>how head-spinningly fast SGK scrambled to reverse themselves,

From what I’ve read, this “reversal” is just PR bullshit.

I wasn’t saying it wasn’t. Only that the fact that they did it belies Parker’s claim that they either weren’t losing donations, or didn’t care if they did.

They put out a statement out of panic at losing all of the support and donations. I’m not advocating that anyone believe it.

My point, in case it wasn’t clear though I suspect it was, was that Parker making this into a matter of whether they have the “right” to do what they want misses the point of the whole firestorm. That point being that a lot of people were refusing to give any more donations, which mattered very much to SGK as it turns out.

And yes, the fiction that SGK more than made up for the losses with right-wing sympathy donations (Parker tries to push that one also) is belied by how head-spinningly fast SGK scrambled to reverse themselves, which of course was after Parker wrote this column, rendering it even more ridiculous than it already was.

Douthat and Parker and others are so caught up in this victim mentality (the one that Newt Gingrich embodies so perfectly) that they really do see everything in terms of the “rights” of right-wing anti-abortion religious believers being trampled under the jackboot of…. people deciding not to give them money any more.

It’s often this way with them, if they’re not allowed to impose their religious strictures on the rest of us, their “rights” are being trampled on. If advertisers pull their business from someone for saying hideous right-wing racist things, that person’s “first amendment rights” are being violated.

It’s always utterly absurd, but they say these sorts of thing all the time.

Their need to see themselves as victims really takes over the entire thought process at some point. Here’s Kathleen Parker writing in the Washington Post with a lecture about how whatever you think of their decision, SGK had a right to do whatever they want:

Don’t like it? Don’t run in Komen’s fundraising races. Don’t buy a pink blender. Give directly to Planned Parenthood.

And that’s just fine with the SGK Foundation, Parker is saying. None of this is about money or fundraising, it’s a political and religious issue, about the rights of anti-abortion Christians being trampled…

With friends like Kathleen Parker and Ross Douthat, SGK doesn’t even need liberal heathen enemies.

Wait so you mean that Brinker and Komen weren’t actually losing any donors because of all this, the media just made it all up? So they didn’t have to reverse their decision after all! They were tricked!

Think of the ramifications of this for a moment. What other things might this be affecting? Maybe there were WMD in Iraq. Maybe Bush and Cheney weren’t the ones who lied, maybe it was.. the Media! Maybe William Kristol is right about everything. Maybe Ross Douthat is really insightful and intelligent, it’s just that the Media tricks us into thinking otherwise by printing his columns.

I think he’s uncovered a real scandal here.

That’s one of the most confused paragraphs I’ve ever seen this side of Thomas Friedman. He seems to be trying to cleverly borrow the “back alley” abortion phrasing to say that now instead of beating poor people in private we disrespect and deny speaking gigs to wealthy founders of health foundations which is the same thing just more modern.

Don’t worry if I even try this most of my list is from the 18th and 19th centuries. Or earlier. By the same token you’re using I’m not only old, I’m Dorian Gray.

Wait until you get to the one about the Wingnut radio host, that’s pretty good too.

I know people in the UK who watched that show religiously and even they wished it was our real President instead of the one we had.

It was like a parallel universe you could escape to now and then during those years where the President was the anti-Bush, was everything Bush wasn’t, and what you and 90% of the world wished he was.

A lot of right wingers hated it, so that was fun also.

Yeah it got pretty terrible at around season 5.

I’m sort of like TBogg, I was living abroad and caught a couple rerun episodes of the third season on the English language channel (the non-dubbed one, with subtitles) and went out and bought all three seasons, and then eventually the rest. The later ones are okay, but it’s those first two seasons that really sing.

It wasn’t until they did an episode about a poet that was possibly the most moronic thing I’ve ever seen that I realized it was probably somewhat the same with the politics (despite Laurence O’Donnell writing and producing some of it), and that DC insiders probably sat around rolling their eyes as well, but it all sounded right to me since it’s not my world. Fun still though.

