“usc-ucla? Felt like was sitting at a newport beach yacht club. Coyotes? Midgets, special ed and axel rose wannabes nearby.”

One of the fairly immutable laws of humor is that good humor punches up, not down. Jason Rose punches down, always. Which is why he’s not funny, ever, and everyone knows it. Even the people who laugh at Rose’s schtick because he’s a rich white guy (rich white guys tend to have people around them who will pretend they’re funny) know that Jason Rose is not funny. He’s mean. Why the Special Olympics would hire a mean person to do PR for them and then be surprised when he eventually says something mean about their participants is beyond me, but they did and I’m glad they at least realized their mistake and gave him and his firm the boot.

I’ve been wanting to blog about the high school student in Kansas who tweeted that Gov. Sam Brownback sucks and blows a lot and got in trouble with her school because one of Brownback’s staffers saw the tweet and whined to the school about it. I totally defended her on facebook and still do. She was exercising free speech and Brownback’s staff and her principal’s response (trying to force her to write an apology letter and attaching the incident to her permanent record) were gross abuses of authority. Inevitably, some of my fellow liberals got all etiquette nanny on the girl about her “tone” and pearl-clutchy over the horrible “incivility” that’s destroying public discourse and whatnot. Which is unfortunate, because I tend to expect liberals to be critical thinkers and better able to make distinctions between silly tweets by a high schooler and a public officials acting like Joe McCarthy in response to it. It’s the latter kind of behavior that’s the real threat to civil society. And just in case anyone wants to accuse me of hypocrisy for condemning Jason Rose but not the Kansas student, please try to follow along: She punched up and the government tried to punish her for it. Jason Rose punched down and is getting his ass handed to him publicly, and deservedly, by a paying client. See the difference? Okay, good.

Before I finish I’d like to say something about Governor Brewer, whom I consider to be an awful person, based on things she’s done in office. Yes, Jan Brewer is in a powerful position so based on that she is fair game for mockery and derision by us peons. But punch up, people. I’m seeing way too many cracks about her appearance and age and gender slurs. When you go for the cheap shots, not only are you giving Brewer and her handlers yet another reason to portray her as a martyr and a delicate flower (while also the toughest governor in America who eats scorpions, don’t ask me how that works) but it’s neither funny nor imaginative. C’mon Arizona liberals, we’re better than that.

ci·pher noun, often attributive \ˈsī-fər\

Definition of CIPHER

1
a : zero 1a
b : one that has no weight, worth, or influence : nonentity

So much going on today! Hard to pick what to write about. Let’s see: The independent redistricting outrage (public meeting going on in Scottsdale as we speak, with many of my East Valley peeps in attendance). Russell Pearce recall (ABC15 announced a poll tonight showing a dead heat between Jerry Lewis at 46% and Pearce at 43%). Mitt Romney endorsed Mississippi’s Personhood Amendment today (putz). More harassment allegations against and evasion by Herman Cain (putz). All GOP Reps voting against infrastructure funding (putzes extraordinaire).

But I’m going to write about Channel 12′s Brahm Resnik reviewing Governor Jan Brewer’s magnum opus, Scorpions for Breakfast. My hero! He read it (in an hour he says) so the rest of us would be spared.

So obsessed, that Jan Brewer created a Google alert for “Jan Brewer.” It’s a wonder that alert didn’t crash the state e-mail server — or crash the governor herself.

“I couldn’t help myself,” the governor writes of her Web watch.

The book provides a meticulous accounting of the red-hot hate directed at Brewer (“Hitler’s daughter,” “Satan’s (inappropriate term),” “brainless blond bimbo”). She read many of the insults and slurs on blogs, she writes, even as her staff implored her not to pay attention to “losers.”

Brewer describes the personal attacks as “torture” the equal of waterboarding. “I could barely breathe,” the governor writes.

