Scrambling to pose Obama with some female advisers.

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IN THE COMMENTS:Paul Zrimsek said:

Get that man some binders, stat.

"To batter this woman because they don't feel they have the ability to batter President Obama is something we the women are not going to stand by and watch."

More sexism displayed in efforts to defend Susan Rice, this time from Wisconsin member of Congress Gwen Moore.

I called attention to President Obama's inappropriate/bogus chivalry here and here.

Women serving in positions of power are subject to the same criticisms as men, and efforts to defend them that are premised on the idea that women deserve special protection, solicitude, or respect or that deploy metaphors from the realm of domestic violence are perversely implying that women do not belong in power. It is absolutely disgusting to defend Susan Rice this way. If we were required to moderate our criticism of women in power, we would need to oppose having women in power in order to preserve our freedom as American citizens.

The suggestion — even implicit — that there is a requirement like this is offensive and retrograde.

"I'm free and I love to be free/To live my life the way I want/To say and do whatever I please..."

Consider the use of the old Lesley Gore song — "You Don't Own Me" — for political, pro-Obama purposes:



Now, I love old Lesley and her classic song. And it's fine with me if the Democratic Party is her party — and she'll cry if Obama loses, cry if Obama loses, you would cry too if it happened to you. "You Don't Own Me" dates back to 1963 — pre-Women's Liberation, pre-Beatles. But let's consider the lyrics and the extent to which they express the values of the present-day Democratic Party.

By the way, Ms. Gore did not write "You Don't Own Me." It was written by 2 men, John Madara (who also wrote "At the Hop") and David White (who co-wrote "At the Hop" and was a member of the doo-wop group Danny & the Juniors who recorded "At the Hop"). Madera and White also co-wrote "The Fly," which was a dance that you could do at the hop, and here's Chubby Checker showing you how:



That was 1961, 2 years before Lesley sang Madera and White's declaration to female autonomy, which is no kind of dance song at all, though Diane Keaton, Bette Midler, and Goldie Hawn manage to turn it into a dance for the purpose of bringing a close to the execrable 1996 movie "First Wives Club":



That movie is best described by David Rakoff in "Half Empty": "A gynocentric comedy predicated on the scenario where men are cheating bastards and middle-aged women the goddesses who best them while cementing their sisterhood with Motown-scored makeover montages, vengeful shopping sprees, warmed-over Lucy-and-Ethel hijinks, and random humiliations visited upon women who are younger and therefore by definition stupid whores."

Anyway, look at the lyrics to "You Don't Own Me," words which a couple youngish guys put in the female singer's mouth, as repurposed for the 2012 election "war on women" theme:

I'm young and I love to be young
I'm free and I love to be free
To live my life the way I want
To say and do whatever I please

Sounds libertarian to me. But it's the Obama side using this, so presumably we're supposed to hear something like:

I'm free and I want my birth control to be free
To live my life the way I want
To say and do whatever I please and have the government pay for it

"I expect that later this century we'll see a growing trend around the world of many couples deciding in advance to simply not have children."

"Hopefully this will occur via mutual agreement for the man to have a vasectomy early on."

Not everyone has to agonize over choosing life priorities, and I think it's likely more and more will choose to skip mom-ism altogether,... maybe for economic reasons, and maybe because we'll have more talk about women asking themselves, "Do I really want to raise kids?".  "If I love kids, would I rather free myself to work with lots of them in other settings?"  

Oh, what could go wrong?!

That's one of the early comments on an article over at The Nation, by Jessica Valenti, "I'm Not a 'Mother First,'" which begins:

Last week, Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney said it was better for children to have a parent at home. “To have one parent to stay closely connected and at home during those early years of education can be very very important,” he said. It’s not hard to imagine which parent he’s talking about.

Romney’s statement didn’t elicit much in the way of outrage, a sign that American women have one more hurdle to overcome on the way to equality: the sexism of mom-ism. It’s no longer enough that women love their children. To be a truly committed parent, women are expected to be mothers above all else—we’re “moms first.”

To make her point, Valenti must reject Romney's use of the sex-neutral word "parent." Why not take it seriously? What does she do when her standard template doesn't fit? Just force it on anyway. Why weren't American women outraged at the sexism of Romney's statement? Because it wasn't sexist! It was putting children first.

