couple of commenters pointed out that hypocrisy). And two, Fassbender has been accused of domestic violence, so I don’t care how pretty he is or how big a dick he has, the internet needs to stop swooning over him.

Black Milk Clothing, for posting a sexist meme on their Facebook page in “honor” of Star Wars Day and then proceeding to have a complete social media meltdown when people called them out.

Future and Kanye West, for releasing a video game for their song “I Won” in which you play as Future or Kanye and throw chains around women in bikinis to win them.

Shailene Woodley is the latest celebrity to come out with a statement that she’s not one of those yucky man-hating feminists, even though she clearly has no fucking idea what feminism actually is and has internalized a bunch of misogynistic bullshit. You should totally read Pajiba’s responsebecause it is brilliant (aside from that tiny bit about all women having a vagina, which I get is supposed to be hyperbole, but sigh). I mean:

MOTHERFUCKING SHIT GODDAMN. I am so fucking sick of faux intellectual Hollywood dipsaps telling us why they’re not feminists when they clearly have no fucking clue about what feminism is because if they did they wouldn’t fucking be saying this. GODDAMN SHIT MOTHERFUCKER.

Good stuff!

California is considering two bills that would require public restrooms to have baby-changing facilities that are accessible to men instead of just having them in the ladies’ room.

The contraception mandate saved women an estimated $483 million in birth control co-pays. Thanks, Obama!

Teen pregnancy, birth, and abortion rates all dropped precipitously between 1990 and 2010. Sex ed and birth control work!

High fives to the psychologists at USC who looked at 58 studies that looked at whether women behaved differently depending on where they were in their menstrual cycle and found that our cycle actually doesn’t affect how attractive we find men or any of that other garbage. Turns out that some studies were using really bad assumptions about when women were actually fertile and that a lot of the studies had found no difference, but they just didn’t get published because the journals favored the ones that did say we’re all hormonal and irrational.

Another debunking of a sort — all the stories freaking out about a study that supposedly found genes on the Y chromosome that make men and women fundamentally different are misreading one speculative sentence in the study. The genes actually work with genes on the X chromosome to make sure that fetuses develop properly; though we aren’t yet sure precisely how they work, we do know that two sets are necessary for the genome to function.

A minor victory in South Carolina, where the state legislature passed a new sex ed curriculum that requires teachers to give accurate information and instructions on how to use contraception (though it does still push abstinence). Hat tip to the Republican lawmaker who sponsored the bill, Rep. B.R. Skelton.

Recommended Reading

Love, love, love the A.V. Club’s defense of the Bechdel Test and how it should actually be used. LOVE.

Bustle looks at how we’re are affected by the barrage of images that chop up women’s bodies to depersonalize and sexualize them.

Amanda Marcotte on the push to tell women that they’ll become mentally ill if they have an abortion.

A new web app called Kitestring will let you set up an alert if you feel like you might be in a dangerous situation; it’ll send a preset message to your emergency contacts if you don’t check in during a specified timeframe to confirm that you’re OK. It won’t necessarily stop anything bad from happening to you, but at least your friends will get an alert to check on you.

Karin Gillespie on being a chick lit writer in an MFA program that only valued Serious Literature.

Shannon Barber on being a Black Queer Author and how people are shitty if you dare to write about characters like yourself.

Katie Heaney talks about the random messages men feel entitled to send her because she exists on the Internet. Having gotten a couple of these myself after I went on Jeopardy! and people tracked me down, I really identified with her frustration that there’s really no good way to respond to them or even talk about them without provoking an escalation.

Lindsey Averill talks about getting death threats after releasing a trailer for her film Fattitudeon Kickstarter.

Zelda Fitzgerald wasn’t “crazy,” she was manipulated, gaslighted, and plagiarized by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Jessica Valenti explains yet again that feminists don’t hate all men, just misogynists.

A new study has found that people who consider themselves to be attractive also tend to believe this puts them in a higher social class than less attractive people, and they’re less likely to care about issues of inequality. Though, ignore the dumb headline, and I’m not thrilled with this article’s conclusion that you should spend more time and money making yourself look good if you want to succeed; instead, let’s stop thinking that attractive people are inherently smarter and better. After all, it’s not vain to recognize the reality that society rewards people for looking good, it’s just shitty to think you actually deserve to be treated better for being attractive.

A brief history of the “not all men” argument, complete with a hilarious comic.

When men try to dismiss women by giving them infantilizing nicknames in debates.

Jonathan McIntosh on male gamer privilege.

TK at Pajiba rips on the “incompetent dad” trope in movies like Moms’ Night Out.

So apparently The Other Woman really sucks. But at least it gave us this headline! “The Other Woman: A Shit Sandwich Wrapped In Shit, Lovingly Placed In A Bag Made Entirely of Shit.”

The ridiculous language differences in how we talk about George Clooney’s and Jennifer Aniston’s engagements.

Christianity Today actually acknowledged that women can have sexual desire! And then reminded them that masturbating is sinful and they shouldn’t do it. Sigh.

Just for Fun

Reductress has some exercise moves to help us tone our flabby winter labia. (I pretty much lost it at “Queef-Burpees.”)

The Onion pokes fun at Disney, who’s built up enough much good will with Frozen that they can totally go back to making misogynistic movies.

More from The Onion: Teen Boys Losing Virginity Earlier And Earlier, Report Teen Boys. Snort.

And the hits just keep on rolling, y’all. State legislatures have been busy passing even more anti-abortion bills that are probably unconstitutional, but that’s ok; we can pick up contraceptives at the 7-11! We’ve got another batch of terrible people, but there are a few others who have earned high fives this week. (As usual, trigger warnings for pretty much everything apply.)

After a 2011 law that effectively banned abortion pills was struck down by the Oklahoma Supreme Court, Gov. Mary Fallin has signed a new law to restrict the use of medications to induce abortions by prohibiting off-label use, even though further research has shown that they’re effective later in pregnancy and at lower doses than the initial tests found.

Mississippi has passed a new law that bans abortion 20 weeks after the first day of the mother’s last period, so at a gestational age of only about 18 weeks. It’s almost certainly going to be declared unconstitutional, just like every other bill that bans abortion before viability at about 24 weeks.

A new Alaska law limits the reasons that a doctor can declare an abortion to be “medically necessary” for Medicaid to cover it. There is no option to protect the mental health of the mother.

Two more Texas doctors have had their hospital admitting privileges revoked because they provide abortions and the association damages the hospital’s reputation. Their privileges have been temporarily reinstated pending a hearing; it’s a violation of federal and state law for hospitals to discriminate against doctors who perform abortion (it still happens, but most of the time they’re smart enough to pretend it’s for a different reason).

Under pressure from religious leaders, the Colorado legislature has withdrawn the proposedReproductive Health Freedom Act that would have prohibited the passage of laws that interfere with reproductive health choices.

