“The State Of Where We’re At”: Lizz Winstead Delivers ‘State Of The Uterus’ Address
It wasn’t an official response, but it was probably the most colorful.
After President Barack Obama delivered his State of the Union address Tuesday night, comedian, author and “The Daily Show” co-creator Lizz Winstead delivered to the world the “State of the Uterus,” a progressive response complete with a uterus hand puppet.
“I thought, ‘Well, maybe the uterus needs to do a recap of the state of where we’re at,'” Winstead told Whispers. “So instead of being like vitriolic or ‘we’re so angry,’ we decided to take the satirical page of celebrating how great it is that government has gotten so involved and the great plans that they have for all the uteri in the country.”
So what did the Uterus have to say?
The Uterus thanked “Republicans and Republicans alike” for “tirelessly fighting so the uteri of America will have the same rights as the uteri of Saudi Arabia.” The Uterus name-dropped former Virginia gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, two anti-abortion conservatives who’ve voiced controversial positions on abortion and the Democratic Party, respectively. And, at the end of the video, the Uterus tipped over a Deer Park water bottle as an homage to Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla.
“There’s not really a whole lot of comedy rapid response – in fact, there’s none,” Winstead said. “And so we kind of want to carve out our space there.”
The State of the Uterus was posted on the website Lady Parts Justice, which Winstead helped create. The site already got some attention because of a video comedian Sarah Silverman made for it, where she talks to Jesus Christ about birth control.
“So it went out and then all of a sudden our project exploded a month before we were actually getting our staffing in place and getting our people on board,” Winstead laughed. “It’s fine, it’s really fun actually.”
In the coming months, Winstead will have other famous faces – including “Girls'” creator Lena Dunham – participate in her progressive, pro-abortion rights videos. The spots will shine light on what lawmakers are up to on a more local level in the areas of abortion and birth control. And a big event, entitled “V to Shining V” is being planned for Sept. 27, where women will gather in every state capital to have a gay pride-like celebration for reproductive rights.
“We’re really, really, really focused on local and state legislatures, that’s really our thing,” Winstead said. “Because no one is and those are the feeder programs where we go, ‘Oh, my God, somebody needs to dam up this horrible, horrible river because it is spawning people who are absolutely not invested in compromise or the truth or science or education or anything else.'”
By: Nikki Schwab, Washington Whispers, U. S. News and World Report, January 29, 2014
“Mission Accomplished”: Rand Paul Says ‘War On Women’ Is Over, Everybody Get Married
Yesterday, Rand Paul (R-Ky) declared an armistice in the “war on women” when he told Candy Crowley that the war is over and besides, “women are winning it.”
“The whole thing with the War on Women, I sort of laughingly say, ‘yeah there might have been,’ but the women are winning it,” he said Sunday on CNN’s ‘State of the Union.’ “I’ve seen the women in my family and how well they’re doing. My niece is in Cornell vet school and about 85% of the people in vet school are women.”
Mazel Tov to your niece, Rand Paul. It’s so great to hear that there are more women in vet school than in Congress.
“I think women are doing very well, and I’m proud of … how far we’ve come,” Paul said. “I think some of the victimology and all this other stuff is trumped up and we don’t get to any good policy by playing some charade that one party doesn’t care about women or one party isn’t in favor of women advancing or other people advancing.”
On the one hand, Paul’s not totally wrong. Here are all the ways women are winning:
- Women outnumber men on college campuses 57% to 43%, and the gap is expected to reach 59% to 41% by 2020.
- The pay gap is shrinking for millennials, with younger women making 93% of what men make
- Women are 48% of medical school graduates, up from around 10% in 1965
- Three words: Hillary Rodham Clinton
But on the other hand, women still have the cards stacked against them, especially poor women:
- 1 in 3 American women live in poverty or on the brink of it
- 2/3 of minimum wage workers are women, and they usually don’t get sick days
- The average woman makes 77 cents on a man’s dollar, and that’s lower for minorities; black women make only 64 cents on the dollar, and Hispanic women make only 55 cents
- Even for the rich and well-educated, there’s still a disparity: men with MBAs make an average of $400,000 per year a decade after grad school, women with MBAs make around $250,000
But what Paul said next about marriage is the real nugget here.