And let's get some respect for the men who take the role of at-home spouse in the single-earner family (or who modify their work life to be the parent spending the most time "closely connected and at home"). Valenti mentions fathers in only one paragraph:

Fathers are never expected to subsume their identity into parenthood the way that mothers are. If President Obama were to tell us that he is 'father-in-chief' first, America would balk. How could a man be an effective president if he put the needs of his children above the needs of his country?

Women aren't expected to subsume their identity into parenthood anymore either. It is a choice, and a woman who makes that choice is at least as likely to be disrespected as to be praised.

And maybe President Obama should have waited until his girls were older before he immersed himself in the overwhelming duties of running for and serving as President. For some reason he had to jump in when he did, despite his and his daughters' youth. We were just about to get the first woman President, so the time was ripe.

ADDED: Hillary Clinton would have been a better President. Where's the outrage about that?

Dr. Helen wonders "if men are going Galt, staying home and collecting unemployment or no longer need jobs because they don’t get married as often?"

"Or is it that they just can’t get a job because the industries they work in are no longer hiring? Could the Obama administration also be part of the problem, focusing only on women’s jobs and not on those of men? Or a combination of these. What do you think?"

On that point about the Obama administration's focus on women's jobs, remember that Obama's original idea was to have a stimulus that would produce jobs for men — who "need to do something that fits with how they define themselves as men":

As the room chewed over the non-PC phrase “women’s work,” trying to square the senator’s point with their analytical models, [Alan] Krueger—who was chief economist at the Department of Labor in the mid-1990s at the tender age of thirty-four—sat there silently, thinking that in all his years of studying men and muscle, he had never used that term. But Obama was right. Krueger wondered how his latest research on happiness and well-being might take into account what Obama had put his finger on: that work is identity, that men like to build, to have something to show for their sweat and toil.

“Infrastructure,” he blurted out. “Rebuilding infrastructure.”

And then what happened? How was Obama — with his concern about manhood — swallowed up and enfolded within the Party of Women?

Interesting to see his desire to build masculine pride by giving men things to build, because men like to build... and now, in 2012, to find him bumbling and mumbling things like "You didn't build that."

Well, we — or they, the men — didn't build that if that is the infrastructure, the roads and bridges you were talking about. (Remember the big roads-and-bridges theme of September 2011?) And — I wish I had a searchable text of everything said from the stage last week — did anyone even mention roads and bridges at the Democratic Convention?

"Barack Obama, the first female president."

A predictable headline — don't you feel you thought of it first? — after Newsweek's "The First Gay President," which played off Toni Morrison's famous declaration about Bill Clinton.

Do you regret referring to Bill Clinton as the first black President?...

People misunderstood that phrase. I was deploring the way in which President Clinton was being treated, vis-à-vis the sex scandal that was surrounding him. I said he was being treated like a black on the street, already guilty, already a perp. I have no idea what his real instincts are, in terms of race.

The "first female president" riff comes from WaPo's Dana Milbank. He doesn't mean it in the Toni Morrison way — that Obama's getting the kind of shabby/unfair treatment typically aimed at women — but in the way Morrison was misunderstood. Milbank's evidence for his proposition is that Obama has gone on “The View” 4 times and that he gave a commencement speech at Barnard. Obama is. speaking to women, boosting them, pleasing them, hoping to get something in return. Hello! He's not getting treated like a woman. He's not even acting like a woman. He's acting like a man, angling for the favor of women.

Milbank admits it:

His reelection campaign has been working for months to exploit the considerable gender gap, which puts him far ahead of likely GOP rival Mitt Romney among women. But Monday’s activities veered into pandering, as Obama brazenly flaunted his feminine mystique.

Pandering. Let's consult the OED:

1. trans. To act as a pander to; to minister to the gratification of (another's desire or lust)....

 2. intr. To act as a pander; to minister to the immoral urges or distasteful desires of another, or to gratify a person with such desires. Also in weakened use: to indulge the tastes, whims, or weaknesses of another. Now usu. with to.

Sorry. Pandering to women is not acting like a woman.  (Or being treated like a woman.)

