Daily Kos

• Pam Spaulding:
  

  The National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP) released its report, Hate Violence Against Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and HIV-Affected Communities in the United States in 2011 on Thursday, and the statistic that jumped out is the rise in anti-LGBT murders, up 11%.

  And she summarizes the recommendations:
  

  The report also listed policy recommendations to bring these numbers down in the future:

  • Increase funding for LGBTQH anti-violence support and prevention.
  • End police profiling and police violence against LGBTQH communities.
  • End the root causes of anti-LGBTQH violence by reducing poverty against LGBTQH communities and systemic homophobic, biphobic, and transphobic discrimination in laws, policies, employment, public services, and education.
  • End the homophobic, transphobic, and biphobic culture that fuels hate violence.
  • Collect data and expand research on LGBTQH communities particularly data and research on LGBTQH communities’ experiences of violence.

  Also reporting this was Kossack rserven.

  Will anyone listen?

• A new carbon dioxide milestone:
  

  Monitoring stations across the Arctic this spring are measuring more than 400 parts per million of the heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere. The number isn't quite a surprise, because it's been rising at an accelerating pace. Years ago, it passed the 350 ppm mark that many scientists say is the highest safe level for carbon dioxide. It now stands globally at 395.

  So far, only the Arctic has reached that 400 level, but the rest of the world will follow soon.

  How big a milestone?
  

  It's been at least 800,000 years — probably more — since Earth saw carbon dioxide levels in the 400s, Butler and other climate scientists said.

  Until now.

• Dreaming large:
  

  Young illegal immigrants, saying President Obama has done little to diminish the threat of deportations they face despite repeated promises, have started a campaign to press him to use executive powers to allow them to remain legally in the country.

  The campaign is led by the United We Dream Network, the largest organization of young immigrants here illegally who would be eligible for legal status under a proposal in Congress known as the Dream Act.

• Maybe Alaska should just abolish its office of governor.
• A political tumor.
• Missing the Gilded Age:
  

  To a remarkable degree, the challenges to the Affordable Care Act reflect an effort to codify legal nostalgia as legal doctrine. The opinions of some lower courts striking down the individual mandate, as well as the arguments of the States and private plaintiffs in the Supreme Court urging that result, repeatedly hark back to bygone eras of American jurisprudence. This legal facsimile of reincarnation seeks to revive not just the long discredited doctrines invoked by an ossified Judiciary to thwart the New Deal. It goes back further still, to the dogma of an earlier time when the Judiciary regarded its principal function as the protection of private property, even at the expense of social justice, democratic values, and other individual rights.

• Austerity as banking kabuki:
  

  The European bailout of 130 billion euros ($163.4 billion) that was supposed to buy time for Greece is mainly servicing only the interest on the country’s debt — while the Greek economy continues to struggle.

  If that seems to make little sense economically, it has a certain logic in the politics of euro-finance. After all, the money dispensed by the troika — the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the European Commission — comes from European taxpayers, many of whom are increasingly wary of the political disarray that has afflicted Athens and clouded the future of the euro zone.

  Actually helping Greece isn't part of the equation.
  

  In an elaborate payment system that began after the May 6 election that brought down the Greek government and is meant to ensure that the Greeks do not touch the cash, the big three creditors are now wiring bailout payments to an escrow account in Greece. There the money sits for two or three days — before much of it is sent back to the troika as interest payments on the Greek bonds that Europe accepted under terms of the bailout deal struck in February.

  And for this the Greek people are supposed to accept the continued deliberate destruction of their economy.
• Not a shock:
  

  Some major U.S. corporations that support climate science in their public relations materials actively work to derail regulations and laws addressing global warming through lobbying, campaign donations and support of various advocacy groups, according to a new report by the Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental and scientific integrity group.

• The Milky Way and Andromeda are destined for a head-on collision. In about 4 billion years. But don't worry, there's no need to stockpile food and water:
  

  It is likely the Sun will be flung into a new region of our galaxy, but our Earth and solar system are in no danger of being destroyed.

