Tweet of the Day

This tweet is making the rounds:

To all the women sharing stories of sexual assault and sexual harassment, thank you for your bravery to speak up. You are not alone. #MeToo

— Women's March (@womensmarch) October 15, 2017

This is my favorite response:

#MeToo https://t.co/VWssdltU3n

— Monica Lewinsky (@MonicaLewinsky) October 16, 2017

Many of the responses to Lewinsky's tweet are respectful and considerate.

There are a fair number, however, are beyond contempt.

My guess is that there is a high correlation with these tweets and, "I'm with her," bumper stickers.

H/t naked capitalism.

A Well Deserved Repudiation of Cultural Relativism

A court in Ontario sentenced an Iranian immigrant for beating and raping his wife repeatedly for 18 months, well below the recommended sentence, with the justification that he was operating under the cultural norms of Iran.

The appellate court overruled this sentence and gave the offender a 4 year sentence, saying that Canadians need to behave according to Canadian standards:

The woman, a recent immigrant from Iran, suffered brutal spousal abuse but didn’t even realize it was against the law.

After moving to Canada in 2009 her husband forced the woman, whose identity is protected by the court, to have sex with him by hitting her, pulling her hair, pinching her and forcefully removing her clothes. “She cried out quietly so the children would not hear,” court was told.

He also slapped, kicked and punched their two sons and hit them with a belt. Once he locked them outside the house on a snowy winter day wearing nothing but shorts and T-shirts until their mother came home and rescued them.

When the husband was convicted of sexual assault and assault, Justice William Gorewich of Ontario court sentenced him to 18 months, citing mitigating factors that included the lack of a criminal record. The judge also noted a “significant cultural gap” between behaviour that is accepted in Canada and in Iran, and the “cultural impact” of changing countries.

That didn’t cut much muster with the Ontario Court of Appeal, nor should it have.

On appeal by the Crown, Justices Mary Lou Benotto, Alexandra Hoy and David Doherty found the 18-month sentence to be “manifestly unfit”and they imposed a far tougher, and entirely appropriate, four-year sentence.

They also went out of their way to send a powerful, timely message to the lower courts and the public in general that “cultural norms that condone or tolerate conduct contrary to Canadian criminal law” must not be a mitigating factor in sentencing. “Cultural differences do not excuse or mitigate criminal conduct,” the appeals court held.

If that were the case “some women in Canadian society would be afforded less protection than others.” In effect “it would … create a second class of person in our society — those who fall victim to offenders who import such practices.”

I wholeheartedly approve of this ruling.

I don't care if you come from WifeBeatIstan, there is no excuse for domestic abuse.  Ever.

Meanwhile, Back in Silicon Valley

We now find rampant sexual harassment and discrimination at Tesla Motors, wunderkind Elon Musk's most high profile project:

The theme for this year’s International Women’s Day was “be bold for change” in the fight for a “more gender inclusive world” – but some at Tesla had a different plan for the day.

It was an opportunity for women to discover essential oils. A “health and wellness group” at the electric car company invited female staff members to an 8 March “lunch ‘n learn” about oils and how they can help improve people’s “health and happiness”, according to emails seen by the Guardian, which reveal that the proposed event was quickly met with vocal criticism. It was particularly offensive to some given that a week earlier, AJ Vandermeyden, a female engineer, had publicly accused Elon Musk’s company of sexual harassment and discrimination.

Tesla postponed the oils session. The company organized a town hall meeting on diversity for that day, which included six male executives and one woman, according to multiple attendees. At the crowded meeting at the Fremont factory, women took the microphone one-by-one and shared stories of sexual harassment, mistreatment by male managers, unfair promotion decisions and more, sources said.

Vandermeyden, who attended the meeting, thought the outpouring of comments validated her own story. But soon after, Tesla fired her, accusing her of pursuing a “miscarriage of justice” by filing a lawsuit that alleged “pervasive harassment” and pay discrimination. Testimony from the town hall – along with internal emails from Musk, and Vandermeyden’s first interview since her termination – paint a picture of a company that has struggled to respond to mounting complaints about gender discrimination and has aggressively attempted to discredit a woman who publicly criticized it .