And Milbank doesn't really know what "the feminine mystique" means. Betty Friedan defined her term clearly in her classic book, in the first paragraph of the first chapter, which was famously titled "The Problem With No Name":

The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night—she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question—“Is this all?”

The "mystique" — she says a few pages later — was the pervasive cultural belief in "feminine fulfillment" in the home...

... the American suburban housewife, kissing their husbands goodbye in front of the picture window, depositing their stationwagonsful of children at school, and smiling as they ran the new electric waxer over the spotless kitchen floor. They baked their own bread, sewed their own and their children’s clothes, kept their new washing machines and dryers running all day. They changed the sheets on the beds twice a week instead of once, took the rug-hooking class in adult education, and pitied their poor frustrated mothers, who had dreamed of having a career. Their only dream was to be perfect wives and mothers; their highest ambition to have five children and a beautiful house, their only fight to get and keep their husbands. They had no thought for the unfeminine problems of the world outside the home; they wanted the men to make the major decisions. They gloried in their role as women, and wrote proudly on the census blank: “Occupation: housewife.”

No way Obama was "flaunting" his feminine fulfillment in the house. Presumably, Dana Milbank (who is a man) thinks he can pontificate about female matters and use a feminist catchphrase and give it whatever meaning it seems to have to him. He's got a longstanding column in the Washington Post, so he feels he can do that. Ironically, that feeling is utterly the opposite of feminism. It's patriarchy. And this patriarch, Milbank, is himself pandering to women. It's funny that he's attempting to flatter and impress women by tagging alongside the man he thinks all the women love, Barack Obama.

Milbank tells us that Obama told the college women that "'Congress would get a lot more done' if more women were there." And Obama gave the women the supposedly good news that "more and more women are out-earning their husbands. You’re more than half of our college graduates and master’s graduates and PhDs." (Presumably, he didn't tell them they're going to have a hell of a time finding a mate on their level.) Milbank goes on:

And they can look good doing it! “You can be stylish and powerful, too,” he said. “That’s Michelle’s advice.” 

And this makes him "a woman"... how? Oh, what's the point of looking for reason in Milbank's lame obeisance to the alpha male?

There were some ironies in the appearance. When the White House asked Barnard for the commencement speaking role, the college dumped its original speaker, Jill Abramson. In addition to being an actual woman, Abramson is the first of her sex to become executive editor of the New York Times.

Obama made no mention of Abramson, but he did mention that he knows the past three Barnard commencement speakers, including Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose presidential aspirations Obama dashed.

Ha ha. Step aside, ladies. The patriarch is here.

"As the person who controlled access to the first couple, Valerie Jarrett saw Oprah as a potential threat to her power."

Writes Edward Klein, author of a new book about Obama:

If Oprah went unchecked, she would bypass Valerie and go directly to the president and first lady. What good was it being the gatekeeper if you couldn’t lock the gate when you wanted? And so Valerie set about turning Michelle against Oprah. Oprah was too close to the president... Oprah was acting like she was the first lady... Oprah didn’t know her place...  Oprah was a bad influence... Valerie advised Michelle to “distance herself” from Oprah and cut her out of the White House inner circle.



It didn’t take much to convince Michelle. As Michelle knew only too well, her husband had a compelling need to win the approval of strong women like Oprah....

“Michelle is very jealous, I would say unusually so,” said someone who was very close to Oprah. “Most people after years of marriage have trust and don’t follow their husbands around and check on them. Michelle doesn’t seem to trust Barack at all. She insists on knowing his every movement and drops in on him at all kinds of odd times. It’s been the buzz of the White House....

“Michelle talked to Gayle King about it, just talking as friends. She has become much closer to Gayle than to Oprah, to Oprah’s anger and surprise. She told Gayle that if she found out her husband was running around, she wouldn’t keep quiet. Gayle was kind of astonished that she would say that.”

Man, people are gossiping! Much more at the link, including the quote, supposedly the real words of Oprah: “Michelle hates fat people and doesn’t want me waddling around the White House!” That was after Oprah tried to get in on Michelle's obesity-fighting action. And here's the corresponding Michelle quote: “Oprah only wants to cash in...."

And Edward Klein has a book to sell. 

On the topic of Obama and his relationship to "strong women," here's a slideshow on the subject chez Wapo.

The Hilary Rosen flap shows the way to a new bipartisanship premised on the value of single-earner households.

