In short, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius vetoed the FDA’s decision to make Plan B available over the counter to anyone who wants it. Currently, people 17 and older can get it from a pharmacist with proof of age. Anyone under 17 needs a prescription. Since it needs to be taken within 72 hours of sex to be effective, this makes it very difficult for younger girls to get it.

The FDA decided to make the morning-after pill available to younger girls, but Sebelius used her authority to veto the decision.

Whatever your opinion of abortion, take a look at this statement from Kristi Hamrick, a spokeswoman for Americans United for Life:

“They should not be administered late in a pregnancy because of risk of severe bleeding. In addition, they make vulnerable women and girls even more at risk to abusers who may acquire the drugs to cover up their criminal behavior.”

First: All drugs carry potential side effects, especially when you use them improperly. Aspirin can cause severe bleeding, too, but we don’t ask people to get a prescription for it.

Second: So the only thing holding your sons, fathers, brothers and husbands back from rape is the possibility of pregnancy. Because they would scrub their victims of all DNA evidence after force-feeding them Plan B, I guess. Nice opinion of American men, assholes.

Third: Childbirth is far more hazardous to a woman’s health than anything related to Plan B, especially for young girls.

Another objection to Plan B is that younger girls are not emotionally mature enough to use the pill appropriately. Yet somehow they are emotionally mature enough to raise these babies if they want to, or choose between abortion and adoption. How odd.

I wish these people would just admit that any acknowledgement of teenagers having sex squicks them out. At least it would be honest.

+++++++

This shit’s cool. Trust me:

Smoking can make your nipples fall off
Baby rocks out with her chili
Chuck Norris jokes never get old. Never. 

What bothers me the most is not that this guy is a douche rag. Lots of people, rich and poor, are douche rags. It’s that I found a bunch of exceptional Americans in the 99 percent with some 5-minute Wikipedia-fu. It seems our educational system is failing the filthy rich.

Peter Cooper: An American industrialist, inventor, philanthropist, and candidate for President of the United States. He designed and built the first steam locomotive in the U.S., and founded the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in Manhattan, New York City.

Aaron Copland: an American composer, composition teacher, writer, and later in his career a conductor of his own and other American music. He was instrumental in forging a distinctly American style of composition, and is often referred to as “the Dean of American Composers.”

Gertrude B. Elion: An American biochemist and pharmacologist, and a 1988 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Working alone as well as with George H. Hitchings, Elion developed a multitude of new drugs, using innovative research methods that would later lead to the development of the AIDS drug AZT.

Millard Fillmore: Not remembered as our greatest president, but still a pretty impressive achievement.

John D. Rockefeller: Yeah, that guy. He wasn’t always stupid rich.

And these are just a handful of 99 percenters from New York state alone. I didn’t even mention any of the raft of actors, athletes, poets and other entertainers that have come out of New York’s working, middle and upper-middle classes. Or the people doing awesome things who will never get Wikipedia articles about them.

Also, and this is a cheap shot, but dude, if you’re that rich, you can afford a suit that fits properly. Damn.

Short version: The Topeka, Kansas city council is considering decriminalizing domestic battery to save money.

My brain just broke. Seriously, it cracked wide fucking open, and there is gray matter all over the goddamn floor. If I lived in Topeka, Devon could kick my ass for getting brains all over the hardwood, I guess. Fortunately, he’s too tired to pound more than a beer when he gets home.

I’m so pissed that I made a new tag just for this: Things that make me want to stab myself in the face. I think I’ll be using it a lot.

Topeka, if you’re going to decriminalize something, make it pot-smoking. I bet you’d have a lot fewer domestic assaults to prosecute, too, if people could just smoke some weed every once in awhile.

Summary: Undocumented women are being forced to give birth in handcuffs, their babies are taken away from them shortly after birth, the fathers are barred from being present and other asshattery.

The “logical” conclusion some of these people have come to is that if you’re accused of a crime, there are no limits to what the police can do to you. Because these people are dickholes.

The problem for me is that I can’t figure out what is the single biggest threat to national security. When I asked Devon whether it was anchor babies or homosexuality, he said, “That’s an impossible question, because they’re both the end of the world as we know it.”

Dear Law Enforcement: If the chick you have in custody is flat on her back and has a 7-pound larva emerging from her hoo-ha, SHE ISN’T GOING ANYWHERE. Really, she’s not. She just wants to get it the fuck out. Then she will want to engage in the unspeakable crime of holding, and maybe feeding, her baby. And allowing her husband or boyfriend to be there with her is unlikely to lead to a Mickey and Mallory-style escape from the maternity ward. Everyone will be too goddamn tired for such shenanigans.

Yeah, I know: These women were charged with crimes. Somehow, I doubt you would think this was cool if these people had, say, stolen mascara from MACY’s, so just fess up and admit you’re racist booger rags.

