PUMA
About that non-vacuum in which Stupak happened…
Kate Harding has a good piece in Salon that captures the PUMA-a-year-later zeitgeist we’ve been talking about here (to recap: A year later, world suddenly gets what PUMAs were talking about, House Democrats pass healthcare reform for men, and Rachel Maddow is becoming post-rational).
Harding’s piece is called Face it: The Democratic Party [...]
Rachel Maddow is becoming post-rational
Today on Meet the Press, Rachel Maddow said that Democratic women “may revolt” over the Stupak amendment, which renders the healthcare reform bill a kind of backdoor ban on abortion.
Interestingly, last year Maddow described PUMAs as “post-rational” for attempting the same thing. It was insane, Maddow said, for feminists to buck the [...]
A year later, world suddenly gets what PUMAs were talking about
So it turns out that the Democratic-sponsored health care reform bill will officially treat women as unpersons: freakish beings whose bizarre, non-human needs cannot possibly be considered part of basic health care. Perhaps we’re extra-terrestrials:
None of the bills emerging from the House and Senate require insurers to cover all the elements of [...]
Who are the PUMAs?
Hint: we’re not who Bonnie Erbe thinks we are:
I’ve been so busy being a PUMA that I’ve had little time to read about PUMAs. Or I should say, read about myself, since in America it’s the media that tells us who and what we are. It’s like Patsy said on the [...]
It’s not about Obama vs. McCain
The central issue of this election is not Barack Obama versus John McCain. The central issue is the future of the Democratic party. For PUMAs, the election is about choosing between the Obama version of the Democratic party — misogynistic, sexist, corrupt, pseudo-Republican — and a Democratic party that represents women’s rights and [...]
The Democrats really, REALLY don’t deserve our votes
Please take a moment to review the imaginary scenario I constructed in this post from May 7: Why I will not vote for Obama even if he’s the nominee — and why you shouldn’t either.
(By the way, when I wrote that I hadn’t heard about Obama using “99 Problems (But A Bitch Ain’t One)” [...]
Obama comes out in favor of forced pregnancy (and manages to belittle mental illness at the same time)
Via TalkLeft, quoting the AP:
In an interview this week with “Relevant,” a Christian magazine, Obama said prohibitions on late-term abortions must contain “a strict, well defined exception for the health of the mother.”
Obama then added: “Now, I don’t think that ‘mental distress’ qualifies as the health of the mother. I think it [...]
PUMA Independence Day
Happy Fourth of July!
In the grand tradition of American political declarations, a group of PUMAs have prepared a declaration — part Declaration of Independence, part Declaration of Sentiments, part Martin Luther’s 95 Theses (okay, that’s not American, but whatever). The lead author is Anna Belle of Peacocks and Lilies, who offers it to [...]
PUMAs versus possums: this is what a grassroots movement looks like
A grassroots movement is something that comes from the ground up; hence the name. That should go without saying, but since the phrase has become utterly devalued by the Opossum marketing-campaign-disguised-as-grassroots, I thought I’d better explain it. Especially since we now have a real grassroots movement afoot, a veritable prairie fire called [...]
Comment of the day (with additional remarks by Violet)
From marge twain:
I’ve felt for the past few months that our nation must be going through one of those mass-insanity, mob-rule periods like the Salem witch trials or the Prohibition era or the McCarthy pinko scare. I imagine that history will not look kindly on this time. Future schoolchildren will wonder what possessed us [...]
