Want to Find an Expert on "The War on Women?" Media Chooses Men

(The 4th Estate)

Are you a lady with lady opinions on issues that affect ladies?

Then shut your stupid ladyhole, stupid lady, because no one cares what you think about that lady stuff. At least, that's what the traditional media thinks, according to an analysis by The 4th Estate and shown in the infographic above.

The numbers are stark, but not exactly surprising. When it comes to coverage of issues that directly affect women, the beacons of traditional journalism—the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Sunday talk shows—clearly subscribe to the Darrell Issa school of thought: that the people best qualified to talk about women are, in fact, men.

Rep. Issa, you may recall, held a congressional hearing in February about the president's new policy mandating that health insurance providers cover birth control without copays. This, as we know, made Issa and his fellow Republican men in Congress, as well as his friends at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (aka, the Catholic wing of the Republican Party), have a very sad sadness of sad. So sad that they needed to have an all-male hearing to share their sad feelings and console one another about how women's access to affordable birth control will simultaneously destroy the republic and bring forth armageddon. And, most importantly, make them very sad.  READ MORE

The Right-Wing Propagandist Charles Murray Exposes the Truth About Conservatives -- They Hate Poor People, White and Black

Charles Murray right wing loser/hater/pundit

As usual, Charles Murray twists and invents economic arguments to demonize poor people. But this time, his targets are white.

February 13, 2012

The article first appeared in the Philadelphia City Paper. Click here to read more great content from them. 

Charles Murray, a leading right-wing polemicist, has spent three decades beating up on poor black people. His new book, however, is an act of more equal opportunity opprobrium, arguing that white working class America is in crisis because it has a fucked up and backward culture. And his main example is Philadelphia's Fishtown.

Murray published summaries of Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 in the Wall Street Journal and another in the right-wing New Criterion. His argument is a mean and vicious slander against the people of Fishtown and working class people everywhere, detailing the decline of what he calls the “Founding virtues” of industriousness, honesty, marriage, and religion amongst the rabble. It's based on the Philadelphia neighborhood, but Murray uses “Fishtown” as an exemplar to generalize about white Americans with “no academic degree higher than a high school diploma...[and unemployed or working in] a blue-collar, service, or low-level white-collar occupation.”

Murray complains that Fishtown residents are increasingly less moral than people in Belmont, based on the wealthy white Boston suburb full of “successful people in managerial and professional occupations―the elites who are in positions of influence over the nation’s economy, media, intellectual life, and politics.” Which is where Mitt Romney lives―so I suppose he offers a lesson in hypocrisy, avarice and greed, huh? But beyond Murray's poisonous politics, the biggest problem is that his argument is wrong.    READ MORE