Even if you’re hard-line on immigration because an illegal immigrant stole that lucrative fruit-picking job you were gunning for, there’s good news: Human decency will not increase your taxes. We don’t need to be assholes just because we can be.

Smokey the Bear would never pull that shit, by the way. Smokey has class.

Also, I wrote a lengthy entry about how Eric Cantor needs to DIAF before news broke that he recanted on his asinine plan to tie relief funding to budget cuts. I’m so glad he seems to have seen the error of his political ways (temporarily) that I’m not even going to give him too much shit for being a troll-faced weasel in the first place. It has to be humbling to wake up and realize you are a bigger dick than even the people who voted for you are willing to tolerate.

Cantor says they “found the money,” which makes me wonder if he ransacked GE CEO Jeff Immelt’s sock drawer.

At the same time, I hold my breath wondering how he is going to use funding the clean-up of Hurricane Irene to starve babies and push old people down stairs. Funny how disaster relief needs to be funded, but wars and tax cuts are like cookies from heaven — a right-wing heaven that bakes only heterosexual, God-fearing cookies.

You are getting a hearing before the Supreme Court today to defend your right to protest soldiers’ funerals, and I think you should probably win that case, freedom of speech being what it is. I also think the next time grieving family members rush your protest to kick the crap out of you, the cops should take a 20-minute smoke break and come back with garbage bags to pick up what’s left of you.

BTW, very brave of you picketing from the safety of an American sidewalk, behind a wall of police protection — police protection that is paid for in part by the tax contributions of Jews and gays and the rest of us “fag-loving” Americans. Go protest where it matters — in Afghanistan or Iraq, in front of the soldiers you scorn so much, with no one to protect your soft, squishy, hateful asses. If your cause is so righteous, I’m sure God will protect you.

You won’t do that, though, because you are enormous pussies. And because God is busy watching “Brokeback Mountain” for, like, the 40th time.

I do have to wonder at the psychology of people who hate one group of people with such relentless ferocity. Makes me think maybe you’re trying to distract yourselves and us from what is probably your cult’s incestuous family circle jerk.

Also, Michael Moore, you are my hero. Not always. But in this case, I adore you. Consider this your “Get out of Dying in a Fire Free” card.

Edited to add: These people will not DIAF, either.

“Obama is saying to himself ‘How can I distance myself from this problem?’ His answer is to throw BP to the wolves.” — Lord Digby Jones, U.K. businessman, on the President’s repeated references to “British Petroleum” being viewed as anti-British in the U.K. The company hasn’t traded under that name for 10 years (Source: TIME)

Screw you, Digby. Don’t think you’re getting off light just because we have the same last name. I haven’t had this last name long enough to give you a pass on your shit. Whatever Obama’s failure in responding to the situation, if he’s throwing them to the wolves, it’s because THEY DESERVE TO BE DEVOURED BY WOLVES.

On his website, Jones goes on to say: “Of course BP are responsible. Of course BP are liable. Of course BP are due a good kicking from every politician to every journalist through the environmentalists and naturalists on the way. But are they totally and solely to blame? Clearly Mother Nature is beating the technology.”

Yeah, that bitch has been out to get us for millions of years. Just look at Vesuvius.

“There are many others who should take a long hard look in the mirror before being so quick to point the finger … and one group that should be doing that is the gas guzzling, dividend enjoying, tax receiving public … ourselves.”

Those old ladies trying not to freeze to death in the dead of winter are total scumbags. Hate eating your meat raw? Scumbag! Does this mean you’ll be giving up your cushy life to live in the woods with a bucket and a spear, Digby? Didn’t think so.

He’s confusing two separate issues. The fact that we use too much oil is a flaw of our civilization. The fact that oil is coating the Gulf of Mexico like a thick layer of diarrhea is BP’s fault.

His words are especially interesting considering the collapse of the IT contractor iSOFT and the investigation into its accounting practices while he was non-executive director: “There is a limit to what a non-executive can know. … They have to rely on what advisers tell them and what the executive team tells them. It is important that people understand this.”

Yes, we understand. We understand that, apparently, you didn’t see iSOFT disintegrating around you when you had a front-row seat to the whole mess, but the rest of us need to be navel-gazing about what went wrong in the Gulf of Mexico.

Playing the “everyone shares a little bit of blame” game obfuscates reality: that BP made a giant fucking mess in a spectacular display of greed and incompetence. And yeah, it’s probably the Minerals Management Service’s fault, too, but that’s like screwing up at your job and blaming your boss for not supervising you carefully enough. It’s a weak excuse and makes you sound like a whiny biotch. If I were driving drunk and killed someone with my car, I could blame Toyota for not making the brakes responsive enough, the local bar for making such tasty apple martinis, the bartender for not noticing I was drunk and my mom for raising the kind of person who would drink and drive, but ultimately, I’m the one who snuffed a life.

DIAF, Digby Jones.