You have to admit, anti-abortionists have a canny grasp of the "news cycle." What if that baby you decided to abort grew up to be... Barack Obama? Then he'd be pro-choice. But whatever. Advertisement!
Tomorrow, America Votes. Most people are fixated on "who will be the next President" and "how many Senate seats will Democrats pick up" but you know what? Real Democracy happens in the insane initiatives that clog local ballots every year. But many of these initiatives are about "taxes" and "redistricting" and other boring things like that. So we've put together a voters guide highlighting only ballot initiatives of interest to drinking, drugging, and whoring Gawker readers. We'll focus on statewide ballot initiatives, which sadly leaves out awesome things like San Francisco's prostitution-legalizing Proposition K but honestly we didn't have time to comb through every damn city in the country's crazy notions. Click through and learn how to vote, oh citizens of this grand experiment! Lady Issues
Suspected bio-warfare prankster Bruce Ivins may or may not have mailed people anthrax back in 2001, but either way, it's clear that the guy appreciates a good practical joke. Long before the FBI came after him for the deadly spore gag—and before he killed himself during the investigation—the Roman Catholic doctor made clear his desire to be cremated upon his death. However, he apparently didn't trust his wife and son to honor his wishes, so he built a rather clever escape clause into his last will and testament. The will states that if his wife—an anti-abortion activist and former president of the Frederick County (Maryland) Right to Life group—doesn't burn his remains and scatter them to the four winds, about one-third of his estate will be donated to Planned Parenthood. Diabolical! There are few things sweeter than zombie emotional blackmail from the beyond. Just remember, though—the guy may have had a habit of terrorizing people with fine particles of dust, but that doesn't necessarily mean the FBI was right. [NYT]
Know what's kinda funny? Just as the whole Republican convention has transpired with basically negative five mentions of George W. Bush because he is so grotesquely unpopular even among all weird hat people, the bleeding-hearts of the Media Elite are having a moment of premature nostalgia for his wife thanks mostly to Curtis Sittenfeld's epic new work of Laura Bush fan fiction American Wife. Because, as the novelized Laura says: "All I did is marry him. You are the ones who gave him power." And, "the single most astonishing fact of political life to me has been the gullibility of the American people…[What] caught me by surprise was the way the American people and the American media egged him on, how complicit they were in Charlie's cultivation of a war-president persona…Even in our cynical age, the percentage of the population who is told something and therefore believes it to be true - it's staggering." I know, right? I really want to believe the real Laura Bush would say the same thing. But would she?Some critics are calling this characterization of Laura a "liberal fantasy." But why do we cling to the fantasy even when Real First Lady Laura Bush totally hung out with Sarah Palin just the other day? Because she actually has very little in common with Sarah Palin, which is why we're all pondering working on our painkiller addictions right about now! The evidence. 1. Laura Bush is a librarian and Sarah Palin bans books.(Sort of in the way Jesus was a community organizer and Pontius Pilate was a governor!) Which brings me to the funniest thing about the story of how Sarah Palin, upon becoming mayor of Wasilla, called up the local librarian to inquire about banning books: the idea never went anywhere because she didn't seem to know what books she'd ban. Sarah Palin doesn't read! Duh. Neither, probably, does Cindy McCain. Laura Bush's favorite book is The Brothers Karamazov, a fact that I still find sort of mindblowing, but anyway, that is what makes this sort of shit so funny. 2. Laura Bush is pro-choice. When Cindy McCain found herself in that messy conundrum over whether Roe v. Wade ought to be overturned earlier this week, to whom did she turn for guidance? According to Katie Couric, Cindy's spokespeople said that she, like Laura Bush, did not want Roe overturned. Who knows why Laura Bush is pro-choice; maybe she read American Tragedy, maybe it's just because she killed someone herself and the law had gone easy on her; maybe she's just a rational person, but whatever the case, women like Laura Bush — not Northeastern Marxists like me or "I Choose Life For My Daughter And Everyone Else In America" Alaskan prophets like Sarah Palin— are ones who live in those crazy states that are always trying to add little "abortion banning" amendments to transportation bills and such, the ones who actually live in states where this stuff comes up on the ballot every November. And as such, women like Laura Bush are the only reason Roe has yet to go back before the Supreme Court. 