… well, they’re certainly not the only people who get breast cancer, but drunk sluts are indeed especially susceptible.

We couldn’t let Breast Cancer Awareness Month pass without a mention. More to the point, we couldn’t resist the opportunity to address the titillating (!) association between drunk sluts and their breasts.

Every October, the breast cancer awareness mafia buries the truth about two major risk factors for the disease.

To wit: Alcohol and abortion correlate with breast cancer.

Now, to recognize that correlation is not necessarily to oppose alcohol or abortion.  It’s simply to recognize the correlation.  And to respect women’s agency enough to let them know about that correlation, particularly during the month designed specifically to draw attention to such matters.

And now here are a set of matters to which we’d like to draw your attention.

Oh, and before someone accuses me of showing gratuitous skin, please remember that I’m a notoriously wordy writer. So, just for a change, here’s me zipping my lips, unzipping my top, and letting pictures speak their thousands of words. Yeah, you’re welcome …

UPDATE I: Hey, isn’t drunken sluttyness like the hallmark of feminism? So then, feminism causes breast cancer, no? Sure it’s reductive … but not altogether untrue.

UPDATE II: Click on over here for more breast cancer info “they” don’t tell you.

While the wonks are hand-wringing over “public options,” state-subsidized abortions, and coverage for illegal aliens, the more pressing health care reform issue has gone unaddressed in Washington.

To wit:  What about plastic surgery?  Will my shiny new health care plan come with cosmetic coverage?

Because right now I’m young and well, and so I have no use for, say, a new knee … but a new nose? That I could use.

What … you think this is a trivial matter?  That there are more meritorious health concerns?

Well, yeah, of course there are.  Cancer is obviously way worthier a cause, as is HIV and heart disease and lots of other ailments.  But we needn’t be myopic.  There’s no reason we can’t throw in a little nip/tuck – a little fun – to offset the rest of it.

After all, we’re paying for it.

Think of it as a sort of economic stimulus package.  Besides stimulating the elective surgery sector ($$$), plastic surgery subsidy also has the benefit of job creation ($$$) and job security ($$$).  Seriously.  (Hey, Washington: See all those dollar signs? That’s tax revenue for the taking. Cosmetic coverage will practically pay for itself!) …

Are you seeing all this pragmatism?  There’s even more practicality to unpack.

People who are pleased with their appearances seem more inclined to practice wellness, precipitating a drop in obesity and all its deadly, costly accoutrement. (That’s dollars saved, Washington … more dollars for your taking.)

And self-confident people need less psychotherapy, antidepressants, and anxiolytics.  The decreased need for mental health services means major savings to government, who’ll soon be footing the bill. ($$$)

And then there’s the “foreign relations” angle.  Barack Obama is committed to improving our international image, right?  Well, after decades of being regarded as the nation with the most fatties, surely the world will welcome a sleeker, svelter, prettier America.

People, please write your representatives and demand that they stop ignoring this aspect of health care reform.  Remind them that pretty is a pressing issue.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: It’s better that you don’t ask whether this item is serious or satirical.  My answer will probably make you frown, and frowning etches unattractive lines in your face. But if you do ask, and I do answer, and you do frown … well, I know a guy who does a terrific facelift.

Now that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has declared a detente with medical marijuana, people are convinced of victory for the “legalize it” movement.

Fine by me.  The less pot prosecutions – the less prosecutions of any type – the better. (That, by the way, is ostensibly a conservative precept … except as it relates to pot.  Or prostitution.  Or s-e-x in general.  Or Harry Potter in the school library. Yeah, except for those, conservatives are all about some autonomy).

Anyway, what I’d like to know is this: What makes marijuana so special?

I know, I know.  Everybody’s doing it. But I mean besides its ubiquity, what sets pot apart?

Because the last time I checked, “everybody does it” isn’t a viable legislative position. (It certainly wasn’t yesterday, in fact, when I had to hand over exactly $262.00 for speeding … another “infraction” committed by, like, all of us).

Actually, now that I mention it, I think speed is indeed the point.

Pot is special – decriminalized in some states, legalized in other states, idolized in all states – because it soothes rather than revs.

It’s a timing thing.

After the cocaine-Ritalin-Red Bull-Adderall fueled ’80s and ’90s, Americans needed to slow their roll.  And so back came pot – retro chic, like something you’d get at Goodwill – to steady America’s pulse.

And steady the collective pulse it has.  Because you know what?  Nobody’s accomplished a damn thing since.

Productivity is pot’s victim.

Seriously, what do we export anymore in America?  Well, besides the promise of “democracy,” which we don’t even practice ourselves anymore.

I mean, every nation has its thing: Israel’s got its technology, China’s got its textiles, Japan’s got its cars and DVD players.  Mexico’s got its drugs … everybody’s always making something.  Americans make … purchases.  That’s it.

Because what else can we make, when “everybody” is frosted out on pot?