………

Musk also appeared to reference Vandermeyden in a company-wide email sent two days after her termination. In the email – with the subject “Doing the right thing”, sent at 2.29am – Musk lamented the scrutiny that his company faces, saying, “The list of companies that want to kill Tesla is so long, I’ve lost track.”

As as a result, he continued, employees must work harder and faster than competitors, adding they can’t be a “jerk” in the process.

Musk did not name Vandermeyden, but went on to offer what seemed to be a thinly veiled attack on her lawsuit: “If you are part of a less represented group, you don’t get a free pass on being a jerk yourself. We have had a few cases at Tesla where someone in a less represented group was actually given a job or promoted over more qualified highly represented candidates and then decided to sue Tesla for millions of dollars because they felt they weren’t promoted enough. That is obviously not cool.”

(emphasis mine)

What a classic example of a narcissistic self entitled tech bro, and Elon Musk is supposed one of the "good" guys in Silicon Valley, someone who is out to save the world.

If this is their best, there is something seriously rotten in the immediate vicinity of San Jose.

More Tech Bros

In this case, venture capitalist Justin Caldbeck who taking an indeterminate leave of absence following multiple allegations of sexual harassment:

In light of allegations of sexual harassment and unwanted sexual advances, Binary Capital co-founder and managing partner Justin Caldbeck is taking an indefinite leave of absence, he said in a statement provided to TechCrunch.

In his apology statement, Caldbeck did not outright admit nor deny the allegations of the female founders who came forward. Instead, he directed his apology “first to those women who I’ve made feel uncomfortable in any way, at any time – but also to the greater tech ecosystem, a community that I have utterly failed.”

As Leslie Miley noted on Twitter, the way Caldbeck kicked off his apology letter with words are how hard the last 24 hours have been on him. That’s because women in tech and in the workplace at larger have been dealing with this type of nonsense since forever.

I don't mean to minimize the sexual harassment, but I think that this is symptomatic of a more general culture of impunity, and I think that if a prosecutor with a background in white collar crime went to town with some forensic accountants, no small number of these "masters of the universe" would find themselves in jail.

Silicon Valley Bro Culture in a Nutshell

Apple's New $5 Billion Apple Park Campus Has a 100,000-Square-Foot Gym and No Daycare

Considering that this building was designed with input from the late Steve Jobs, this is not particularly surprising.

Job's relationship to parenting was (at best) problematic, so this development is rather unsurprising.

There Are Two People Who Make Donald Trump Look Good, Hillary Clinton, and ………

Mark Zuckerberg:

Facebook is disputing a former employee’s analysis that female engineers have their code rejected 35% more than male engineers, telling employees internally that leaking such information damages its “recruiting brand” and makes it harder for the company to hire women.

The original analysis, first reported by the Wall Street Journal and independently confirmed by the Guardian, was conducted by a longtime Facebook software engineer last year. The engineer studied the company’s code review process, looking at the number of times code was rejected, commented upon, or updated; how long it took for code to be accepted; and demographic data about the coder, such as gender and length of employment.

Female coders received 35% more “rejects” and 8.2% more comments on their code, the engineer found. The engineer also found that the disparity in rejections for male and female coders was “consistent across time at company”.

(emphasis mine)

We don't care, we don't have to … we're Facebook.

"Damages its recruiting brand?" Seriously?

If Facebook thinks that this is the worst part of their being another outpost of "Bro Culture," is that it damages their brand, then their moral compass is spinning fast enough to power all of Bayonne, New Jersey.

It's no wonder that another publication described Facebook's response as, "Incredibly tone-deaf."

They are Facebook, they don't care, they don't have to.

So Not a Surprise

It appears that while teaching law school courses, Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch made much over how women "abused" their employers over maternity benefits:

A former law student of Judge Neil Gorsuch, President Trump's nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, alleges that in a course she took from Gorsuch at the University of Colorado Law School last year, the judge told his class that employers, specifically law firms, should ask women seeking jobs about their plans for having children and implied that women manipulate companies starting in the interview stage to extract maternity benefits.

