Contractor still here …

So I might as well continue blogging.
•The HPV vaccine works. The same blog post also reveals that most people are happier with their sex lives when they’re getting more sex than other people.
•Conservative bloggers seethe with outrage over Benghazi and wonder why Obama isn’t being tried for treason yet.
•But leave it to Limbaugh to show why he leaves other conservative extremists in the dust. His response to the rescue of three captive girls in Cleveland was to reference a Hawaii 5-0 episode about someone kidnapping children, using them to claim welfare benefits and then killing them when they turned 18. And doing his best to link them in some incomprehensible fashion (while admitting he knows jack about the Cleveland case) although carefully saying he is, of course, not saying that this was what happened in Cleveland … As Northier Than Thou notes at the link, it’s fine job of smoke-and-mirrors.
•Sometimes the arc of the universe does tend toward justice: Guatemalan former dictator Rios Mott has been found guilty of genocide.
•Much as I disagree with Sen. John McCain on many things, pushing to make it easier to offer a la carte cable channels (you only buy channels you want to watch instead of packages) sounds great (with the caveat I haven’t read the bill so it may have all kinds of problems). And I totally agree that if the networks give up over-the-air broadcasting (to avoid Aero, a company that allows you to pick up over-the-air broadcasts on the Internet) they should lose their chunk of broadcasting spectrum, as the bill provides.
•Some states are making it harder to vote. Colorado is working to make it easier.
•Slacktivist links to a recent couple of columns about Beyonce’s SuperBowl performance. One argues rather bizarrely that Beyoncé wearing skimpy clothes on stage and generally not conducting herself like a proper lady is what leads to sex trafficking. Amanda Marcotte explains that it doesn’t. And this is not he says/she says, Marcotte has the clear win here (“The only thing that stops sexual abuse is to stop men from developing the belief that they’re entitled to control women’s bodies”). Slacktivist goes on to discuss how obsessions with female purity promote this belief: if women are only worthwhile when pure, then any tarnishing of that purity is irreversible and destructive, and they (in the eyes of this attitude) are worthless. As Elizabeth Smart said, there was no point in escaping her captor—by the abstinence ed she’d received, she was nothing but a piece of used chewing gum, too filthy for anyone to want.
•Soraya Chemaly points out how often it’s the rape victim who becomes the culprit and the rapists whose reputations have to be protected. Familiar material, but well said, and I agree with her conclusion: “If boys don’t want to risk penalties then they shouldn’t sexually assault people.”
•Last year some of the major mortgage companies negotiated a settlement over alleged unethical/illegal mortgage practices. New York’s attorney general says some of the banks promptly turned around and cheated on the deal.
•Colorado is trying to figure out the nuts-and-bolts of pot legalization. How much pot can you put in a cookie? Should pot magazines be kept out of kids’ reach, like Penthouse?
•A Christian post on the problems of believing you’re persecuted when it isn’t true (something I’ve blogged about before).
•The WaPo suggests that as liberals believe government should help boost the economy, and military spending boosts the economy, therefore liberals can’t seriously fight to cut defense spending! At the link, FAIR disagrees.