Browsing PBH By Articles

Student Faces Six Months In Prison…For Throwing Glitter At Mitt Romney

From The Chicago Tribune: A Colorado student faced misdemeanor charges on Wednesday for flinging glitter toward Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney in an increasingly frequent protest act some commentators say should be subject to prosecution.

The practice of “glitter bombing” has mainly been the domain of gay rights activists targeting Republican politicians and other public figures who oppose same-sex marriage.

But University of Colorado Boulder student Peter Smith, 20, told Reuters he threw glitter at Romney after the candidate’s speech in Colorado on Tuesday to protest against his “general political philosophy,” and not only his stance on gay marriage.

ACNN video of the incident shows Romney shaking hands with supporters in an auditorium when the glitter is thrown at him and Secret Service agents usher him away.

Continue Reading

Mitt Romney’s Own Solyndra Problem

The Article: Mitt’s Solyndra? He handed out renewable energy subsidies, too by Darren Samuelsohn on Politico.

The Text: Republicans are pounding Barack Obama on Solyndra, but it may be a complicated argument for their front-runner to maintain: While Mitt Romney was governor, Massachusetts also picked some winners and losers with energy subsidies.

And like Obama, some of the companies Romney’s state invested in came out on the losing end.

The scale is dramatically different: While the Obama administration dumped $535 million alone into Solyndra — the California solar panel company that subsequently filed for bankruptcy protection — the energy loans, grants and other financial help Romney distributed during four years as governor add up to just a fraction of that amount.

But Democrats — and even some Republicans — say the core issue is the same: If the federal government shouldn’t be betting on one company rather than the other, then neither should the state of Massachusetts.

Continue Reading

Why The Susan G. Komen Backlash Worked

The Article: Damage Control: Why the Backlash Against the Komen Foundation Succeeded by Nona Willis Aronowitz in Good News.

The Text: On Tuesday, the anti-breast cancer charity Susan G. Komen For The Cure announced it was pulling funds that it had previously provided Planned Parenthood for breast exams. And today, after a hailstorm of protest on Twitter, Facebook, and Susan G. Komen’s message boards, the charity announced that it would be restoring Planned Parenthood’s grants.

Folks across the Internet are attributing this victory to, well, the Internet. Yay, social media! But it’s worth asking why this particular attack on women’s health prompted such a deafening outcry. After all, just one year ago the House of Representatives voted to defund Planned Parenthood outright. Conservative legislators rail against the HPV vaccine, which also prevents women from getting life-threatening cancer. Neither case prompted a fraction of the ire. What exactly got us so riled up this time?

It’s partly about the politics of breast cancer itself, or lack thereof. Breast cancer is one of the few nonpartisan women’s health issues. For those of us irritated by Komen’s pinkwashing or the foundation’s petty lawsuits against smaller charities, this may have also been an opportunity to vent our disgust. Mainly, though, the difference lies in the money: We expect to have a say in where our donations go.

Continue Reading

Can We Please Leave Cats Out Of Politics?

The Article: Democratic Operative’s Cat Slaughtered, ‘Liberal’ Painted On Corpse by Amanda Terkel in the Huffington Post.

The Text: The race for the Arkansas’ third congressional district took a gruesome turn on Sunday, when the campaign manager for Democratic challenger Ken Aden came home and found his cat slaughtered with the word “liberal” painted on the corpse.

According to a press release sent out by the Aden campaign, “The family pet, an adult, mixed-breed Siamese cat, had one side of its head bashed in to the point the cat’s eyeball was barely hanging from its socket. The perpetrators scrawled ‘liberal’ across the cat’s body and left it on the doorstep of [Jacob] Burris’ house.”

Burris, Aden’s campaign manager, told The Huffington Post that it was his 5-year-old son who first saw the atrocity. He had taken his children out to fill the family car with gas before going to church, and the young boy was the first one out of the vehicle when they returned.

Continue Reading

Egypt’s Sexual Counterrevolution

The Article: Egypt’s Sexual Counterrevolution by Khaled Diab in Salon.

The Text: Half a world away from the Republican presidential primaries where candidates vie to outlaw birth control and promote abstinence, ban pornography and condemn the “sin” of homosexuality, Egypt’s first post-revolution parliamentary election was, thanks to the Islamists, dominated by similar issues.

As the first anniversary of the revolution approaches this week, Egypt is facing a spate of urgent political, social and economic issues, such as mass youth unemployment, a tanking economy and a cabal of die-hard generals who just refuse to call it quits. But you wouldn’t know it from listening to the discourse of Islamists, particularly the hard-line Salafist Nour party, which has focused attention on issues of “morality,” including talk of banning booze, prohibiting or restricting bikinis and censoring “sex scenes” in Egypt’s vibrant film industry.

Although women from all walks of life have been at the forefront of the popular uprising and are treated as relative equals by the revolutionary youth movement that has orchestrated the revolution, the burden of this moralizing, as is often the case, has fallen on the shoulders of women. This has led Egypt’s secular, liberal women and feminists to look to the immediate future with a mixture of apprehension and worry.

Continue Reading