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 Arizona Hospital and Healthcare Association is working with consultants on an initiative it hopes will make it to the ballot in November. It would raise money to stop the state from cutting more than 310,000 people from the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System, the state’s Medicaid program.

Exactly what form the proposed levy would take has yet to be worked out. Laurie Liles, the association’s lobbyist, said consultants and pollsters are looking at what kind of tax would be most palatable to voters. Historically, voters have been particularly receptive to taxing cigarettes; the total levies on those are now $2 per pack.

Funny, I hadn’t realized that The Arizona Hospital and Healthcare Association was a Democratic organization. Someone should let Don Bivens know.

I’ve mentioned here before that I smoke and I did vote for First Things First, though I do agree that tobacco taxes are somewhat regressive. And one of the flaws with using sin taxes to fund programs that don’t directly work to mitigate the harms of the sinful behavior is that they actually do work as disincentives (I smoke a helluva lot less than I used to and the $7 a pack cost has a lot to do with it) and diminish the available funds over time. This leads to having to impose higher fees or find other sins to tax. But when voters are presented with a choice of “pass this regressive tax or poor people will die because they can’t see a doctor” it kind of ties their hands.

That said, I’m immediately suspicious when Republican pundits handwring over “the poor”. Most of them don’t believe in public funding for social services in the first place. Most of them blame the poor for being poor. They definitely don’t think middle class and rich people should be taxed to pay for programs that benefit poor people. So, really, why should they care if poor people are regressively taxed to pay for their own services? Of course, it helps to paint Democrats in a bad light and let them pretend that decades of tax cuts to the rich and corporations had nothing to do with it.

They can also pretend that regressive taxation is fair and just when they present hypothetical contrivances that make it appear to be so, as the conservative blogger does here:

Take the guy who lives in poverty. He pays very little actual tax–primarily on tobacco and if he lives in Phoenix a new sales tax on food. He probably pays no income tax or property tax. Of course, what little tax he actually pays can look like a fairly high percentage, because he has almost no income.

But what does he get from the state? Well, if his kids are in school, the state pays about $8,000 per year per kid to educate them and his family has free health care that’s worth another $5,000 to $10,000 a year. So if he has 3 kids, he receives about $30,000 a year in direct services from the state.

And the guy in Paradise Valley? He gets the same basic services that the poor guys gets, but he surely has health insurance and his kids are likely grown, or they went to private school. So he pays income taxes and property taxes and gets almost nothing in services while the poor guy pays taxes on his cigarettes and gets $30K a year in direct benefits.

Wow, that poor guy is really making out, isn’t he? Let’s look at the health care costs: Is ACCCHS a Cadillac health insurance plan now? Um, no. Assuming he and his family qualify for the full benefit, ACCCHS only pays for whatever health care they consume. If Poor Guy and his family went to the doctor for nothing but routine check ups and vaccinations in a given year, then the state paid far less than $5-10K.

As for Paradise Valley Guy, why assume he doesn’t have kids? Maybe he’s on his second wife and is working the fancy schmancy tuition tax credit racket to pay for Madison’s and Connor’s pricey private school tuition. That’s tens of thousands of public dollars right there. Hey, while we’re hypothesizing, let’s assume Poor Guy works for him. PV Guy pays Poor Guy crap wages and doesn’t give him any benefits. So PV Guy externalizes a truckload of his labor costs onto the public because his employee gets ACCCHS and a host of other benefits. We’re supposed to feel sorry for him and give him YET another tax cut? Don’t think so.

Or, we could stop with the hypotheticals and look at the numbers:

Hey, Arizona Hospital and Healthcare Association, I have one word for you. Oregon.

On edit: If you want to dismiss the percentage the poorest Arizonans pay because you assume they get more government bennies, I suppose you can get away that. But I don’t see what the rich have done to justify getting to pay over a third less what the middle class pays in taxes. People making $40-80K generally don’t qualify for ACCCHS or other public programs. IOW, they’re not getting anything that Paradise Valley Guy doesn’t get (well, except for the tuition tax credits). You can’t justify that disparity, no matter how hard you squint.

