"Cows rise up!" Spokecow proclaims.

At noon on Monday, the Environmental Working Group launched a new farm subsidies database profiling the 358,070 people who've gotten over $34.75 billion in federal subsidies.
Twenty-four hours later, the database was already getting 7,000 hits per hour on the new database. Two days later, the website still took five minutes to load. Why all the interest? Well, why did Microsoft's Paul Allen get $30,687 in farm subsidies between 2003-2005?
Right here would be a great place for a pun about something smelling like manure, but I don't want to offend any cows, especially since they're organizing.

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This post was a whole long longer and more emotional an hour ago...

First off: It's sad that I get better wireless reception in my backyard than in my apartment, right? Sigh. I normally try to stay out of the quagmire that is the abortion debate, but as usually, elyzabethe wrote something insightful about feminist issues that I had to comment on. Actually, I had to comment on the framing war that was going on in the comments section between elyzabethe and another friend. Then I ended up emailing back and forth with her for awhile. Then someone at work mentioned how the "choice" frame is starting to lose ground, even though advocates don't want to admit it. I started scribbling notes, sighed, and thought, "well, I'm gonna have to blog about this." Elyzabeth rants often against anti-choice organizations and legislation, as is her wont as a libertarian feminist. She’s particularly good at teasing out how anti-choice (A, if you’re reading this, bear with me, I’m referring to ‘anti-choice’ as more than just the abortion issu...

Obligatory OWS Post

I'll try and expand on this later, but a few links looking at the protest from marketing and demographic standpoints: OWS Demographics or, "Duh, it's not just unemployed college dropouts" Protest, Music and #OWS Opportunism or, "Hey, this thing ain't going away. Can we market it?" OWS Billboard? or, "Really, you think Clear Channel will put this up?" and the Frameworks Institute analyzes the "We are the 99%" meme.

First off, this isn't a post about abortion. It's about how the personhood movement is dangerous even if you take abortion out of the debate. According to my friend Liz, More than 55% of voters in Mississippi yesterday rejected the state’s ‘personhood’ initiative —a development that certainly bodes well for reproductive rights in this country, and gives me a little more hope about our collective sanity, as well. What interested me about this issue (aside from the fact that I possess a uterus), was the way some of the groups fighting the Mississippi amendment were approaching the issue. The group Parents against MS 26 pointed out that the personhood movement , "has far-reaching effects on infertility treatment, contraception, and women's physical health." Jessica Valenti cites several examples in her column in the Washington Post , including this one: In 1996, when Laura Pemberton in Florida refused a recommended C-section because she did not want su...

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