It's an open secret in the porn world that many female performers are supplementing their income by "hooking on the side". It's also called "doing privates", as in private bookings. The official industry line is that it's dangerous (because clients aren't tested the way performers are) and irresponsible (because the women could then infect the closed community of professional performers). But the women can make far more money having sex behind closed doors than doing it on film and, in fact, the practice is widespread. For many female performers nowadays, the movies are merely a sideline, a kind of advertising for their real business of prostitution.
Recent Dish on the collapse of the porn industry here.
"Some believe that when it comes to counterterrorism, the end always justifies the means; that torture, abuse, the suspension of civil liberties – no measure is too extreme in the name of keeping our citizens safe. But unfortunately, this view is short-sighted and wrong. When nations violate human rights and undermine the rule of law, even in the pursuit of terrorists, it feeds radicalization, gives propaganda tools to the extremists, and ultimately undermines our efforts. The international community cannot turn our eyes away from the effects of these tactics because they are part of the problem. I know that the United States has not always had a perfect record, and we can and must do a better job of addressing the mistaken belief that these tactics are ever permissible," – secretary of state Hillary Clinton.
After the jobs numbers and the Wisconsin recall, we get a royal verbal screw-up from POTUS and Romney drives the knife further in:
I'm with Weigel on this one. This is a big black eye for the president – not because what he said is in context that outrageous. It's a black eye purely because what he said is outrageous out of context and not in a self-evidently false way. So it's a pure political gift to his opponents – and the GOP will clip the quote to make it as damning as they can. They will try to identify a president whose administration inherited and was consumed by the worst recession since the 1930s as a man who has no idea there is a recession at all. And with low-information swing voters, it will be horrible.
Of course, I do not believe for a second that Romney actually believes that Obama believes the private sector is doing fine. He knows, as we do, that what Obama was trying ineptly to say is that compared with the public sector, the private sector is doing fine, which is not the same as great, right now. But watch Mitt up there, all shocked and stunned. He's just incredulous that Barack Obama genuinely believes that the private sector is doing fine. Amazed. Staggered. I mean: gee willikers, can you believe it?
Now watch Obama's expression as he swiftly tries to correct himself:
This embed is invalid
Yes, that's a smile. Of amused desperation. He knows the damage. He knows that the result is that some will successfully persuade others that he truly believes the exact opposite of what he actually believes. He knows that the elaboration above will get one millionth of the views of the original fuck-up.
All I hope is that it doesn't get into his head. Or our collective head.
There are some real choices in this election: how to work off a recession created by a financial crisis, a housing bubble, and a debt overhang? Whether to tackle the debt with spending cuts alone or whether to include tax increases in the mix? War with Iran or not? More stimulus or more austerity? And none of them can usefully be engaged in by any reference as to whether the president actually believes that the private sector is booming. He doesn't. It's obvious he doesn't. It came out wrong. If we cannot make the distinction between those kinds of arguments – real ones or phony ones – then we will get the government we deserve.
As for Obama, he's been hazed before; he will be hazed again. This election campaign is going to turn him into a pinata of projection and distortion and blame. It will be like the battle with Clinton only far, far more brutal. His only option is to do what he did then: relentlessly counter distortions with truth. He needs to tell the story of the last three years clearly and honestly, and to make the case for what he will do in the future, without being distracted by the 24 hour nonstop chatter that now convulses the attentive body politic. He has a strong case on the content of his record and on what he plans to do going forward and how it all fits together. He has to make it. Again and again. With ever more clarity and concision.
To be more precise, he must make it plainer that, in this country's politics, he is still the change agent. If he weren't, why would they have done so much to stop him? And why are they so desperate to prevent a second term? What Obama needs to do is to connect the opposition he now faces to the campaign he ran in 2008. He did what he said he'd do. But he needs another term to get it to stick. They know that. He knows that. But do his 2008 supporters see it yet?
It's going to be hard. And it's not always going to be fair. But the stakes now are as large as they were in 2008. And the wind, rather than being at his back like last time, is blowing with increasingly irrational ferocity in his face. I feel no pity for him. When you take up the mantle he has, you accept that you will alternately be blessed and cursed by fate as well as your own judgments. And he's had plenty of his own luck in getting to the White House. He's going to have to earn every inch of it to stay there.
This is where we see, of course, if he really has got it in him – and if those of us who saw him as a change agent have the stamina in us as well. Few have achieved so much in the presidency so tenuously. But that was always the risk of the long game.
In that long game, as they say on cable news, the critical period starts now.
Darren Taylor, aka Professor Splash, celebrates after achieving a world record of diving from 30 feet into 12 inches of Cornish milk at the Royal Cornwall Show on June 8, 2012 near Wadebridge, England. The American stuntman visited the showground on the second day of the three day agricultural show. By Matt Cardy/Getty Images.
The Internet is stitched together by the odd love of obsessed people, and every time I stumble down one of the rabbit holes left by one of them, I fall in love with the whole of the internet further and deeper. Today I fell in love with this guy, who is meticulously tracking all the language anachronisms in Mad Men (though he started his logging with Downton Abbey) to a resolution level that, frankly, takes my breath away and leaves me feeling dizzy.
