As a woman who was raped at gunpoint in my own home when I was in my twenties, and shot at while escaping from another would-be rapist a couple of years later, then endured an abusive relationship just to round out the nightmare, I could relate very well to Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wisconsin), who stood up on the floor of the House of Representatives and recounted her personal experiences of child molestation and of being raped as an adult — a rape that resulted in pregnancy and her now 40-something-year-old son — as part of a Democratic message to the GOP regarding the Republican “war on women.” I suspect there are a good many American women who can also unfortunately identify with Rep. Moore.

Once upon a time, the Violence Against Women Act had bipartisan support, but as the Republican Party continues to devolve into rightwing extremism, Republicans like Rep. Bob Turner (R – NY) — a good pal of Rush Limbaugh, and instrumental in getting the conservative talk show host his own television program back when Turner was a television executive — voted against renewing the Violence Against Women Act. What a surprise.

But lest we think it’s all the fault of rich fat white men, the GOP has lost no time in trotting out their angry mama grizzlies to support the backlash against women and minorities in general. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Washington) the only woman in the GOP leadership, called Rep. Moore’s statements on the House floor a “distraction,” and accused Democrats of “manufacturing this war on women because the Democrats know that the Republicans won the women's vote in 2010.” Her colleague, Rep Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee) managed to expand the rhetoric to include anything the current administration supports. “Whether it is spending, whether it is the cost of your health insurance, whether it is the price at the pump, this administration is too expensive to afford.” Rep. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyoming) even managed to shoehorn a few sacred catchwords into the mix, evoking “moms of America” who want “freedom for themselves and their kids” ... whatever that means.

One might think that anyone with a mother, or a sister, or a daughter, or an aunt — which is to say most of the human race — would find state agencies, rape crisis centers, and organizations that provide services to vulnerable women to keep them safe and alive, to be something laudable. Something worth funding and fighting for. Something that transcends political affiliation. Apparently, not Republicans. They don’t give a flying Fox about women.

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(With sincere apologies to Judith Martin)

DEAR MISS MANNERS: I am a young woman in my early 20s, a law student at Georgetown University, and I recently testified on Capitol Hill after being denied the opportunity of appearing before a Senate Committee consisting only of men from conservative religious organizations on the proposed contraceptive mandate. Because of this, a well-known conservative talk show host has targeted me for public abuse, calling me a “slut” and a “prostitute” and demanding I make sex tapes so he can view them on-line. I’m stunned and outraged, what should I do?

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Find more of Rush Limbaugh's statements at Media Matters.

Rush Limbaugh has made his considerable fortune from espousing extreme righ-twing views and attacking opponents with hate-filled, vitriolic rhetoric for years. A large portion of the American radio audience has long found it entertaining, although those numbers are starting to wane considerably. The nation’s first all-conservative talk radio station, KVI in Seattle, switched back to its classic rock format shortly after the elections in 2010, after 17 years of supporting right-wing talk shows. An Arbitron report released less than a year ago showed ratings for Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity had fallen sharply, down 33 percent and 28 percent respectively. Premiere Radio Networks, which syndicates both shows, expressed their lack of concern for the report, saying even with such a sharp drop Limbaugh and Hannity “continue to be No. 1 and No. 2.”

Such unmitigated support has allowed Limbaugh to really pull out all the stops in recent days and release his inner psychotic, unleashing an attack on Sandra Fluke, who testified before Congress about the problem of women’s lack of access to contraception, that bordered on, if not downright was, legally slanderous, calling the Georgetown University Law School student a “slut” and a “prostitute.”

“Who bought your condoms in sixth grade?” Limbaugh said, “Who bought your contraceptive pills in high school?" Then he mocked her in much the same way he mocked Michael J. Fox’s battle with Parkinson’s disease, impersonating Fluke in baby voice and pretending to cry. “I'm going broke having sex. I need government to provide me condoms and contraception. It's not fair.” He then took it one disgusting step further, telling Miss Fluke, “and the rest of you Feminazis, here’s the deal. If we are going to pay for your contraceptives, and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something for it. We want you to post the videos online, so we can all watch.”

You only wish, you narrow-minded Oxycontin- popping pervert.

This, from the guy who along with four of his best buddies, most of them from Fox, flew to the Dominican Republic for a “stag party” on a Gulfstream IV jet owned by Premiere Radio Networks, which syndicates his radio program, along with 29 100mg pills of Viagra issued in someone else’s name. Methinks it’s not Georgetown law students who are abnormally obsessed with sex.

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I enjoy reading The Onion, even more so when those it lampoons don’t get the joke. But while satire is meant to be amusing, it quite often reflects a more serious state of affairs. A recent Onion post on a captive breeding program designed to save the critically endangered moderate Republican had me laughing, before it had me thinking.

