A: Hmm, maybe it’s because he’s a misogynist.

Seriously. Very few Republican dudes have spent this much time hating on women so I’m speechless at Rush Limbaugh’s recent convening of a “female summit.” The idea of a summit comes after a new public opinion poll found a huge gender gap in the radio talk show host’s favorability ratings.

46% [of American voters] have a positive perception of him with 43% viewing him negatively. There is a massive gender gap in those numbers, with 56% of men but only 37% of women holding a favorable opinion of him.

My question is, who are these 37% of women and what medication are they on? Limbaugh, however, feigned concern for the ladies.

Be ready at any moment for me to declare the summit officially underway, and we will take calls only from women who want to seriously discuss the proposition of this giant gender gap that I have, and what I could do to close it. In other words: What could I do to attract a higher favorability rating among more women in America? I own the men, and what must I do now to own women? And who better to ask than women?

Now, granted I’m not the target audience for tripe like his but nevertheless, I would humbly suggest the following. Stop calling women ugly and mocking their appearances, referring to women as “hos” and claiming that we “ask” for sexual harassment and of course, treating us like inanimate objects.

And, tune in for next month’s summit- why do minorities hate Rush Limbaugh?

h/t- feministe

In a stunning move and an indication of greater transparency within the new administration, the Pentagon is reversing an 18-year old policy that banned media coverage of coffins carrying dead U.S. servicemen and women. The one caveat here is that the families of the deceased will have to agree to the coverage. In making such an exception, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said the following-

I have decided that the decision regarding media coverage of the dignified transfer process at Dover should be made by those most directly affected — the families.

While I do think that this is a wise move and one that was long overdue, I wonder if perhaps this rule will be used to further politicize the sacrifices of American soldiers. To be sure, there is a tendency, mostly for Republicans, to act all bellicose and favor military aggression without any regard for the cost, both personal and financial. Particularly with the Iraqi and Afghan invasions, Republicans were so removed from the real cost of war which made it that much easier for them to advocate brain dead (and failing) policies. Surge, anyone?

At the same time, I would hope that neither party uses these images to advance their own agendas. A soldier’s death, even if caused by political considerations, is largely apolitical and it should remain that way. Moreover, if our soldiers died for an honorable cause, why should we hide their images, as if they were a source of embarrassment?

I hinted in my column this week of the challenge Barack Obama’s message may face from tensions within the Democratic Party itself.

This article from the New York Times is interesting.

A group of liberal bloggers said it was teaming up with organized labor and MoveOn.org to form a political action committee that would seek to push the Democratic Party further to the left.

The political action committee – known as Accountability Now – will have support from the Daily Kos and the Service Employees International Union. If it becomes the thoughtless advocate I fear it will be, Obama will be best off brushing them aside.

I thought Obama’s move to the center was a key selling point for a green (in the inexperienced sense) politician. Given the popularity gap between him and other Democrats it probably helped him with other voters too.

The article goes on:

Soliciting donations from their readers, the bloggers said they were planning to recruit liberal candidates to challenge more centrist Democrats currently in Congress.

This sounds familiar. Ann Coulter threatened to run against a Republican Congressmen from Connecticut, Christopher Shays, after he voted not to impeach Bill Clinton. (Not quite delusional enough to think she could win, she planned to throw his re-election.) Conservative bloggers and radio hosts ran smear campaigns against Republicans willing to touch George Bush’s immigration reform bill.

These days the GOP has a spoiled base. Republicans willing to reach out to the electorate in the middle face regular intimidation from conservative commentators.

At a time when many Americans considered themselves conservative Republicans managed to flub everything. Now, even as America seems to be shifting to the left it is important to remember the vast amount of voters who consider themselves Independent.

Why turn to a political action committee the New York Times compared to the Club for Growth? Surely Mr. Obama can do a better job of reaching out to voters by listening to some of the talented advisers he assembled in his administration rather than the liberal blogosphere.

Freedom of Religion is perhaps the most frequently misunderstood right Americans are granted in the first ten amendments to the Constitution.

