The closest I’ve ever come to buying a political T-shirt was back in 2000, when I was tempted by the “Sore Loserman” play on the Gore-Lieberman logo. It was a playful rebuke to those who wavered between claiming that George Bush was a stupid chimp and that he was nefariously genius enough to steal an election. I have been thinking a lot about sore losers as I see some of my fellow conservatives stooping to acts that are clearly beneath them in response to the health care law.

Don’t get me wrong, I sympathize. (And, no, I’m not angling for invitations to Beltway dinner parties.) The health care bill is a monstrously expensive piece of legislation that will cost more than what we were told (even by its own math), that was acquired through sleazy backroom deals, that will have a terrible cost for businesses and will create all kinds of havoc with already nightmarish state budgets, and that was ultimately secured by a meaningless executive order. I don’t like it either.

But the way to respond is not to park a coffin in front of Russ Carnahan’s home (I don’t care if that was a peace vigil) or cut propane lines at Tom Perriello's house or throw bricks through Louise Slaughter’s office window. (Kind of makes it hard to complain about someone shooting at Eric Cantor’s office or threatening Jean Schmidt, no?)

You know what happens when you do that? Instead of covering the angle that the health care plan did not, as promised, provide that children with pre-existing conditions could get coverage on Day 1 or reporting that the IRS gets $10 billion to hire 16,500 agents to make sure you’re buying insurance or reporting that Nancy Pelosi has an 11 percent favorable rating, the networks are covering the crazy health care haters who are threatening violence.

It’s not just distracting. It’s also empowering to your opponents. As Anne Applebaum pointed out in Slate, “nasty parties don’t win elections.” The Republicans, if they can get their act together, have a tremendous opportunity in the fall. There are some energetic politicians with great ideas going after some of the more entrenched pols in Congress. (Daniel Gross cautions that an improving economy might help the Dems instead of the GOP, but his caveat that lingering high unemployment and a bad housing market might hinder perception of the recovery is an important one, I think.) If the health care law is as bad as conservatives believe it is, it will get sorted out in courts (at least 15 states are already pursuing legal action). In the meantime, remember that people do not like this Congress or this legislation. Let those facts speak for themselves and quit drowning them out.

Photograph of Republican Whip Eric Cantor by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images News.

Tags: health care protests, health care reform, Russ Carnahan, threats of violence

Eat food, says Michael Pollan, author of Food Rules and the new voice of contemporary conventional wisdom. Not too much. Mostly plants. Eat fresh fruit and veggies, says Michelle Obama. Hell, eat' em canned and frozen, adds Slate's Daniel Engber. But many and varied are the forces aligned against us in our efforts to eat real food, as opposed to food that has passed and passed again through the many innovative hands of food processors.

The latest is a drop in oil drilling. Xanthan gum, a food additive that creates viscosity (which allows fast-food milk shakes to have better "mouth-feel" and makes dressing flow out of the bottle and then congeal again on your salad) is also commonly used in larger quantities as a lubricant for oil drills, a market that's been drying up of late. That leaves a large supply of xanthan gum on the market that has to get used up somehow, and xanthan gum producers, like organisms fighting for survival, are lowering prices and seeking new markets for their product.

From a supermarket-shopper point of view, it means eventual markdowns on pudding and possibly the creation of new and lower-priced lines of everything from frozen dinners to cottage cheese. And it means all of those products, glowing with convenience and new, low prices, crowding the shelves and the dairy case, will overshadow (as they always have) the plain old apples and the ordinary cheese. It means that even with all of the noise surrounding efforts to improve the way Americans (and an increasingly Westernized world) eat, small things that you rarely hear about may have big effects, too.

Tags: Michael Pollan, xanthan gum

The Mirena, along with its fellow IUD the ParaGard, is one of the methods of birth control that women like best, according to doctors at Planned Parenthood. (The other most popular method is the Nuva Ring.) Forget the old scares about IUDs in the 1970s—this is the new and improved and safe IUD. The ParaGard is made of copper; the Mirena ireleases a small amount of hormones into your uterine system, which for some women means no more period.* (Though for others there are side effects.) More doctors should probably be offering either or both to women, given that they're as effective as getting your tubes tied and easy-peasy to use once they're inserted. But Mirena recently doubled the price of its IUD from $300 and change to more than $700. The ParaGard still costs around $200, according to the doctors I've talked to. What's with the price hike—why should women suddenly pay so much more?

CORRECTION: The sentence originally called the ParaGard and the Mirena barrier methods. They are not.