“The number one cause of poverty is having kids before you’re married,” he said. “I tell people over and over again, I can’t make you get married, I can’t do anything about that.”
But, Rand…what if there was some magical way to make sure women didn’t have babies before they were married? What if there were some kind of pill, or even a procedure that would allow women to not have babies when they couldn’t afford them? How bout it, Rand? Maybe science has the answer! Let’s check!
Oh wait, this the same Rand Paul that co-sponsored the Life at Conception act to completely outlaw abortion and opposes the Obamacare birth control insurance coverage mandate. Right, I forgot.
He did seem very, very concerned about the plight of women on CNN. “It would be very difficult to have a government policy… how would you institute a government policy that didn’t create incentives to have more children?”
It’s a real head-scratcher.
The fact that Rand Paul thinks the war on women is over means he had no idea what it was about in the first place. Nobody accused the Republican party of standing in the way of women going to veterinary school– women’s financial and educational advancements are propelled by social changes that aren’t being specifically debated on the Senate floor. The “War on Women” is about abortion rights and access to affordable contraception more than anything, and Paul is fighting against both of them.
It’s giving me deja vu to when Bush stood in front of a “Mission Accomplished” banner in 2003; a false victory, a pat on the back, and nothing really accomplished.
By: Charlotte Alter, Time, January 27, 2014
“When Stupid Goes Unchallenged”: Dim And Divisive Rand Paul Self-Destructs, Again
Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul is what you get when traditional and corrosive American nepotism meets the 21st century GOP echo chamber: a pampered princeling whose dumb ideas have never been challenged by reality.
If you missed Ron Paul’s son on “Meet the Press” Sunday, go watch it. I am honestly not sure what was most ridiculous or offensive: attacking Hillary Clinton for something her husband did, or declaring that “if there was a war on women, I think they won.”
Leave that question aside for a moment. Paul’s performance was most interesting for the window it gave us into his character, as the indulged but slightly dim scion of an eccentric political family whose every utterance, all his life, has been treated as important. At some points in interviews with the freshman senator, including this one, you can see the wheels turning in his head, maybe a little slowly, as he winds up to deliver what he thinks is a political humdinger. It’s the oily crazy of Rand Paul being adorably Rand Paul: saying what he thinks is brave and leader-like, but that thing turns out to be simply nutty.
Then the media collectively scrunches its forehead and tries to decide if he’s brave or nutty.
So it was with “Meet the Press” Sunday. Paul obviously set out to say cleverly what Mike Huckabee said stupidly: Republicans aren’t going to take the Democrats’ “war on women” rhetoric lying down, especially if they’re facing a Democratic woman running for president in 2016. You can almost see behind his eyes as he thinks to himself: “I’ve got it: I’ll throw a haymaker at Hillary Clinton for something stupid her husband did almost 20 years ago!”
Oh, and the man who opposed the Lilly Ledbetter pay equity act had the stones to frame his critique of President Clinton’s long-ago relationship with Monica Lewinsky as support for workplace laws supporting women.
One of the workplace laws and rules that I think are good is that bosses shouldn’t prey on young interns in their office. And I think really the media seems to be — have given President Clinton a pass on this. He took advantage of a girl that was 20 years old and an intern in his office. There is no excuse for that. And that is predatory behavior, and it should — it should be something — we shouldn’t want to associate with people who would take advantage of a young girl in his office… I mean, really — and then they have the gall to stand up and say Republicans are having a war on women? So yes, I think it’s a factor.
Though Paul allowed that her husband’s behavior is “not Hillary’s fault,” he added, “with regard to the Clintons, sometimes it’s hard to separate one from the other.”
But wait, there was more. He came right at that whole war on women thing, echoing men’s rights advocates everywhere by declaring that “if there was a war on women, I think they won.” Evidence? “The women in my family are doing great.”
