1. Sandy Hook “Truthers” (also known as Newtown “Truthers” and/or batshit paranoiacs who of course ALL HAVE GUNS!)

2. The CEO of Whole Foods, John Mackey, who thinks that Obamacare is not socialist (Sweden) but fascist (Nazi Germany).  As I commented on HuffPo, I’m glad I know where NOT to buy my bulk quinoa and Rice Dream from now on.

3. Suzanne Moore, Julie Burchill, and any other vagina-born person who considers intersectionality a bad thing.  Allow me to introduce them to my new favorite meme, the RadFem Scorpion:

4. The godawful people who run the NRA.

5. Lance Armstrong apologists.  And Lance Armstrong.  Gawd, I can’t stand that guy.

6. That dude who thinks that an effective way to shut down the work of a feminist writer is to call her “ugly.” Instead of feeling badly for Jen McCreight, Jessica Valenti, and Sandra Fluke, I have to ask this Mr. Roosh fella: WHY AM I NOT ON THIS LIST?!  I’m a feminist and an atheist, dammit!  Why aren’t you giving me the same blog traffic as Amanda Marcotte?  Do you not love me?  I am a lady, so of course I need your approval.  What can I do to win it?  Are there not enough unflattering pictures of me in the internets?  Here’s one you can use, taken just after I returned from a vacation to Cancun:

Add your own reasons for staying locked inside your house in the comments section.

….then we fix education.  Why?  THIS:

Yeah, indeed.  I learned this handy fact in ninth grade.  Why didn’t he??

Happy Affordable Care Act Day, everyone!

There are some days in which I deeply regret waking up and opening the laptop.  I want to rewind my day completely: unbrew the coffee, uncook the oatmeal, unpack the lunches, unkiss the children goodbye.

Today is one of those days.

Photo credit: Patrick Smith/Getty Images

This happened last night.  I’m in shock.  I’m nauseated.  I’m so tense I can barely pry my jaw open for said coffee and oatmeal.

It is honestly killing me that thousands of people would take to the streets to support a man accused of covering up the sexual assault of children.  

These people are mostly college students, the types who are gravely affected by the issues that sparked Occupy Wall Street.  But are they protesting the fact that the hyperinflation of college fees and predatory lending policies mean that their average student loan debt will be well over $20K per person? No.  They are protesting the firing of an 84-year-old man who allegedly conspired to hush up the actions of a serial pedophile.  What the hell is wrong with them?

Add the menacing warning of Herman Cain’s lawyer to those who accuse the powerful of sexual assault and harassment (“THINK TWICE”) and you have a headache that just won’t quit and a strong desire to crawl back into bed, wishing that this day never happened.

Welcome to a rape culture morning, folks.

On November 24, 2010, I wrote a post on Tom Hackbarth’s pistol-packing girlfriend-stalking scandal. I’m rerunning the piece in its entirety today because 1) it remains one of my most popular posts of all time, 2) a Google search of “Tom Hackbarth,” a Minnesota legislator, leads you to my blog, which I find totally hilarious, and 3) last Friday, Speaker of the House Kurt Zellers quietly gave back  Hackbarth’s chair of the House Environment, Energy, and Natural Resources Policy and Finance Committee.  This leadership position was yanked from Hackbarth in the wake of allegations that he was, y’know, stalking a woman with a loaded gun.  Apparently Zellers thought that all the 9/11 hoo-hah would keep folks sufficiently distracted from such a move.

Thanks, MN GOP, for letting women in Minnesota know how seriously you take their safety!  When they’re in the womb, they’re bulletproof (no pun intended), but once they’re out, all bets are off!

TOM HACKBARTH: ARMED AND JEALOUS (BUT STILL PRO-LIFE)!

by The Radical Housewife, 11/24/10

City Pages captioned this shot “Tom Hackbarth goes looking for a girlfriend”

That my beloved home state has gone to the crazies is no longer news; the level of bizarre behavior, on the other hand, is what makes even a not-very-liberal-newspaper-anymore stand up and take notice.  From the article “Armed Lawmaker Stopped by Police in Highland Park” (StarTribune, November 23) by Chao Xiong:

A state representative said it was a misunderstanding when he parked his car in the Planned Parenthood lot in Highland Park and was later stopped by St. Paul police because of the revolver he was carrying near his waistband.