• If you happen to be near Philadelphia:
  

  The richness of Cézanne’s legacy derives from the complexity of his technique, which combines linear and planar elements with passages of solid modeling and allows the white ground of the canvas to interrupt what is represented on it. This creates a picture space full of shifts and ellipses, especially noticeable in depictions of the human figure, where even small alterations in the shapes and sizes of body parts or facial features are conspicuous.

  Cézanne’s manner of building his forms with accumulations of small, planar strokes was as much a way of not fully defining objects as it was of depicting them. What results is a tension between the painted surface and what is represented on it. Consequently, Mondrian could write that Cézanne showed how beauty was created not by the objects he represented “but by the relationships of form and color,” while Kandinsky emphasized the content of Cézanne’s paintings, his “gift of seeing the inner life in everything.”

  The grandeur of Cézanne’s achievement and the tensions that underlay it are superbly exemplified in The Large Bathers, from 1906, which will be a key work in the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s forthcoming exhibition “Gauguin, Cézanne, Matisse: Visions of Arcadia,” on view from June 20 through September 3.

• From a truly lovely appreciation of birding and birders, in the Wall Street Journal, of all places:
  

  From Peterson's "Guide" and Carson's "Silent Spring" a movement was born: environmentalism. It grew out of a new set of relationships between Homo sapiens and nature. Peterson invited the public to care enough about birds to identify them and, by extension, to identify with them. Carson showed that in caring about the fate of another species we were implicitly protecting our own fate as a species. The "Life List" that is kept by most birders acquired a double meaning: It names every live species seen in a person's lifetime.

• Genius:
  

  Some lawmakers will go to great lengths to deny the reality of climate change. But this week, North Carolina lawmakers reached new heights of denial, proposing a new law that would require estimates of sea level rise to be based only on historical data—not on all the evidence that demonstrates that the seas are rising much faster now thanks to global warming.

  The sea level along the coast of North Carolina is expected to rise about a meter by the end of the century. But business interests in the state are worried that grim projections that account for climate-induced sea level rise will make it harder for them to develop along the coast line. So policymakers in the state plan to deal with that issue by writing a law requiring inaccurate projections.

  Scott Huler, of Scientific American, a North Carolina resident:
  

  North Carolina legislators have decided that the way to make exponential increases in sea level rise – caused by those inconvenient feedback loops we keep hearing about from scientists – go away is to make it against the law to extrapolate exponential; we can only extrapolate along a line predicted by previous sea level rises.

  Which, yes, is exactly like saying, do not predict tomorrow’s weather based on radar images of a hurricane swirling offshore, moving west towards us with 60-mph winds and ten inches of rain. Predict the weather based on the last two weeks of fair weather with gentle breezes towards the east. Don’t use radar and barometers; use the Farmer’s Almanac and what grandpa remembers.

Jesse LaGreca, a/k/a Ministry of Truth, will be in Wisconsin for the fight in Wisconsin, the recall election that culminates the year-long battle against the anti-worker, anti-labor, anti-women, anti-democracy Republican Party project, spearheaded by the extreme, retrograde bully and liar Scott Walker.

How Tuesday will end is not clear. But how it began and how it will continue past Tuesday is clear. We will never stop fighting for progressive values!

We think no one exemplifies that fight more than our own Jesse LaGreca, Ministry of Truth, and are thrilled that he will be there for the fight in Wisconsin for Daily Kos Radio. You can listen here.

Jesse will be on as much as possible but stay tuned for times to listen to Jesse's reports for Daily Kos Radio. He will be providing reports Tuesday morning from 10 AM ET, and continuing, on and off all day and through the nightl LISTEN HERE.

Once again, our most heartfelt thanks to Netroots Radio, who will be hosting Jesse's reports from Wisconsin—you can listen here. Special thanks to Wink Edelman, who will be producing Jesse's reports, and Justice Putnam, the program director for Netroots Radio.

Consider this the pre-relaunch of Daily Kos Radio, whose official relaunch comes at Netroots Nation. More on that this week. Stay tuned.

