But I sure as hell remember growing up and seeing my mom being dissed as a Bad Mother for a) working outside the home and b) earning more than her husband. And I've seen plenty of homeschooling SAHMs who are hyper-religious, antifeminist, and who happily lob the Bad Mother Stones at women who work outside the home. You may not be one of them, but please don't pretend they don't exist.

Silencing works both ways, Anonymous_Too. People who try to shout down others with walls of heated words when no slight was meant are silencers, too.

If anyone is seriously thinking about mounting a viable presidential campaign for 2012, they have get started now. And yes, Obama is that formidable -- check out his approval numbers sometime.

Consider also this: It is now just about impossible for a Republican to win both his party's nomination for president and the general election. Hell, in some places, like Pennsylvania, it's impossible for Republicans to win primaries for Senate seats and then go on to win in the general elections. (And now you know both why Arlen Specter jumped to the Democrats, and why Tom Ridge won't run in the GOP primary for Specter's seat.)

Look at John McCain: Copious national polling by Gallup and other pollsters, including favored GOP pollster Scott Rasmussen, consistently showed that John McCain was the only Republican to have a good chance of winning in 2008. Yet the party base had to be forced to support him. Now McCain is gone, the party base has been 'purified' even further of its saner elements, and there is simply no one left on the horizon who could beat Dennis Kucinich, much less Barack Obama, in 2012. (The other semi-sane alternative that would actually stand a chance, Chuck Hagel, is no longer running for anything, precisely because being even semi-sane is a liability where the GOP base is concerned.)

Oh, and Huntsman is fluent in Mandarin and familiar with Chinese and Asian culture in general. Win-win-win all around.

How dare you pay attention to the root of the matter? Why can't you be like the TradMed and swallow uncritically everything the CIA or the GOP says?

So Margaret Sanger wasn't alone in being a fan of it. Nor was a fondness for eugenics confined to those who favored women's emancipation. But the antichoicers, eager to cover up the fact that bigots and racists currently run riot in their movement and have for decades, try to distract from this fact by pointing out a flaw that Margaret Sanger, who has been dead over forty years and whose salad days were over a century ago, shared with most of her contemporaries round about 1900 or so.

Please do keep it up, sir.

Now, for the adults among us: Anyone notice how none of Lind's critics marshalled any facts and data, much less in a proper context, against him? All they had was blather or insults such as provided by the inestimable Mr. Majors of the Stainless Banner.

Here are some facts in context. Now watch as the conservatives following me will either lie about them or ignore them in favor of name-calling:

From http://firedoglake.com/2009/03/31/social-security-more-sound-and-fury-still-signifying-nothing/ --

The trustees' long-range economic growth projections are so low-balled that were they actually to occur, Social Security would be the LEAST of our worries.

For example: Economic growth over the period of 1929 to 2004 -- years that include the Great Depression -- averaged 3.6%. It only takes a 2.7% average to keep SS fully funded forever. Yet the trustees, in order to achieve their sky-is-falling bullshit numbers, consistently project long-term growth rates of around 1.8%, which means they're predicting Depression Forever -- in which case we'd have much, much bigger things to worry about than SS. Such as total societal collapse and cannibalism.

I noticed that one important reason for childrens' resentment of their dads' new wives was left out: The likelihood that Daddy's new wife was the person who, in the kids' eyes, came between Daddy and Mommy and wrecked their happy home.

Yeah, yeah, it's really more complicated than that: Some couples aren't meant to be together even if they have kids, and commitment is hard, yadda yadda yadda. Try telling that to a kid whose main understanding of the situation is that Mommy and Daddy aren't together any more and that this interloper is probably the cause.

So very predictable.

Susan's a gifted amateur who's had some training but is also held back by more than a little stage fright, perhaps occasioned by an all-too-vivid awareness of being mentally 'different' from other people. Her rendition of "Cry Me A River", done ten years ago for a charity compilation CD, is probably her best complete song, though the ending of "Memory" approaches Elaine Paige in terms of quality, with perhaps a touch of Patti LuPone thrown in.

Would she have become famous without the whole looks/demeanor issue? Probably not. But then again, fame is as much about sheer luck and seizing whatever opportunities appear, as it is about talent or work. Look at all the pretty-faced songstresses who've been pushed down our throats because they happen to be sleeping with their producers. These silicone-enhanced warblers almost always need vocal enhancements in the studio, too. Say what you will about Susan Boyle -- unlike the silicone sisters, she will never need a producer to massively overproduce her vocal tracks to compensate for a half-octave range.

Is she Patti LuPone or Elaine Paige or Julie London? Not quite, but this shows her as herself, and singing as herself, she bests 90% of the pretty wives and girlfriends of the record execs:

http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/2009/04/16/exclusive-susan-boyle-s-first-ever-song-release-revealed-listen-to-it-here-86908-21283564/

According to a friend in the know, she has had many openly gay clerks and staffers over the years.