I stayed on the site for a while, reading articles by various contributors. The site’s emphasis is on self-improvement, health, and relationships but I liked the overall focus on simplicity and against materialism in many of the articles. A little on psychobabble-y and woo woo side, but still interesting.

At 41, I’m not quite ready to admit to being middle aged yet but I am increasingly aware that kids these days drive too fast and play music I don’t understand. Readers around my age who are dating someone older should know that when they join AARP at age 50, they might think it’s a laugh riot to you up for the group without your knowledge. I was just shy of my 40th birthday when I received my AARP card in the mail. Ha ha, Mark, but you’re still a decade my senior. Although I’m not AARP-age yet, it’s weird to realize that Gen X is entering middle age now, after over two decades of that being strictly Boomer territory.

Anyway since that seque had nothing to do with energy, I’m eager to read McKibben’s book since Amazon reviewers praise him for his clear and unsparing writing. There are too few voices talking about how unsustainable an economic paradigm based on unending growth is, which is tragic since it ought to be part of everyday conversation at this point.

I’ll have a post tomorrow about the bullcrap going on at the lege.

“There was concern about how public policy impacts families,” said Cathi Herrod, who joined the group a couple of years later and is now president. “We were seeing a need to have someone on-site at the Legislature on behalf of family issues.”

The group started out slowly. Herrod said that although there were legislators who supported the center’s agenda, it wasn’t a priority at that time. In recent years, that mentality has begun to change, she said, both in the Legislature and among voters.

“Increasingly, people are understanding that what happens down here impacts their daily lives,” she said.

Aw shucks.

CAP may have started as a small, independent outfit, but very soon after its formation it was known to be affiliated with Focus on the Family, the extremely influential national Religious Right organization. Here’s a Public Eye report from back in 1999 that lists CAP as a FOF state partner organization. It’s hardly a hidden association; there are links to FOF and its subsidiaries all over CAP’s website. Yet CAP presents itself to the mainstream public as a local grassroots effort dedicated to the interests of Arizona families. Hogwash. CAP’s legislative agenda is identical to those of “Family Policy” groups in practically every other state. The hideous bill that requires the publication of personal information of abortion patients is exactly the same as the one passed by the Oklahoma state legislature last year. Yet news outlets in Arizona ignore all that and takes CAP at its word that its mission is independent and local, when in fact it is carrying out the national agenda of reactionary theocrats.

And let’s talk about our other “local think tank”, Goldwater Institute, for a sec. The Public Eye identified GI as an affiliate of the State Policy Network.

Founded in 1992, the State Policy Network
(SPN) evolved from the now defunct Madison Group, a network of
conservative organizations created in the aftermath of a 1986 meeting at the Madison Hotel in Washington, DC. The State Policy Network is based in Ft. Wayne, Indiana and serves as a coordination agency for
37 state-level think tanks in 30 states.

Although corporate money and executives are the dominant presence in these think tanks, they nevertheless do not solely promote business interests. The tendency is to focus on conservative/libertarian campaigns, from welfare reform to school privatization.
According to Byron Lamm, the longtime Executive Director of the State
Policy Network, all the think tanks advocate “free market solutions to public policy, with an emphasis on individual rights and responsibility.” While there are often different emphases, determined by the interests
of the leadership and the local situation, the think tanks share broad ideological agreement and nearly identical political agendas—primarily supporting privatization of most government services and advocating
“free market solutions” to public policy issues from health care to the environment. Most have a strong emphasis on school privatization. They favor deregulation of business and oppose organized labor.

