a litany of good stuff.

i've been horrible about updating this thing recently, but now that i'm back at a 9-6 desk job, let the procrastinerding begin!!

some fav things, in list form for today just to play catch-up:

1. cruch grassley (r-iowa, immense idiot)

hopefully, we've all been following grassley's completely foolish obama bashing on twitter. if not, wonkette says everything i want to say better than i can say it (source):

Jesus fucking christ. Remember back in 1780-something, when we had actual smart people writing our founding documents in beautiful longhand when they weren’t inventing new kinds of ploughs and bifocals and shit? Now our nation’s top legislators just type away like petulant teenage girls, with their thumbs, about how the president is so awful for spending the weekend in Paris. We are all stupider for having read this.

2. this comic is hilarious. (source)

(clickly click to make it bigger)

3. andrew sullivan's abortion series. (source)

on a far more serious note, andrew sullivan at the daily dish has been running an incredible series of personal accounts submitted by readers that really personalize the abortion debate. the entire series is well worth reading, but here's one that i thought was really incredible:

A reader writes:

One thing that helped me to rethink the abortion issue was the time I spent researching health care in the eastern D.R. Congo. It's impossible to study the health system there without confronting the rape epidemic that plagues the region.

One hospital I visited is mostly funded by overseas churches. Their supporters and workers are conservative, evangelical Protestants, many of whom you would probably classify as "Christianists." The patients in their facility are living reminders of the region's horror story. Most were violently gang raped by soldiers and have unspeakable physical and mental wounds. Staff at the hospital sacrifice a lot to repair the physical damage of rape and to provide counseling to the women who manage to get there.

They also dispense "morning after" pills. When I asked one of the directors why, I was told, "We follow the law of love." They came to the conclusion that when a dilemma doesn't present black-and-white choices, Christians have to do the most loving thing. Once they looked at it in those terms, it became clear that for an orphaned, eleven-year-old rape victim in a collapsed state with no adoption system and overcrowded orphanages, the most loving thing to do is not to force one child to deliver another who would inevitably suffer and almost certainly die. The most loving thing to do for those girls is to end potential pregnancies with grief for the horror that the living and the yet-to-be-born have to endure.

I cannot imagine facing the moral dilemmas your readers have shared this week. It's all grey. But in most of the accounts, it is clear that these women and their families did their best to follow the law of love. They chose to suffer emotional and mental anguish themselves so that their children would not have to live brief lives of pain. And that seems to me to be morally defensible.

4. ridiculous end note

guys, the tween pop star drama is really heating up these days and it is way more interesting than weekly dissertations on whether or not brad and angelina are going to get married and/or break up. i'm spending a lot of procrastinerding time reading about it, so if you're into it, let me know. i would not be ashamed to bring some of that nonsense in here.