The concerns were shared in a letter, posted Sunday evening by the National Employment Lawyers Association and the National Women's Law Center, written by Jennifer Sisk, a 2016 graduate of the University of Colorado Law School. It was sent on Friday to the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Ranking Member Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.

………

On April 19, 2016, Sisk wrote, Judge Gorsuch used a hypothetical from the prepared material for the class, in which a female law student applies for jobs at law firms because the student has a large debt to pay off. The student also intends to have a family with her husband.

"He interrupted our class discussion to ask students how many of us knew women who used their companies for maternity benefits, who used their companies to — in order to have a baby and then leave right away," Sisk said.

She recalled that few students raised their hands and Gorsuch became animated. "He said, 'Come on, guys. All of your hands should be up. Many women do this,'" Sisk said.

Sisk offered overall praise of Gorsuch as a teacher and legal mind, outside of this incident.

Apart from that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

This whole Handmaidens Tale thing is a feature, not a bug of conservative jurists.

Democrats will roll over on his nomination anyway.

Silicon Valley in All of Its Glory

We had revelations about a hostile work place at Uber last week, and this week it's Tesla where the "Brogrammer" culture is alleged:

A female engineer at Tesla has accused Elon Musk’s car company of ignoring her complaints of “pervasive harassment”, paying her a lower salary than men doing the same work, promoting less qualified men over her and retaliating against her for raising concerns.

The allegations of AJ Vandermeyden, who still works at the celebrated electric car manufacturer, paint a picture of a hostile work environment dominated by men where inappropriate sexual behavior is tolerated and women face numerous barriers to advance their careers.
………

Vandermeyden began at Tesla in 2013 and was eventually promoted to a manufacturing engineering position in the general assembly department, which consisted mostly of men and where she was paid less than male engineers whose work she directly took over, according to her complaint.

I think that we need to reconsider the adulation that we throw Silicon Valley's way.

There seems to be a surfeit of narcissism in around San Jose that rivals that around 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Psychopathic Is as Psychopathic Does

I'm sure that you have heard some of the stories about Uber, such as their simply refusing to pay taxes in the UK, and their relationship with the city of Pittsburgh, where after defending them against state regulators, ignoring the fact that they were pillaging the Carnegie-Mellon robotics lab, and allowing the ride service to roll out robotic cars on city streets, told the "City of Bridges" to pound sand when they requested help competing in the 2016 Smart City Challenge, Uber responded with a list of new demands.

And now, we have the case of Susan Fowler, and employee (full time programmer, not a driver) how documented the toxic and hostile workplace environment for women.

• Her manager propositioned her on her first day of work.
• HR said it was the first time that this had happened, and that he would get a stern talking to ……… The kicker is that they said this to her and at least a half dozen other complainants.
• She transferred to a rather dysfunctional and chaotic division, and then was not allowed to transfer again because her performance review was downgraded because, "Performance problems aren't always something that has to do with work, but sometimes can be about things outside of work or your personal life." (Translation, "Women are to be seen, not heard.")
• It is then revealed that her performance review was retroactively downgraded because, it prevented her transfer, "It turned out that keeping me on the team made my manager look good, and I overheard him boasting to the rest of the team that even though the rest of the teams were losing their women engineers left and right, he still had some on his team." (Women in the division went from 25% to 6%[!] while she was there)
• HR asked if, "I had noticed that *I* was the common theme in all of the reports I had been making, and that if I had ever considered that I might be the problem."
• She was threatened with firing for making complaints by her boss.

Note that she is no slouch, she has written what has been described as the de-facto standard on designing standard microservices, but she still got treated like crap, because treating employees, drivers, and customers like crap is what Uber does.

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick is a big fan of Ayn Rand and Objectivism, and I've said before, "That Ayn Rand Is to Business What Ebola Is to the Exchange of Bodily Fluids."

#DeleteUber.

What is Wrong with the Clinton Wing of the Democratic Party Succinctly Stated

I am not at all surprised that it is a Brit who notes that aggressive identity politics has pushed economic justice out of the political spotlight.