Because the think tanks of the SPN generally reflect the business/libertarian wing of the GOP, some of them avoid dealing
with such social issues as abortion and gay rights, on which some GOP libertarians such as William Weld, former governor of Massachusetts, are often at odds with the Christian Right. Eight SPN think tanks,
including the Goldwater, Pioneer, and Heartland Institutes (but none
of the Family Policy Councils) reflect a specifically libertarian orientation through their “partnership” in Freemarket.net, an on-line libertarian
network sponsored by the Henry Hazlitt Foundation. However, the agenda of many SPN think tanks seems to mesh well with the Christian
Right, and others are indistinguishable from the Christian Right’s agenda. For example, the California Resource Institute described a 1999 bill in the California legislature (proposing that the states 140 “charter schools” be unionized like the rest of the publicly funded school system) as an effort to “squash the academic freedom of charter schools.” Such an anti-union stance reliably appeals to both the business and Christian Right wings of the Republican Party, and often generates popular appeal well beyond that base. The ideological differences among SPN affiliates
seem to originate in the circumstances surrounding their founding and funding.

Again, not a hidden association, but one that has never, to my recollection, been acknowledged in the AZ news media.

A while back I joked about Goldwater not having a position on gay rights or abortion because they were scared of Cathi Herrod. Now it’s clear why Goldwater and other SPN groups don’t articulate positions on those social issues. They let FOF groups like CAP drive the Republican base to the polls while retaining their libertarian cred. They’re all about their “classical liberal approach”. Well, except on immigration, where they suddenly remember that businesses need cheap labor uh Joe Arpaio is a racist thug.

Notice how silent CAP is on immigration? Remarkable that an organization touted as the most powerful lobbying group at the AZ Capitol, and that claims it looks out for Arizona families, has nothing to say about arguably the hottest and most contentious issue in this state, don’t you think?

I’m sure there’s a reason for it.

With state finances evaporating, Gov. Jan Brewer is moving to help those with needs get their services from church and nonprofit groups.

In an executive order Tuesday, Brewer created a 20-member task force to coordinate volunteer efforts statewide. The panel also will look for ways to both inform people of the services that are available.

One of the focus areas will be helping put low-income families together with organizations that provide free or low-cost child care.

That follows budget cutbacks last year which have limited the number of people who will get state subsidies to help them pay for the services. That created a waiting list for any new applicants, a waiting list the governor’s office said now caps 10,500 children.

More than half of those children, according to the state, are in families below the federal poverty level of $18,312 for a family of three.

“Child care assistance is critical to helping families retain employment and become self-sufficient,” the governor’s office said in a release. More to the point, they said allowing parents to keep their jobs while knowing their children are in good hands avoids two less desirable alternatives: quitting work and turning to government assistance, or leaving children in unregulated facilities.

Psst…Governor…you know, when government coffers are bare, the same situation tends to hold for charities. I’m sure your efforts to link people in need of childcare to charities will bear some limited fruit, but I predict that the state will still be left with thousands of single mothers who will be left with no choice but to go on welfare.

Since we’re on the topic, and because my status as a childless spinster makes me the foremost expert on parenthood, I have to ask: Why is it that conservatives insist middle class mothers absolutely must stay home with their young children while at the same time acting as though poor women staying home with their children is a heinous offense against society? As an expert on childrearing, I must insist that the children of poor people deserve the same consideration as their better, whiter, non-poor counterparts. Therefore, it stands to reason that we should just go ahead and pay welfare to the poor mothers. Right, conservatives?

Skeptic Argument vs What the Science Says

1 “It’s the sun” In the last 35 years of global warming, the sun has shown a slight cooling trend. Sun and climate have been going in opposite directions.
2 “Climate’s changed before” Natural climate change in the past proves that climate is sensitive to an energy imbalance. If the planet accumulates heat, global temperatures will go up. Currently, CO2 is imposing an energy imbalance due to the enhanced greenhouse effect. Past climate change actually provides evidence for our climate’s sensitivity to CO2.
3 “There is no consensus” That humans are causing global warming is the position of the Academies of Science from 19 countries plus many scientific organisations that study climate science. More specifically, 97% of climate scientists actively publishing climate papers endorse the consensus position.