Nine Pennsylvania colleges have been sued under Title IX for discriminating against female athletes.

Schools really need to cool it with their dress code rules that force students to dress according to their gender. Most recently, an Illinois high school told students that they wouldn’t be able to participate in graduation ceremonies unless “females… wear dresses or skirts” along with dressy shoes or sandals, while “[m]ales are required to wear slacks, shirt and a tie.” In North Carolina, meanwhile, a girl was kicked out of prom for wearing skinny jeans instead of a dress.

When researchers sent out letters to 6,500 faculty members around the U.S. posing as prospective doctoral students who wanted to talk about research opportunities, the letters signed with a white-sounding male name got more replies than the letters purportedly from women or minorities.

Terrible people of the week!

Terry Richardson, for his entire existence allegedly texting model Emma Appleton to say he’d shoot her for Vogue if she had sex with him. Vogue, meanwhile, has denied that they have any plans to work with him again and Richardson claims that he never sent the text.

Alex Graves, the director of the most recent episode of Game of Thrones, for thinking that he’d filmed a consensual sex scene when it was clearly a rape.

Cardinal Dolan, who said he’s “inspired” by the Hobby Lobby case because women can just “walk into a 7-11″ to pick up contraceptives.

The idiots who don’t understand that Chelsea Clinton can be pro-choice and still happy to be pregnant. Surprise! We have babies too, if we choose to.

All sorts of conservative columnists and pundits who called Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor “legally illiterate” and “emotional” because she disagreed with the court’s decision that it was constitutional for Michigan to allow voters to ban affirmative action.

The jackasses at Tankhead Custom Tees, who sold the following shirt at WonderCon (and who “apologized” by saying that they hated fanboys too, but “real” fans are ok).

Via Landry Quinn Walker.

High fives!

To Emma Stone for calling out Andrew Garfield’s dumb sexist joke about sewing being “feminine” and turning it into a teachable moment.

To the people who take to Twitter during Tampa Bay Rays games to remind people thatpitcher Josh Lueke is a rapist.

To the 69% of respondents in a recent survey who are in favor of the contraceptive mandate.

To Jon Stewart, for absolutely eviscerating Republican sexism against Hillary Clinton. (Though I could live with the joke about Pres. Taft being pregnant.)

Australian musician Iggy Azalea has decided to stop crowd-surfing during concerts because fans would try to sexually assault her, even tweeting at her before concerts to let her know that they couldn’t wait to finger her.

Kim Novak has spoken out about the abuse she received after her appearance at the Oscars and says that she had fasted for three days before the ceremony and had to take anti-anxiety meds to be able to go onstage.

Four former Buffalo Bills cheerleaders have sued the team and their management company for failing to pay them for many of the appearances they made in violation of minimum wage laws.

Sigh. A new survey found that not only are boys more likely to earn an allowance than girls, they also receive more money than girls even though on average they do fewer chores.

Recommended Reading

A reminder that while the suffragettes were instrumental in gaining the vote and other rights for women, they were racist as all fuck.

However, you definitely should not read the drivel Thought Catalog published that claims that women were better off before the feminist movement because we had it so much better than men, who had to live in fear of the draft, and that feminists are whiny brats (unless they’re cops or soldiers).

Jill Filipovic discusses how NGOs and aid organizations are failing women around the worldbecause they’re either outright banned from mentioning abortion in order to keep their funding or they disapprove of it. Never mind that unsafe abortions kill thousands of women every year.

When researchers actually talked to underage sex workers in NYC and Atlantic City, they found that far fewer were working for pimps than most people believe and that most hadn’t been trafficked, so laws that target pimps and sex traffickers don’t address the real issues most of them face (though they do help some).

Why do so many colleges and universities hesitate to call rape “rape” and instead substitute euphemisms like “nonconsensual sex” in their policies? Though that’s still better than the Christian colleges who claim that they don’t have to comply with federal laws about protecting rape victims because they don’t accept federal money.

How the myth of all rapists and murderers as “monsters” can make it harder to sympathize with victims since “most perpetrators of violence are normal men.”

Jessica Valenti argues that women aren’t being held back by a “confidence gap;” we just know that the system is rigged against us. I suspect it’s both.

An interview with NPR’s Nina Totenberg about what it was like to be the only woman in a newsroom.

What are misogynistic geeks so afraid of?

Young women are the fastest-growing demographic of comic book readers.

On the brilliant and intentional misandry of Orphan Black, which has some of the best female characters on TV (and some of the most inept straight men).

“The Great List of Things I Can’t Do Because I Only Have Daughters.” (Don’t worry, the headline is sarcastic and this is actually awesome.)

I laughed WAY too hard at Sam Killermann’s suggestion for a sign to reduce confusion as to who can use gender neutral bathrooms.

Some schools may be on Passover/spring break this week, but misogyny didn’t take the week off. Instead, we’ve learned that young girls think it’s normal to be sexually harassed, that even women who become CEOs aren’t exempt from harassment, and that we shouldn’t try to earn the same wages as men if we ever want to catch a husband. Sigh. At least there’s a new GoldieBlox ad! With a baby chicken! (As usual, trigger warnings for pretty much everything apply.)

115 Nigerian schoolgirls are still missing after 129 students were kidnapped from a secondary school on Monday by a militant group that opposes Western education. However, the military has reported that all but eight have been recovered, leading the families of the missing girls to fear that no further effort will be made to rescue them (14 girls managed to escape the kidnappers on their own).

Republicans around the country are trying to eliminate or add obstacles to no-fault divorces, even though studies have proven that domestic violence and spousal murder rates drop when states make divorce easier and that children fare better when their parents aren’t stuck in a drawn-out process to split up.

A new study comparing the number of children living in poverty in the U.S. to other countries with similar family compositions found that single moms aren’t to blame, as many people think, but rather our institutional failure to support people living in poverty.

A bill being considered in the South Carolina state senate would allow the “Stand Your Ground” law to cover threats to empbryos even though pregnant women are already covered under the law.

One of only two abortion clinics in El Paso, TX has been forced to close after the hospital with which they were affiliated revoked admitting privileges without notice.

Good news! North Dakota’s “fetal heartbeat bill,” which banned abortions so early that many women wouldn’t even know they were pregnant until it was too late to terminate if they wanted to, has been overturned. But thanks for wasting everyone’s time and money on a bill that was blatantly unconstitutional!

More good news! The Nevada Republican party has dropped all anti-abortion language from its official platform.

A study of young girls’ attitudes toward sexual harassment and assault found that many don’t report abusive behaviors because they think that it’s “normal male behavior” and that no one will take them seriously if they complain, not even other girls.

Terrible People of the Week!

Victor Barnard, the leader of a cult-like religious group in Minnesota, who has been charged with raping at least 59 teen girls in his “Shepherd’s Camp” community because of “God’s word.”

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, who signed a law allowing unannounced warrantless inspections of the state’s abortion clinics, even though the federal appeals court has ruled that unconstitutional.