Because, actually... they’re right - the Republican Party truly is dying. For all intents and purposes, it’s already dead, the only impression of life being the lurching about of animated zombies eating their own brains, leaving the traditional mainstream moderate Republican conservative embarrassed and frustrated. The traditional mainstream moderate conservatives aren’t even in reality Republicans any longer, as the party itself has deteriorated from the rot of tea party fanaticism, and Koch Brother corruption, and the constant barrage Fox propaganda posing as journalism, and hate-filled blustering talk shows spewing hydrophobic nonsense, and the jaw-droppingly atrocious bunch of incompetent idiots posing as GOP Presidential candidates. All that is left of a once a respectable political party is the name “Republican” for nostalgic conservatives to cling to.

Which is so not good for our country. If disaffected Republicans ever managed to purge themselves of the zombies and the tea partiers and the Limbaughs and Fox and regrouped as something else, much like New Labour rebranded itself in the UK (although New Labour turned out to be just Tory Lite rather than any sort of improved Labour party), Democrats might finally have genuine opponents again - which would be both a bit scary and a bit hopeful. A nation runs best when there's an honorable opposition to keep the ruling party honest, regardless of what party is in power. An honorable opposition represents a very large proportion of the nation’s citizenship, and gives that citizenship a strong voice. An honorable opposition works harder at designing and proposing alternative ideas in the hope that the good they can do will garner them enough votes next go-round at the polls. I’d like to see an honorable opposition again.

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When the Republican-dominated Virginia senate proposed a bill requiring women to undergo an ultrasound before having an abortion, one of their own finally had had enough. Sen. Janet Howell (D-Fairfax) attached an amendment to the bill that would require men to have a rectal exam and cardiac stress test before being prescribed Viagra for erectile dysfunction. "We need some gender equality here."

She didn't get it. While her amendment failed, the rest of the bill passed. Rush Limbaugh can be reassured Virginia will protect his God-given right to a medically-enhanced stiffy while making sure the women of their fair state will be forced to pay for an unnecessary and expensive ultrasound and view images of the fetus before an abortion can be performed. This particularly cruel act proves yet again that Republicans consider women to be very little more than walking wombs without the same rights over their own bodies that men enjoy over theirs.

But it started a trend. When Republican Senator Brian Crain of Tulsa, Oklahoma, introduced Bill SB 1433, otherwise known as the "Personhood" bill, seeking to legally define human life as beginning at conception, even before implantation in the womb, and offering more legal protection to a one-celled zygote than its fully grown adult mother, Democratic senator Constance Johnson had had enough - she introduced an amendment declaring every sperm must be likewise sacred. "Any action in which a man ejaculates or otherwise deposits semen anywhere but in a woman’s vagina shall be interpreted and construed as an action against an unborn child."

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(h/t ABL WARNING: Graphic images and language)

My mother died of breast cancer. I'm sure the vast majority of people reading this can point to an aunt, a cousin, a sister, a best friend who has had the disease. So far, the estimated new cases and deaths from breast cancer in the United States in 2012 (and this is just February) is 226,870 women and 2,190 men with new cases of cancer and 39,510 women and 410 men who have died from the disease. Many of these women, and possibly even men, are poor and have little access to proper health care or support in a country where health care is still only for few who can afford it, and many of them owe their lives to finding the disease early through breast screening provided by Planned Parenthood.

But it seems the anti-abortion faction of the right wing isn't just trying to impose their moral, political and religious values on women's wombs, they don't give a damn about the health of women's breasts, either. The Susan G. Komen Foundation has found itself under fire during this past week over its decision to withdraw funding from Planned Parenthood, thereby depriving thousands of women from life-saving breast screening. But one voice in the many opposed to the gutless capitulation of the Komen Foundation, and specifically Komen's CEO, Nancy Brinker, is that of Linda Burger, a 56-year-old breast cancer survivor in Las Vegas, who was so appalled she made a video. It is not for the faint hearted, for as Linda says in this video, cancer makes you frank, it makes you say what you feel. It give you the courage to face a camera and bare the scars from a mastectomy for the entire world to see. This brave, beautiful, kick-ass woman pulls no punches, she's a hero through and through.

Watch this wonderful video. Then send it to an aunt, a cousin, a sister, a best friend. Send it to your Congressman. Send the Komen Foundation the message that politics and religion have no place in providing health care for women who have nowhere else to turn. They can take their plastic pink ribbons and shove them up Ari Fleischer's nose. Then send a donation to Planned Parenthood - help keep them alive, so that they can help keep us alive.