By now you know the rest of the book doesn’t revisit the infamous 13 seconds of silence during Brewer’s 2010 debate with Democratic opponent Terry Goddard. The governor does write about headless bodies — but they’re not in the Arizona desert.

I can actually empathize with that since you wouldn’t believe some of the comments I’ve gotten from angry conservative troll-men in my queue. It’s jarring. And look, I don’t cotton to gender slurs, whether they’re against my kind of woman or Jan Brewer’s. Opponents of Brewer and SB1070 haven’t done the cause any favors by calling her ugly names based on her being female (I include myself in this because I’ve made references to her being a “witch” on Facebook a time or two and I’m going to stop doing it henceforth). It’s cheap, too easy, and needlessly counterproductive.

That said, I don’t think Jan Brewer is tough. Or smart or principled. That’s not because she’s a woman. It’s because she’s a modern-day Republican politician. Of course she sits on the internet all day googling her name, when she’s not making appearances before adoring throngs. She does so for the same reason that Russell Pearce trawls white supremacist sites for hours on end and another Republican Arizona state legislator whom I didn’t name on this blog can spend hours on Facebook kvetching about how slutty 14 year old girls are these days. And Trent Franks can indulge his non-stop abortion obsession. They have lots of time to dwell on those things because they have no reason to become anything resembling policy experts. That work is done for them, via innumerable right wing think tanks, lobby shops, PACs, PR firms, etc. All they have to do is repeat the talking points while looking stern, concerned, excited, or maudlin about them as the situation requires.

So they fill their gobs of extra time up with what really interests them – which in most cases is sadly embarrassing narcissism or reactionary authoritarian narcissism, or a combination of both. This is why the GOP is having so much trouble with their Presidential candidates. They’re ciphers, not leaders.

American conservatives, who are nominally pro-democracy, seem to be confused and perturbed by the recent events in Egypt. Democracy troubles them when “those people” take it without proper neo-conservative dispensation. It is along those lines that these same conservatives favor personal freedom here in the U.S., again in limited circumstances. The mere suggestion of gun regulations or resdistribution of wealth causes them to collapse in a massive case of the vapors and/or march around in ridiculous colonial costumes waving Gadsden flags . But where the sexual freedom and medical privacy of women are concerned, movement conservatives get as panicky and hostile as they do when poor brown people demand governmental self-determination without authorization. Since the GOP has taken over the U.S. House of Representatives and many state governments the escalation of the culture war against female autonomy has been swift. It should lay to waste any lingering wishful thinking on the part of progressives/liberals/moderates that Republican politicians are merely using attacks on reproductive rights as voting booth flypaper for the base. “Oh come on, they’ll never ban abortion! What would they do for a wedge issue if they did that?” Have we not learned by now that yesterday’s “reasonable mainstream position” is today’s right wing “RADICAL LEFTIST OMGZ TEH SOCIALISM!!”?

Let me cosign to what prominent feminist author and blogger Amanda Marcotte said today (emphasis mine):

The past couple of weeks have been exhausting, which is, of course, by design from anti-choicers. The idea is clearly to declare total war on women’s rights in hopes of wearing us down. Where they fail is in understanding how much feminists are ready for this fight. Most of us are exhausted mainly from the lack of support we get from our liberal brethren, who want reproductive rights to be a third tier issue so badly that they convince themselves that it must be one for the right, even though all evidence points to the fact that Republicans have used abortion more than any other issue for a scorched earth policy in eliminating moderates. We’re also exhausted from trying to convince our liberal brethren that anti-choicers really aren’t just super sentimentalists about fetal life, so much as hysterics that think female sexual liberation is the end of life as we know it. (And in a sense, it is, but only because life as we knew it was so terrible for women.)