The Louisiana House of Representatives, which voted 27-67 against striking down an unconstitutional state law that forbids “crimes against nature.” Meaning, oral sex and gay/lesbian sex acts.

Phyllis Schlafly, who argued in a Christian Post op-ed that we shouldn’t eliminate the gender wage gap because then women won’t be able to find good husbands who earn more than them, and that the best way to help women economically is to pay men more.

Former Arizona Sheriff Richard Mack and other people protesting that rancher Cliven Bundy shouldn’t have to pay the Bureau of Land Management for grazing his cattle on federal land, who said that if the standoff turned violent, they planned to put the women up front so the feds would look bad for shooting women.

Google, which bought out a startup and hired all of the male engineers at the company and gave them huge compensation packages, but didn’t hire the only woman at the company despite the fact that she had created the product in the first place. And for giving her only $10,000 in the buyout because her boyfriend had received a large payout recently.

GoDaddy, for releasing personal info about someone who reported a spammer to the spammer, who then created a website to insult her and emailed it to her friends.

The unnamed idiot who wrote, “I like my beer like I like my violence… domestic,” on a sign outside the Philly bar from which he’s since been fired.

And a frustrated eyeroll at Kirsten Dunst, for this excerpt from a interview withHarper’s Bazaar UK:

Dunst is surprisingly outspoken on the subject of gender: “I feel like the feminine has been a little undervalued,” she says. “We all have to get our own jobs and make our own money, but staying at home, nurturing, being the mother, cooking — it’s a valuable thing my mum created. And sometimes, you need your knight in shining armour. I’m sorry. You need a man to be a man and a woman to be a woman. That’s why relationships work…”

Dove came out with another “Real Beauty” ad in which women were told to wear a patch that would make them more beautiful for two weeks and record how it made them feel, then were told that Surprise! There was nothing in the patch; their higher self-esteem was a pure placebo effect. As usual, some people are pissed off at the hypocrisy that a company that sells beauty products is telling people they don’t actually need them (but hey, if you still want some, buy ours!), while others are annoyed at the outrage. (Three guesses which of the linked articles is written by a dude…)

Recommended Reading

In the wake of #CancelColbert, a look at the vitriol women, especially women of color, receive when they speak up for issues that are important to them.

In the New York Times‘ Metropolitan Diary, a 17-year-old girl talks about street harassment and getting blamed for not fighting back.

Katty Kay and Claire Shipman talk about the confidence gap between men and women.

What I Learned in My First Year as a Female Startup CEO. (Hint: Even when you run the company, men you approach as potential hires will hit on you.)

Is Game of Thrones secretly a “chick show?”

Katy Waldman explores the new “no-makeup” trend. Which I suspect is only a trend because now people are talking about it even though a hell of a lot of us haven’t been wearing makeup all along. (Team Lazy/DGAF here!)

One Virginia county is dealing with teen sexting by educating kids rather than arresting them on child porn charges that will follow them for the rest of their lives, but their message still puts more blame on the teens who send nude pics than the ones who share them without consent.

Some people are freaking out that Good Housekeeping has a story about vibrators in the May issue.

A call to criminalize revenge porn (but carefully, so that it isn’t misapplied).

Oh, and about that “toughest job in the world” video? Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon does a good job of breaking down why it’s bullshit, while Allison Benedikt at Slate just goes straight for the sarcasm.

Bloomberg Businessweek has an interesting look at career women who freeze their eggs.

Olivia at Skepchick discusses how bias can infiltrate science in many ways that do a disservice to women and PoC.

Finally, let’s end with the new GoldieBlox ad!

Happy belated Equal Pay Day! Let’s see who’s been terrible this week, find out why people need to show the love to Sansa Stark and Black Widow, and, apparently, go to the restroom together. (As usual, trigger warnings for pretty much everything apply.)

The biggest story this week has been equal pay. Tuesday was Equal Pay Day, which is the symbolic date through which women would have to work to finally catch up with what men earned in 2013. President Obama used it as an opportunity to sign an executive order to provide protections to employees of federal contractors. Unfortunately, the Paycheck Fairness Act that would extend those rights to all workers was blocked by Senate Republicans; it fell short of the 60 votes needed to bring it to a floor vote. (Which, don’t even get me started on the fact that you only need 51 votes to pass a bill but 60 votes to agree to vote on it at all.) The Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed from some dudes who trotted out the same tired old explanations as to why they think the gender wage gap is a conspiracy between Obama and feminists, but they’re full of shit. And in a particularly enraging turn, a 2010 video was released in which Terri Lynn Land, who will likely be Michigan’s Republican Senate candidate, explained that women don’t want equal pay because we want to take lots of time off to take care of our kids. Because all women are moms and men never need to take care of their kids, amirite?

Image credit: Occupy Democrats

A rape victim in Senegal has been denied an abortion under the country’s strict laws that require three doctors to testify that a mother’s life is in imminent danger, even though she’s only 10 years old and is carrying twins.

Tennessee’s state legislature has passed a bill that, if signed into law by the governor, allows women to be charged with assault if they use drugs while pregnant (and is written so poorly that it could require investigations into any woman who suffers a miscarriage or stillbirth or whose baby has health problems, in order to prove that the complications weren’t caused by drug use).

Mississippi’s new sex ed curriculum, which has been adopted by more than 60% of school districts in the state, includes an exercise in which teachers are supposed to unwrap a piece of chocolate and pass it around so that the students can see how dirty it is, just like dirty sluts who have sex before marriage. Of course, this isn’t the only really horrible purity analogy being taught to teens.

Related, a CDC survey found that 83% of teen girls became sexually active before receiving any formal sex education.

Terrible people of the week!

Wisconsin state Rep. Bill Kramer, who has been charged with two counts of second-degree sexual assault and allegedly assaulted a senate aide three years ago, though that assault was never reported to police. He’s been removed as Majority leader in the state house, but he still gets to keep his seat.

South Carolina state Sen. Mike Fair, who convinced officials at USC Upstate to cancel a planned production of a satirical one-woman show titled “How to Be a Lesbian in 10 Days or Less” because he thought it was meant to recruit lesbians.

Louisiana Congressman Vance McAllister, who ran a family-values campaign and then got caught on video making out with a woman who is not his wife of 16 years, with whom he has five kids. He has stated that he will not resign over the scandal, though many other Republicans aren’t happy about that.

Former CIA Director Michael Hayden, who said that Sen. Dianne Feinstein is “too emotional” to investigate the CIA’s torture program. (She called him out in epic fashion.)

Sen. Mitch McConnell, whose campaign has endorsed a sexist op-ed slamming his opponent, Alison Lundergan Grimes.

Truth in Advertising, which released a transphobic ad that promotes several harmful stereotypes (though they’ve since apologized).