Would you have guessed that Canada and Australia both have a higher percentage of foreign-born citizens than the U.S.? In fact, in this respect, America–which once led the world–increasingly looks like many other Western countries. France, Germany and the U.K. have only slightly fewer foreign-born residents than America (as a percentage of the population). And some of these countries have managed to take in immigrants mostly based on their skills, giving a big boost to their economies.
Advice from Ross Perlin, the author of Intern Nation:
There’s good reason why traditional summer jobs like lifeguarding, scooping ice cream, and being a camp counselor have a nice, nostalgic sound to them—they have real value.
All kinds of businesses, from theme parks to rental car companies to restaurants to fish canneries, are at their busiest during the summer and need extra help. You might be surprised by how much you can learn from these “menial” jobs: being outside (in many cases), having real responsibilities squarely on your shoulders, working with cool people from all sorts of different backgrounds, and not least, earning money and (hopefully) being financially independent. If potential employers in your future don’t see the value in that—and a lot of them will—they might not be people you want to work for, anyway. There’s no question there are industries that basically require internships these days: media, politics, film, and fashion, to name just a few. And short of a full-scale boycott of unpaid internships, you may feel that the pragmatic thing is simply to suck it up—but doesn’t that just reflect how deep the problem goes?
Of course, some internships, like the Dish's, are paid.
"I am pro-life, in as much as I find abortion deeply morally troubling" … unlike pro-choicers who think that abortions are just barrels of fun? You don't get to make words mean what you like, and the meaning of "pro-life" is well-established. If you don't want abortions to be illegal, then you aren't pro-life. If you think the government should allow women to decide whether they carry their pregnancies to term, even if you disapprove of their choices, then you're pro-choice.
Holding pro-choice positions while calling yourself pro-life so that you can pretend that your position is so much more nuanced than that of the rest of us pro-choicers (who obviously all just love abortions) doesn't make you deep and high-minded. It just makes you sound as if you've only listened to what pro-lifers have to say about pro-choicers instead of listening to pro-choicers themselves.
(Also, you might want to reread Roe; it didn't deprive America of "legal, safe and rare abortion, with increasing restrictions past the first trimester"; that's pretty much exactly what it established.)
What it effectively established – with no democratic input – was abortion on demand, one of the most liberal abortion regimes in the West, in one of the most conservative countries in the West. From that, so much of our culture wars follow. Another points to Blackmun's opinion (Section XI, about halfway down):
(a) For the stage prior to approximately the end of the first trimester, the abortion decision and its effectuation must be left to the medical judgment of the pregnant woman's attending physician.
(b) For the stage subsequent to approximately the end of the first trimester, the State, in promoting its interest in the health of the mother, may, if it chooses, regulate the abortion procedure in ways that are reasonably related to maternal health.
(c) For the stage subsequent to viability, the State in promoting its interest in the potentiality of human life may, if it chooses, regulate, and even proscribe, abortion except where it is necessary, in appropriate medical judgment, for the preservation of the life or health of the mother.
I gather that subsequent legislation on the issue has rejected the trimester framework of the original Roe decision, but I'm not sure how Roe itself is contradictory to your characterization of the European position.
Another dissent:
The photo you are using for the abortion debate has got to go. That is a baby. I assume your ethical quandary transcends fetal age, but considering that even a pro-life website uses this photo to demonstrate "3 months": Your photo is pretty emotionally manipulative.
It is intended to be emotionally resonant. Another counters Marcotte:
I think that there may be some specious reasoning about the effects of banning abortions on the rate of abortion. I'm not denying that women will seek back alley abortions were it made illegal (or that those abortions are more harmful physically), but to say that the rate is higher in countries where it is illegal and to conclude that it would be higher in the US if it were illegal is fallacious.
The obvious reason is this: the comparison of abortion rates where it is illegal versus where it's legal is based on comparing developing and developed countries. I'm not surprised that abortion rates are higher in countries that are developing and poorer, even if it's illegal. But a real apples-to-apples comparison would require comparing similarly situated countries (vis-a-vis social and economic factors) that have divergent abortion policies. Only then could you maybe conclude that the effect of banning abortion has overall pro-life or non-pro-life effects.
The video above is supposed to be an invocation for the Colorado Republican State Assembly and Convention in Denver last April. It's less an invocation than a segment on the Hannity propaganda show. David Gibson has the details. It's yet another depressing sign of the fusion of the Catholic hierarchy with the Republican party – a stark use of religious authority to endorse one political party and to echo partisan propaganda about the president. Mercifully, it's not only the nuns and Franciscans who are fighting back. A group of influential lay Catholics in Washington DC has just issued a statement criticizing over-reach by the Bishops in their partisan maneuvering. Money quote:
We are deeply concerned that, under cover of a campaign for religious liberty, the provision of universal health care–a priority of Catholic social teaching from the early years of the last century–is being turned into a wedge issue in a highly-charged political environment and that our parish, and indeed the wider church, is in danger of being rent asunder by partisan politics. We, as a group, may have differing views as to the wisdom of the details of the Health and Human Services mandate, against which our archdiocese has now announced a lawsuit in federal court, but we are united in our concern that the bishops’ alarmist call to defend religious freedom has had the effect of shutting down discussion. It is a step too far. We, the faithful, are in danger of becoming pawns and collateral damage in a standoff between our church and our government.
The Dish 