I would argue that some political factions, most notably the Clinton political machine, have done so deliberately, because it allows them to check the "right" boxes while still aligning themselves with what Theodore Roosevelt called the "Malefactors of Wealth".

People like Wal-Mart (Hillary was a member of its board for years) and Goldman Sachs (Hillary's speeches, and they funded her son-in-law's hedge fund) are Hillary's peeps, because they all agree that focusing on identity politics, as opposed to the the increasingly ferocious war on the average American worker or the financialization of our economy, is a good thing:

The rise of identity politics means that the personal is commonly understood to be political. Being a radical today relates as much to who you are as to what you think. Class struggle, at one time the raison d’être of the socialist movement, has been usurped on the left by the personal grievances of women, gays and ethnic minorities.

Identity politics was an understandable response to some of the injustices of the twentieth century. Despite the loftiness of much left-wing rhetoric, sexism, racism and homophobia have never successfully been eliminated from socialist politics for the simple reason that these movements reflect the societies in which they were conceived. It was often made apparent to women in particular that the priorities for leftists lay strictly within the class framework.

It would be wrong to imply that today this dynamic has been turned on its head. One can still find sexism, racism and homophobia on the left as easily as one can find it in wider society. In an article for Slate about the US Democratic primaries, Michelle Goldberg wrote in late 2015 about a cultural phenomenon of so-called 'Bernie Bros' – male supporters of US presidential candidate Bernie Sanders who 'seem to believe that their class politics exempt them from taking sexism seriously'.

………

Ultimately, though, the left should seek to move beyond identity politics for the simple reason that it is compatible with neo-liberal economics. Identity politics can co-exist with the corporate boss who makes more money in a week than his cleaner takes home in a year – as long as the chances of being the boss are assigned proportionally among different ethnic groups, sexualities and genders. Individual winners and losers remain as remote from each other as ever; they are simply sorted in direct proportion to their numbers in society. The ultimate aim of identity politics is to 'tune up' the elite rather than to abolish it.

………

Class politics must certainly evolve with the times – at the very least it should take account of the legitimate grievances of people who feel marginalised for reasons other than their class. However, liberal identity politics is increasingly a zero-sum game in which white men must invariably lose out so that women, ethnic minorities and LGBT individuals can prosper. With no account for the impact of class, this will simply give rise to another injustice, or at the very least, compound an existing one.

(emphasis mine)

I think that the author, James Bloodworth, undersells the deliberate nature of this transformation.

When one looks at the professional class, doctors, lawyers, and (most significantly) college professors, the top 2-5%, this focus on identity politics benefits them.

While they have not benefited to the degree of the top 1% of 1%, they have benefited, and now it's easier to for them to find inexpensive domestic help.

Gloria Steinem, How about a Nice Glass of Shut the F%$# Up?

Feminist icon Gloria Steinem has just suggested that young women are supporting Bernie Sanders because they are looking to impress boys:

Feminist activist Gloria Steinem on Friday suggested that young women support Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders over rival Hillary Clinton because they want to meet boys.

On HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher,” Maher asked Steinem why Clinton, who has campaigned on the historic nature of her candidacy, was losing the young female vote.

“I don’t mean to over-generalize … but men tend to get more conservative because they gain power as they age, and women get more radical because they lose power as they age,” Steinem responded.

“So it’s kind of not fair to measure most women by the standard of most men, because they’re going to get more activist as they get older,” she added.

“And when you’re young, you’re thinking, ‘Where are the boys?’ The boys are with Bernie.”

Maher joked that if he had chalked up Bernie’s support among young women to their desire to meet boys, Steinem would have slapped him.

Seriously?

After a lifetime of supporting equality, you blithely dismiss the attitudes of women as some sort of attempt at catching the right man?

She is saying that young women have no agency of their all.

I understand how some people are excited about the possibility of Hillary Clinton being the first woman President, but this is nuts.

The bigger picture is that identity politics is morally bankrupt, but I'm not a big picture kind of guy.

I'll just call lame beyond belief.