James Franco and Christian McQueen; Franco for hitting on a 17-year-old on Instagram and pickup artist/”Alpha Playboy” McQueen for praising Franco’s game.

Bill Maher, who took a study about the number of young men who’ve been coerced into sex (43% of those questioned) and turned it into a skit about “Lucky Bastard Syndrome.” Because men can’t possibly not want sex.

Mike Huckabee, for this sexist and homophobic gem at a fundraiser Tuesday night:

Guys like to go fishing with other men. They like to go hunting with other men. Women like to go to the restroom with other women. I don’t get that. I can tell you this much: if I ever say, ‘I have to go to the restroom’ and some guy says, ‘I’ll go with you,’ he ain’t goin’ with me. That much I know.

Recommended Reading

Haters to the left; Sansa Stark is the strongest character on Game of Thrones.

The Daily Dot explains what Captain America: The Winter Soldier reviewers get wrong about Black Widow.

Olivia at TeenSkepchick discusses how Divergent has its hits and misses with regards to being a feminist book/movie.

A new study has been represented as saying that people can tell how smart a man is by looking at him but that women are harder to read; Jamie at Skepchick explains that the study was far too small and limited in scope to make any such grandiose generalizations.

Similarly, many have claimed the FDA is sexist for not approving flibanserin, a drug purported to increase sexual desire in women, but many of the talking points come directly from the manufacturer and use misleading numbers. Besides, it has to be taken daily, not as-needed like most erectile dysfunction drugs, it has potentially dangerous side effects, and it doesn’t even work. (Note: The article refers to men and women according to their reproductive systems since that’s what the drugs in question work on.)

Jill Filipovic discusses the problem of forced or coerced C-sections in Brazil.

Cordelia Fine on why there isn’t a biological reason for girls to like “girly” toys or for boys to like “boy” toys.

What to do when you meet a lesbian in 1998

Welcome to another roundup of misogyny news! Fortunately this week wasn’t nearly as horrible as last week, and we even have some good stuff to report. (As usual, trigger warnings for pretty much everything apply.)

Let’s switch things up and start with some good news! Or at least, some terrible stories that may have not-terrible endings after all.

Last week Michelle Byrom was facing execution in Mississippi for her husband’s murder, but the state supreme court not only overturned her sentence but also recommended that she receive a new trial. Given that her son confessed to the murder and that she was basically coerced into covering for him (and that she’s an abuse victim who suffers from mental and physical illnesses), it’s about damn time.

An Arkansas mom who was arrested in November after breastfeeding her six-month-old daughter while having a beer at a restaurant will not be brought up on child endangerment charges after all, since there’s no proof she was in any way incapable of caring for her child at the time or that the alcohol had entered her breastmilk yet or in a high enough amount to endanger her.

Interns in NYC are now protected against workplace sexual harassment; the city council passed the new law after an intern’s lawsuit was dismissed last fall because she wasn’t technically an employee.

Hobby Lobby news! We won’t hear the Supreme Court’s decision on their lawsuit to get out of paying for employee’s contraceptives, but we did find out that, through their employee 401(k) plans, they invest in the companies that make the exact medicines and devices that their lawsuit alleges they’re morally opposed to. They also invest in companies that manufacture abortion pills. Fucking hypocrites.

A Harvard student, frustrated that the university had done little to help her after she was sexually assaulted by a student who lived in the same house as her because the assault fell outside the narrow definition of “assault” in the school’s 20-year-old policy, wrote a letter to the university in the Harvard Crimson saying that she’d given up and would just move rather than keep trying to get them to take her side.

It took a while, but the Bridgegate scandal in New Jersey finally managed to turn sexist. Gov. Chris Christie’s lawyers reported that Bridget Anne Kelly, she of the “Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee” email, orchestrated the entire ordeal because she was upset that her boyfriend broke up with her. Not that they actually interviewed Kelly or her ex, who had also worked for Christie, so it’s hard to say when or how they separated even if it were relevant. The report also claimed that Hoboken mayor Dawn Zimmer was lying about being strong-armed by Christie over Hurricane Sandy relief funds because she yawned in a picture and thus couldn’t have felt threatened. Mmmkay. Noticeably absent from the report was analysis of the emotional state of any of the men involved.

Terrible people of the week!

Senator Lamar Alexander, who opposes the Paycheck Fairness Act because it would be totally unfair if women were suddenly making more money than men!

West Virginia’s state legislature, which became the first Democrat-controlled group to pass a ban on abortions after 20 weeks. (Fortunately, Gov. Ray Tomblin vetoed it because similar laws have been declared unconstitutional in other states.)

Superior Court Judge Jan Jurden, who suspended du Pont heir Robert H. Richards IV’s eight-year prison sentence for raping his 3-year-old daughter and gave him probation instead because he “will not fare well” in prison. Isn’t it kind of the point that child rapists shouldn’t enjoy their punishment?

Sterling Jewelers, the parent company of jewelry stores including Jared and Kay, which is being sued by 16 current and former employees alleging that female employees are paid far less than men and are given fewer promotions.

New York Mets fans, who are pissed off that one of their players is missing the first few games of the season because his wife is due to give birth any day now and he doesn’t want to miss it. On his radio show, Boomer Esiason went so far as to say Daniel Murphy should have forced his wife to have a C-section before the season started so that it wouldn’t interfere with his playing.

The Army has implemented new rules regarding hairstyles for female soldiers, and they specifically ban many styles worn by black women with natural hair.

Saturday Night Live misgendered the subject of a joke (and her female professor) during last week’s Weekend Update even though she appeared in the video they were mocking, because of course chemists are men. In the words of the woman in question,

You made me into a male graduate student. I am a female postdoctoral research fellow and a member of the teaching faculty at my institution. Truth be told, I’m a bit of a magical unicorn, so it’s odd you did not notice that. “Magical unicorn” you say? I am a black female chemistry PhD.

A new study has found that women were 52% of moviegoers in 2013. Too bad studios will likely use that as an excuse to say women will go to the movies even if they aren’t represented on screen, so why bother making more female-centric films?

Recommended Reading

Why Inside Amy Schumer may be the most sneakily feminist show on TV. Or maybe Trophy Wife is.

Brooke Eikmeier speaks out about ABC Family’s cancellation of the pilot order for the show she created, Alice in Arabia, after it was described as a story about a girl being kidnapped by Saudi relatives and forced to live as a virtual prisoner, when that was the exact opposite tone of the story she wanted to tell.

BuzzFeed has a good longread about the effort to process Detroit’s backlog of 11,304 rape kitsthat were found in a warehouse in 2009.

Why don’t people care (or worse, think it’s cool) that Naked Lunch writer William S. Burroughsmurdered his wife?

“Career advice for women” is almost always useless because it’s mostly full of the same old platitudes and because career women aren’t a homogenized group; different fields have different rules.

Women frequently feel unsafe on subways and buses, especially late at night, but there are wayscities can make mass transit systems safer for riders.

