In some rather distressing news, a Surgeon General’s report has found that the number of women smokers has increased. There is some excellent work by Jean Kilbourne on how tobacco advertising targets women.

Salon.com Politics | Bush to impose new abortion limits — JACKASS! Bush has decided to try to reissue the global gag rule in a form that cannot be overridden by the will of Congress (i.e., the people’s representatives). I can only hope that people remember this thuggish, Napoleonic streak of Bush’s come 2004…

P.S. Why does Bush continue to repeat that It is my conviction that taxpayer funds should not be used to pay for abortions or advocate or actively promote abortion either here or abroad? It’s already against the law for this to happen. What Bush is complaining about is taxpayer funds which are earmarked not to go towards abortion, going to family planning groups which also do provide abortion advocacy or abortion services. If Bush is going to say that that constitutes U.S. money going to abortion, then why the hell don’t faith-based initiatives constitute giving taxpayer money for evangelism? (Answer: they don’t, and neither does giving taxpayer money to family planning services constitute using taxpayer money for abortions). Bush is either (a) stupid, (b) lying, or (c) crazy. The sad thing is I really can’t rule out any of them.

Excellent news from Switzerland, as the Swiss Parliament has legalized abortion. The Swiss are notorious laggards when it comes to women’s rights issues: that whole women’s suffrage thing didn’t go through until 1971, but this is an encouraging sign. Unfortunately the Christian People’s Party may be able to hold up decriminalization for a few years by forcing a referendum before the new law is enacted. I do applaud CPP for their honesty about the fundamentally obstructionist, anti-choice, anti-woman nature of their stance: the Party President, Adalbert Durrer, summed it up by saying that The question of abortion should not be considered by the woman alone. [She needs a big strong white-coated man in there to overcome her feminine irrationality!]

Letters in response to Battle of the Celebrity Gender Theorists have injected a note of sanity into Salon.com’s on-going love-fest for the antifeminist media creation, Christina Hoff Sommers. The Hear Hear! Award goes to the following letter:

Well, well, what have we here? Salon participating in the media phenomenon of giving prominence to the female anti-feminist who labels gender-based academic pursuits as frivolous and lacking in scientific rigor. How about equal space for a reply?

— Susan Saylor

Salon, of course, responded to this challenge by not providing equal space. Their top article is an Arts & Entertainment piece about radio and their top article in Life is an article about vasectomies.

By the way, the most outrageous thing about the original self-indulgent marketing crusade is the way they are cynically exploiting the name of Take Back the Night, the world’s oldest and most powerful women’s demonstration against sexual violence. Not to mention the kitschy, self-conscious appropriation of jargon and logos from women’s liberation and other liberation movements to hawk their marketing wares, which sometimes gets so absurd as to defy parody:

As Netizens, we hold certain truths to be self-evident: that the Internet was created and endowed by its Creator with certain unalienable Rights, chief among these: free Access to uncensored Content, the ability to Shop wherever and whenever one chooses and the general pursuit of e-Happiness.

First Revolution became an e-business trade magazine; now we are taking back the Net. And who is we?

Q: Who is ICONOCAST?

A: An Internet media publisher based in San Francisco best known for its weekly ICONOCAST e-marketing newsletter read by 50,000 senior-level marketing executives.

Q: Who is Michael Tchong?

A: Editor and founder of ICONOCAST, Michael is a well-known commentator on Internet marketing and advertising, with more than 20 years of advertising, publishing and software development experience. He is also the founder of MacWEEK magazine.

Oh yeah. All power to the people.