Yes, Hilary Rosen disrespected Ann Romney, who, she said, had "actually not worked a day in her life." Fine. Everybody learned that the American people think it's important to acknowledge the work that women do when they choose to forgo careers and stay home with the children.

But now that this door is open, let's walk through it. There is much more here, and I'm only going to begin to talk about it in this post. I have already talked about the less-noticed issue of respecting men's choices. It shouldn't be simply a matter of women getting to choose to stay home. This is a household economics decision. Traditionally, it's been the woman who stays home in the single-earner family, but in modern America, each family has the power to decide who will bring in the money, and it may be preferable for the man to be the one to contribute to the family in the non-monetary ways. This is something I will talk about much more in future posts.

What I want to concentrate on in this first post, initiating my "single-earner household" tag, is the way it's not just for traditionalists. I want to challenge liberals, left-wingers, feminists, progressives — all those folks — to see why they should want to actively promote the single-earner household.

Single-earner households benefit the environment. You believe in global warming? Prove it! A 2-earner household has a much larger carbon footprint. 2 adults travel to work each day, they buy extra consumer goods (such as work clothes), they rely on fast-food, they take their children to day care. They need to do these things to get along. Yes, they pull in more income, but with more income, they buy more things, and these things must be manufactured, which emits carbon into the atmosphere. A single-earner family sticks with that smaller income and buys less. The stay-at-home spouse works hard to stretch and conserve that income, so that the family's needs are met. In fact, these needs can be better met, as the home spouse cooks meals from scratch, teaches and plays with young children, and so forth.

Here's "The Tightwad Gazette." It's all about using ingenuity to make it possible for a family to live on a single income. Why should we all have to join what they used to call the "rat race"? Is life about having a job? Some people need jobs, but why have we come to believe that every adult must have a job?

Let's form single-earner households. We talk about economics all the time, but why don't we economize — at the personal level?

I've concentrated on environmentalism here, but there is so much more to talk about. For example, unemployment. If the single-earner household movement were to flourish, we wouldn't need so many jobs, and we wouldn't need to drive ourselves so hard. Then there are taxes. If you're living alone, filing as an unmarried person, you've probably noticed how much less you would pay if you added a spouse. And what about feminism? If the woman stays home, maybe the man will leave her some day — leave her for a younger woman! — and then what will she do, not having developed her career? The women's movement made a big deal out of warning us about that danger, but something I want to examine — not here, but in later posts — is the way this women's movement came along just when we Baby Boomers in the 1960s were inspired by the hippie movement, which tipped us off that life might be about freedom and not about taking one's place in the conventional workworld. Wouldn't it be a kick in the head if it turned out feminism served, above all, the interests of commerce and not individual liberation?

I'll end this post now, but I'm beginning a conversation. I want to reject the idea — which Obama himself propounded — that the single-earner household is a luxury available only to a few lucky people. Let's consider the possibility that it is available to most people and what we need is to understand when it works and how to make it work.

"Class warfare" and "the war on women" — 2 wars or 2 fronts in the same war?

A question that came to mind as I was reading this comment, from Yashu, on last night's "Rosengate" post:

What happened was, in their efforts to attack Romney, the Dems suffered a strategery malfunction. Crossed wires caused a short circuit.

Crossed wires: i.e. two separate tactical strands of the Obama 2012 campaign against Romney momentarily met in Rosen's soundbite and short-circuited.

1. GOP "war on women" (Dem pandering to women)
2. Class warfare (spurring resentment of Romney's wealth)

Rosen was predictably going along on #1 (that's the meme the Dems are pushing now, #2 will come to the forefront later). But because they had to defend themselves against Romney's counterattack (Obama's economy hurting women), for a moment #2 came to the fore: i.e., Ann Romney's a rich bitch who's never worked a day in her life, so what does she know about the economy or jobs?

Short circuit. Because the "rich bitch" was tacit, implicit; what was explicit, what everyone heard out loud was: stay-at-home mom never worked a day in her life, so what does she know about the economy or jobs?

A stupid sneering insult to stay-at-home moms, i.e. a large number of women. Short circuit.