Click on each rebuttal, and you get an in-depth explanation. This is a godsend. It’s like a snopes.com on global warming for us non-scientists. They do a nice job on the “Climate-gate” email hubbub.

Sadly for Kavanagh, the Democrats and Governor Brewer are totally trying to harsh his mellow with their tedious “legal arguments” about some bogus law that passed by the stupid “voters” back in 2000. It mandates that Arizona fund Medicaid for people making 100% Federal Poverty Level or less. Whatever.

Brewer, in her budget plan, said Arizona can’t afford to have more than 1.2 million people — about one out of every six Arizonans — getting their care from the public. She proposed taking the question back to voters.

Kavanagh, however, said that’s not necessary.

He is relying on a section of the initiative which says the expansion is funded by tobacco dollars “and shall be supplemented, as necessary, by any other available sources including legislative appropriations and federal monies.”

“As of now, there are no other available sources,” Kavanagh said.

“We’re broke,” he continued. “We’re $3 billion in the hole.”

The Gov wanting to take it to the voters isn’t going to go over well with the GOP legislators but at least she retains some of her Family Values^TM and Pro-Life^TM cred with her willingness to boot poor people off health care benefits.

Speaking of corporations, here’s what I want folks to take away: The vast majority of people who will be thrown off the program are working people. They will be added to the already swollen ranks of the working uninsured, currently 37% of the under age 65 population in Arizona. According to the Families USA pdf I linked, 80% of the uninsured in Arizona are in the labor force. 60% of them are below 200% FPL in income. Now we’re looking at the possibility of over 40% of working Arizonans not having any form of health coverage.

But the companies that employ many of them deserve more tax cuts, right?

Give me a break.

One of the things I dislike about public assistance programs is that they effectively function as a subsidy to low wage employers. If you know your workers will qualify for food stamps, Medicaid, EITC, free school lunches and a host of other government programs, you can pay them as little as you can get away with and know that they are mollified enough to keep working at your burger joints instead of burning them to the ground. Which is why I find business owners whining about taxes and minimum wages to be incredibly annoying.

Unfortunately, cutting burger flippers off Medicaid won’t cause their employers to start providing them with affordable health coverage. They’ll just go without. Of course, if you are a person like John Kavanagh, that doesn’t trouble you. It probably enhances the pleasure you take in your nice home in Fountain Hills and your generous health plan if burger flippers are not getting to go to the doctor.

FRANK: In this country, we had slavery for God knows how long. And now we look back on it and we say “How brave were they? What was the matter with them? You know, I can’t believe, you know, four million slaves. This is incredible.” And we’re right, we’re right. We should look back on that with criticism. It is a crushing mark on America’s soul. And yet today, half of all black children are aborted. Half of all black children are aborted. Far more of the African-American community is being devastated by the policies of today than were being devastated by policies of slavery. And I think, What does it take to get us to wake up?

He was being interviewed by blogger Mike Stark on the topic of Rush Limbaugh mocking an uninsured woman using her dead sister’s dentures.

I’ve met Congressman Franks socially on two occasions. Both times in small groups where people were engaging in innocuous superficial chatter, as folks are wont to do in nonpartisan gatherings. Both times, Franks commandeered the conversation into a creepy harangue about abortion and made everyone visibly uncomfortable. Many, many other people have reported similar encounters with Franks.

Think Progress says to start watching the youtube at 6:20 but if you watch from the beginning you’ll see that you only have to get 1:04 minutes in before Trent segues into abortion. I think we can safely say that dude is obsessed with the topic. And this isn’t the first time he’s linked abortion with African American slavery and a genocide conspiracy.