By now, the story of Rebecca Hains's frosted cupcake confiscated by an overly zealous (or possibly just hungry) TSA Security Officer at a Los Vegas airport has gone viral, leading to a satirical song, and the sudden burst in popularity at the bakery of a "traditional style red velvet cake with Madagascar Bourbon vanilla cream cheese butter cream frosting" cupcake in a jar, now re-dubbed the National (Security) Velvet Cupcake (with the packaging redesigned to make it safe for air travel). Possibly the only dangerous thing about this cupcake is what it might do to your cholesterol levels.

The rationale - if one can use that word here without sniggering - behind the confiscation of a cupcake is the Transportation Security Administration's rule enforcing the 3-ounce limit for gels in carry-on luggage, ostensibly to prevent terrorists sneaking explosive aboard an airplane. But once we're finished with shaking our heads in disbelief and having a bit of a laugh... it might be advisable to look at this incident from a slightly more serious angle.

The Transport Security Administration was created as part of the Aviation and Transportation Security Act sponsored by Republican Congressman Don "Bridge to Nowhere" Young, signed into law barely a month after the 9/11 attacks, and transferred out of the US Department of Transportation and into the Department of Homeland Security itself in 2003. The stated mission of the Transport Security Administration is to protect 'the Nation's [sic] transportation systems to ensure freedom of movement for people and commerce.' Yet since its inception, the TSA has been the focus of one idiotic bungle after another, supposedly in the name of fighting terrorism, making freedom of movement for people and commerce far harder than it's ever been - for everyone, including politicians.

Rand Paul is hardly the first US politician to finally start objecting to the TSA's intrusive security searches, although he might be one of the most hypocritical, as he was on his way to Washington DC to speak at an anti-abortion March for Life rally. Don't anyone dare even think about touching his body, but he has no problem with government telling women what they can and cannot do with theirs. Rep Sharon Cissna (D-Alaska) endured far more than what Mr Paul suffered, after refusing an 'enhanced' full-body pat-down last year after the TSA in Seattle decided her mastectomy and gel-filled prosthetic breast insert required further investigation, the second time Ms Cissna was subjected to a pat-down. She took a ferry instead from Prince Rupert, BC to Juneau rather than fly, and had been a champion for the rights of travellers since. "The freedom of travel should never come at the price of basic human dignity and pride," she said.

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Tom Clancy’s fiction has never really been my cup of tea, and his rightwing ideology even less so. Clancy, a gun-toting NRA member who famously blamed 9/11 on left wing politicians, has made a vast fortune writing military thrillers. But like a lot of rightwing military fans, Clancy never served in the military, enrolling at Loyola College at the height of the Vietnam War to earn a bachelor’s in English Literature before becoming an insurance broker. His wife of nearly thirty years divorced him after she discovered his affair with Katherine Huang, an assistant district attorney in New York he’d met on-line. He then married Alexandra Llewellyn, twenty years his junior and a cousin to Colin Powell who introduced them while Clancy was still married to his first wife while having an affair with his mistress. Charming.

His personal ethics are reflected in his fiction, not only by its literary content but by the questionable professional practices of its author. His novels gleefully espouse torture such as waterboarding and inducing heart attacks, where every liberal character is an idiot and a buffoon snorting cocaine, scarfing tofu, and determined to raise taxes on the wealthy (the b-stards!), and all the conservative characters are heroic patriots with impeccable principles. Then again, Clancy can’t actually be considered a real writer anymore, since he’s far too busy milking his various cash cows to ever sit down at a keyboard. It might be because since 2002 and the release of Red Rabbit the quality of his novels has greatly deteriorated. “If you haven’t read the new Jack Ryan novel yet, do yourself a favour. Don’t,” read one particularly acrid critic. The following year, his book, The Teeth of the Tiger (where the so-called “good-guys” are an FBI agent who murders a suspect in cold blood, and his cousin, Jack Ryan Junior, a lacklustre foul-mouthed frat-boy with the intellectual acuity of roadkill) was likewise savaged in reviews; the Washington Post calling it a “bloated, boring, silly novel” with “inane dialogue, gossamer characterizations, endless repetition and bumper-sticker politics.”

Ouch. On the other hand, Putnam paid him a cool $50 million for the two new books, which I’m sure did much to assuage any bruising to the ego.

