blessingsinmarriage

Stop Smoking!

As you can see, there's no end to this stuff. I finally had to stop gathering it if this post was ever going up, even though I know there's stuff I didn't't include.

Here's what I couldn't capture on video:

• The Taliban have sharks with lasers attached to their heads.
• Serial Butt-Biting GOP Operative Sinks Teeth Into Texas Race
• Bachmann calls for constitutional conservative takeover to free ‘nation of slaves’
• Right-wing machine attacks Michelle for focusing on childhood obesity
• How American Right-Wing Christians Are Waging 'Spiritual Warfare' in Northern Iraq
• Conservative Pastor Wants You to Know Jesus Wasn’t a Sissy
• Republican senator says he backs birther lawsuits
• Extremist Christians Aim to Create Armed Militias Against "Godless" Federal Government
• Headless bodies and other immigration tall tales in Arizona
• Corbett says some would rather get unemployment checks than work
• GOP Rep. Dean Heller claims extending unemployment benefits is creating 'hobos.'
• When Life Gives You Lemonade, Conservatives Make Lemons
• GOP: "We don't need any more monuments"
• Don Young: Gulf spill 'not an environmental disaster'
• MN GOP's Emmer: Cut Minimum Wage For Waiters
• FLASHBACK: GOPer Angle Spoke Out Against Fluoride In Water Supply
• Republicans Take Brave Stand Against "Tan Tax"
• End the Liberal Bias Against Slavery
• The little-know but sinister link between socialism and fear of opposable thumbs
• Republicans Take Brave Stand Against "Tan Tax"
• Republican Senate wants homeless vets' families to stay homeless
• Rand Paul Passes When Asked About The Age Of The Earth
• Gun Proponents Take Aim at Domestic Violence Survivors
• GOP Sen. Bob Bennett Says His Own Party Is Short On Policy Ideas
• John Boehner: Raise Retirement Age To 70; Wall Street Reform Is Like 'Killing An Ant With A Nuclear Weapon'
• Sharron Angle’s energy plan: Deregulate the ‘mining industry,’ as well as the ‘oil and petroleum industry’
• "Blacks Don't Own Martin Luther King"
• Is U.S. Now On Slippery Slope To Tyranny?
• Widespread GOP Comfort With Sowell's Hitler Comparison….
• Rand Paul at Christian Homeschoolers Conference: Schools and Hospitals Now Part of Our ‘Welfare State’
• Obama still a furriner, say 24%
• Conservatives Castigate Public Infrastructure Spending, BP Escrow Fund, as Nazi-Inspired
• Joe Barton Touts A Defense Of His BP Comments, Minutes After Apologizing To GOP For Them
• When It Doubt, the Right Goes With the Hitler Comparison….
• Ron Paul calls $20 billion BP escrow fund a 'PR stunt,' 'suspicious'
• Rand Paul: 'I Don't Think The 14th Amendment Was Meant To Apply To Illegal Aliens'
• Republican Admits GOP Plan: Protect Corporations, Take Down the President
• GOP Nutcase Steve King’s Immigration Solution: Deport Liberals
• The BP Party: GOP Stands Behind Congressman Who Apologized to BP
• The Right Celebrates The End Of The American Dream
• The Right-Wing Lie Behind Haley Barbour’s BP Talking-Point
• The Constitution Party: Delusional Religious Fanatics Pushing for Christian Tyranny
• Jim DeMint, ‘Biblical Law’ Christians Unite in Fundraising for Angle
• GOPer’s Groveling Apology to BP CEO Sets Off Firestorm — Florida Republican Tells Him to Resign
• Sarah Palin Blames Environmentalists For Gulf Oil Disaster
• Boehner Wants You to Pick up the Tab

There. That gets us as far back as the beginning of summer — the point at which I drew an arbitrary line, because I couldn't keep going indefinitely. (If I had the time, I could. The material is there.)

The point of compiling all of this isn't to continue the "Stupid Republicans" meme, or to be dismissive of tea party types. Quite the opposite, actually. The point is that they should be taken seriously, as they are quite serious about what they believe, and all of the above is a mere preview of what we can expect if this brand of radicalized conservatism wins in November.

The point is: This is how they will govern.

Progressives — us complicated people who believe in "creating a world that works for everyone" — need to remember this much, no matter how frustrated, disappointed, or even angry we are about reforms that aren't everything that they should be and that the country needs them to be. The inmates haven't just taken over the asylum. They have breached its gates, organized, and are now threatening to take over the government.