Bullsh%$ Bingo Winner of the Day

There is a mildly amusing parody web site that does a compare and contrast of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, things like:

• Bernie: Star Wars is a great series, and I thought that episode 7 is a nice return to the Franchise's roots,
• Hillary: [Makes "Live long and prosper" hand signal]

It's kind of silly, and not too deep, and pokes fun at Hillary Clinton's perceived lack of authenticity,^* but someone at Salon decided to use the meme to attack all Bernie Sanders supporters as male chauvinists, aka Bernie Bros:

………These jabs at Clinton’s imagined sonic preferences reinforce the tired idea that the tastes of non-cis-male cultural consumers—from teenagers on through boomers and beyond—are something to be mocked and disrespected.………

Don't even bother trying.

Annie Zaleski has won the bullsh%$ bingo game for this month, and possibly for the entire f%$#ing presidential campaign.

She has her head so far up her ass that she resembles a Klein bottle.

^*Not her fault.   Bill Clinton does authenticity so well that if he were sharing a bill with Pope Frank, the Pontiff would look like the Andy Kaufman character Tony Clifton.

Props to Bernie

On Face the Nation, Bernie Sanders said that much of the criticism of Hillary Clinton is motivated by sexism:

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said on Sunday that some of the criticism directed at his Democratic primary rival Hillary Clinton is motivated by sexism.

“I can’t think of many personalities who have been attacked for more reasons than Hillary Clinton,” Sanders told John Dickerson on “Face the Nation.”

“And by the way, let me be frank – and I’m running against her – some of it is sexist. I don’t know that a man would be treated the same way that Hillary is,” Sanders added.

Sanders remarks came in response to a question about whether Clinton’s use of a private server while secretary of state has hurt her trustworthiness in the eyes of some Americans. Sanders refused to comment on the scandal or Clinton’s honesty, and went on to emphasize that his concerns with her as the Democratic nominee are about her policies, not personality.

That's actually pretty classy, particularly in the context of the 2016 campaign.

I Wish that I Were This Good a Jew

Baci Weiler, a woman in New York City with a buzz cut and wearing baggy trowsers and t-shirt, was was approached by a Chabad Lubovich representative and lent her Tefillin^* so that she could pray.

In Orthodox Judaism, Tefillin are only to be worn by men, so Ms. Weiler posted the picture of this (Since deleted) to Facebook:

This happened last friday at a chabad table. Apparently, buzzed hair + baggy t-shirt + charedi lack of any concept of fluidity in gender expression = egalitarianism. Tefillin with a bracha [blessing], administered by a chabadnik! bimheira beyameinu [Hebrew for "it should come speedily in our time].

It should not have been a big deal, and no one but her FB friends should have seen it, but at this point, through the vagaries of the Internet, it ends up getting some mainstream coverage. (The Jerusalem Post picked it up.)

Well. Baci Weler was horrified at the idea that the Chabadnik who offered her Tefillin was being subjected to mocking, and she offered the most sincere and spiritual that I have ever read:

Two days ago, I posted a couple of photos of myself...

Two days ago, I posted a couple of photos of myself putting on tefillin at a Chabad stand in Union Square. Watching these photos spread, I’ve had time to reflect on their implications. These thoughts are still not fully formed, but I hope both my critics and supporters read them carefully and charitably.

The encounter itself was brief, shocking, and personally significant. I did not plan or initiate this interaction. I was approached and misgendered. Being seen as a man, despite being a woman, was paradoxically validating: for just a minute, I was no longer an Other - the mechitza that has frustrated me for years dissolved. As he carefully wrapped the tefillin shel yad around my arm, I felt connected - to him, to God, to tradition, to the Jewish people. It was a powerful moment, but also painful and wrong - because it was under false pretenses. Though his mistaken assumptions - products of the harmfully rigid gender roles with which he grew up - instigated the encounter, I let it continue without correcting him. Though I didn’t force him to do something wrong, I allowed him to do something he presumably would have been uncomfortable doing given complete knowledge of the situation. Despite our ideological differences, I owed him this basic level of respect as a fellow Jew and as a human. For that I am sorry.