One South Carolina town has proved that actually teaching kids about sex can drastically reduce teen pregnancy rates.

I always enjoy a good rant about why Men’s Rights Activists suck.

Newspapers need to stop framing introductory articles about things like Twitter and Bitcoin as“how to explain this so your clueless Mom will understand” because that’s sexist and ageist.

A call for anti-choice activists to give up judgment for Lent.

A defense of pink toys for girls. While I’m frustrated that seemingly everything for little girls comes in a pink version, I do agree that there’s nothing wrong with girls liking pink things (and that it’s 100% wrong to tell little boys they can’t play with pink things). I just hate that every shopping trip turns into my having to decide if I buy the pink version to prove that girls like things like LEGOs and scooters or buying the gender-neutral/boy version because my daughter doesn’t really care if stuff’s pink or not (she prefers purple, which has also seemingly been coded as girly), but then manufacturer’s might assume I’m buying a red firetruck for a boy and take that as evidence that girls don’t like that sort of toy. (Of course if she’s with me, she gets to pick which version she wants.)

Posting selfies in which you aren’t wearing make-up isn’t “brave,” nor does it help people with cancer. Just stop.

I’ll ask again; which of y’all is writing for the Onion?

US Finally Number 1

For years politicians have claimed the US was "Number 1" at things we were not: Healthcare, Education, infrastructure and the list goes on. However, today the US now has bragging rights. It is official the United States is now Number 1 in Income Inequality. YEAH! "We're Number 1, We're Number 1"

Caught between a 'Rock and a Hard Place.' Recent studies show the rise in inequality can be directly linked to the Feds "Quantitative Easing" (QE). Yellen was appointed to eliminate the QE program. However, the economies aren't growing, the banks and the wealthy are hoarding the money being given to them. However, it is becoming clearer to Yellen that any elimination of QE will have a catastrophic and cascading effect on the economy. Bernake left a big pile of crap, and Yellen is now holding the bag.

Buckle up, everyone, it’s about to get rough up in here. Hobby Lobby went before the Supreme Court this week, so that could really suck if the court sides with them. Our new weekly list of terrible people is just ridiculous today, and schools are also being particularly shitty. But to balance that out, we have a few scathingly funny critics of bro culture. And dick pics! Sorta. (As usual, trigger warnings for pretty much everything apply.)

The biggest story is, of course, Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood’s anti-contraception mandate case that was heard by the Supreme Court this week. Let’s start with the fact that not only do they not want the insurance plans that employees pay for to be allowed to cover contraception, they don’t even want the insurance to cover doctors talking about contraception (though since conversations aren’t billed, it would be difficult to enforce). During oral arguments before the court on Tuesday, Justices Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Kagan hammered the corporations’ talking points (seriously, go read what they said), but it still looks like the court could go either way. Of course, as Jill Filipovic and Sandra Fluke discussed,there are a LOT of other things that corporations could ban on religious grounds (blood transfusions, mental health care, AIDS drugs…) if the court rules against the mandate. After all, they’ve tried it before. I think the part of this that pisses me off the most is that the court can’t consider whether or not Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood’s beliefs that some forms of contraception are abortifacients are even true (it’s not; they aren’t!) because holding incorrect views about science is apparently a fucking protected religious belief. But thankfully, a new poll found that American women overwhelmingly oppose Hobby Lobby’s stance on contraception and support the ACA mandate. If you still want to read more on the case, SCOTUSblog has a ton of coverage if you scroll back a day or so. Or just watch the Daily Show‘s coverage if you’d rather laugh through the tears.

The Daily Show Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Indecision Political Humor,The Daily Show on Facebook

At least New York state is taking steps to close a legal loophole and ensure that women cannot be firedbased on their reproductive choices if their boss objects to them.

There was some good news from SCOTUS this week; they issued a unanimous decision that bars people convicted of domestic violence from owning a gun under federal law if there was any physical violence involved.

Under Hawaii law, it’s technically legal for police officers to have sex with prostitutes before arresting them, and even though police departments promise that their own rules prevent this from happening, they don’t want the law to be amended.

Fucking Kansas. A bill that was intended to allow families to be issued birth and death certificates after miscarriages has been amended and, if passed, would require doctors to report all miscarriages to the state’s department of health. They also defunded Planned Parenthood, because let’s not actually provide reproductive services to women.

Terrible people of the week!

Arizona pastor Steven Anderson, who made headlines in 2009 when he publicly wished for President Obama to die of a brain tumor. This time, he’s ordering women not to talk in his church because, “It’s not for a woman to be doing the preaching, and second of all, it’s not for women to be speaking.”

The string of judges who for years let Jared Remy walk free with little more than a slap on the wrist even though he repeatedly found himself in court facing charges that mostly involve violence against women. He’s currently being charged with murdering his girlfriend.

Federal court judge Richard Kopf, who responded to an article in Slate about the latest “huge problem” with how female lawyers dress in the courtroom by saying that he’s “a dirty old man” and that a lawyer shouldn’t dress like “an ignorant slut.”

Massachusetts State Sen. Richard J. Ross (R), who put forward a bill that would change the state’s divorce law and forbid the parent who has remained in the couple’s formerly shared home from having sex in that home until the divorce and all custody issues are settled (unless they get permission from a judge first). The partner who got kicked out and presumably doesn’t have to care for the kids as much can have as much sex as they want. And the really annoying part is that Ross claims not to even support the bill, but he put it forward for one of his constituents anyway.

Alaska State Sen. Pete Kelly, who wants the state to pay for women to take pregnancy tests before drinking in bars or restaurants so that they can make responsible choices to avoid having a child with fetal alcohol syndrome but is opposed to paying for birth control because people who use it “don’t necessarily want to act responsibly” and thinks using contraception is “social engineering.” (Though, I’ve seen several people interpret this as requiring women to take pregnancy tests to drink or requiring bars to refuse service to pregnant women, which doesn’t appear to be the case, though it could certainly lead to more drastic steps in the future.)

Missouri Republican state legislators, who have already introduced at least 32 separate anti-abortion measures this year. And of course they have refused the Medicaid expansion offered under Obamacare.

Pat Robertson, who said that atheist women are controlled by “demonic” forces and might have rejected Jesus because they were raped.

Rush Limbaugh, who mocked the proposed National Women’s History Museum by saying that we already have plenty of museums for women; “they are called malls.” But hey, it’s just a joke, and he was gonna say brothels but didn’t!

TIME Magazine and Caroline Kitchens, for an op-ed claiming that rape culture doesn’t exist and that people who discuss it are hysterical and vilify all men. They later published a counter-argument that ripped Kitchens’ allegations to shreds.

SELF Magazine, which mocked a woman who was wearing a tutu while running in the LA Marathon, not realizing that she was in the middle of chemotherapy treatments for brain cancer or that she made the tutu herself and sells them to raise money for charity. (Autoplay warning)

Joan Rivers, who in an interview with Howard Stern went off on a bizarre fat-phobic rant about Lena Denham.