These past two weeks have done all our work for us. It’s undeniable now that Republicans think stripping women of basic human rights is, to quote John Boehner, a top priority. Not a third tier issue. A top priority. And, it’s clear that the full court press to cut off federal funding for contraception is about cutting off funding for contraception. The head-in-the-sand strategy isn’t going to work anymore. Sure, the word “abortion” is being flung around a lot, but it’s clear from the Lila Rose videos—and from the fact that Title X funds just don’t go to abortion, full stop—that anti-choicers are making a big play to deprive low income and young women of contraception. Which is something pro-choicers have been saying for a long time now. The skepticism about this has been fading for years now, due to the push for abstinence-only education and the way the Bush administration wouldn’t let emergency contraception go over the counter. But this full-blown attack on contraception access is making it really hard to deny that anti-choicers are just that, anti-choice and anti-sex, and that anti-abortion is just the tip of that iceberg

What I’ll add to that is that I think some of the hesitance on the part of Dems to take this issue on in a full-frontal way is because of recent polls that show more Americans identifying as “pro-life” than “pro-choice”. Let’s forget for a second that rights should never be determined by popular support. It’s important to distinguish between the general public and anti-choice activists and politicians who take their cues from them. People who identify as pro-life are not necessarily a monolithic bloc of Operation Rescue sympathizers. I suspect they run the gamut from those who want to ban all abortion and birth control to “I’m personally uncomfortable with abortion and would probably never have one but I don’t want it to be illegal and, geez, I’m totally for birth control being available.” Some people on that latter end of the spectrum might call themselves “pro-life” to a pollster. And polls show that vast majorities of Americans support access to contraception and comprehensive sex ed. So popular opinion is largely on our side on this issue, in addition to our being right about it from a human rights standpoint.

Nancy Pelosi is on the case:

Pelosi described the GOP push as the “most radical assault” on women’s reproductive rights “in our lifetimes.” And she was equally blunt in her assessment of right-wing assaults on family planning.

“They are at a different philosophical place,” she said, characterizing their view as: “all engagement has to result in a child.” Pelosi noted that contraception and family planning is “not consistent with their belief that it’s all about procreation.”

House Republicans have begun work on two bills that would dramatically restrict financing of and access to abortions. They are also looking to zero out funding for Title X, a decades-old program providing federal funds to family planning and reproductive health, which would be a hard hit to Planned Parenthood…

…Pelosi acknowledged that Dems could not stop Republicans from passing their anti-abortion agenda through the House. But she said it was crucial that pro-choice forces and Dems kick up enough noise to ensure that it dies in the Senate: “We have to make this issue too hot to handle.”

Pelosi added that the unreconcilable philosophical differences between Republicans and Dems on abortion left Dems no choice but to adopt a scorched-earth approach to the war ahead. “We don’t have a set of shared values,” she said. “We have to fight this out in the public domain, so when we move to the Senate it has no popular support.”

Yeah, I don’t think most Americans are down with the idea that “all engagement has to result in a child.” I’m pretty sure that includes most Arizonans. Nancy Barto, take note. We’ve had enough of you. Arizona Democrats, take note, this is a big effing deal. Have we had enough of them by now?

Silly women, why did you think you mattered?

Sorry dudes, but we women vote and we don’t care for the likes of Ben Quayle. Quayle’s denials of his involvement with the Dirty Scottsdale website are comical but his misogyny is not. He made comments on Dirty Scottsdale denigrating women as sex objects and is now running on a “family values” platform of wanting to take away our reproductive rights. He couldn’t even give Greta Van Susteren a straight answer to her question of whether Dirty Scottsdale and The Dirty sites degrade women. Quayle is a giant hypocrite who had his fun in the Scottsdale club scene and then, upon deciding he had political aspirations, embraced social conservatism.

Quayle boasts of his “lifelong” social conservatism on his campaign website. IOW, he’s for imposing a harsh and punitive sexual moral code on the little people (women especially) while while he and his rich pals can have a grand old time having “youthful indiscretions” until whenever.

Screw that. And screw anyone who thinks “Brock Landers” doesn’t matter and that Ben Quayle’s disparagement of women and his deplorable hypocrisy don’t matter.