It’s not defending President Clinton’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky to marvel at Paul’s raising it all again. Forget the fact that the issue was litigated 15 years ago, and every time Republicans went at Clinton, his public approval numbers went higher. Also forget that Paul’s claim that “the media seems to have given President Clinton a pass on this” is demonstrably false and idiotic. The man was impeached, and an awful lot of mainstream journalists shamed themselves by being stenographers for Kenneth Starr.
But on the self-pitying right, you can never lose by blaming the media for coddling awful Democrats. Paul’s brilliant declaration about women winning the war on women was likewise fact-challenged and paranoid. “I don’t see so much that women are downtrodden. I see women rising up and doing great things,” he told David Gregory. “In fact, I worry about our young men sometimes because I think the women are out-competing the men in our world.”
Never mind that women still make less than men and are more likely to live in poverty. Even more cruelly, the man who opposes legal abortion and the contraception-coverage mandate also suggested last Thursday that women who have “too many” children should lose welfare support. “Maybe we have to say, ‘Enough’s enough, you shouldn’t be having kids after a certain amount,’” Paul said Thursday. He backed off a bit on CNN Sunday morning, telling Candy Crowley: “I mused about how you’d have a government policy, but I actually came down saying it would be very difficult to have a government policy,” Paul said.
Only last week reasonably smart people declared that Paul was the beneficiary of Chris Christie’s implosion. The Atlantic’s Peter Beinart called him the new “front-runner,” and Andrew Sullivan endorsed Beinart’s piece, tweeting, “Those who dismiss Rand Paul’s chances are missing something, I think — a revival of true small-gov’t conservatism.”
I want to get this straight: I know someone is going to win the Republican nomination for president in 2016. The party may be headed toward demographic extinction, but they’re not going to forfeit the election. They’ll nominate somebody. I just can’t see it being any of the people regularly mentioned, as the party’s supposedly “deep bench” of candidates splinters.
I could be wrong. On “Morning Joe” Mark Halperin suggested Paul might have advanced his candidacy by proving he’ll attack the Clintons and go on the offensive on the Democrats’ “war on women” claims. He’s definitely on the offensive. Very offensive.
Of course Peter Beinart left himself many outs in his Paul-as-front-runner piece, noting the freshman senator’s plagiarism and neo-Confederacy problems and adding: “Who knows what the media will turn up when the real vetting that greets a presidential candidate begins?”
He should have added: And who knows what will happen the next time the candidate opens his mouth?
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, January 27, 2014
“Here They Go Again”: Why Women Do Not Love Mike Huckabee
A few weeks ago, right after the dark clouds gathered over Chris Christie’s presidential prospects, some friends and I were having the usual Washington conversation of discussing the rest of the field. After we agreed that it was an awfully B-list bench, someone piped up: Hey, don’t forget Mike Huckabee! He’s losing all the weight!
Clearly, some of that vaporized body mass came out of his brain matter, based on his unhinged comments Wednesday at the Republican Party’s winter meeting. Discussing the GOP’s need to get more of the women’s vote, he said the Democratic Party tells women “they are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing for them a prescription each month for birth control because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of government.”
He said this, amazingly, in a speech that, in his mind anyway, was all about how the Republican Party is the true friend of women: “The fact is the Republicans don’t have a war on women, they have a war for women, to empower them to be something other than victims of their gender.”
Here we go again. What galaxy do these right-wing men live in? So now contraception is like welfare? I’m reading him right, right? This is what he said—in essence, that birth control, provided by people who think women can’t control their libidos, makes women “helpless.” It’s the culture of dependency again, but this time transferred from the ghetto to the uterus. The Democrats, I guess, want women to go out and have unrestrained sex, so Democrats can then go out and destroy America by distributing these sinful contraceptive devices. So women, you see, are not human beings with agency and volition about their sexuality in Huckabee Land. They’re nothing more than the cat’s paws of the godless, baby-killing Democrats, who want to keep them on the Democratic plantation. The Pill, the welfare check, the Earned Income Tax Credit—all the work of Satan, propagated by the party of Satan.
