A Conservative Trifecta: Fat-shaming, welfare-state-hating, and victim-blaming
What’s making you fat now? Food stamps. The argument goes something like this: Low-income people are more likely to be overweight than wealthier Americans. Low-income people are often on food stamps. Therefore, we should re-vamp the foodstamp program because clearly federal food relief leads to obesity. Also, poor people today (read: uppity Negroes) feel entitled [...]
...read moreThe Hyde Amendment
Women’s eNews has a great article about the anti-choice Hyde Amendment, and pro-choice efforts to dismantle it now that Hyde has left Congress. A quick 101 for those who aren’t familiar with the Hyde Amendment: Passed in the late 1970s, the Hyde Amendment blocks federal Medicaid funding from paying for abortion. So if you’re a [...]
...read moreWhy fix the problem when we can push for a feel-good policy that won’t work?
Apparently, there’s still a horrible crisis in education. And the answer according to some pundits is to go back to single sex schools.
...read moreAdvocates of single-sex education for girls believe that, in general, many girls thrive when educated apart from boys. Research concerning the academic achievement of girls suggests that in coeducational classrooms they often defer to boys, are called on less frequently than boys, receive significantly less teacher attention than boys, and are less likely than boys to study mathematics and science. Evidence suggests that attending single-sex schools improves many girls’ academic performance and attitude toward less traditional school subjects for girls while encouraging them to assume non-traditional career paths.
Why I am glad both that there are no Wal-Marts nearby, and that John Tierney is behind the subscription wall
Ilyka explains it all to you. Be sure to check out her comments, and her links, and the comments at the links. I don’t really have anything to add.
...read moreMicrocredit Pioneer Wins Nobel Peace Prize
This is awesome. OSLO, Norway (AP) — Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank he founded won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for their pioneering use of tiny, seemingly insignificant loans — microcredit — to lift millions out of poverty. Through Yunus’s efforts and those of the bank he founded, poor people around [...]
...read moreThe Third World Is Not A Baby Farm For Celebrities
While I wholeheartedly support the adoption of children rather than making your own, there’s just something unseemly and faintly colonial about celebrities adopting babies from Africa as if they were fashion accessories. Angelina did it, Britney considered it. Madonna is the latest. I think AbFab covered this well with the Rumanian baby episode.
...read moreA Step Backward
Wal-Mart, already under fire for its shoddy labor practices, low pay, locking cleaning crews in at night, nonexistent benefits, encouraging their workers to make up a living wage by seeking welfare benefits, antitunionism, et al., is sinking even deeper into the mire of worker exploitation by introducing wage caps and relying more on part-timers. Wal-Mart [...]
...read moreWhat Was That About Gluttony, Again?
You know the drill. Someone’s fat, and someone else comes to the conclusion that the fat person got that way by stuffing his or her face with cheesecake or donuts or what have you. Not so fast. News Flash: Soda Is Fattening Add a report from the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition to the growing [...]
...read moreThey Hate Us For Our Freedom
Conservatives, that is. Check out this little gem from the Doubleday Web page for Dinesh D’Souza’s new book, The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility For 9/11: He argues that it is not our exercise of freedom that enrages our enemies, but our abuse of that freedom — from the sexual liberty [...]
...read moreWhy don’t more women breastfeed, again?
If you had any doubts that breastfeeding in America is a luxury, this story should clear them up for you. When a new mother returns to Starbucks’ corporate headquarters in Seattle after maternity leave, she learns what is behind the doors mysteriously marked “Lactation Room.” Whenever she likes, she can slip away from her desk [...]
...read moreNew Orleans’ Women Being Left Behind
The Times-Picayune has a story about a study (pdf) from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research which shows that, as bad as everybody has it in New Orleans, women have it that much worse: When it comes to economic opportunity in post-Katrina New Orleans, women, particularly African-American women, have been largely ignored, according to a [...]
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No racism here, no sir!
Jane Galt links to my post on food stamps and mentions that when she was in the grocery store recently, she asked a cashier what the acronym “EBT,” something on the supermarket checkout machines, stood for. Jane is white. The cashier was black. The cashier stared at her and said, “That’s for food stamps.” Jane [...]
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