A misunderstanding happens over Thanksgiving dinner, when your relatives make snide remarks about your vegetarianism. When a pro-life legislator from waaaaaay out in the exurbs is found chillin’ with a loaded gun in the parking lot of a big-city PP where surgical abortions are performed, even my carnivorous cousins know better. But let’s allow Tom Hackbarth to explain himself, shall we?

[Hackbarth] didn’t know he was at Planned Parenthood when he pulled into the empty lot so that he could look for a woman he had met online.

It’s been a long time since I was in the dating pool, but I don’t remember arranging rendezvous at Planned Parenthood. And I’m pro-abortion, remember??

Hackbarth said he had coffee with the woman on Nov. 15, and asked her to dinner the next night but she told him she couldn’t because of a commitment she had with a female friend in Highland Park. Hackbarth said he felt that she might have been seeing a man instead, so he parked his car and walked around the block looking for her car. (The security guard spotted Hackbarth’s gun when he got out of his car and put on a winter coat.)

I see the misunderstanding now. He wasn’t threatening to shoot up the clinic, the doctors, the staff, the clients; he was stalking someone! That’s cool, right? Pat Kessler, a reporter with the local CBS affiliate, connects the dots that Xiaong wouldn’t:

Police say Hackbarth exhibited the behavior of a stalker: angry, looking for a woman, with a fully loaded gun.

Not much to misunderstand, there.

Hackbarth was apparently on the hunt for his girlfriend whom he’d recently met online.

Lest you misunderstand: I did not use the word HUNT in the sentence above. Pat Kessler did, the naughty boy. Hackbarth told him:

“She gave me some line of baloney, and I thought, ‘well, she’s fibbing to me.’ You could tell, and I thought, ‘well, I’m going to check it out.’ and I went there to see if she was around and her vehicle was not there. And I was just checking on her,” he said.

No misunderstanding here. MORE dirt comes to us from the St Paul Pioneer Press, the town that had the honor of hosting the arrest! [UPDATE: the PiPress wants you to pay for access to this article now, the cheapskates.  You'll just have to trust my quotations and that I am a paragon of journalistic integrity. Heh]

Police reports note officers found extra ammunition for the revolver, a map and binoculars in the front of Hackbarth’s vehicle.

!!!!!

Hackbarth provided officers the name of the woman but said he had no contact information for her and could not recall the website where he met her. He said he uses “maybe three or four” different dating sites and couldn’t remember which one….. He said the woman he was looking for was the only one he had ever actually met face to face through online dating. “You don’t get a lot of responses when you say you’re separated,” he said.

Or when you’re a really, really big asshole.

No misunderstanding here: a recently divorced jerk met a woman online who was wise enough to keep her phone number and address to herself. Said jerk, convinced that this woman could not possibly be immune to his charms, drove down to the big city to stalk her. Sadly, there are dicks like Hackbarth everywhere, armed or otherwise.

I don’t relish the fact that a guy who votes with the Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life 100% of the time is shown to have little respect for post-born life. It happens all the time. To this crowd, a woman’s body is property: of the state, of heterosexual men, and especially of heterosexual men who run the state!

As Minnesota gets nuttier, all I can say is: Jesse Ventura, come back! ALL IS FORGIVEN!

Mike Burbach, Editor: mburbach@pioneerpress.com

Mike Bass, Sports Editor: mbass@pioneerpress.com

As a reader unfamiliar with Joe Soucheray’s style, I cannot tell whether his May 19, 2011 column was meant to skewer the unenlightened readers who suggested he was somehow un-masculine for protesting the dangers of modern football, or whether he aimed to prove his macho bona fides via said mockery. Whatever the intentions of Soucheray himself, the message made by the print headline was clear: “No. I’m still a man, not a woman. It’s football that changed.”

I’m a writer as well as a feminist activist—I am not interested in policing language. Yet I am keenly aware of the power that words have, particularly in the hands of a major newspaper, to perpetuate stereotypes that are at best, irritating, and at worst, dangerous. Soucheray’s column and accompanying headline reinforce the message that for a presumably heterosexual man, there is no worse offense than to be called a woman.