Yes, it really is.

Shanesha Taylor lost custody of her two children and is facing child abuse charges because she’s homeless and didn’t have anyone to watch her kids while she was in a job interview, so she left them in her car. (Which is obviously not a good idea because cars can get hot enough to kill kids even if you leave the windows open a crack as she did, but it sucks that she had no other options and was trying to do the right thing by looking for a job.)

Misogyny in schools

There’s a lot of blatant misinformation and bullshit in the textbooks used by private schools (including some that are partially taxpayer funded since they accept vouchers). Unsurprisingly, they’re also teaching misogyny and racism.

Meanwhile the new World History curriculum for 9th and 10th graders from the New York Board of Regents only mentions one woman, Mary Wollstonecraft.

An Evanston, Illinois middle school has jumped into the debate over whether leggings are pants. Girls were pulled out of class to get a lecture on how their clothing could be distracting for boys, and yet only certain students (the ones with boobs and/or the more heavyset girls) are actually being punished for wearing them.

A Virginia Christian school sent home a letter saying that they would kick out 8-year-old Sunnie Kahle if she didn’t start acting and dressing more appropriately feminine.

A Grand Junction, Colorado charter school suspended 9-year-old Kamryn Renfro for two days for violating the school’s dress code — because she shaved her head in solidarity with a friend who’d lost her hair while undergoing chemotherapy. The school board voted 3-1 to let her come back.(Autoplay warning)

Schools aren’t just misogynist, of course; many are also racist. A new study found that even in preschool, black students are suspended at far higher rates than white students, and the other findings are just as depressing.

Former President Jimmy Carter has a new book out this week, A Call To Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power, in which he tackles human rights violations against women around the world and discusses how conservative religious leaders and the United States are partially to blame for anti-woman attitudes.

Three cheers for VP Joe Biden, who called on Congress to pass a law forbidding discrimination against gays in the workplace.

President Obama also called for new legislation this week; in his case a bill to require equal pay for men and women.

Recommended Reading

NPR interviewed Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

Rapper Lil B held an impromptu discussion of rape culture on Twitter, and while he said a few things that weren’t great, he also retweeted criticisms of his comments and hopefully learned from them (which if you’ve ever seen a Twitter flame war, is not how they usually play out).

Zerlina Maxwell outlines five ways we can teach men not to rape.

From Tumblr, a fantastic summation of how society fails teen girls.

The New York Times covered the strange case of an Orthodox Jewish couple who’s been legally divorced since 2007, but despite that fact that the ex-husband remarried this weekend (supposedly with the dispensation of 100 rabbis), he has refused to give his ex-wife the document that would dissolve their marriage in the eyes of their religion, so she isn’t allowed to remarry.

The Norwegian army has found an interesting way to reduce sexual harassment — unisex dorms.

Valleywag commenters came forward with their stories of discrimination against women in tech.

Kit Harington thinks it would be only fair for there to be more male nudity on Game of Thrones.

Cool story, bro

At last, guys have jumped on the bandwagon of doing dumb things to raise “awareness” of cancer. By Instagramming themselves nude but for a sock on their penis. Because when I see a naked bro with a cock sock, I think of ways to fight testicular cancer. (NSFW pics at the link.)

McSweeney’s has a really funny open letter to dudes who take up WAY too much space on crowded subways.

Why men shouldn’t claim social awkwardness as a get-out-of-jail-free card for being creepy (and how to tell the difference between creepers and people who really do have a problem navigating social interactions).

The A.V. Club discusses the Nice Guy™ storyline on Brooklyn Nine-Nine and why it shouldn’t be funny that one character refuses to stop pursuing a woman who repeatedly says no to him.

VICE has the best description of the “American Bro” ever.

Do yourself a favor and don’t actually read this list of “50 things every woman should realize about men.” You can probably guess most of them anyway.

And let’s end on a funny note, because lord knows you’ll need a good laugh if you’ve stuck with me this far. Though this is still rage-inducing because it’s fucking true.

Hobby Lobby

THIS CASE IS NOT ABOUT RELIGIOUS FREEDOM, IT IS ABOUT CORPORATE SERVITUDE: This needs to be made clear for all following this case. 1) First of all a corporation are not a people and therefore cannot have a religion. The law governing corporations specifically states that as a legal entity it needs to stand apart from its owners, this is what gives the owners a corporate shield from personal liability. This is irrespective of whether 1 person or a million people own shares, you want limited personal liability then your personal views must remain separate from the company.

2) But this isn't about the definition of a corporation. This is about Hobby Lobby's shareholders wanting to impose their religious views on their employees. Insurance is NOT the employers, it is owned by the employees. The employees pay for it, as it is a compensated benefit to them and administered by a third party (the insurance company). Corporations receive the benefit of a tax deduction against their income. As far as I know I have never seen a corporation in a doctors office.

So what Hobby Lobby is arguing is that they OWN their EMPLOYEES and as such have a say in their employees belief system and can tell their employees how they are to live their lives. They are arguing for "Corporate Slavery" and I am sorry, but, slavery is not a christian virtue.

womxxn-blog-deactivated20160930

A woman in Utah gave birth to twins. When one was stillborn, she was arrested and charged with criminal homicide based on the claim that her decision to delay cesarean surgery was the cause of the stillbirth.

After a hearing that...

Because why are we still calling it a walk of shame anyway? Oh right, because people are terrible. Let’s see just how terrible people were this week! (As usual, trigger warnings for pretty much everything apply.)

Georgia’s legislature has passed a bill that would ban abortion coverage (except to save the life of the mother) from all state employee health plans and insurance plans offered on the state’s exchanges.

A “heartbeat ban” has been reintroduced in Ohio; it would ban abortions as soon as the heartbeat could be detected, as early as 6 weeks in (before many women even know they’re pregnant or can get a doctor’s appointment).

South Carolina’s house passed a 20-week abortion ban, even though it would only apply to emergencies in hospitals since the state’s clinics don’t perform them after 14 weeks (and even though similar bans have been declared unconstitutional in other states). The only exception is to save the mother’s life.

U.S. District Judge Susan Webber Wright struck down Arkansas’ 12-week abortion ban as unconstitutional, but allowed a provision that forces mandatory ultrasounds to check for a fetal heartbeat.

Hat tip to the religious leaders and nuns who publicly came out in defense of birth control coverage under Obamacare.

Louisiana took Medicaid eligibility away from some pregnant women and new moms because of a typo on Healthcare.gov that they would have realized was a mistake if they’d looked at the actual law or Medicaid rules.

“Leaning In” may seem like a good idea in theory, but in reality women are frequently punished for negotiating. The latest example comes from a woman applying for a tenure-track position at Nazareth College whose employment offer was withdrawn after she asked for several perks in her contract. (Though, as many of my friends in academia pointed out in a private conversation on Facebook, some of the things she asked for in this particular instance may have been unreasonable, especially her request for a 2015 start date for a position that’s open now.)