The jobs report was bad, and the Republicans will be out with their usual mantra: We need more tax cuts, we need less regulation, President Obama and those mean Democrats are suffocating corporations, and if we want more jobs we need to set corporations free from taxes and regulations and let them have their way. Of course, that mantra will remain the same whether the economy is growing or shrinking, whether jobs are being created or being lost, and whether the sky is blue or the sky is gray. Because to Republicans, ideology trumps reality.

One problem:

The Fortune 500 generated a total of $824.5 billion in earnings last year, up 16.4% over 2010. That beats the previous record of $785 billion, set in 2006 during a roaring economy. The 2011 profits are outsized based on two key historical metrics. They represent 7% of total sales, vs. an average of 5.14% over the 58-year history of the Fortune 500. Companies are also garnering exceptional returns on their capital. The 500 achieved a return-on-equity of 14.3%, far above the historical norm of 12%.

Another problem:

Profits at big U.S. companies broke records last year, and so did pay for CEOs.

The head of a typical public company made $9.6 million in 2011, according to an analysis by The Associated Press using data from Equilar, an executive pay research firm.

That was up more than 6 percent from the previous year and is the second year in a row of increases. The figure is also the highest since the AP began tracking executive compensation in 2006.

In other words, corporations are doing just fine. Really really fine. They're making record piles of cash, their CEOs are making record piles of cash, and yet somehow they're not creating jobs. In others words, the line that high taxes and tough regulations are hurting corporations, thus preventing job creation, is a lie. A good old-fashioned completely full of it lie. The Republican way.

Remember when the economy was doing well? Like under President Clinton? Maybe we should return to the Clinton tax rates. Maybe we should have another shot of government stimulus. Which is exactly the opposite of the austerity agenda the Republicans are proposing. And anyone paying attention to the European economic collapse knows just how well austerity works out.

(Click for larger image)

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Visual source: Newseum

Ross Douthat at The New York Times:

As grim as the Obama era has been, Americans still have a distinctly negative reading on what the last period of Republican economic stewardship delivered: rising health care costs, wage stagnation, a real estate bubble and then of course the financial crash itself.

Against this backdrop, it may not be quite enough for Mitt Romney to explain how the incumbent has failed. He needs to explain why, so soon after the Bush era, the country should trust his party to put things right again.

David Lightman and Lesley Clark at McClatchy:

Mitt Romney has vowed that on Day One of his presidency, things would be dramatically different. History and the ways of Washington suggest that by Day Two, he'd find he couldn't move as fast as he promised.

The presumptive Republican presidential nominee's latest guarantee was featured in a new television ad Friday, the third in a campaign pledging a new direction for the country immediately on Inauguration Day 2013, if Romney is sworn in that day to replace a defeated President Obama. It's not that easy. [...]

First, he's probably not going to have a lot of top staff in place. Cabinet secretaries and key trade and economic officials will need Senate confirmation. The campaign maintains it can take some action without all staff in place, such as designating a country as a currency manipulator.

Second, regulations and laws often can't be eradicated overnight. Repealing the 2010 health-care law, for instance, would require an act of Congress.

Andres Oppenheimer at The Stabroek News:

Asked whether Romney will ignore the immigration issue, Romney campaign spokesman Alberto Martinez told me that “Hispanics do not vote based solely on the issue of immigration. Poll after poll indicates that jobs and the economy will be the most important issue for Hispanic voters come November.” Martinez added, “Like all Americans, Hispanics will cast their vote for president based on their perception of who is best suited to turning the economy around and creating jobs, which is why we’re confident that Governor Romney will attract considerable support.”

 [...] My opinion: If elections were decided by purely rational reasons and could be predicted with cold calculations on what issues matter the most to voters, Romney could indeed win this election. Polls show that Hispanic voters care more about the economy, jobs and education, than about immigration.

But elections are most often decided by emotional factors, and the fact is that Romney has alienated many Hispanics with a dehumanizing rhetoric against “illegals” that to many of us comes across as Latino-bashing.

Most Latinos don’t buy Romney’s claim that he is a strong supporter of “legal” immigration and only opposes “illegal” immigration, because that’s a deceiving argument. Under the current system, it’s very hard for foreigners to become legal US residents, and Romney has opposed comprehensive immigration reform that would increase the number of resident visas to match the needs of the US labour market.