When they noticed a Ten Commandments monument in a public park in the Pleasant Grove City, Utah, the Summum church, a small and eccentric group, decided to dedicate a copy of its ‘Seven Aphorisms’ to the Church. The city rejected the monument, claiming that the other fifteen donated monuments in the park, including the Ten Commandments, were reflective of the city’s history, implying that the Seven Aphorisms were not.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court unanimously held that the city could legally reject the ‘Seven Aphorisms’ monument.

Associate Justice Samuel Alito framed the issue as being a question of a government’s right to expression.  While I’m not well versed enough in the law to comment on government expression, I do wonder if ‘government expression’ could lead to the municipal governments ‘expressing’ a preference for things like, the Ten Commandments, say.

Despite the fact that the Ten Commandments will remain in the park – that wasn’t what this case was about – the ruling against the Summum church is most definitely a victory for those who care about a separation between church and state.

We shouldn’t think about this case as encouraging an unhealthy liaison between church and state because the local government is allowed to keep a monument to only one religion in its park. Rather, this ruling constitutes a decisive victory for civil rights activists.

The most important message of the ruling is that the way to deal with religion in the public place is not to sanction more religion. That the Court has not encouraged the government to become more involved in the religious debate as a way to promote religious equality is extremely heartening.

The relationship between church and state is healthiest when non-existent.

Barack Obama’s speech before a joint session of Congress, essentially a state-of-the-union address, was low on details and touched on a lot of familiar, perhaps too familiar, themes.

He brought up his new mortgage rescue plan in an attempt to head-off Republican criticism. He claimed “It’s not about helping banks, it’s about helping people” though Tim Geithner’s fumbles are probably helping neither.

Obama’s attempts to wrangle up Republican votes for the stimulus failed but he was still draping his plans under a mantel of bipartisanship. He channeled Theodore Roosevelt on health care reform, talked tough on deficits, and promised not to raise taxes for the vast majority of Americans.

Watching him try to frame his agenda as fiscally responsible it seems his strategy may now be about redefining the center leftward rather than getting any meaningful support from the GOP.

Few opposition responses to this sort of thing are ever that memorable. Still, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal probably could have done a better job.

Jindal claimed that “Republicans believe in a simple principle: No American should have to worry about losing their health coverage – period.” That is a tough sell. Republicans have come up with some decent health care plans but only after they were forced by popular sentiment.

Jindal’s quip about Hurricane Katrina being made worse by government bureaucracy certainly won’t change the conventional wisdom that federal relief efforts that should have been stronger. Besides, hasn’t Louisiana been doing quite well with all the federal money it has gotten since?

The common Republican mantra about Democrats was repeated: “they place their hope in the federal government. We place our hope in you, the American people.” This, after Obama spent much of speech praising American ingenuity and the power of the private sector sounds particularly tired.

Viewer response to Obama’s speech was pretty positive, though the market was less thrilled. Either way, it now seems Obama has even more promises to keep.

(Photo credit: AP)

Remember, after we elected Barack Obama, everybody was twittering about the end of racial barriers in America? Yeah, not so much. Today, the New York Post published a cartoon referencing Obama and the stimulus package, offensive even by the Post’s disgustingly low standards.

Where to begin? On matters of fact alone, the cartoon is grossly inaccurate. While it is true that Obama is the public face of the package, he’s not the author and never purported to be. More problematic though is the imagery. Depicting a black man as a monkey while two police officers stand over him with a smoking gun? Not cool and incredibly racist. Instead of apologizing for publishing this nonsense, the NY Post blamed the furor on all those whiny, over-sensitive minorities.

Col Allan, the Post’s editor-in-chief, said the cartoon “is a clear parody of a current news event.”

“It broadly mocks Washington’s efforts to revive the economy. Again, Al Sharpton reveals himself as nothing more than a publicity opportunist,” Allan said in a written statement.

I love that we’re so past racism, we don’t even need to acknowledge it any more. It’s nice living in post-racial America.

UPDATE: Here are ten more disgusting cartoons from the loathsome cartoonist Sean Delonas.