Meanwhile the executive director of the Texas Republican Party thinks that the answer to the wage gap is teaching women to negotiate like men rather than allowing them to sue when they find out they’re being discriminated against.

A study of writer representation in the media found that women writers outnumber men… in writings about family and gender. In every other topic, there are more men; in some cases a lot more men.

Well, that’s depressing. Graphic by Foreign Policy using data from The OpEd Project.

Headscratcher of the week: A statement from RAINN implies that people who talk about “rape culture” don’t realize that rapes are committed by people, not culture. Of course we understand that! But rape culture helps most rapists get away with it.

Terrible people!

Susanne Atanus won the Republican primary for Illinois 9th congressional district despite thinking that tornadoes and autism are God’s punishment for abortion and gay rights and that allowing gays in the military will weaken our defenses because they’ll spread AIDS through the armed forces.

Ralph Reed thinks that to combat poverty we should make it harder for women to get divorced rather than increasing food stamp programs. Because if a man is going to refuse to pay child support and his ex suffers, she would have been so much better off staying with the asshole.

Conservative talk-radio host and Mitch McConnell fundraiser Dennis Praeger is all kinds of freaked out about the sanctity of straight marriage, which in his view means a woman should never withhold sex from her husband just because she isn’t in the mood.

The Independent‘s children’s book blog will no longer review books that are marketed as “for boys” or “for girls” and fall prey to gender stereotypes about what kids are interested in.

Nice! A study in Italy found that when a woman replaces a man as CEO of a family-owned business,profits go up. Adding women to the board of directors increases this even more.

If you want to carry a spare toothbrush and t-shirt in case you hook up at a party, great, but “Walk of Shame Kits” are a really dumb marketing move because who wants to buy something that tells them to be ashamed that they might use it? I’m also automatically skeptical of products that promote themselves by promising to donate a portion of the proceeds to breast cancer research without specifying which one or how much. (It’s also kinda weird to associate breast cancer with one-night stands.)

Recommended Reading

Stop asking Ruth Bader Ginsburg to resign! She’s awesome and it could backfire horribly.

Long, but worth your time: A look at the lives of Nepali women who are shunned while menstruating.

Why do people react differently when a black model posts a breastfeeding pic than they did when it was a white model? (Also, mad props to Ashley Nicole for being able to walk around while nursing; no way my kiddo would have cooperated with that!)

Another post from The Root, this time on why fathers shouldn’t be praised for beating their daughters.

Is the “My Husband’s Stupid Record Collection” tumblr sexist? Not inherently, but the people who like it because it “proves” that women don’t know anything about music are definitely sexist.

Why the “Female vs. SheMale” segment on RuPaul’s Drag Race was ridiculously transphobic and misogynistic.

Saturday Night Live‘s segment poking fun at Men’s Right’s Activists was supposed to be feminist, but that was lost in the obnoxiously stereotypical portrayal of a Latina character (who was played by a white woman, since SNL has never hired a single Latina cast member).

LOVE this: “Feminism is not the F-word.”

Parents, y’all need to chill.

This article on how women are trained to fear failure and give up because they have to be better than men to have the same opportunities is so fucking true and it pisses me off how familiar it all is.

Another blow for women in tech, as Julie Anne Horvath left her position as a developer at GitHub due to harassment and a sexist office culture.

Kelly Wallace discusses a SXSW panel on how technology both helps and hurts feminism (it’s easier for women to connect and reach a large audience, but then we get all kinds of anonymous harassment).

Pointlessly gendered products! I assume that the men’s and women’s wrist braces are sized differently, so the existence of both is legit, but it’s still silly that the packaging is totally different (and that the women’s one is more expensive despite presumedly being smaller).

BuzzFeed decided to remake three sexist ads and show how ridiculous they look when men and women’s roles are reversed. (Slightly NSFW)

#republican #NSA #NSA spying #Snowden #Edward Snowden

Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,

Rather than deal forthrightly with the reality that unrealistic promises made to their employees cannot be honored, local government has pursued a strategy of legalizing looting.

The gradual erosion of civil liberties, legal rights and government ethics are connected: our rights don't just vanish into thin air, they are expropriated by government: Federal, state and local. Though much is written about the loss of civil liberties at the Federal level, many of the most blatantly illegal power grabs are occurring in local government.

This expropriation is under the radar of the average citizen because the process slowly chips away the fundamentals of legality and justice: bit by bit, due process and the rights of the individual have been eroded by state and local governments until the fundamental Constitutional protections simply cease to exist.

When local government looting is legalized, the entire system is illegal. Here are three recent examples of blatantly illegal looting by local governments.

First up: privatizing the collection of traffic fines and probation to create a modernized debtor's prison. We turn to The Nation for the story:

The Town That Turned Poverty Into a Prison Sentence Most states shut down their debtors’ prisons more than 100 years ago; in 2005, Harpersville, Alabama, opened one back up.

What happened to Ford in the small town of Harpersville was tangled and unconstitutional-- but hardly unique. Similar tales have been playing out in more than 1,000 courts across the country, from Georgia to Idaho. In the face of strained budgets and cuts to public services, state and local governments have been stepping up their efforts to ensure that the criminal justice system pays for itself. They have increased fines and court costs, intensified law enforcement efforts, and passed so-called “pay-to-stay” laws that charge offenders daily jail fees. They have also begun contracting with “offender-funded” probation companies like JCS, which offer a particularly attractive solution—collection, at no cost to the court.

Harpersville’s experiment with private probation began nearly ten years ago. In Alabama, people know Harpersville best as a speed trap, the stretch of country highway where the speed limit changes six times in roughly as many miles. Indeed, traffic is by far the biggest business in the town of 1,600, where there is little more than Big Man’s BBQ, the Sudden Impact Collision Center and a dollar store.

In 2005, the court’s revenue was nearly three times the amount that the town received from a sales tax, Harpersville’s second-largest source of income. Fines had become key to Harpersville’s development, but it proved difficult to chase down those who did not pay. So, that year, Harpersville decided to follow in the footsteps of other Alabama cities and hire JCS to help collect.

It was a system of extraction and coercion so flagrant that Alabama Circuit Court Judge Hub Harrington likened it to a modern-day “debtors’ prison.”

Her fines for the three charges added up to $2,922, court papers show. Ward sentenced her--and others who said they couldn’t pay their full fines that day-- to probation. Once a means of allowing convicted offenders to stay out of jail on the condition of good behavior, probation had now become a court-sanctioned tool for debt collection. Burdette reported to the JCS office in nearby Childersburg, where she paid her probation officer $100. Of that, $45 went toward her fine, $10 toward a one-time “start-up fee,” and the last $45 went to JCS as a monthly fee for service.