Alexander Bolton at The Hill runs down 10 potential gamechangers in the presidential race:

The biggest obvious risk to Obama’s re-election is a financial crisis in Europe that could drag down the U.S. economy with it.

A popular backlash in Greece, Spain and France against German-led austerity programs has cast doubt on European leaders’ ability to avert a financial chain reaction that could send world stock markets plummeting and paralyze U.S. banks. [...]

The U.S. economy has already borne the effect of reduced trade with Europe and domestic banks have had time to insulate themselves from an overseas financial collapse but a panic could send domestic markets reeling and hurt consumer confidence.

Maureen Dowd at The New York Times is disappointed in President Obama:

The president who started off with such dazzle now seems incapable of stimulating either the economy or the voters. His campaign is offering Obama 2012 car magnets for a donation of $10; cat collars reading “I Meow for Michelle” for $12; an Obama grill spatula for $40, and discounted hoodies and T-shirts. How the mighty have fallen.

Once glowing, his press is now burning. “To a very real degree, 2008’s candidate of hope stands poised to become 2012’s candidate of fear,” John Heilemann wrote in New York magazine, noting that because Obama feels he can’t run on his record, his campaign will resort to nuking Romney. [...]

As president, Obama has never felt the need to explain or sell his signature pieces of legislation — the stimulus and health care bills — or stanch the flow of false information from the other side. [...] The president had lofty dreams of playing the great convener and conciliator. But at a fund-raiser in Minneapolis, he admitted he’s just another combatant in a capital full of Hatfields and McCoys. No compromises, just nihilism.

The AP:

Nothing upsets a president's re-election groove like ugly economic numbers.

A spring slowdown in hiring and a rise in the unemployment rate are weighing on President Barack Obama, while enhancing Republican challenger Mitt Romney's argument that the incumbent is in over his head.

On Tuesday, after five-plus years of non-stop campaigning, Mexican descendant Willard Mitt Romney finally secured enough delegates to clinch the GOP nomination for president.

To celebrate this monumental achievement, Romney jetted off to Las Vegas to bask in the glow of Donald Trump's bright orange skin.

Pundits across the political spectrum wondered why he would choose to pal around with such a bloviating ignoramus, but they were overlooking the obvious.

Because Bill Maher, that's why.

Meanwhile, proving that what happens in Vegas doesn't always stay in Vegas, Romney paid a secret visit to the California headquarters of Solyndra on Thursday, where he engaged in some Trump-esque conspiracy theorizing, and reiterated his promise to create a better Amercia.

Yeargh!

Reposted from Daily Kos Elections by Steve Singiser

It is not hyperbole to suggest that, short of November 6th, the next most important day in the election cycle may well be this coming Tuesday.

First off, you have primary elections in six states, with a total of 73 House seats and four Senate seats selecting their nominees for November. This includes the California primary, where a new format may well offer some hints to how November will progress in the Golden State.

Beyond that, however, there is Wisconsin. Two statewide elections and four state senate elections will determine the balance of power in what arguably has been the epicenter of the Republican revolution that was visited upon the country after the 2010 elections. Democrats are working hard to end the political career of one of the most visible figures of that revolution, while Republicans are expending tremendous energy in preserving his career.

On top of that, there was quite a bit of data, in spite of the holiday week. At the presidential front, the polling varied little from last week, and still portended a very competitive Fall at the top of the ticket. Downballot, meanwhile, the data was far more variable, with causes for both celebration and concern for both parties buried within.

All that (and more!) awaits you just past the jump in this, the "Main Event before the Main Event" edition of the Daily Kos Elections Weekend Digest.