Do Democrats need to be careful to fight these 2 wars separately, or is there a way that the 2 wars could be merged successfully? Rosen merely lost a battle. That doesn't mean her side has lost the war or that it is not capable of a war on 2 fronts. You might not want them to win, but that doesn't matter for the purposes of this discussion. Whichever side you are on, you will want to understand this.



Here's something I found that was written before Rosengate. (I need a better word than "Rosengate." What would be the equivalent of "-gate" that would signify not a scandal, but a battle. Maybe: -incourt. Rosenincourt/Rosincourt?) Anyway, this is from a website I've never noticed before called policymic, and the author is John Giokaris:

During the weakest post-recession recovery in history, there’s very little material to accentuate the positive with, so the Democrats are trying to make up for it by dividing the American public with class warfare and trying to convince women they need dependency on government for protection.

See the connection between the 2 wars? In the merger of these wars, there is a coherent left-wing vision of government, and the stay-at-home wife is a threat to this vision. In the "war on women," women are threatened and beleaguered. They are victims, and they can't make it one their own. The left would like you to see that only the government can competently and reliably serve the needs of women.

The traditional vision would have each woman ally with one man and form a single economic unit that would be effectively and efficiently structured, with one spouse leaving the house each day to engage in commercial activity and the other spouse looking after things in the home. The married couple takes care itself, including its emotional and sexual needs, which are the very thing that produces offspring, and the love and economic support flows naturally to the next generation, which is trained to follow the same effective and efficient structure.

The left-wing response is to reject that traditional vision, but how? The rejection is the 2-front war. Women should perceive the traditional married-life model as a big threat. It's retrograde and subordinating. It's a throwback to the bad old days when women lacked choices. Anyone promoting the traditional married-life model will be re-framed as someone who will destroy the advances that have been made for women — even if they are only saying women have a choice, and the traditional model is actually a great choice, a choice you should consider, a choice that works best if you can find a good husband.

There's the central battleground: Do women have a choice? The left has loved the word "choice" when it comes to childbearing. Indeed, in the "war on women" battlefront, they want to say their opponents aim to take away the choice that is birth control and abortion, the choice whether to become pregnant or to go through with a pregnancy. But a different choice comes into play here: Should women choose the traditional marriage structure to protect their economic needs? It's a great option if you can get it, so the left would like to say: You can't get it. That's a choice that is no choice. Only rich people can afford that luxury. Only a 1 percenter can keep a wife at home. The right-wing candidate is very rich, and his rich-bitch wife doesn't know what she's talking about. They'd like to deprive all the other women of the protection they really need, which must come from the government.

In this left-wing framework in which the vast majority of women need the government structure around them, women are not supposed to identify with Ann Romney . The left would like to alienate her from you by portraying the economically supportive husband as something only available to the rich. President Obama would like you to think that even he, as a Harvard Law School graduate, could not keep a wife at home with their 2 children. It's an economic solution that works for so few people that it's no choice at all.

How does the other side fight this 2-front war? It's obvious now, isn't it? They need to show that the traditional household division of labor is viable and advantageous to many people, even those of modest wealth. I'd like to see that battle fought. Personally, I think many women have been fooled over the years into working terribly hard for too little reward. I also think — and I'm very non-retrograde here — that many men can do well as the stay-at-home spouse. (And I support same-sex marriages and think these nontraditional couples can prosper using a traditional division of labor.)

I would love to hear a very open and fact-based discussion of household economics. Let's do the math and take everything into account, including the tax advantages for the 1-earner family, the costs of going to work (clothes, transportation, eating out, etc.), and the many expense that can be avoided if someone is at home doing household work. There's a lot of propaganda in this 2-front war for the minds of women (and men). Let's keep our wits about us as we make our personal life decisions and our political decisions.

"Women are not some monolithic voting bloc, women are not an interest group, you shouldn’t be treated that way."

Says Obama. I agree. But... has the Democratic Party been acting like it believes that? Just before that he said: "There’s been a lot of talk about women and women’s issues lately, as there should be, but I think the conversation has been oversimplified."

So... will you call bullshit on the "War on Women"? Or will you alternate between fighting the war and saying there is no war?

Rush Limbaugh makes a sex joke about President Obama: "I've laid more pipe than any president except Bill Clinton."