As with Todd Akin and other recent Republican men who’ve been such marvelous spokesmen for the female side, it’s just hard to believe that this offensive gibberish even came out of his mouth. And not in an interview, as was the case with Akin, who was caught off-guard, but in a prepared speech! How do these men come to these views?
Just yesterday I discovered an old news clip from late 2012, in which some bozo Ohio state legislator is being interviewed on Al Jazeera. He’s throwing lightning bolts around about how evil abortion is, and he’d really prefer if we could ban it all the time. Then the reporter asks: “What do you think makes a woman want to have an abortion?” This genius hems and haws and finally says: “I don’t know. It’s a question I’ve never even thought about.”
What can one say? The man is trying to ban abortion in the state of Ohio, and he’s never thought about why a woman might want one. Certainly he’d never actually asked a woman. That, I think, is what makes these right-wing men say these deranged things. They either never discuss these matters with women, or they discuss them only with women who are as right-wing and moralistic as they are and who don’t just speak as a normal, apolitical woman with the normal level of sexual desire and activity would. So they haven’t the slightest idea what regular women think, nor the slightest interest in it. That’s just incuriosity. But it’s an incuriosity that produces ignorance and intolerance, which is what the GOP specializes in these days.
The thing about Huckabee is that he used to hide this very well. I’d imagine that deep down, he’s as Old Testament fire-and-brimstone as they come—a biblical literalist, right down to Jonah living in the whale’s stomach, the whole schmear. But he managed not to come across that way. He cracked jokes. He liked reporters (a media-friendly conservative!). He played rock ’n’roll bass guitar, for gosh sakes. If he was a mullah, he was at least a good-natured one who didn’t seem threatening.
But after this speech, forget that. He’s just a mullah now. He’s mad at birth control, which virtually every woman uses and which has been legal in this country for 54 years! And there was no small dose of acid in his voice as he spit out the infamous sentences, and he looked mad. Now, he’s going to be lumped in with Akin and cited, and very rightly so, as Exhibit B (Akin is still A) in why the Republicans would just be better off not talking about women at all and living with a 12- to 14-point gender gap, because every time one of them opens his mouth it just increases.
Incidentally, his cluelessness Wednesday wasn’t limited to women. My colleague Ben Jacobs, who was there, tells me Huck rhapsodized about The Beatles, and how he once fantasized about being the “fifth Beatle” and delivered the opinion that they healed the country after Kennedy’s assassination. He has no idea what he’s talking about. They weren’t interested in “healing” anything. Quite the contrary, they started the revolution that split the country in two, the two sides that are still doing battle, and Huckabee sure ain’t on their side. Reactionary fundamentalists of Huckabee’s ilk despised The Beatles in 1964, and The Beatles—authority-haters and atheists one and all (except for George later, but that was very different), and Lord knows great believers in the powers of contraception—would have despised him. Besides which, they already had a pretty good bassist, Bub.
His rewriting of Beatles history is a minor transgression but it’s of a piece. These people live in a morally simplistic fantasy land that’s impervious to facts and to the very real complexities of life. And he’s reportedly thinking of seeking the GOP nomination again? Come to think of it, he’d be perfect.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, January 24, 2014
“Ignorance, Contempt, And Puritan Morality”: Why Republicans Keep Calling Women Sluts
As you’ve heard, yesterday Mike Huckabee stepped up to the plate and smacked a stand-up double in the GOP’s ongoing effort to alienate every woman in America, when he said, “If the Democrats want to insult the women of America by making them believe that they are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing for them a prescription each month for birth control because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of government then so be it! Let us take that discussion all across America because women are far more than the Democrats have played them to be.”