Reposted from Daily Kos Labor by Laura Clawson Sometimes you really have to wonder about Mitt Romney's campaign strategery. At a time when the Obama campaign is turning on the spotlight on Mitt's jobs record as Massachusetts governor, the Romney camp is practically jumping up and down pointing to another of Romney's giant weak spots from Massachusetts by trying to blame Obama for rising college tuitions and student loan debt. It's just not the shrewdest strategy to go after your opponent for those things when your own record is one of:

[...] dramatically slashing public higher education funding and hiking fees during his one term. According to the Boston Globe, fees and tuition jumped 63 percent at Massachusetts’ once-stellar system of public higher education from 2003 to 2007, as Romney slashed state funding year after year, for a total of $140 million, or 14 percent, in four years. Not surprisingly, average student debt in Massachusetts jumped 25 percent while Romney was governor. Between 2001 and 2011, tuition and fees have more than doubled at the state’s community colleges, state university and UMass campuses, but the bulk of the added burden piled up under Romney.

Romney's record is, in other words, ripe for a more fact-based rendition of exactly the attacks he's making on Obama. It's also not an isolated blip in Romney's vision of the economy, as Joan Walsh explains:

Under Reagan, median wages for the working and middle classes began to stagnate and fall – but household debt began to rise. It was as if the GOP-unleashed private sector figured out how to make money lending families the money that they were no longer making in income. Republicans have the same approach to higher education: They slashed public funding, and then let their banker friends “help” students afford higher tuition by lending them the cash to pay for it.

There's no reason to expect Romney will stick to attacks on President Obama that are reasonable or based in fact. You'd think he'd stick to ones that weren't likely to bite him in the ass, but then, maybe his problem is he doesn't have many of those—in fact, even without an Obama campaign response, Romney's big "Obama raised tuition" video has already been pulled for a copyright violation and drawn an annoyed response ("Considering I am not a supporter of Mitt Romney, this is not exactly sitting well with me") from one of the students featured in the video talking about his debt.

Reposted from Daily Kos Labor by Laura Clawson

The SEIU held its convention from May 28-30. The union's president, Mary Kay Henry, was unanimously reelected by delegates. Delegates also:

[...] endorsed a comprehensive program to engage in unprecedented levels of coordination with strategic partners and to recruit, train and mobilize more than 100,000 member-leaders across the union who will reach out to friends, neighbors and co-workers to demand justice for the 99%.

On Thursday, The Bilerico Project's Bil Browning reported from the convention that:

During yesterday's gathering the delegates passed a resolution that the many SEIU locals bargain for trans-inclusive heath care as part of their contracts. The SEIU International offices already offer trans-inclusive health care benefits to employees.

I went to watch as the delegates debated the issue and came away incredibly impressed. While I expected there to be push back on the measure, instead it was brought to the floor and the delegates were allowed 40 minutes to debate. Every single person who got up to speak was in favor of the resolution; no one spoke in opposition. It easily passed.

Having SEIU locals bargaining for trans-inclusive health care is a step toward such care not being so difficult to get—the more employers, the more insurance programs, the more doctors who are expected to be trans-inclusive, the more likely people who don't have SEIU bargaining for their health care will be to find those doctors.

Perennial dumb ass, the voice of establishment stupidity, offered this political advice to President Obama:

Obama could have adapted Simpson-Bowles, but symbolically it was vital to embrace it in some form as his headline deficit plan, because it already enjoyed some G.O.P. support and strong backing from independents, who liked the way it forced both parties to compromise. Had Obama gone to the country with more near-term stimulus married to Simpson-Bowles, he would have owned the left, independents and center-right. It would have split the Republicans and provided a real alternative to the radical Paul Ryan-Romney plan.

Now, just think about this for a moment. The Simpson-Bowles plan:

a. did not pass the Simpson-Bowles committee;
b. had no support in Congress (it lost 328-38) or the public; and
c. addressed an issue (the deficit) that is not nearly as important as jobs.

Furthermore, that plan:

a. cut Social Security and Medicare
b. cut military pension benefits
c. cut student loans
d. increased the payroll tax(!) and the gasoline tax(!)
e. eliminated the mortgage interest deduction (those underwater would love this!)
f. puts 10 percent of the entire federal workforce out of a job

Do all those things sound like election year winners to you? Not if you've got at least one synapse working. Had Obama done any of what Friedman recommends, he would have won himself nothing more than a strong primary challenge and the certainty of defeat in November. The idea that he'd win some over on the right, people who don't even believe he was born in America, is as ridiculous as thinking Sarah Palin would win over the women's vote.

