Jenn Q. Public
Jenn escaped blue state academia for redder pastures in the South. Follow her on Twitter and read more of her work at JennQPublic.com.
by Tammy Bruce
And an indication of how much work there is to do. The host described this Ryan Sorba’s bigoted rant as “freedom of opinion.” Would she have said the same if some loon got up there and started ‘condemning’ CPAC for having African-Americans in attendance? And we complain about the enemy living in the stone age.
“She was black, they were white, and race and sex were in the air.” That’s how a Washington Post columnist described the atmosphere that led to the brutal gang rape of Crystal Mangum by a group of Duke University lacrosse players in 2006. You remember, right? That was the violent, racially motivated hate crime that never happened.
Mangum is in the news again, but this time she won’t find an army of race-obsessed charlatans, Marxist demagogues, and pandering politicians speeding to her defense. The Left only rolls out that treatment for struggling black single mothers when their harrowing tales bolster an ideological agenda. Pulling off the “virtuous victim of white privilege” shtick won’t be easy when Mangum faces charges of child abuse, arson, and attempted murder. read more…
Wednesday morning I published a piece about the media’s unsurprising embrace of Bart Centre, the anti-theist whose Web site offers devout Christians a chance to purchase post-Rapture pet care contracts. Bart dropped by NewsReal to “correct one or two errors” in my post. Four comments later, I’m still waiting for him to point out an actual error.
Does Bart believe that saying I made errors will make it come true? That’s quite a feat of magical thinking for an avowed atheist who purports to be guided by reason and rational thought. read more…
Bart Centre runs Eternal Earth-Bound Pets, a Web site that promises “the next best thing to pet salvation in a Post Rapture World.” He’s also a militant atheist. For a one-time payment of $110, Centre guarantees that a “confirmed atheist” will adopt your pet if the Rapture occurs in the next decade and Fido is left behind.
An enlightened, kind-hearted atheist entrepreneur legally fleecing the fundie flock? Now that’s a narrative hook the media can’t resist. read more…
by William Saletan
Rhiannon O’Donnabhain felt like a woman trapped in a man’s body. So she changed her body. She hired a surgeon to turn her scrotum* and penis into a vagina and clitoris. She got hormones and additional surgery to make her breasts look like a woman’s. Then she did something really ballsy: She wrote off these expenses—about $20,000—on her tax return. The IRS told her to stuff it. So she went to court.
O’Donnabhain said she took the hormones and got the surgery to treat gender identity disorder, a certified psychiatric illness. The IRS didn’t buy it. The agency dismissed GID as a “social construction.” It said her procedures were done to adjust her appearance, not to fix a physical defect. Therefore, the IRS argued, her expenses were cosmetic, not medically necessary.
This month, the U.S. Tax Court decided the case. Guess what? The transsexual beat the tax man. The court concluded that altering your appearance to make yourself socially comfortable can be medically necessary and therefore tax-deductible.
Filmmaker Kevin Smith (Clerks, Dogma) was thrown off a Southwest Airlines plane Saturday night when the flight crew determined he posed a “safety risk” due to his size. The overweight celeb immediately took to Twitter to air his grievances. Here’s his multi-tweet tantrum (organized into paragraphs for semi-coherence): read more…
by Jennifer Rubin
Obama is getting flack from his own party for lacking the common touch, failing to connect with ordinary voters, and struggling to identify with Middle America. The mainstream media is baffled because, they say, he came from a middle-class background. What’s the problem? They are stumped.
Much of the problem is that his background isn’t so much middle class as it is academic. A large chunk of his adult life has been spent attending, teaching in, and living in close proximity to elite universities. The intellectual bent (e.g., disdainful of American exceptionalism, ignorant of the workings of free-market capitalism, infatuated with the public sector) and the posture (e.g., remote, condescending) of liberal academics are evident in Obama’s persona and governing style. And his saturation in Left-leaning elite schools certainly explain much of what ails him.
by Megan McArdle
Everyone knows that people without health insurance are more likely to die. But are they?
In 2009, Ileana Jiménez asked her class of high school juniors and seniors to write letters to President Obama about “the ways in which feminism might be addressed in the curriculum.” Earlier this week she shared one letter on her blog, Feminist Teacher.
It is understandable that teachers cannot be expected to cram decades of struggles into 12 years of study. I just feel that there should be more time in the curriculum starting in the lower grades (if they can learn about the slave trade, they can learn about feminism) dedicated to learning about feminism and the goals behind it.
To do that, I propose that by fourth grade, students be exposed to basic feminist ideas. read more…
by Kurt Schlichter
Some people will tell you that there is no such thing as a stupid question. They’re wrong. People ask stupid questions all the time. It becomes a problem when people do it on purpose.
The “we’re just asking questions” rationale seems to be the explanation du jour for the tiresome and self-destructive continuing “Birther” fixation of some journalists who purport to be on the Right.
Incensed by the completely innocuous Tim Tebow Super Bowl commercial, sports editor Dave Zirin blogged his fury at The Nation yesterday. He admits the ad was “about as vanilla as an Andy Williams Christmas Special.” But it’s not the actual content of the ad that angers Zirin.
It’s the pesky free speech. read more…
By Phyllis Chesler
In Turkey — a country which was nearly accepted as a member by the European Union — a father and grandfather recently buried Medine Memi, a sixteen-year-old girl, alive — and all because she was seen talking to boys. Medine was repeatedly beaten. She ran to the police but they did not help her. When the men buried her she was “alive and fully conscious.”
This savage, heartless, primitive act is the ultimate, logical consequence of burying women alive — shrouding them — while they are still allowed to roam the earth. One becomes claustrophobic under the burqa, until one gets used to, indeed becomes dependent upon, being seen as a ghost, a phantom, invisible, not-quite-human, as good as dead.
Continue reading at Pajamas Media.