Beyond this, my post was interpreted as personally mocking him, and for that I am also sorry. This was not my intention. The post is a separate entity from the encounter itself, and its goal was dual: on one level, I was knowingly making a sharp, ironic political statement - a criticism of a religious ideology with which I fundamentally disagree. It transcended the human interaction and presented us as caricatures of our respective religious identities. I am not retracting this criticism, but I don't want to be lauded for encouraging that kind of dehumanization. On another level, and more importantly, the photo - also separate from the encounter itself - is powerful because it depicts an instance of accidental pluralism and of shared joy in the mitzvah of hanachat tefillin. It is a serendipitous glimpse of the world I wish I lived in: a world where both he, a bearded chabadnik guy, and I, a buzz-cut egalitarian girl, could be “frum”, regardless of gender or labels, equally bound by mitzvot. I'll end as I did before: Bimheira Beyameinu.

I don't think that I would ever achieve this level of Kavanah.^†

Ms. Weiler might want to consider the Rabbinate as a career.

H/T Failed Messiah.

^*Boxes that contain scripture, and are placed on the non-dominant arm and head in order to conduct certain prayers.
^†The spiritual focus and awareness required for prayer to "take".

If You Are a Guy and You Refuse to Go on Your Rescuing-Supermodels Adventure Because Charlize Theron Is Coming with You, You Really Need to Reconsider Your Commitment to Heterosexuality.

Virginia Hey, "Warrior Woman", Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981)


Charlize Theron, Furiosa, Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

You may be aware that Australian director George Miller has done a reboot of his seminal 1979 film Mad Max.

What you may not be aware of is the fact that various members of the really small penis brigade, aka "Men's Rights Advocates", have called for a boycott of the film.

Over at Unfogged, a guest poster notes:

The new Mad Max movie may be the most guy movie ever made. The plot is literally Tom Hardy (Mad Max) and Charlize Theron (Furiosa) rescue scantily-clad supermodels. If you asked me when I was 15 to list movie ideas, the list would have gone something like: scantily-clad supermodels, 18 wheelers, guys getting shot, guys getting blown up, fist-fights on top of an 18 wheeler, guys with chainsaws, guys getting run over by 18 wheelers, guys with guitars that shoot fire, and cars crashing into 18 wheelers and blowing up. This list is basically the script for Mad Max: Fury Road. The only thing missing is a helicoper piloted by velociraptors crashing into an 18 wheeler. But there's always the chance of a sequel.

He further notes that the this shows just how toxic the "Mens Rights" Movement is. Not only are they demandin "guy films", they are demanding the exclusion of any strong women from the movie, even though the director, George Miller, has a long history of woman warriors in his films.

His closing statement says it all, "If you are a guy and you refuse to go on your rescuing-supermodels adventure because Charlize Theron is coming with you, you really need to reconsider your commitment to heterosexuality."

That's gonna leave a mark.

H/t Brad DeLong

It Looks Like I Wasn't the Only One Who Thought That Obama's Attitude toward Elizabeth Warren Was Sexist

It turns out that the distinguished gentleman from Ohio, Senator Sherrod Brown, found Obama's statements about Warren and the TPP dismissive in a way that he never would be to male members of congress:

Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown threw a grenade into the ongoing war of words between Sen. Elizabeth Warren and President Barack Obama, a war that reached new heights with Tuesday’s dramatic setback of Obama’s trade agenda in the Senate.

Brown, one of the top Democratic leaders of the uprising against Obama’s trade push, criticized the president for what the senator saw as “disrespectful” comments toward Warren and suggested that Warren’s gender may have played a role.

When asked how Obama was being disrespectful of the Massachusetts Democrat, Brown replied: “I think by just calling her ‘another politician.’” He continued, “I’m not going to get into more details. I think referring to her as first name, when he might not have done that for a male senator, perhaps? I’ve said enough.”

Particularly when juxtaposed with a former staffer saying of the Obama White House that, "It actually fit all of the classic legal requirements for a genuinely hostile workplace to women," and his "Sweetie" comment to a female reporter, I think that the burden of proof must be on the President, and not Mr. Brown.

And now Obama, though his proxy White House press secretary Josh Earnest, is not just asking for an apology from Senator Brown, but is insisting that it inevitable that he will eventually apologize.

The word, "Whiny Bitch," is completely inadequate to describe this.