Stark approached Franks with the intention of discussing Limbaugh and to bolster his case that “bipartisanship” is a pipe dream so I can’t criticize him for not challenging Franks on the merits of his bogus anti-choice conspiracy theory mongering. But I’ll do it: Black women do indeed have a higher abortion rate but it’s due to a significantly higher rate of unintended pregnancy in their community, due to less access to reliable birth control and medically accurate information. As I’ve noted numerous times on this blog, anti-choicers get free reign to bloviate about abortion but are rarely, if ever, asked probing questions about their true positions on contraception and sex ed by the MSM. Which is maddening, because anti-choicers have been at the forefront of blocking every program that has proven to reduce unintended pregnancies while advancing dangerous nonsense like abstinence-only sex “education” and crackpot conspiracy theories in the most vulnerable communities.

I googled several permutations of “Trent Franks” and “contraception” and “birth control”. Several links of Franks blathering about abortion and several links to his votes against family planning funding but no direct statements on birth control. My travels on Teh Interwebz led me to this awesome gem by GWU researchers Naomi Chan and June Carbone.

The legal fights over what forms of contraception are permissible, who has access and under what circumstances, are fundamentally about control of the socialization of the next generation. The much more divisive (and seemingly principled) issue of abortion receives the lion’s share of publicity and anger, but contraception has been, and remains, a hidden casualty of the conflict. It is also an issue ripe for reframing – and for making the subterranean assaults on women’s interests visible. While feminist theory can be separated into various strands – liberal, radical, dominance, reconstructive – and various waves – first, second, and third — virtually all feminists would place women’s ability to control our own bodies as a central tenet. Moreover, if there is any issue that should be able to rally consensus support with the general public, it should be the principle of reducing unwanted pregnancies. We believe that both abstinence and abortion are distracters in this effort; the critical issue is the availability and
affordability of birth control. Over 95% of sexually active Americans will use contraception at some point in their lives, over 90% of Americans will engage in non-marital sexuality, and over 60% agree that sexuality outside of marriage is permissible. Moreover, unlike abortion, there is little objection to contraception per se, with even 75% of Catholics agreeing that the Church’s position on birth control should be changed.

Yet, amidst controversies over abstinence education in public schools and the continuing abortion wars, the class-based nature of contraceptive access has become invisible. We explore the hypocrisy of a system that, whatever its values, makes reproductive autonomy readily available for the affluent and the sophisticated and increasingly beyond the reach of the most vulnerable. We also consider the potential of contraception as a reframing device, capable of exposing the hypocrisy of family values advocates whose policies disproportionately hurt the most vulnerable. This paper traces the history of attempts to restrict contraception, the legal events securing widespread access to contraception and their importance to a generation of college-aged women, the short-lived nature of the consensus that produced them, and the potential of the issue to serve as a rallying point for a revitalized feminism.

I love it when people smarter than I am put my discombobulated thoughts into words. For a very long time, I’ve been convinced that arguing with conservatives about abortion is a waste of time because the more important issue is contraception, and, more to the point, who is allowed to have sex. If anti-choicers really cared about stopping abortion, then they’d be calling for condom dispensers on every corner and female-controlled birth control on demand. But instead they prescribe abstinence for all unmarried people, regardless of age. I’m 41, I’ve never married. I’m supposed to be abstaining? Really?

Somehow, a marriage certificate is a magical prophylactic.

The only truly “safe sex” out there is sex between married couples that are faithful to each other for life. If you’re single, then the only safe sex is no sex. Abstinence is not engaging in sexual contact (vaginal, anal, oral, or any other genital contact whatsoever) with another person. If you are not practicing abstinence while single then you are making yourself vulnerable to potentially deadly diseases and pregnancy. Condoms simply cannot provide complete protection against STIs or unplanned pregnancies. Having anything other than married, monogamous sex—even with a condom—is like playing Russian roulette with your life. You are choosing to put a bullet in the gun and hold it up to your head. All you can hope for is that it doesn’t fire, this time. But there are no guarantees.

