Oaksterdam =/= Oikos.

So whatever happened to Mary Katherine Ham?

And PP is a doormat, so they’re in the make-nice-repair-bridges mode. Gah.

Are you kidding? They’ve won. They got Komen to back down; they’ve let it be known that they are more than prepared to start another shitstorm if Komen decides to de-fund them in the future (don’t forget, it was PP who publicized the decision in the first place); they’ve raised multiples of what Komen pulled from them, so they can not only fund breast cancer screening, but expand the program; they’ve exposed Komen as a branch of the right wing; they’ve gotten more people to think of them as a provider of women’s health care rather than a provider of abortion services; and they’ve shown weasels like Brinker, Handel and that doofus in Congress that they’re *not* going to roll over.

They’re not doormats at all. They just have no need to be ungracious in victory.

However, it’s worth remembering that the Coca-Cola Company survived New Coke.

The New Coke fiasco occurred just as the company changed its formula to replace sugar with HFCS, which significantly altered the flavor. I think that New Coke was always meant as a stall so that the company could make the switch to the new formula without the old formula still on the market for comparison.

The Komen thing was overreach by wingnuts and really shitty PR. They’ve clearly gotten some better PR, since they’ve just told us they’re going to do what they announced on Tuesday anyhow (cut PP’s funding), but everyone’s acting like they really caved.

She must live in Cobble Hill. The brownstones there were owned until 10 or so years ago mostly by Italian immigrants, mainly dockworkers. Then it got gentrified.

And the projects were there long before Katie Roiphe’s house hit $2 mil.

The Truthers like to proclaim that Building 7 was untouched (aside from “a few small fires”) by the attacks. They don’t like it when pictures showing the massive damage WTC 7 suffered are exhibited.

I worked in the building that was kitty-corner to WTC 7 (and across the street from the Burlington Coat Factory Mosque), and we had fusellage on the roof and in some of the windows. Those planes didn’t stop when they hit the towers, they kept going — and one of the first things they hit was WTC 7. My building didn’t get a lot of damage because WTC

What’s your (you all) excuse for the collapse of Building 7?

Rudy Giuliani, who stupidly created a command center with 20,000 gallons of fuel stored in it just a block from the site of an earlier terrorist attack.

I have been an FDL member since the days of MediaWhoresOnline.

Really? ‘Cause your member profile doesn’t have a single comment earlier than June of this year. Nor do you have any diaries, group memberships or friend connections.

IOW: Concern Troll Is Concerned.

“purely grade-based achievement” – WTF??? So Harvard Law just dispenses grades randomly? It doesn’t take hard work? You don’t have to actually know anything?

Sort of. Law school is a tremendous amount of work, but the line on Harvard Law is, “Pay your fee, get your B.” You have to work really hard to distinguish yourself, and you have to work really hard to fuck up. Yale has long had no letter grades for 1Ls, just high pass, pass and low pass.

That said, the top law schools don’t want people failing out, so they pick people who are likely to make it through (I don’t think legacy status counts as heavily at HLS as it does for Harvard undergrad). I went to a different top law school, with a tougher grade curve (that was, mercifully, changed my first year — prior to that, 40% of the class had to be below a B, and there was no B minus), and there was a guy in my first-year class who had sort of unraveled the previous year, failed a lot of his classes, and was given the chance to wipe the slate clean and start over again.

By contrast, I now work at a law school where failure is actually an option, where the school tries very hard to prevent student failure by teaching them the skills they need to get through law school. But the atmosphere is very different.

Does it occur to Ross that maybe it’s the urban, well-educated stratum of society who can afford to have the genetic testing and pay the abortion doctor, and maybe not the poor who live on about $2.50 a day?

And that maybe the poor who can’t afford such things might find other means of ensuring that they only raise sons?

Or maybe, just maybe, that the problem isn’t the availability of abortion, it’s that women are so devalued that it’s considered a reasonable thing to ensure you don’t have any girls?

tejanarusa — is your kitty pooping? Because not only is not eating a very bad thing in cats, but not pooping is awful as well.

I’ve had a cat with the liver thing (and it is really awful; what was worse was that I hadn’t even noticed until she was half-dead that she hadn’t been eating, because my other animals ate her food), and another who got a hairball stuck and stopped eating/threw up everything she ate and then stopped pooping.