What's changed is that the nutcases on the right are capable of beating a sane Republican incumbent by 42 points if they step out of line. Believe me, every member of the GOP in Congress is aware of this fact. They have to eat chicken dinners with these people and ask them for money. Arlen Specter knew his goose was cooked as soon as he saw the reaction to Sarah Palin. In fact, it was the selection of Sarah Palin to be a vice-presidential candidate that put this Tea Party movement into overdrive. Up to that point all their energy was being put into Ron Paul's delegate-deprived run for the presidency. McCain made the single most irresponsible political decision since a lame-duck James Buchanan sat silently while half the country seceded from the Union.

But I'm getting off my point. My point is that, while Scher is correct to point out the Tea Party is merely the latest incarnation of the right's rage at being governed by a Democratic President, and to point out their overall numbers are small, he's wrong to give the impression that we're not dealing with something extremely dangerous. Because, if you haven't noticed, the Republicans are voting in absolute lockstep, and they're dancing to the Tea Partiers tune. They are terrified of opposing them. And even when they do oppose them we see outcomes like Rand Paul crushing the establishment candidate in a socially conservative (i.e., not a libertarian) state.

I've never seen a fringe movement take control of a party's soul and mind like this before. I was hoping that the governance of Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, and Karl Rove was the worst the right could offer, but it's not even close. The Republicans have been cynical so long that they've been taken over by the duped.

Actual Republican congresspeople (with a handful of exceptions) have no interest in the Tea Party's priorities. Want proof? Read the Mission & Platform just passed by Maine's GOP. It's cuckoo land. And that might be the saving grace for this country, because the establishment GOP doesn't intend to become the party of Rand Paul. They just want to use that energy to get back into power and take the gavels back from the Democrats. But, first of all, we just saw what 'reasonable' establishment Republican politics can do to our country, so we can't take much solace from the fact that that establishment is taking their cynicism to eleven by playing footsie with these people. Secondly, a bunch of the new Republicans elected this November are going to be certifiably Michele Bachmann-insane. And just like with the Republican Class of 1994, sixteen years later some of the people will be governors and senators.

They might just be the "world's craziest conservatives," but they could be "coming soon to a Congress near you," if progressives — out of frustration, despair, or a lack of enthusiasm — decide to "sit this one out." Because I can guarantee you, the tea-party types and the far right fringe won't. As Bill pointed out, the current overheated right-wing fringe movement called the Tea Party has deep roots.

Was GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham correct when he told the New York Times Magazine that the Tea Party would "die out" because "they can never come up with a coherent vision for governing the country"?

It would be nice if that were the basis on which political parties and movements survived or collapsed. But the Republican Party did not have a coherent vision for governing the country between 2001 and 2008, and it is still around. (Michael Steele notwithstanding.)

The Tea Party can easily survive on blind hatred for responsive government, revulsion of shared responsibility, rampant misinformation and conspiracy theories.

How do I know? Because it has survived for decades.

The Tea Party is nothing new. It is merely the latest incarnation of the right-wing fringe that predictably overheats whenever a left-of-center reformer is elected to the presidency. It was the John Birch Society and the National Indignation Convention in the early 1960s, the Moral Majority and other "New Right" groups in the late 1970s, and Rush Limbaugh's "dittoheads" and the militia movement in the 1990s.

The name has changed, along with a few other details, but the movement is the same one that rises up every time we take a step closer to "a world that works for everyone," the same movement that "stands athwart history yelling stop" every time a progressive movement brings America closer to living up to all it promises to be on paper for all of its citizens.

That the same old movement has reared its head again suggests we've had more victories than perhaps we're inclined to acknowledge, due to a progressive tendency to always seek more justice, more inclusion, more equality, etc. Clearly we're not "there" yet, but we're close than we were and we have an opportunity to get even closer.

Unless. Unless we throw our hands up in frustration at the winding route and painfully slow pace and decide not to make the trip at all.

That would separate us from previous progressive movements that made it possible for someone like Barack Obama to be president, and someone like Hillary Clinton to make 18 million cracks in the glass ceiling that will someday shatter — taking with it another barrier between us and "there," our destination of "a world that works for everyone." None of which would have happened if our progressive forebears had given up when they set out for "a world that world for everyone" and ended up with a piece of the world that worked a bit better for some than it did before.

In short, we wouldn't be at this juncture if they had abandoned their fellow citizens and future generations — us — to an opposition that declare "no further" and promised to push back what gains had been made. Can we, in good conscience, abandon those whose lives will be made worse if today's reactionary conservative movement grabs the reins and turns their battle cry of "Hell no" or "Hell, no you can't" into policy. Can we in good conscience abandon 15 million unemployed Americans to the will of a movement and politicians who withhold the unemployment benefits they need for basic necessities, to score political points?