Choosing to save sex for the special person you will end up spending the rest of your life with is the only way to truly enjoy the gift of sex without the risk of getting a life-threatening STI or causing an unplanned pregnancy. This will also increase your likelihood of having a healthy relationship. This is your life we are talking about here. We want you to make it a good one.

If you don’t take control of and responsibility for your sexual life, who will?

Because no one was ever infected by a spouse who had prior sexual experience or who cheated during the marriage. And no one ever got pregnant without wanting to with someone with whom they were married. Nope, no way, that never happens.

Really? Trent, what say you on all of this?

House Bill 2701 was killed two days after hearing from several solar companies, including Suntech Power Holdings Co. Ltd., which threatened to abandon plans to locate a factory in Goodyear.

The bill was seen as a potential showdown with the Arizona Corporation Commission, which had set standards requiring state utilities get 15 percent of their energy from renewable sources such as solar and wind by 2025. Provisions included the classification of nuclear power as a renewable.

Solar industry officials said the bill had the potential to gut the industry in the state. Other companies protesting the bill were First Solar and Arizona Public Service Co.

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer issued a statement thanking bill sponsor Rep. Debbie Lesko, R-Glendale, for pulling the bill from consideration.

“This sends a clear and united message to employers around the world — Arizona remains the premier destination for solar industries,” Brewer said in the statement.

Since much of the impetus behind this bill was a grab by the Legislature at the ACC’s authority, expect this issue to be resurrected, maybe minus the unpopular solar-killing aspect. Still, this needs to be used as a campaign issue against the sponsors, especially LD12’s Weiers, Montenegro, and Nelson. Smooth move, guys, jeopardizing a big solar project in your district.

Then, there’s this:

The two-week fight over the bill may already have inflicted damage on Arizona’s chances to land at least one company, China’s Yingli Green Energy. The Austin Business Journal, sister paper of the Phoenix Business Journal, reported on its Web site Thursday that Yingli was offered a contract with the Texas city to locate its manufacturing facility there.

Yingli, while not publicly committed to Arizona, had received a federal tax credit from the U.S. Department of Energy to locate in Arizona. The company potentially could lose millions in the credit if it switches states, as DOE officials said the grants cannot be transferred.

Hopefully that’s an overblown concern, especially since a federal tax credit is at stake, but still, thanks ever so much to the myopic dimwits in our State Legislature that it’s even an issue.

Join me in a fight to save utility customers millions of dollars from unreasonable mandates placed on them by the Arizona Corporation Commission.

These mandates have forced electric-utility companies to charge a tariff on utility bills over and above the cost of electricity. For example, APS will charge utility customers an extra $153 million this year because of the mandates placed on them by the Corporation Commission.

The item on the APS bill is titled “Environmental Benefit Surcharge.” Although it is a relatively small amount for residential customers, it adds up to thousands of dollars for each business and industry. The Sun City Recreation Centers paid over $52,000 in this extra tariff in 2009.

Businesses and facilities that have to pay this extra charge will be forced to raise their prices just to cover the additional costs.

To fight these outrageous mandates, I have introduced House Bill 2701. I have the support of 51 other legislators, but I expect that I will have a battle on my hands and need your help.

For more information or to join me in my fight, call me at 602-926-5413 or e-mail me at: DLesko@azleg.gov. – Debbie Lesko, Glendale
The writer is a Republican state representative from District 9, which includes Sun City, Youngtown and parts of Glendale and Peoria.

$52,000 in 2009 for The Sun City Recreation Centers? To the internets we go, divas! From The Sun City Recreation Centers website:

With seven recreation centers, eight golf courses and more than 120 chartered clubs, there’s something for everyone in Sun City!

For a total of 15 facilities, that works out to about $288 a month per facility. These aren’t residential homes, mind you. These are huge facilities that use a lot of energy and have thousands of members paying annual dues. If they can’t afford a little under $300 a month to help promote renewable energy in Arizona, they’ve got far bigger problems than being spared that surcharge is going to solve.