Fortunately, the stuck hairball moved, and her system restarted, after several days of force-feeding her hairball remedy. The other one needed hospitalization, surgery, a transfusion and a month of force-feeding before she started eating on her own again.

Shorter me: get that cat to the vet post haste.

Peachy. But I was talking about Ed.

I disagree. He still called her a slut, which is a label slapped on women who get uppity, no matter what their political orientation. There are a hell of a lot of words he could have used after “right-wing” that *didn’t* insult half of humanity — and more than half of the Democratic base.

The English language is full of gender-neutral, race-neutral, sexuality-neutral insults that pass muster with the FCC and *don’t* give Fox the opportunity to trot out the faux-feminist butthurt. A smart progressive ought to know that and make use of them.

It’s not the language that’s offensive, it’s the whole concept. He called her a slut to insult and demean her. But why is it a bad thing for women to have sex, or to — horrors! — enjoy it?

Absolutely, the Republicans took the opportunity to pearl-clutch and get the vapors about civility, but it wasn’t just Republicans who were offended. There’s a reason that feminists fight against this stuff. You may want to look into the recent SlutWalk movement, which arose after a Toronto cop said that women could avoid being raped if they didn’t dress like sluts. Which is of course bullshit, both because rape has much more to do with the rapist than the victim, but also because the really insidious thing about “slut” is that it doesn’t have an actual meaning — it means whatever the user wants it to.

Snape.

You might help your case if you didn’t use “rape” to describe economic turmoil when we’re talking about, as Whoopi Goldberg put it, “rape-rape.”

BTW, what, exactly, was the damage DSK was about to do to the people “who are raping the world’s economy”? He’s on the austerity train with the IMF, so he’s one of the ones making things worse in Ireland, Portugal and elsewhere. Plus, he was about to run for President of France. Even if you think the NYPD’s controlled by Sarkozy, Sarkozy’s not dumb enough to take out DSK so far in advance of the election that someone else can step in to replace him.

Did I say Assange was guilty? I said he’d been accused. Spitzer was guilty, as he admitted.

It’s not unheard of for rich, powerful men who are members of the financial establishment to treat women like shit and to treat the help as their personal playthings.

Eliot Spitzer really did hire prostitutes. Julian Assange really was accused of the rape of two women in Sweden. DSK really does have a history of sexual complaints being lodged against him.

That Spitzer was targeted by Roger Stone or Assange’s alleged crimes were used opportunistically by the US or DSK was swiftly arrested before he left the country does not change the fact that their conduct, or alleged conduct, is criminal.

Frankly, it’s really damned difficult to get the cops to believe an accuser when it comes to a rape case. I’m honestly proud of Sofitel and the NYPD here: they took a complaint by an African immigrant hotel maid against a rich and powerful man seriously, and acted upon her complaint quickly. They didn’t discount her story just because of who the players were.

DSK deserves a fair trial, and if he’s found guilty he deserves jail time, whether or not anyone’s out to get him for other reasons.

It’s kind of pathetic that you can’t see that several things can be true at once: DSK could have enemies trying to destroy him, AND he can be a rapist. It’s not either/or. Moreover, being a reformer or a whistleblower doesn’t balance out being a rapist.

Know what else was going on in the Church in the 60s and 70s? Vatican II, that’s what.

I’m not surprised that the current reactionary crowd is trying to blame everything on John XXIII and his attempts at reforming and modernizing the Church. They’ve been trying to stuff that genie back in the bottle ever since JPII came in.

Because of course women don’t have, or need, jobs.

Attempts to take money from health care to open it up for other uses are being crushed.

These attempts are being crushed because the deal with Medicare taxes is that you pay into them all your working life and you get to have health care at the end of it. Same deal with Social Security. These are dedicated taxes for current expenses and depend on two things: 1) that current workers pay into the system to fund the expenses of retirees, in exchange for the expectation that when they retire, they too will benefit from delayed gratification in this way; 2) that the money collected via the payroll taxes for Medicare and SS is not treated as a slush fund for the kind of social experimentation Bobo advocates.

Here’s an idea, Bobo: raise taxes on your rich friends to pay for your ideas.

There’s always this. Works nicely.