Yesterday Rush Limbaugh was riffing on Obama's seeming turnaround on the Keystone Pipeline. You might think he wouldn't dip back into sexual imagery so soon after the Fluke incident:

Obama could not stop this pipeline if he wanted to. This leg of the pipeline from Oklahoma to Texas was in the works. He doesn't have the authority to stop it.... He's just glomming onto it. It's like trying to be present when the Ten Commandments are given at the burning bush and claiming you wrote 'em. 

Note: The burning bush and the 10 Commandments are separate events in the Bible. Back to Rush:

I'm almost speechless here with the absolute brazenness of this. I wouldn't be surprised if Obama says, "I've laid more pipe than any president except Bill Clinton." That's where we're heading with this. The guy who steadfastly opposes drilling for oil and has not issued any permits to speak of, particularly since Gulf oil drilling moratorium -- the guy who has made his name opposing the Keystone pipeline -- is now out taking credit for it....

Several paragraphs later:

And that's why I think it isn't gonna be long before Obama starts bragging about how much pipe he's laid. He'll start comparing himself to other presidents. "I've laid more pipe than any president except Bill Clinton." He's gotta throw Clinton in there for credibility.

See? That's a scripted joke. Said twice, word for word the same. There's no question "laid pipe" is slang for having sexual intercourse. It's not unusual for Rush to throw sexual double entendre into his monologues. He has a way of saying things very clearly and pausing so that listeners who enjoy that kind of thing can laugh and his more puritanical listeners can not notice or pretend they don't notice.

Now, I don't really have a problem with him saying this, and I don't think it's like using an inaccurate prostitute metaphor over and over to make fun of a student who isn't much of a public figure. I think we should make fun of Presidents, and the joke is straightforward hilarity, not a component of a confusing argument about health care insurance. So it's funny, and it's against not one but 2 Presidents, and I always appreciate reminders of the way Bill Clinton treated women. In fact, I think Rush's joke may be a salvo in the much-vaunted "war on women": You think I'm bad to women? Remember how awful Bill Clinton was!

The trouble with that is it's very hard to say anything negative about Barack Obama's interaction with women. (Remember when Christina Romer tried? (She got her double entendre wrong!)) If you have to dredge up Bill Clinton, maybe it's not worth doing. But there is a larger, significant enough, point: The Democratic Party wants women to think it's all about women's interests, but they will subordinate these interests to their political interests whenever the interests diverge. That was the horrifying spectacle of the Lewinsky scandal.

Bristol Palin is waiting for Obama's phone call.

Given that he called Sandra Fluke, she says she's "a little surprised my phone hasn’t rung":

Your $1,000,000 donor Bill Maher has said reprehensible things about my family.  He’s made fun of my brother because of his Down’s Syndrome. He’s said I was “f—-d so hard a baby fell out.”...

What if you did something radical and wildly unpopular with your base and took a stand against the denigration of all women… even if they’re just single moms? Even if they’re Republicans?

Best move for Obama? Call her!

Obama's approval rating sinks from 50% to 41% in one month.

According to the new CBS News/New York Times survey.

I guess pandering to women isn't all it's cracked up to be. Or did he do it the wrong way? Maybe women don't want to be saved from cutting satire, rough language, and the need to pay for their own sex supplies.

But the standard interpretation is that it's gas prices. All these issues and policies and wars to debate and, in the end, it all comes down to what does gas cost. It's that basic day-to-day expense that isn't about sex.

Obama says he doesn't want Malia and Sasha to be "attacked or called horrible names when they’re being good citizens."

Milking Flukegate.

"The bishops note that the Obama administration never even bothered to contact them to discover what their true objections are, and what would satisfy them."

"The White House simply presumed to know church business better than the bishops and offered an 'accommodation' that is anything but.  In fact, that sounds a lot like the process that produced this mandate in the first place."

Writes Ed Morrissey, flailing in the trap Obama set.

Note to conservatives: When you get people thinking about abortion, you may very well win. If the liberals drag you back over the line before conception — your when-life-begins line — and make the subject contraception, you'll probably lose.

"Obama Punks the GOP on Contraception."

That's the spin from Slate's Amanda Marcotte (and I think she may have it right!):

After two solid weeks of Republicans rapidly escalating attacks on contraception access under the banner of "religous [sic] freedom," Obama finally announced what the White House is proposing an accomodation [sic] of religiously affiliated employers who don't want to offer birth control coverage as part of their insurance plans. 