Women matter, guys, and Brock Landers might just get the hell knocked out of him at the ballot box in November.

Howard Stern shows us how here, in his tirade about Gabourey Sidibe having the nerve to exist:

“There’s the most enormous, fat black chick I’ve ever seen. She is enormous. Everyone’s pretending she’s a part of show business and she’s never going to be in another movie,” Stern ranted. “She should have gotten the Best Actress award because she’s never going to have another shot. What movie is she gonna be in?”

And the fact that some of Hollywood’s most powerful players (uh, like Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry) are among 26-year-old actress’ biggest supporters, doesn’t mean squat to Stern.

He knocked Winfrey, who praised Sidibe at the Academy Awards Sunday night and said she was sure Sidibe would have a long, fruitful career.

“Oprah’s another liar, a filthy liar,” added Stern. “She’s telling an enormous woman the size of a planet that she’s going to have a career.”

Your concern about Sidibe’s race and appearance uh I mean career is duly noted, Howard. Then there were were (male) commenters to the article who added their own misogynistic screeds uh I mean concerns for Sidibe’s “health” to the mix. Like this one:

Reading through these comments reminds me when George Carlin famously said, “Picture how stupid the average American is and just think, half of ‘em are even dumber than that.” If anyone thinks this morbidly obese, disgusting pig will ‘have a long life’ or ‘lose weight while Howard can’t do anything about his face’, then you are living in an alternate universe where home prices never go down. Deep down, you know she is a walking heart attack and needs help.

I love how he defends his multi-millionaire hero, Howard Stern, against people who note that Stern’s not exactly easy on the eyes, by saying even meaner things about Gabi Sidibe. But hey, the commenter is worried about Gabi’s heart health, dontchaknow.

I have detested Howard Stern for many years. Both Stern and Rush Limbaugh have thrown red meat to bitter entitled white men every day for over two decades. But at least with Rush you know it’s overtly political and it’s never really been cool to be a Dittohead. OTOH, a liberal white dude can enjoy Howard Stern humiliating women every morning, while insisting that he’s a “feminist” because Howard is pro-choice.

I submit that Howard Stern has contributed more to the coarsening and polarization in the populace than Rush Limbaugh has. For over 20 years, Stern has given hipster cred to being a bigoted misogynistic asshole. But hey, ladies, he cares about our looks, our weight uh I mean, our careers.

The Secretary of State’s Office is proposing changes in state campaign contribution law to bring Arizona into compliance with a U.S. Supreme Court ruling passed down last month.

Under the ruling, companies and labor unions are permitted to spend money to influence candidate elections through methods such as running TV ads about a candidate. Arizona law forbids corporations and unions from spending their own money supporting or opposing state candidates. When the Supreme Court determined such limitations violated First Amendment rights, Arizona’s law became unenforceable…

…The Senate bill, which is sponsored by Senate president Bob Burns, R-Peoria, and Senate minority leader Jorge Luis Garcia, D-Tucson, passed the Senate Judiciary Committee Monday and moves on to the Senate Rules Committee. The House bill, sponsored by Speaker of the House Kirk Adams, R-Mesa, and House minority leader David Lujan, D-Phoenix, is expected to be heard by the House Judiciary Committee this week.

It’s “unenforceable” now, ya know. Therefore, it behooves the legislature to rectify the situation, post haste. It being a big Supreme Court decision and all. I mean, what’s the point of having unenforceable laws on the books?

*cough*

13-3604. Soliciting abortion; punishment; exception

A woman who solicits from any person any medicine, drug or substance whatever, and takes it, or who submits to an operation, or to the use of any means whatever, with intent thereby to procure a miscarriage, unless it is necessary to preserve her life, shall be punished by imprisonment in the state prison for not less than one nor more than five years.

Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973.

The photo on the left is the one that a Florida Christian group used to illustrate their objection to a lesbian couple adopting a child in an alert to members. The photo on the right is the actual couple.

