Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Stuff To Read, 3/12/14


I always say that writing can be as fast as your ability to type.  It's the research that props up the writing which takes time.  That's another way to say that I've been doing a lot of research and very little writing today.

So what could you read, instead of me?  Let's see.

This piece talks about a new study which suggests that money buys access to politicians, but that even the smell of money isn't quite enough to guarantee face-to-face access.  More on the power of money in American politics can be found in this editorial.

What the Hobby Lobby case reveals about the US religious right's attitudes toward contraception.  A spoiler:  They think contraception destroys marriage and makes men disrespect women.

The US is ranked 98th in the global ranking of national legislatures when it comes to the number of women in them.  Sure, some other countries achieve a higher ranking through quotas, but many don't need quotas to get there.  This country is behind Kenya and Indonesia and just ahead of United Arab Emirates.  Part of the reason for America's less-than-stellar performance is the two-party system which makes atypical candidates less likely than multi-party systems.

On crowdworkers.  A new kind of labor market and mostly unregulated.

And one more example of the Republican wingtip-in-the-mouth syndrome when it comes to so-called women's issues:

New Hampshire state Rep. Kyle Tasker (R) posted a joke about domestic violence to Facebook on Monday while defending a fellow lawmaker's comments about abusive relationships, according to William Tucker's New Hampshire politics blog, Miscellany: Blue.
Tasker posted a graphic joke about domestic violence that read, "50,000 battered women and I still eat mine plain!"
Tasker has since deleted the joke from Facebook...