Yeah, rotten spelling/proofreading, but give her a chance. Normally, I can't stand Marcotte, but I think she's homing in on the truth:

In those situations, the insurance companies will have to reach out directly to employees and offer contraception coverage for free, without going through the employer. Insurance companies are down with the plan... contraception actually saves insurance companies money, since it's cheaper than abortion and far cheaper than childbirth. 

Remember the economies of the "blue pill" and the don't-call-them-death-panels for end-of-life human beings? There's lots of money to be saved at life's onset. Insurance companies (and the safety-net-providing government) stand to save lots of money through pregnancy — and child! — prevention. It makes economic sense to incentivize the use of birth control. A woman has a right to choose whether to have children or not, but the government may nudge the woman toward its preferred choice. It is good economic policy to push women to avoid having babies until they've got a stable relationship and a solid economic foundation, so clear the path to the relatively inexpensive pills and poisons and devices that keep the sperm and the egg from acquiring a will of their own.

Another point, which Marcotte doesn't make, is that many, many healthy individuals are about to be forced to spend thousands of dollars a year on health insurance, and there needs to be a decent flow of seemingly "free" things so that they don't get too upset about it. Birth control is perfect for this. It's something women use — continually — when they are perfectly healthy. Face it: Birth control is about preventing an important bodily function from working. Now, the birth control won't be free, because everyone paying into the insurance pool will be covering the cost, but the women who use the birth control will have the feeling that they're getting something. That's a special kind of palliative care that the designers of Obamacare are going to want to cover.

So did Obama "pull a fast one" on conservatives, as Marcotte surmises?

He drew this out for two weeks, letting Republicans work themselves into a frenzy of anti-contraception rhetoric, all thinly disguised as concern for religious liberty, and then created a compromise that addressed their purported concerns but without actually reducing women's access to contraception, which is what this has always been about....

Now, those who complained about the old rule have a choice whether to move on to some other traditional-values issue or to find a way to say that the problem is still there. If they do the latter — as Rush Limbaugh did a series of semi-coherent rants on his show yesterday — they're going to annoy/scare the millions of women who use contraception and the millions and millions of women and men who want other people to use contraception. (Don't forget the "Freakonomics" theory connecting the avoidance of unwanted pregnancy to a reduction in crime.)

Marcotte thinks the conservatives will give up on this issue and exults that "the damage has already been done."

[W]hat most people will remember is that Republicans picked a fight with Obama over contraception coverage and lost. This also gave Obama a chance to highlight this benefit and take full credit for it. Obama needs young female voters to turn out at the polls in November, and hijacking two weeks of the news cycle to send the message that he's going to get you your birth control for free is a big win for him in that department.

And let's not forget — Marcotte doesn't mention this — that the birth control fracas peaked precisely when a story was breaking that should have made the administration look weak on a women's rights issues: the decision limiting women in the military. As I noted yesterday, Michelle Obama was deployed on a nutrition-in-the-military mission on the very day that decision was announced. So there is good reason to think the Obama campaign is sharply focused on manipulating the minds of constituents who care about women's issues.

As Marcotte said: "It's all so perfect that I'm inclined to think this was Obama's plan all along."

"Sexist Obama?"

A Bloggingheads clip makes the NYT.

Obama, the boys' club man who, on graduating from Harvard Law School, felt drawn into "personal journaling."

In a diavlog about Obama's problem with women, I'm trying to figure out what makes a man a man's man, especially when the man isn't all that manly:

Obama's female trouble.

ADDED: Here, I extract a 2-minute clip in which I question what makes a man a man's man and refer to "Dreams From My Father" as "personal journaling."

"Nearly every professional woman has had the experience of saying something in a meeting, receiving no response..."

"... and then listening as a male colleague offers the same thought or suggestion minutes later to great acclaim. The first time it happens, she feels slightly foolish and is a little unsettled. Did I say that out loud or just in my head? Maybe he made the point better than I did. The second time it happens, she gets frustrated. The third time, she gets angry."

Amy Sullivan, beginning a piece speculating about Obama's woman problem, which, she says, has long been "obvious."