Sigh.

But wait, there’s more! Scott Maxwell, editorialist for the Orlando Sentinel, couldn’t resist adding his own special layer of suckage to this homophobic misogyny extravaganza. I’m sure he meant well, and wanted to take the Florida Family Policy Council to task for their dishonesty, but was this necessary?

And to make their point about just how frightening this ruling was, the Policy Council included a photograph of the couple — a strange and androgynous-looking duo, one with bleached skin and both with mullet haircuts. The couple look so odd (you literally can’t tell whether they are male or female) that one might wonder how any judge could place a young child with such a disturbing-looking duo.

Except the judge didn’t.

The abnormal-looking couple that the Policy Council chose to illustrate this story is not the same couple granted the right to adopt the child.

No, the two-woman couple awarded custody of the 1-year-old — South Florida trade-show executive Vanessa Alenier and her partner, Melanie Leon — look more like J.Crew models: all-American with catalogue clothes and smiles.

The picture that the Policy Council chose was a grotesque caricature.

Grotesque caricature? Of what? I’m not being disingenuous here. I know why the FL Family Policy Council used that photo instead of the real couple. Pretty people are more sympathetic than non-pretty people, and lesbians who don’t resemble stereotypes about lesbians muddle the “gays are different and scary” message. But since when does being non-pretty and having a bad hairdo make you “grotesque”? I’m not sure where Scott’s getting the bleached skin thing from and other than the unflattering haircuts there’s nothing about the pair that would elicit shocked double-takes were they walking around my local Costco. Admittedly, it’s hard to tell the gender of the dark haired one but that’s more a function of the quality of the photo than because the person is freakishly deformed. Honest to God this society is so warped where looks are concerned, especially (of course) with women. Look around you. Most people are not J Crew models and that includes Scott Maxwell, who ain’t all that if you ask me.

Now, I realize there are few things that bring straight dudes from across the political spectrum together like an opportunity to bond over the tragedy of non-conventionally attractive women being allowed to show themselves in public. Kumbaya, bros! But I hadn’t realized that physical appearance had so much bearing on one’s parenting ability. Wow. Hopefully judges are aware of this important factor and aren’t carelessly awarding children to aesthetically challenged people!

I told y’all, there’s all kinds of wrong about this story.

I spent ten years in the military, and nearly a decade more in a male-dominated technical occupation. On more than one occasion, three that I’m aware of, men that I worked with spread false rumors about my sexual promiscuity, and specifically the supposed trysts I had with them. In each case the guy had tried to date me or made a pass at me and I turned him down. Either because they had already told their friends they were going to “nail” me, or as a way to exact revenge for my uppity insistence that I had personal autonomy and could refuse a man (or both), these men talked all kinds of trash about me and smeared my reputation at work. The last time it happened, shortly after I moved to Arizona and was working the night shift at a major manufacturing company, was particularly odious.

“Randy” was a married guy on shift with me. He was entertaining at times, but mostly he was an obnoxious annoying bully. Y’all know the type. They now exactly how far to push people with their jerk-y behavior until they tell him to get out their faces, at which point they become apologetic and behave themselves for a while. Lather rinse repeat. We’ve probably all worked with them and it’s draining enough as it is but I got the special extra privilege of Randy’s persistent amorous attention. He hit on me constantly. I rejected him, constantly. I was far too polite (in retrospect I don’t know why) to tell him I found him repulsive but he was married anyway. I made it (what I thought was) emphatically clear that I don’t take up with married men. Which is true, since I’m one of those godless amoral liberals who actually respects marriage enough not to go around breaking them up. But I digress.