Even so, Clancy didn’t come out with another Jack Ryan novel until 2010, which he didn’t even write – instead, it was written by Grant Blackwood, with his two follow-up novels, Against All Enemies and Locked On written by Peter Telep and Mark Greaney, respectively. That the true authors’ names appear on the cover in squintingly teeny-tiny print dwarfed under Tom Clancy’s name in huge typeface is actually quite remarkable, since Clancy didn’t even previously acknowledge his novels were being ghostwritten by other people past a brief mention in the acknowledgments to their “invaluable contribution to the manuscript.” Raymond Benson and David Michaels wrote the first two books in his Splinter Cell franchise, for which Clancy received millions from his publishers. No idea how much Benson and Michaels got for their work-for-hire hackery. The only thing Tom Clancy has to write these days to ensure a bestseller is two words: his name.

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(h/t David at VideoCafe)

Bill Johnson is a Republican Christian politician who was a former Birmingham City councilman and director of Alabama’s Department of Economic and Community Affairs until he resigned to run for governor. That wasn’t his first run – he ran for the U.S. Senate in Missouri as a Libertarian, campaigning to legalize marijuana and prostitution – views he’s since renounced since he became a Republican. Still, he’s got this odd streak of idealism that has made it difficult for him to fit into the GOP stable – after he fell out with Republican Gov. Bob Riley by asking the state attorney general and the Montgomery County DA to investigate his former boss for conflict of interest, he was banned by the GOP from appearing before the executive committee in Prattsville, his home county, or speaking at any other event the committee sponsors.

But it’s his latest brush with altruism, albeit somewhat peculiar, that’s landed him in hot water once again. Bill Johnson has spent most of the past year in Christchurch as a long-term recovery manager for Ceres NZ, helping the earthquake recovery, which is very nice of him. But his selflessness didn’t stop at helping New Zealanders rebuilt their ruined city. On his off-hours, he’s been surfing the net for women who want to get pregnant and donating his sperm, including to lesbian couples – despite his public campaign against gay marriage. At least nine women have been recipients of his genetic philanthropy, three of whom are now pregnant, and there’s a line of ladies on his waiting list. On the one hand, the mothers might be happy that the donor went through college on a full scholarship, has a Bachelor’s in chemistry, graduated cum laude and is a member of Mensa. On the other, for a smart guy, he’s been really stupid – while he was being so noble and gallant, he neglected to tell his wife, former Miss America finalist Kathy Johnson, what he was up to while he’s been "helping" New Zealanders.

Beyond the WTF factor making this just another incredibly bizarre activity by a Republican politician (at least he’s original!), there’s a more serious concern. New Zealand is a very small country, with around 4.5 million people, about half the number of people who live in New York City. It’s an idiom here that if you’re not related to someone in New Zealand, you're probably best mates with someone who is. With such a small population, Bill Johnson’s ad hoc mobile sperm bank has the NZ fertility medicine community concerned. Fertility clinic regulations recommend that no one man donates sperm to more than four families, to reduce the chance of accidental incest, as well as any adverse impact on donors and children if they seek each other out later in life, which New Zealand law allows.

This is a remarkable video, on so many levels. I crochet, always on the lookout for new ideas. These women are part of a community based organization called the Kibera Integrated Empowerment Group, seventy women, ninety percent of them HIV positive, who live in one of the sub-Sahara’s most crowded slums. This clip was shot by Charles Stuart Gay, a remarkable man who runs Humanity Unites Brilliance, dedicated to promote opportunities for some of the world’s most disadvantaged people – and you don’t get much more disadvantaged than being an HIV positive woman living in an African slum – through education, micro-loans, and small business schemes to “create self-sustainability.” That’s a fancy way of saying “make a living.” He also works with Craft Link Kenya, a fair trade market organization working with designers and retailers around the world to provide distribution for the Kenyan artisans creating a wealth of handmade goods, strongly focused on combating poverty while at the same time promoting environmentally friendly enterprises.

They employ over one thousand women in the Kitui district who weave sisal products. Eight hundred rural Maasi woman in Sambura, Magadi and Kajianda who produce beaded goods tailored for a Western market. One thousand men in Nairobi carve exquisite wooden products, and four thousand people in Mombasa working to orders coming in from Europe and North America. But by far, for me, the most impressive group of people are these women in Kibera, crafting amazing handbags out of recycled plastic carrier bags. Because not only are they creating a product that is helping them make a living, they’re consciously environmentally active, aware of and dedicated to whatever they can do to help save our planet.

Yet it’s even more than that – these woman have so little, and yet this video was made so that they could show you how to make your own bag, if you prefer. They have nothing but their intellectual property in designing these bags, and what they can make selling them in the world market – yet their generosity of spirit is so humbling I was close to tears. That’s all they have – and they’re willing to share it with you, and me. So as embattled as we are while we’re fighting for the future of the 99%, let’s take a moment to remember that the vast majority of the world’s 99% doesn’t even live in Europe or North America.