Leave it to Friedman and his ilk to stand staunchly behind perhaps the dumbest political strategy to come out of Washington in perhaps ... forever. The idea that the way to win a national election is to piss off the voters and mollify the Washington establishment and punditry will never cease to find currency inside the Beltway. But even among that elite group of calcified know-nothings, most of them are smart enough to know that Simpson-Bowles would be about as popular as a smallpox epidemic. Only Thom Friedman is dumb enough not to get that.

Are you a lady with lady opinions on issues that affect ladies?

Then shut your stupid ladyhole, stupid lady, because no one cares what you think about that lady stuff. At least, that's what the traditional media thinks, according to an analysis by The 4th Estate and shown in the infographic above.

The numbers are stark, but not exactly surprising. When it comes to coverage of issues that directly affect women, the beacons of traditional journalism—the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Sunday talk shows—clearly subscribe to the Darrell Issa school of thought: that the people best qualified to talk about women are, in fact, men.

Rep. Issa, you may recall, held a congressional hearing in February about the president's new policy mandating that health insurance providers cover birth control without copays. This, as we know, made Issa and his fellow Republican men in Congress, as well as his friends at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (aka, the Catholic wing of the Republican Party), have a very sad sadness of sad. So sad that they needed to have an all-male hearing to share their sad feelings and console one another about how women's access to affordable birth control will simultaneously destroy the republic and bring forth armageddon. And, most importantly, make them very sad.

The No Girls Allowed rule at the Issa hearing was so shocking, given the subject, that even some in the traditional media tsk-tsked it. But the following Sunday, when the Very Serious People of the beltway sounded off on the morning shows on this very subject, none saw fit to feature women as guests, though some were allowed to join the menfolk in roundtable discussions:

Additionally, of the five women included in roundtable discussions, four were non-partisan, allegedly unbiased reporters, while the men across the table from them included former Republican National Committee Chair Ed Gillespie, on Meet the Press, and conservative columnist George Will and conservative television commentator Lou Dobbs, both on This Week. Only former Clinton press secretary Dee Dee Myers could be considered an opinionated counterpart to those three partisan voices.

Even when the media is talking about women, and about issues and policies that directly affect women, and even about the absence of women from the discussion, they still don't think women should actually be included in that discussion.

Take the New York Times, for example. The editors of our newspaper of record have published editorial after editorial decrying the Republicans' War on Women, but they're still turning to men most of the time for their opinions and expertise. Not that it's breaking news that the Times has its own woman problem. It's just further evidence that even when an outlet acknowledges that there is an assault on women, it doesn't make the connection between the legislative assault and the absence of women's voices in the media to address that assault.

Two years ago, Meteor Blades spent an agonizing 16 months analyzing the Sunday morning shows and found them to be "dominated by men, whites and Republicans, particularly right-wing Republicans[.]" Since then, nothing has changed—except for the first time in a long time, maybe ever, women (or "caterpillars," as the nice Republican menfolk call them) have been front and center in political discourse for several months, which you would think just might be an opportunity for the guardians of the fourth estate to seek out women to see what they think about all that. But alas, no. The fact that the national discussion has turned to women does not mean the media feels compelled or obligated to expand its pool of commentators and experts. Should we invade Iraq? Ask the menfolk. Should women have access to birth control? Ask the menfolk. Are women's rights under attack? Ask the menfolk. Regardless of topic, regardless of the carefully measured outrage of the editorial pages, it is still He Who Has The Penis Who Has The Answers.