Over a period of several weeks I noticed my coworkers were acting weird around me. Couldn’t put my finger on it but something was a bit…off. One night a female coworker who was sort of a casual friend asked me if it was true about me and Randy. If what was true, I asked. She blurted out that Randy had been telling everyone about the wild and torrid trysts he and I were having on a regular basis. Shocked and appalled, I cornered other people in the department and, yes, they too had heard the Randy’s stories of the assignations I was having with this cretin in hotels and even in the parking lot of our work! Against my better judgment I opted to confront him directly rather than going right to HR as I should have. He denied it at first but as I pushed the matter he finally acknowledged he might have said some things that could have been misconstrued. He apologized profusely and begged me not to tell management. My compassion for his family was the deciding factor in not pursuing a harassment case against him. His wife was a stay-at-home mom and they had 3 kids. I’d like to say my ordeal ended right then but, alas, no. I moved to another shift in early 2000 and after a few months a friend of mine from my former shift called me and let me know that Randy was telling his locker room tales about me again. This time I decided I’d had enough and consulted HR. They thought I definitely had a case against him but I was going to have to line up witnesses willing to sign affidavits that he’d said what he did. Not likely in that good old boy “no snitch” environment, even though several of the guys were sympathetic to me and thought Randy was a pig.

Unsurprisingly, I was not the only woman he lied about. There were at least three other women that I know of whose reputations he tarnished with his sick compulsive lying. The person I really felt sorry for was his wife. Apparently, rumors about Randy and one woman got to her. She confronted the woman at the company holiday party, throwing a drink in her face. It was a horribly embarrassing scene, with the woman Randy lied about professing her innocence profusely and the wife refusing to believe it. I’ve often thought about the wife and wondered what would be worse, having a husband who’s a philandering louse or one who is the kind of weirdo loser who wants to cheat on you but can’t find a woman to do it with him so he lies about it instead.

I don’t know what the deal is with this Duvall character but when I look at him and read the outlandishness of his claims I’m reminded of Randy. This story has been the subject of much tittering and speculation in the blogosphere and it ticks me off that even though the energy lobbyist 19 years his junior is denying Mike Duvall’s claim (as of this writing) most people seem to believe him. And they are doing so based on some pretty flimsy evidence. When I suggested that Assemblyman Duvall may have been telling tall tales on a progressive discussion board here are some of the comments I got:

She may have thought it was part of her “job” description.

Her first lobbyist job only lasted 3 months, I wonder what the reason was for the change. She just became a lobbyist this year. (All of this is available on a CA government lobbyist oversight web page…

Isn’t bragging about sex with a lobbyist a bit like bragging about sex with a prostitute?

Excuse me? I happen to know several female lobbyists in Arizona and they are ultra-professional and take their jobs very seriously. But here’s my favorite:

Yes, but if he was telling a whopper just to impress he would have made it the waitress at the local Hooters or the head cheerleader at the college…or even the hottest intern. That he made it a 36 year old lobbyist…well that one has a ring of truth to it.

Well of course it does. You know, once women hit 35 and get all old and gross and stuff we take whatever we can get, am I right ladies? Thanks so much, liberal dude, for the helpful reminder.

I wonder what the reaction would be if the female lobbyist had accused the male lawmaker of raping her. Something tells me her account of the alleged incident would be greeted with a lot more skepticism than his account of their alleged affair. Yes, rape is a serious charge so skepticism is warranted, but this story and my own experience speak to a big problem we have in society where, when it comes to matters of sex, women are usually assumed to be lying while men are assumed to be telling the truth.

But, the point of this post is neither to garner sympathy nor to gripe about the budget or lege. I happened upon a site called the Valley PR Blog, one of whose writers is a friend and fellow resident of the Tuke, Len Gutman. Len wrote a post about Michael Jackson and the power of PR to transform a troubled legacy posthumously. I happen to agree with Len but one of the commenters, a charming fellow named Tyler Hurst, didn’t. So I started responding, and then he started responding and then hilarity ensued in the comments section.

Tyler says he might blog about me. If he does I promise that I will share his special eloquence with Diva readers.

I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat, or a prostitute.

Rebecca West – 1913

Just sayin’.