KJ

As an antidote to my earlier post today, and on the flip side, here is a completely awesome project: karenhealey calls on the women of the Internet to tell her why we're awesome.

I just read through all the comments, and the catalog of awesome is a wonderous sight to behold. And it's not just the comments themselves, but also in the beauty of the supportive responses to them. I highly recommend checking it out, and (if applicable) leaving a comment of your own. It was pretty scary to proclaim my own awesomeness, but it was also exhilerating. Or, if doing it there is too daunting, share the awesome here. Consider this an open thread for awesome. Because I'm definitely not afraid to proclaim this: you women are, indeed, awesome.

(Thanks to Jed for the link!)

Earlier this month, the House passed the Stupak Amendment to their health care reform bill, which would be one of the biggest setbacks to women's health in recent decades — unless we stand together and stop it.

That's why we're launching this petition, because women must not be denied access to safe and legal medical procedures.

Join us by signing the petition and help build pressure to remove the discriminatory, extreme, anti-choice Stupak Amendment from the final health care reform bill!

The print publishing industry as a whole is staring into a void. Across the board, newsstand magazine sales are in a slump, subscriber numbers are down, and paper and postal costs continue to rise. But it's not magazines like US Weekly or Vogue that you'll see disappearing from the newsstands—they have the parent companies and the resources to weather industry ill winds. It's the small, independent magazines like Bitch that will disappear, because the odds are already stacked high against us. And simply put: We need to raise $40,000 by October 15th in order to print the next issue of Bitch.

...things that are up for continuing discussion include: Gov. Palin’s positions on abstinence-only education, women’s control of their bodies, birth control, Roe v. Wade, whether medical professionals can refuse on religious grounds to give treatment to women, and all other manner of topics relating to sex, women’s bodies, and choice. If Gov. Palin and the McCain campaign try to use Miss Palin’s pregnancy like they use Senator McCain’s former POW status — i.e., a cheap and easy trope to trot out in order to avoid answering reasonable questions — that’s well worth calling them on.

What's so startling in watching the coverage of the Clinton convention-speech story has been the complete ignorance displayed about how previous Democratic conventions have dealt with runners-up like Clinton. It's either complete ignorance or the media's strong desire to painstakingly avoid any historical context, which, in turn, allows the press to mislead news consumers into thinking Clinton's appearance (as well as the gracious invitation extended by Obama) represents something unique and unusual. Something newsworthy.

Based on previous conventions, if a candidate had accumulated as many delegates and votes as Clinton did during the primaries and then did not have her name placed into nomination, that would represent a radical departure from the convention norm.

But, boy, in 2008, an awful lot of media outlets have played dumb. When covering the August 14 announcement about Clinton's role in Denver, they miraculously forgot to make any historical reference to similar names-placed-in-nomination at previous conventions.

Instead, readers and viewers were left with the obvious impression that what was scheduled to happen in Denver was remarkable, an anomaly. And I suppose if you look at the events through a soda straw, it does look unusual. But if you include the slightest bit of context, the story changes into something normal and routine.

But that's not the story the press wants to tell (the Clintons are not normal!), so the press simply erased the context and stuck to its preferred story line that Clinton's appearance in Denver and the placing of her name in nomination are one for the record books.

Over the course of the campaign, I received complaints that Times coverage of Clinton included too much emphasis on her appearance, too many stereotypical words that appeared to put her down and dismiss a woman’s potential for leadership and too many snide references to her as cold or unlikable. When I pressed for details, the subject often boiled down to Dowd.

Nicholas Lemann, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, said: "I have not had a lot of regretful conversations with high-ranking media types and political reporters about how unfair their coverage of the Hillary Clinton campaign was."

Among journalists, he added, the coverage "does not register as a mistake that must not be allowed to happen again."