Tweet of the Day

In response to a misogynist tweet about the UK elections directed at her, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling responded:

.@sjosiah0 The Internet doesn’t just offer opportunities for misogynistic abuse, you know. Penis enlargers can also be bought discreetly.

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) May 8, 2015

That is brilliant, and I place Ms. Rowling in my most sacred order of People I Do Not Want to Piss Off.

H/t Vox.

Church of England Enters 20th Century

The Church of England has appointed its first female Bishop. The American branch of the church, the Episcopal Church, first did so in 1989:

The Church of England consecrated its first woman bishop on Monday, the culmination of years of efforts by Church modernizers to overcome opposition from traditionalists - one of whom briefly shouted a protest during the service.

More than two decades after the Church allowed women to become priests, 48-year-old mother-of-two the Reverend Libby Lane became Bishop of Stockport in a ceremony at York Minster, a Gothic cathedral in northern England.

The protest came as John Sentamu, Archbishop of York, asked the congregation whether Lane should be consecrated as Bishop.

As the congregation chorused its approval, a lone man's voice shouted above them: "No, not in the Bible."

When Sentamu asked the question again, there was no dissent and the ceremony went ahead.

During the service, which ended in applause, Sentamu and other bishops ceremonially laid their hands on Lane and prayed for her.

This is really something that should have happened in the last century, but religious institutions are frequently MANY centuries behind the time, so this ain't too shabby.

Rush Limbaugh is a Whiny Bitch, Part MMMMMMCMLXIX

Yeah, he's threatening to sue the DCCC over their use of his quotes in the last campaign:

Rush Limbaugh is hopping mad at the Democratic Party — but this time he’s threatening to do more than just talk about it on the radio.

The conservative pundit is threatening to sue the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee for a series of fundraising e-mails that suggested Limbaugh was condoning campus rape in comments he made on his widely syndicated program on Sept. 15.

In a letter to the Washington-based organization intended for delivery Monday morning, Limbaugh’s lawyer demanded a retraction and a public apology for the fundraising e-mails. The letter indicated Limbaugh will sue for defamation and business “interference” if his demand isn’t met.

DCCC representatives were not available Monday; the organization’s offices are closed for the Veterans Day holiday.

The legal threat is the result of DCCC fundraising appeals sent out in the wake of Limbaugh’s on-air comments about a new policy at Ohio State University that instructs students to get verbal consent before having sex. The DCCC highlighted one particular sentence from his commentary — “How many of you guys . . . have learned that ‘no’ means ‘yes’ if you know how to spot it?” — saying it was tantamount to condoning sexual assault.

………

The legal threat is the result of DCCC fundraising appeals sent out in the wake of Limbaugh’s on-air comments about a new policy at Ohio State University that instructs students to get verbal consent before having sex. The DCCC highlighted one particular sentence from his commentary — “How many of you guys . . . have learned that ‘no’ means ‘yes’ if you know how to spot it?” — saying it was tantamount to condoning sexual assault.

Yeah, well I listened to what he said, and even if he weren't a public figure, this would be laughed out of court, because, in the United States, the truth is always a defense against accusations of libel and slander.

As a public figure, there is no evidence of malice or a reckless disregard for the truth in this.

Also, considering how the DCCC did no November 4, why the f%$# would Limbaugh, who is Republican to his core want to force the Democratic party to change its strategy?

Seriously Rush, take one for the team, and man up.

Blessed are you, Lord our G-d, King of the Universe, Who has not Made me a Moman.*

You know the reasons.

• He's assertive, she's a bitch.
• I get paid more for the same work.
• He's a playa, she's a slut.
• He's cool, and she's an ice queen.

Finally, and most importantly, I'll never have to deal with the mountain of bullsh%$ that has been sliding toward Renee Zellweger.

Seriously.

What the f%$# is wrong with people?

^*This is actually part of the traditional morning prayers for Jewish males. The Hebrew is, "בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יְיָ אֶלֹהֵֽינוּ מֶֽלֶךְ הָעוֹלָם, שֶׁלֹּא עָשַֽׂנִי אִשָּׁה."