Next up: illegal search and seizure under the pretext of traffic violations. As if "driving while black" isn't bad enough, now "driving with cash" is pretext enough to be stripped of your rights and your property stolen by local government:

Lawsuits over cash seizures settled in Nevada

Tan Nguyen of Newport, Calif., and Michael Lee of Denver said in lawsuits filed in U.S. District Court in Reno they were stopped last year on U.S. Interstate 80 near Winnemucca about 165 miles east of Reno under the pretext of speeding. They said they were subjected to illegal searches and told they wouldn't be released with their vehicles unless they forfeited their cash.

The lawsuits claimed the cash seizures were part of a pattern of stopping drivers for speeding as a pretext for drug busts in violation of the Constitution.

Nguyen was given a written warning for speeding but wasn't cited. As a condition of release, he signed a "property for safekeeping receipt," which indicated the money was abandoned or seized and not returnable. But the lawsuit says he did so only because Dove threatened to seize his vehicle unless he "got in his car and drove off and forgot this ever happened."

"He wasn't charged with anything. He had no drugs in his car. The pretext for stopping him was he was doing 78 in a 75," John Ohlson told KRNV-TV. "It's like Jesse James or Black Bart," he told AP in an interview last week.

The district attorney's statement said both men were stopped legally and that "every asset that was seized pursuant to those stops was lawfully seized."

Exhibit # 3: guilty until proven innocent: State of California seizes cash from "suspected" tax evaders with no evidence, no court action, no recourse. I have documented in detail how the jackboot of the State of California has pressed on the necks of thousands of law-abiding citizens whose only crime was moving out of California.

The State of California presumes anyone moving out of the state who still has a source of income in California--for example, a few dollars of interest earned on a bank account--owes California income tax on all their presumed income, even if they have filed income tax returns in another state.

If this isn't the acme of illegal seizure and denial of basic rights, i.e. presumed innocent until proven guilty, then what is?

Here is one reader's account of how this legal looting works: I wrote about this inWelcome to the United States of Orwell: Law-Abiding Taxpayers Are Treated as Criminals While the Real Criminals Go Free (March 27, 2012).

I received a letter last year that we owed the state of California's Franchise Tax Board $90,000 for taxes in the year 2008.We replied to the Franchise Tax board in a similar manner as RT stating that:

-- Did not reside in California in 2008 -- Did not file a State income tax return in California in 2008 -- Did not have any outstanding tax issues with California in 2008 -- Did no business in California in 2008 -- Owned no property in California in 2008

The CA Franchise Tax board responded by putting a lien on us in the state - fortunately, our banks and assets have no business in CA or I am certain our accounts would have been robbed as well.

After a great deal of uncertainty and angst, I found an accountant in CA who advised us that we needed to file a complete CA tax return for 2008 even though we did not owe any tax. We filed the return and received a response that we owed the state $625 to cover the State's collection fees. We paid the fee and within two weeks received a "refund" check for the $625.

On reflection, we felt as if we had been "held up" by some powerful gangsters and if it had not been for an honest tax accountant we would have suffered much financial damage.

In other words, honest taxpayers are reduced to begging the predatory state of California to return their own money. Meanwhile, the bagmen for the local government thieves, Wells Fargo and Bank of America, among others, get to keep the $100 fee they charged the taxpayer for stealing their money. If this isn't Orwellian, then what do you call it? "Legal"? If this is legal, legality has lost all meaning.

For more on the blatantly illegal seizures of cash from people who aren't even residents of California and who filed income tax returns in another state, please read:

Welcome to the Predatory State of California--Even If You Don't Live There (March 20, 2012)

The Predatory State of California, Part 2 (March 21, 2012)

Just as pernicious as outright looting is the growing dependence of local government on fines and related rip-offs. Correspondent Joel M. recently submitted this article which features New York City officials whining that the recent snow storm deprived them of sorely needed revenues from parking fines. Costs Have Piled Up Along With the Snow of a Difficult Winter (NYT.com)

"If the winter was costly for individuals, it was even more so for municipalities. The snow triggered repeated suspensions of New York City’s alternate-side-of-the-street parking rules, delighting car owners but costing the city an average of $270,000 a day in potential fines, officials said. That added up to $4.3 million during a three-week stretch in February alone, money that would have gone to help pay for city services, including the fire and police forces, city officials said."

Everyone who believes local government is "here to fill potholes and help disadvantaged people" needs to wake up and ask what kind of government we have when due process has been replaced with "legal" looting. Is local government focused on serving citizens or on funding public employee pensions and healthcare benefits?

The erosion of ethics of those in government service is as pernicious as the rise of legal looting. Let's be honest, shall we? Those in local government tasked with collecting all these forms of legal looting are "just doing my job," but how many protest the process? How many public employee unions are outraged by the legal looting that fills the coffers of their pension funds?

For context, government employees constitute about 15% of the employed workforce in the U.S.: 22 million out of 142 million. Unlike the other 85%, their employer can legalize looting on their behalf.

Local government spending has soared for decades.

So has local government debt.

Promises were made to local government employees by craven, bought-and-paid-for politicos that cannot possibly be honored in a stagnating economy with widening wealth inequality. But rather than deal forthrightly with that reality, local government has pursued a strategy of legalizing looting.

From the point of view of the hapless tax donkeys and debt-serfs being looted, this strategy boils down to a stark threat: Pay Our Pensions Or We'll Throw You in Jail.

Here's the deal: government is supposed to serve the people, not the insiders. Please read the above news stories; can anyone claim that legalized looting is OK because the "ends" (public services) justify the "means" (legalized looting)? How many public employees care about where the money that funds their paycheck, pension and healthcare benefits comes from?

Maybe public employees should start caring about where the money is coming from, because taxation approved by elected officials or direct voter approval is one thing, and legalized looting is another. If you don't care that your pay/pension/benefits may be partly funded by legalized looting, perhaps you should start caring.

Remember that we (the general public) can't pull you over and "legally" steal your cash, nor can we order Wells Fargo to go into your bank account and "legally" steal your money without court review, evidence of wrongdoing or recourse. We can't award private collection agencies the powers reserved for representative government and rig the probation system into a cash cow that benefits us.

Please don't trot out the "good German" excuse: I only take orders. You're the ones who are pulling the levers of the legalized looting machine; us tax donkeys and debt-serfs are on the receiving end. Given that special interests own the state legislatures, the tax donkeys and debt-serfs have only three choices: opt out, move out or stop paying, and fill your modern debtors' prisons to the brim.

justinspoliticalcorner

New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez issues ‘declaration of war’ on unions (via Raw Story )

On Monday, New Mexico’s Republican governor issued what union leaders are calling a “declaration of war” against unionized state employees. According to the Albuquerque Journal, Gov. Susana Martinez told a group of commercial real estate developers…

The US loves their Bullies but even more then bullies they love war. not surprised.

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