Another study released this week by the OpEd Project found that even the editorial pages are dominated by men, and while women have slightly more prominence in digital media—you know, in the great meritocracy that is the gender-blind, color-blind internet—those lady bylines are largely restricted to lady subjects. As Erika Fry at Columbia Journalism Review reported:

But while women’s opinions were better represented in digital media, they were more than twice as likely to focus on “pink topics”—the “four F’s” (family, food, furniture, fashion), plus women’s and gender issues—than in the traditional media, where about 14 percent of women’s op-eds were “pink.” These statistics suggest a silo effect online, with writers speaking more frequently to like-minded (or like-bodied) individuals—a concern that has been much lamented within the political media landscape, but less so with regards to gender, race, and class. This development would seem to hark back to the days of the “ladies pages”; while there is nothing wrong with women writing on “pink topics,” it’s the relative lack of women’s voices on non-pink topics like the economy and politics online that is problematic.

In other words, women are occasionally allowed to offer their opinion, as long as they keep it to unimportant "pink" topics like the latest fad diet or what's new in window treatments or how to empower yourself with a pair of $500 stilettos. And those pink topics are narrowly defined. Abortion, birth control, women's rights—these, apparently, are not pink topics. Family planning, it seems, does not qualify as a "family" topic suitable for women to discuss. You may be permitted to offer your thoughts on where to take your family for a summer vacation or which lunch box is right for your child, but more serious family matters—like whether you should be allowed to plan your family and under what circumstances and how much it should cost? Nah. That is far too important a topic of too much "general" interest to leave to the ladies of the pink ghetto. Better to leave such conversation to the Very Serious Men Whose Opinions Matter.

Yes, yes, as the lady haters are quick to point out, we've come a long way, baby. But we're still underrepresented in our government, in boardrooms across America, in the economic recovery hecovery, and in the national meta conversations about why all of that might be. It's a shameful stain on traditional media that even conversations about women are still being held mostly by men. We can't possibly hope to eradicate institutional discrimination, not to mention cultural misogyny, if we can't even get our voices heard. But that's the lesson from this week's reports: Shut up, little ladies, and stick to not-of-general-interest pink subjects, so Very Serious Men can tell us what we should think about ourselves.

---

This week's good, bad and ugly below the fold.

Reposted from Daily Kos Elections by David Nir Wow:

Thaddeus McCotter ends his write-in campaign and says his sole focus as U.S. Representative is finishing his term and aiding his requested Attorney General probe.

“I have ended my write-in campaign in Michigan’s 11th Congressional District,” announced McCotter in an email sent to WWJ Newsradio 950 on Saturday.

“One can’t clean up a mess multitasking. Honoring my promise to the sovereign people of our community only allows me to finish the official duties of my present Congressional term; and aid the State Attorney General criminal investigation that I requested into identifying the person or persons who concocted the fraudulent petitions that have cost me so dearly.

While it's stunning that McCotter's political career will come to an end like this, it's less surprising to see him quit at this point, given how the situation has unfolded over the past week (when news of McCotter's ballot access screw-up first surfaced). To win the GOP nomination, McCotter would have had to wage a difficult and expensive write-in campaign, and he had less than $200K in the bank (plus a bunch of debt left over from his joke of a presidential campaign). McCotter also faced the specter of an ongoing criminal investigation into the fraudulent petitions he filed that caused this whole mess. And on top of that, local Republicans almost seemed eager to get rid of him, with a barrage of stories in the press about former allies now abandoning him and fellow party members also considering their own write-in campaigns.

Indeed, this news comes right on the heels of another local official announcing just that: On Friday afternoon, former state Sen. Loren Bennett, who hails from McCotter's Wayne County, said that he, too, would run as a write-in. Winning his own write-in campaign would have been hard enough for McCotter; if the GOP establishment were instead to coalesce around Bennett (as I'm guessing they now may), it would have been impossible.

Bennett will still have a difficult time securing the Republican nomination: Tea partier Kerry Bentivolio is already on the ballot, and at least two other local pols have suggested they might go write-in as well, state Sen. Mike Kowall and former state Rep. Rocky Raczkowski. Democrats also have a legitimate candidate here in the form of physician Syed Taj, though he'll first have to beat LaRouchie nutcase William Roberts in the primary. Barack Obama won this swingish district 50-48 (even after it was made redder in redistricting), so this seat is potentially very much in play. At the very least, it's a serious headache for Republicans—and a major black eye for McCotter and his party.