To anyone who’s visited Economist.com lately, this will come as no surprise. But to those who haven’t seen it before, would you care to guess the controversial, divisive issue that currently holds the honor of being the 3rd most commented story on the entire website at the moment?

IMPORTS to China plunged in January, signalling that demand is shrinking alarmingly: they fell by 43.1% compared with a year earlier, worse than forecast and double the decline in December. But China’s trade surplus, at $39.1 billion, is one of the biggest on record because a huge tumble in exports of 17.5 was dwarfed by falling imports. A recovery in Chinese exports is unlikely as the world slides deeper into an economic slump but imports may well pick up—China has resumed importing iron ore after running down stocks in recent months. China’s economy could also get a boost from a big government stimulus package.

That’s the entire story– essentially a verbal explanation of a graph released by the Chinese government, without any real editorial content. And last time I checked, when it was roughly 200 comments, it didn’t come close to matching the scale of historic, earlier posts, most of them around the time of the Olympics regarding media freedom or the Communist Party.

The comment board might as well, though, be like every other story out there. Comments on the China Daily (at least before they’re moderated out) usually take the same route– someone makes a comment about the imminent fall of Western society and China’s simultaneous rise, someone else counters that the Chinese government is evil and corrupt, and then they go at it for 20 pages.

I suppose you can attribute a good deal of the vitriol between commentators in the West and China to the fact that they’re commentators; being confrontational and unreasonable is part of their nature (people watching Youtube can’t even get along). But it’s also a disappointing fact of the ideological divide that seperates us. I’ll be frank and state that it is my wish that China become a more open Government, and I say that having spent a substantial amount of time living over here, with a fair amount of cultural and linguistic fluency. It was my assumption in first coming here that closed governments, which disallowed media freedom, would lose their grip when the light of truth was shined inside their borders. Public reaction to that light, however, has been anything but favorable.

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Last week, the Republican Party picked former Maryland Lt. Governor Michael Steele as the new GOP Chairman, making him the first black person to fill the role. Admittedly, it was slim pickings. Steele’s major competitor, South Carolina GOP Chairman Katon Dawson belonged to a whites-only club and only resigned after he learned that a local newspaper was planning to reveal his deep association with the country club. Another candidate, former Tennessee GOP Chairman Chip Saltsman, sent a CD titled “Barack the Magic Negro” to his supporters. The song originally appeared on the beacon of intellectual vigor and tolerance otherwise known as The Rush Limbaugh show.

Although Steele certainly seems the most competent of the lot, that’s not saying much. Consider this ringing endorsement of Steele by the WaPo when he ran against Ben Cardin for the U.S. Senate in Maryland-

Despite his efforts to construct an image as an independent-minded newcomer, there is nothing in Mr. Steele’s past — no achievement, no record, no evidence and certainly no command of the issues — to support it. Pressed on energy or the environment, health care or North Korea, he tells reporters that he would get “all the players in the room.” That sounds fine but means nothing; he’s running to be a senator, not a meetings coordinator.

While I doubt that Steele’s race was a primary factor in his win, I can’t help but think that it did matter. Emerging from the 2008 Presidential elections, there was a sense that the GOP was relegated to a Southern regional power. At the party’s convention, less than 2% of delegates were black compared to 24.5% at the Democratic National Convention. Can Steele fix this image problem? To answer that, just take a look at Mel Martinez (R-FL) who served as RNC Chairman from 2006-07. Martinez was picked in order to appeal to the Hispanic vote in the 2008 elections but the strategy didn’t work. Hispanics ended up voting for Democrats 67% to 31%, up from 60% in 2004.

The problem here is that no matter the number of cosmetic changes, the Republican party’s interests have never been aligned with that of minorities. Indeed, on issues like welfare, poverty, taxes, education, immigration and women’s rights, the differences couldn’t be any more stark. It also doesn’t help that Republicans are the first to blame minorities for the country’s ills, whether it be the current financial crisis or decrease in quality of living or better yet, increased abortion rates. While this is not to say that Democrats are particularly great in this regard, they are marginally better. And in politics, sometimes, that’s all that matters.