We're dealing with a movement that is as dangerous as it was generations ago — and not in terms of violence, threats of violence, or justification of both — but in terms of what it means for Americans now and for generations to come if todays radicalized, reactionary conservative movement succeeds in grabbing power in the midst of a crisis, bringing more pain to more Americans, and inflicting likely permanent damage on our economy, culture, and society.

All that's required, to borrow (ironically) a quote from "the father of modern conservatism," is for us to do nothing.

This November, I'll probably go to the ballot box with the words of my late father ringing in my ears. He and my mom stressed to us the importance of voting, of taking part in the political process — however frustrating and dispiriting it may be at times — and not "sitting it out." They knew whereof they spoke, because they saw their country change from an America where they could not vote to one that enshrined their right to vote in law, and they knew the long fight required to get there.

I reach voting age in the 1980s, having grown up in the Reagan era, and seen the south where I grew up turn a deep shade of "red." So, I knew what my father meant when he said to me, "Always vote. If you can't find someone to vote for, find someone to vote against, but vote." That was how he'd managed to keep going back to the polls, by framing his choice in terms of which candidate or which policies might do the least harm, if not the most good.

But this year I'm going to frame my vote (my volunteer activities and donations) as support for "the world as it should be" or "a world that works for everyone" and the candidates and policies that will get us, if not all the way there, then closer than we were before 2008 and closer than we are now — instead of framing my vote against "the world's craziest conservatives."

Popperfoto / Getty Images

Take Dorothée Rascle, an attractive Parisian singer whose long red hair has been tinged with smoke since she was a teenager. “I am on stage and my weight matters,” says the thirtysomething performer, who has no intention of giving up. “If I stopped smoking, the first thing I’d think about would be weight gain,” she says. “If you work on stage, you have to look cool—and not be enormous.”

Rascle, who is well aware of cancer dangers, is hardly alone. “The top concern of many women who contemplate giving up smoking: don’t fatten up,” says Christelle Touré, a project manager at France’s national anti-tobacco committee.

The trend has authorities worried, and in recent weeks, anti-smoking campaigns targeted at women have flooded French television and French-language websites.

One prominent anti-tobacco website addresses concerns about weight gain associated with giving up smoking ahead of its impact on early menopause, loss of fertility and an array of deadly cancers.

“If I stop smoking, will I gain weight?” asks another advert, which has been given great play in various French media since Anti-Tobacco Day on May 31. The online advert leads to a website that doesn't try to refute that many smokers add a few pounds, at least initially, when they stop smoking. But the site offers tips to help smokers gain less weight.

Yet, the mythology of slimming cigarettes still runs deep in France, and the stigma of fat is apparently more powerful than the death-glow of cigarettes. (A recent French survey highlighting that pudgy ladies have less sex certainly didn’t help.)

French anti-smoking consultant Mathieu Daveaulli argues that cynical cigarette companies devised a devious plan to feminize cigarettes and brought it to France just after women won the right to vote in the 1940s. “Fifty years ago, a woman who smoked was seen as very vulgar, like a man,” says Daveaulli. “You didn’t see a woman smoking in the street unless she was a whore.”

In their advertising, cigarette makers exploited the emancipation of women by marketing cigarettes as both liberating and slimming, and Daveaulli argues that this, in part, has lead to a growing equality in smoking and death rates between French men and women many decades later.

Céline Curiol, an old friend of Rascle, felt liberated when she took up smoking after she moved from her parent’s home in Lyon to Paris for her university studies. After all, she was making her own decisions. “It didn't seem suicidal because I always thought I would stop easily,” she explains.

Now a successful and attention-grabbing thirtysomething novelist, who has been translated into English, Curiol has repeatedly tried—and failed—to stop. She is convinced, to her chagrin, that smoking helps her to write. And when she tried to stop in the past, another concern flitted through her mind: She might start eating too much chocolate.

Experts say that female smokers, regardless of why they started, find all manner of justification not to stop. The real reason, of course, is that they are simply hooked on the nicotine—just like their still-smoking male counterparts.

In 1950, 66 percent of all French men smoked. Today, that has fallen to 33 percent. Meanwhile, the percentage of fumeuses has risen from 20 percent to 26.5 percent, and some experts fear that the rate of women smokers will (with some fluctuations, especially when cigarette taxes spike) merge with the male level.

Ween off of wellbutrin xl

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