I had planned a deep,thoughtful post–

But while I’m 90 percent recovered from the bug, the remaining 10 percent is undercutting my ability to be creative (as I could tell from today’s writing). So links again!
•A good post from Echidne on misogyny.
•FAIR reminds us that Reagan didn’t leave office with glowing approval ratings (Clinton’s were higher) and that some of his policies, such as backing death squads in Central America, were not all about freedom. I wrote a column a few years ago arguing that Reagan wouldn’t get elected to anything in today’s Republican party. Rachel Maddow makes the same point.
•Digby points out that low wages aren’t about people with limiting skills just starting out, they’re about professionals getting squeezed by corporations. Then she tackles the way business and politics have to depend on certain accepted norms, and the advantage that gives people willing to violate them. The blogger Hilzoy made the same point a few years ago: When we say “the president doesn’t can’t do that” we’re saying that there’s no Constitutional authorization or that the traditional interpretation of the president’s power doesn’t allow it. In practice, as Bush, then Obama proved, the president can do a great deal more (torture, spy, kill) if he chooses to ignore that.
•Katha Pollitt on theories of income inequality.
•Rep. Steve King (a rape apologist) shows the usual Repub commitment to federalism by pushing a farm-bill amendment that stops states from imposing their own standards for safety or animal cruelty in the food industry. Another Republican proposal would ban new regulations and any actions that might lead to regulations.
•Even in the hands of responsible gun-owners, fatal accidents happen.
•Here’s how casually a sexist standard gets tossed around.
•Gasp! Beauty pageants, according to one conservative woman, have a Liberal Bias!
•If the Constitution doesn’t justify the laws conservatives want, then perhaps the Articles of Confederation will.
•Obama’s right, they didn’t build it alone. Here’s more on the same topic.
•The ability of many Christians to have government cater to them while feeling persecuted.
•Dave Ex Machina on the challenge of shopping ethically and respecting the rights of labor.
•Ta-Nehisi Coates on a recent study by Mark Regnerus supposedly proving that gay parenting is harmful.
•Once again, an allegedly Christian group thinks being Godly allows it to lie.
•A reminder that non-millionaire salaries and high tax rates don’t stop executives from doing their job.
•How to tell science from pseudoscience. Here’s a Christian argument that creationism is demonic. And it turns out some Christians also object to the anti-Biblical attitudes of advanced math.