3. Laura Bush raised Jenna Bush. Laura Bush's other vocation besides library science was being a mother, and even that Communist organ Us Weekly agrees that Jenna Bush turned out pretty good. Laura Bush raised a fun underage-drinking socially-conscious charter school teacher who spent months in the ghettos of that little country her granddaddy invaded learning about the tragic life of a teenage mom with AIDS for the purpose of writing a cautionary tale of what happens when you don't use condoms. Sarah Palin raised a fun underage-drinking cautionary tale of what happens when you don't use condoms. 4. Laura Bush is a walking living and in some ways tragic symbol of the emotional core of liberalism, which is to say, our bottomless capacity to forgive. She had a tragedy in her early life and for that reason alone most of us will forgive her unwillingness to try and make herself into some sort of internal dissident in the Cheney White House. She reads Russian lit, she knows how it goes for dissidents. She forgives her ignorant husband the way we all forgive our ignorant racist grandmas. She accepts his differences and we preach acceptance. She is from a Red State and married to a red meat Republican but she defies all the usual pithy pollster cartoonology; she has never had big hair even though she's from Texas, she has never been blonde even though that is a major rule for Republicans in DC; she has never seemed Stepfordy, she smokes cigarettes. And like with Laura, said sentimentality can lead us to be forgiving to a fault! Remember how we hated Clinton for his triangulation and his beholdenness to Wall Street and his generalized moral turpitude? Ha ha ha, yeah. Don't let's let this become the election that gets us all misty-eyed for the Bush years in a couple years time, Laura Bushes of the world! (God did you ever think that would even be a possibility? Christ.) OH AND BONUS EXTRA THING I FORGOT: She defended Michelle Obama against those ridiculous attacks on her patriotism that both Cindy and Sarah Palin have milked well into elementary school at this point. Thanks for pointing out, readers!
Here is a clip of presumptive vice presidential Sarah Palin responding two years ago to a hypothetical question about whether she would reconsider her opposition to abortion even in the case of rape or incest in the tragic hypothetical event that one of her daughters were impregnated by a rapist or relative. "I would choose life," she repeats, smiling placidly, in what should serve to remind all of the nauseating mendaciousness of that trope we keep hearing about how Palin's daughter's non-hypothetical pregnancy is a "personal" matter that ought to be "off-limits" to the media and in any case "irrelevant" to the greater issues of the day. This question, first asked (and answered decently!) in my own personal-political memory of former vice president Dan Quayle, is now itself old enough kill a fetus without the consent of its parents in most American states. By what demented logic does its relevance recede when the hypothetical becomes actual? As Meghan McCain pointed out in a blog post today, it's a question that, posed of her father eight years ago, "single-handedly changed my life."Specifically, John McCain was asked what he would do if Meghan, then 14, were to get pregnant.
You know, a while ago we got all huffy about how passing the hat for donations from friends and family members toward your "sick" honeymoon on the internet was tacky. But hey, you know what's really tacky? Passing the hat for donations from random strangers on the internet for not aborting your pregnancy.
We're a little bit on edge about today's Supreme Court decision upholding the ban on dilation and extraction—or, as it has become commonly known, partial-birth abortion—but we know that laughter is the only way to heal the hurt. Or at least, partial laughter. To that end, we looked to the Fox News Red Eye host and humanitarian Greg Gutfeld, whose look at the lighter side of abortion has given us so many chuckles over the years. Some of Greg's jokes needed a few tweaks for relevance, but we think you'll find yourself having a few yuks either way! Or not—it's your choice. For now.