Thanks to a half-century of civil rights progress, it is no longer considered acceptable to use race, ethnicity, or perceived sexual orientation as a slur. No editor would approve a headline that read “No. I’m still a man, not a faggot,” for fear of significant (and richly deserved) backlash. Why is gender still, after all these years, fair game?

Rigid gender stereotypes hurt everyone, from men who are prevented from developing emotional relationships with their children to women who are stymied by sexism in the workplace. As a newspaper that hopes to survive in the 21^st century, the writers and editors of the Pioneer Press would be wise to make decisions that better reflect our changing times.

Shannon Drury

President, Minnesota NOW

The clip below, from a hearing in the Minnesota State Legislature on Friday, May 6, has already made its way around the Minnesota blogosphere, but it deserves national attention. It needs to go big: crazy nasty-ass honey badger big, “leave Britney alone!” big, Rebecca Black big, bed intruder big. How else to respond to the implication, made by state representative Glenn Gruenhagen, that the seven men on the Burger Court decided Roe v. Wade in 1973 just to get in women’s pants??!

WHAT REP. GRUENHAGEN SAYS:
“Let me just remind you, especially ladies, it was seven men that made abortion legal. Not seven women. Now what’s the significance of that? Men, a certain percentage, have developed a perverted view of women and what abortion tells men is they can use women and lose them. OK? Use and lose them and run from their responsibility… Again I plead with you, ladies, help men support legislation that teaches men to accept their responsibility when conceiving with a woman. Don’t support government legislation and programs that tell men they can impregnate women and run away from their responsibilities. Please ladies, think about what’s been done to you in the last 40 to 50 years.”

WHAT ‘LADIES’ HEAR:
“Forget what you may have heard in those ‘womyn’s studies’ classes of yours–those seven men on the Supreme Court in 1973 were horny, twisted perverts. Harry Blackmun wrote the majority opinion to score with loose Washington chicks, not to guarantee your right to medical privacy. Thurgood Marshall, your civil rights hero? Voted on Roe to realize his dream of boinking every last clerk in the office, not to give you any civil rights of your own. Ladies, men are dirty hornballs who need to fuck everything that moves! Only abortion law keeps us in line! Heaven knows that YOU don’t want sex. Justice Elena Kagan, a celibate spinster, would NEVER have voted in favor of a woman’s sexual agency. I know she’ll vote like a proper lady when the time comes.”

First they came after my womb:

Then they came after my friends:

Minnesota Republicans offer constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage

DFLers ding GOP for social issue ahead of budget shortfall

Now they want…..MY SON??

From an action alert issued by the PACER Center, a nonprofit organization that provides education, support and advocacy for Minnesota children with disabilities:

“Stop just a second,” says Glenn Back on the the clip below, reacting to O’Donnell’s totally unshocking revelation. “Hookers? Who? Who depends on Planned Parenthood? (whines) I’ve got 400 abortions that I HAVE to have…. I’m DEPENDING on Planned Parenthood.”

If you can stand it, give the boys a listen, will you? You’ll understand so much about how entitled, right-wing white men feel about women. In their universe, any woman taking control of her sexual health is a prostitute–and that’s A Bad Thing. A burn-in-hell kinda thing.

Adding to the moral confusion, these white men proceed make fun of people who need condoms, then they will make fun of people who want to take the Pill instead of using condoms, and THEN they will make fun of people who don’t want to wear condoms. Huh?

Perhaps Barbara Kruger could shed some light on the subject?

I would also add: “100% of them will never be shamed for their sexuality.” Fuckers.

If you know me, you know that I come from a long line of old-fashioned Minnesota liberals who put the “farmer” and “laborer” in the name of our state’s Democratic Party. My Grandma Rose revered FDR like a god. My own political shero, Shirley Chisholm, wasn’t treated wonderfully by the party back in the day, but she remained convinced that reform from within was the only way to go. In her spirit (call it What Would Shirley Do?), I felt moved to respond to a new campaign of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.