Oh definitely a part of it, I agree. I think money and debt and suffering are inextricably linked, especially since reading this.

Also domination and Dominionism, and so on. Religion at base was always about power to begin with.

Our original desire was to fulfill our fiduciary duty to our donors by not funding grant applications made by organizations under investigation. We will amend the criteria to make clear that disqualifying investigations must be criminal and conclusive in nature and not political. That is what is right and fair.

I think criminal investigations that are “conclusive in nature” are called “convictions”, or at least “charges”, not investigations.

What a bunch of idiots.

Oh I think Charmaine Yoest (Senior Advisor to Mike Huckabee, opposed Sotomayer and Kagan appointments based on abortion issues, etc) is a true believer. The right wing elected representatives running the trumped-up investigation also.

If Brinker is using people like Yoest, people like Yoest are using Brinker as well. I think they convince themselves that it’s a righteous cause, whether they start that way or not, but Brinker’s right-wing history makes me tend to think she’s the real thing also.

I think the all-fronts assault on women’s rights is the real story here, and the grifting aspect is also about sucking money away from Planned Parenthood, not just grifting itself. Just my opinion too of course.

Shock Doctrine, the Brinker Variation (on a theme by Handel).

One division beats the drum for investigation, the other division says why… yes! they’re right, these people need investigating! and proceeds to do so on some trumped-up bullshit, the third division says oh my, well we can’t be funding any outfit dodgy enough to be under investigation, now, can we? all of them hoping that people don’t notice that they’re the same group, right-wingers who want to impose their religious strictures on everyone else.

Create chaos (and suspicion) and then move into the opening that created to take advantage of it, textbook case.

I’m expecting something like this next.

That’s weird I had exactly the same mixup today. And I don’t do that all that often.

Someone has clearly removed a day this week, hypnotized us all to think they didn’t, and put us back as if nothing happened.

Yea and the forces of righteousness did flop massively at the Offices of Box thus destroying their enemies, who, being liberals, cried tears of sympathy drowning themselves in a sea of their own salt, or something.

October 1 2012: The Return of the Flopocalypse.

Is that before or after Brietbart is destroying the liberal blogosphere? I can never keep these dates straight. Is that the one with spaceships, or the one who lives in Oakland?

Atrios, master of the blog haiku:

Planned Parenthood really is the place where women – especially poor women – can get necessary medical care without worrying some paternalistic freak thinking he speaks for God is going to determine what’s best for the little lady without consulting her.

Megan’s own writing is pretty fungible so that may be why she sees other things that way. Facts enter and get turned into an undifferentiated paste, where everything is unknowable, nothing is certain, no one is right, so we might as well let those in charge do, you know, whatever, and by “those in charge” I mean the Galtian Overlords, not the ones actually elected.

It’s not so much “A B C D” as “On Beyond Zebra”, sort of an elaborate exercise in obfuscation, hand waving, and misdirection, all to make time for the crooks to get away. Basically.

Since I think this is a very tough issue on which reasonable people can disagree, I can see why the federal government, and private foundations, would decline to fund their operations.

It’s only reasonable that the federal government would stop funding anything that certain religious groups have a religion-based objection to?

There are religious groups in the US who think that it’s morally corrupt for for people to eat cows, so is it “only reasonable” that the federal government refrain from supporting ranchers in any way?

She doesn’t seem to know the difference between “can disagree” and “can force the rest of us to live according to their religion”.

Whether people’s religious rules are “reasonable” or not isn’t the point. Any religious stricture you have is perfectly reasonable right up to the point where you start trying to impose it on the rest of us.

Megan McArdle must have a moral compass that’s as broken as her calculator, with its dial pointing to “enlightened modern woman” when she’s anything but.

Catalog business?

Okay now I know why most of what’s supposed to be funny on TV is not.

Staffing SNAFU! Aisle six!