Tags: IUD, mirena

Over on Broadsheet, Judy Berman is upset about the women's culture magazine Venus distancing itself from the word "feminism." Berman believes that Venus is ankling the f-word in order to reach a broader audience—which she believes is a fool's errand, because the term is, according to her colleague Rebecca Traister, "bandied about like crazy" among young women in the blogosphere, "albeit with different ideology and spirit than it used to be, sure."

But just a few years ago, Rebecca Traister wrote a long article for Salon about how the term feminist is a turn-off for many young women. The reason behind this is probably something Gloria Steinem put her finger on in a more recent interview, while talking about why Sarah Palin is not a feminist. "As social-justice movements have learned the hard way, having someone who looks like you and behaves like them—who looks like a friend but behaves like an adversary—is worse than having no one." As Steinem sees it, feminism is not something that cannot be "bandied about" quite so easily. For example, I'm sure many women who are anti-abortion rights and yet believe in many other tenets of feminism have felt acutely alienated from the term.

So here is the problem: Either feminism is something with a less-than-specific meaning that can be used broadly (as Berman writes, "It's true that ... watching 30 Rock doesn't look much like going to a protest march or volunteering at Planned Parenthood. But they all represent potentially meaningful encounters with feminist consciousness and prove that young women are anything but allergic to it"), or it's something with a very particular ideology that should not be used so casually. Just yesterday I read this very smart post by Sady at the blog Tiger Beatdown about how 30 Rock heroine Liz Lemon is not a true feminist. According to Sady, she represents "a particularly irritating brand of privileged semi-feminism." The friction between these two opposing viewpoints—those who think "feminism" is a big tent and those who seek to give it a more specific definition—has been going on for decades. I'm sure I will write some version of this post (which I already did back in 2008 at Jezebel) in another year or two.

Tags: feminism, semantics

“Terrorists Could Use Explosives In Breast Implants to Crash Planes, Experts Warn.” That is not an Onion headline. It is real. Apparently female suicide bombers are being fitted with exploding breast implants that are impossible to detect, British spy agencies say. It’s perfectly logical. The underwear bomber failed, so why not try the bra bomber?

It is, of course, difficult to take this story seriously, and the Slate staff has already failed to do so. Suggested headlines: Bust and Boom, Va-Va-Boom, Booby Trap, Bammaries, Delicate Orbs of Womanhood Bigger Than Your Head Can Hurt You.

Apparently they are also trying butt implants for men. Does this mean jihadi circles are becoming places where you can freely discuss sexual parts? That is actually possible. For a long time we’ve had a relatively static notion of a jihadi: loner, religious, male zealot who was both fascinated and repulsed by female sexuality. Steve Coll’s book The Bin Ladens includes profile after profile of young Muslim men who walk among Western harlots, eyes wide, and then ultimately turn violently against the culture that produces them. The point of being a jihadi was to deny yourself any fun.

These days, an opposite picture of the jihadi is emerging. Young men are drawn to jihad in order to escape a dull suburban existence and have some adventure. Jihad Jane was housebound, caring for an ailing parent, when she typed “holy war” into Google. Intelligence officials are starting to talk about “jihadi cool” or “lazy jihadis.” Christine Fair, a professor at Georgetown, has done ethnographies sussing out the motivations of the new generation of jihadi: "The top three answers were motorcycles, guns, and access to women,” she says. “You had to go pretty far down the list to get to religious motivation."

Of course, blowing yourself up by way of your breast or butt implants is not actually fun. I only mean to suggest that these new sets of cultural references—blond suburban killers, guns and girls—have given jihadis a whole new way to be sadistic.

Tags: terrorists breast implats.

—A women’s music-magazine publisher calls "feminism" outdated, but is she the one who’s out of touch? [Salon]

—In the world of important news, Sandra Bullock trumps health care. [Washington Post]

—The abortion wars continue: Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott employs legal tactics to harass Planned Parenthood. [Courthouse News Service]

—New York Governor David Paterson allegedly helped draft a statement he hoped would be endorsed by the woman accusing his aide of sexual assault. [New York Times]

—Researchers find that women are greater hypochondriacs than men. [Telegraph]

—While former White House social secretary Desiree Rogers lost her job, the infamous gate-crashing Salahis earned a spot on the new Real Housewives series. [The Daily Beast]

—Industry insiders report that obese Oscar nominee Gabourey Sidibe is a “joke in the fashion community” and has no chance of appearing on the cover of Vogue. [NY Daily News]

Photograph of Michaele and Tareq Salahi by Scott Barbour/Getty Images Entertainment.

Tags: david paterson, Desiree Rogers, fashion, feminism, gabourey sidibe, health, hollywood, obesity, Salahis, sandra bullock, white house crashers