As expected, Huckabee quickly explained to his supporters who the real victim is here (“I am apparently the worst conservative ever or at least the most annoying one according to the left wingers in Washington today”), but the question is, why do they keep doing this? After all, every Republican knows by now that their party has a problem with women; Mitt Romney lost their votes by 11 points. The simple answer is that they can’t help themselves, but more specifically, it’s a combination of ignorance, contempt, and Puritan morality that inevitably leads to these eruptions. And it’s going to keep happening. Let’s look at the particulars:
Ignorance: These kinds of statements tend to come from older conservative men who have no idea how ladyparts work, and really don’t want to know. That extends to contraception, which as far as they’re concerned is something that is women’s responsibility and therefore there’s no need to understand it. That accounts for the bizarrely widespread belief that all forms of contraception work like condoms: a one-use kind of thing that is employed whenever sex is desired. Which is why Rush Limbaugh said that Sandra Fluke was obviously a “slut” if she wanted contraception to be covered by the insurance she was paying for, because “She’s having so much sex she can’t afford the contraception.” And Huckabee believes that you only need birth control every month if you have a rampaging libido, while if you were more chaste, it would be something that would sit at the back of the cabinet, seldom brought out but there if necessary, like that little container of tumeric you once bought for a particularly exotic recipe and might some day use again.
Since Mike Huckabee doesn’t have 18 kids, I’m guessing his wife has used contraception throughout their marriage. But a Baptist minister and his wife have a “don’t ask, don’t tell” arrangement when it comes to that sort of thing, just like millions of other couples, which enables him to continue believing that only a fallen woman would need to take a contraceptive pill every doggone day like she was some kind of insatiable sex machine who barely had time to cook his food and do his laundry in between all that rutting. Which brings us to…
Beliefs about sin: The morality clearly reflected in these statements is that sex is inherently sinful. It’s a tiny bit sinful for the man—the kind of thing you might feel a little guilty about, but you can get over quickly—but it’s hugely sinful for the woman. An unwanted pregnancy is the just punishment a woman receives for having sex, and a virtuous woman doesn’t have sex except for those rare occasions when her husband wants to impregnate her. That’s why Huckabee can say—sincerely, I’m sure—that it’s an insult for Democrats to say women should have access to contraception, because that’s the same as saying women lack virtue. Women who don’t need contraception “are far more than the Democrats have played them to be.”
The conception of sex as inherently sinful drives pretty much every conservative policy position that touches on sex, perhaps most notably the support for abstinence-only sex education. The fact that abstinence-only sex education has been shown over and over to fail is of only passing concern to them, because what they want out of sex education isn’t so much practical things like a reduction in teen pregnancy and the spread of STDs, but a moral statement: sex is bad. If you talk to kids about sex without telling them it’s bad, you’ve cooperated with immorality. Conservatives seem to be constitutionally unable to discuss anything that touches on sex without including some kind of moral condemnation in everything they say.
Tone-deafness: Huckabee’s position is that saying “Democrats are treating women like dirty sluts by saying they should have access to birth control!” is very, very different from just saying women are dirty sluts. He feels he’s been falsely accused of saying the latter, when he was really just saying the former. I’m sure that he thinks that if women just understood the full context of his statement, they’d realize he respects and honors them. What he doesn’t get is that women actually want and need contraception, and 99 percent of women who have had sex have used some form of contraception at some point in their lives. So when he tells them that contraception is for sluts, what they hear isn’t “Because I care for you, I don’t want you to become a slut,” what they hear is, “You’re a slut.”
This seems to come up again and again: Republicans think they’re talking to a nation of nuns, when in reality they’re talking to actual women whose lives and experiences are different from what Republicans imagine them to be. If you told them that, guess what, your wife uses contraception, and so does your sister, and so does your daughter, and not only that, so did your mom, they’d cry “Nuh-uh!” and stick their fingers in their ears.
Which is why this is going to keep happening. Maybe Republicans can be convinced to steer clear of saying appalling things about rape, but the subject of contraception is going to keep coming up because of the Affordable Care Act’s mandate that it be included in insurance plans. And every time it does, they’re going to keep pushing women away. They can’t help themselves.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, January 24, 2014
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