Let’s keep it real.  People aren’t pushing for legalization merely because “everybody does it.”  People want pot legalized because pot fits squarely with the new American ideal: Passivity.

After all, what’s the frequent defense of the drug?  That it mellows people.  You know, the whole “I’d rather deal with a stoner than a drunk” thing.

Oh and by the way, not “everybody” is toking up.

Specifically, the “man” is not.

That’s right.  The people calling the increasingly “pro-pot” shots depend on y’all being too stoned to notice what they’re doing.  They rely on pot to keep us passive enough to not notice or care.  Feminists like to blame the “patriarchy” for oppressing women.  I blame the “potriarchy” for oppressing us all.

And here we come full circle.

Why do you think the government is willing to look the other way on the issue of pot?  Its complicity alone should rouse suspicion, because we all know the government sidesteps enforcement of its laws only when it has something to gain.  Take illegal immigration, for example, the un-enforcement of which benefits the government … just as, in its way, the decriminalization of pot benefits the government by pacifying us into passivity.

Too “conspiracy theory” for y’all?  Yeah, I bet.

Or maybe we’re all just too “dazed and confused” to see it for what it is …

Pic: 420 Girls (NSFW)

Before President Barack Obama sparked a firestorm by proposing to eliminate the controversial “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy on gays in the military, Democrats in Congress took a much bigger step on behalf of the nation’s homosexuals.

The U.S. House of Representatives – with anticipated Senate approval – voted last week to extend hate crime legislation, including homosexuals as a protected group.

Following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., hate crime laws were enacted to ensure Americans’ safety, regardless of race, color, or national origin – characteristics that cannot be chosen or changed.

To that end, Congress has, with the proposed expansion, more or less conflated homosexuality with these inborn traits – a tacit agreement that homosexuality is congenital.

Which, incidentally, I declared long ago.

That is, indeed, the silver lining of the hate crime legislation expansion.

Besides being tautological (aren’t all crimes “hate crimes?”), these laws are arbitrary – perhaps unconstitutionally so – since their enforcement relies on unfettered governmental discretion.  As such, hate crime laws constitute one hell of a slippery slope toward suppression of expression.  And bonus:  To prosecute a hate crime is to infer not state of mind – i.e. the customary legal standard - but rather state of heart … which is as irrelevant as it is immeasurable.

Anyway, about that silver lining: Tacit congressional recognition that homosexuality is, for gay people, an inevitability – something with which one is born, like skin color – does go a long way toward closing America’s biggest cultural chasm.

To accept – even begrudgingly – that homosexuality can’t be helped is to foster unconditional humanity. Notwithstanding a doubtless deviation from the norm, homosexuality shouldn’t be the basis for mistreatment or discrimination. You know, kind of like how it would be wrong to discriminate against someone who has a second pinkie … even though a second pinkie is an abnormality, a birth defect.

So, here’s a tepid “way to go, Congress” … when you’re right, you’re right.

“So you are a dazzling brunette Jewish Republican writer extraordinaire. You’re singular … but are you single?”

Such was the gist of an email I received last year from one Eric Golub, author of the book Ideological Bigotry and publisher of The Tygrrrr Express – a blog whose political focus is winningly diluted with sports, celebrity, and sundry miscellany.

The Express sounds remarkably like our very own FITSNews, doesn’t it? Well, it is … and Golub is, incidentally, remarkably like FITS founding editor Sic Willie.

In fact, I’ve dubbed Golub “the Will of the West” (Golub is a die-hard conservative living in California – a state whose quasi-communism may or may not be linked to its penury).

Anyway, while Sic is certainly inimitable, Golub’s approximation is hauntingly dead-on. Like Sic, Golub is incisive, irreverent, self-aggrandizing, evocative, funny, womanizing, histrionic, and politically conservative.  At once one-sided and dimensional, Golub flaunts his biases but rarely at the expense of intellectual honesty.

See?

This guy is every bit Sic’s brotha from anotha motha’ – right down to the premature weaning, we’re guessing.

Now we just have to find out if he man-crushes on Peyton Manning … or if he’s ever tossed anybody into furniture.

AUTHOR’S NOTE I: Please mute the sound on your computer before vising the The Tygrrrr Express . . . unless you’d masochistically enjoy being blasted with “Eye of the Tiger” – a song that is just blatantly beyond the musical pale. Fair warning, people. Fair warning.

AUTHOR’S NOTE II: My all-time favorite Express column deals with Golub’s ambivalent relationship with Facebook. The article is LOL funny, especially if, like me, Facebooking is for you more chore than hobby. Seriously, click that effing link. And if you forget to take my above advice about muting your computer’s sound, your laughter will drown out that ear-splitting “Eye of the Tiger” tune.

Apparently rewarding hope in lieu of change, the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize has gone to President Barack Obama.

Now, that’s a mighty strange development considering that Obama, in his still-nascent presidency, simply hasn’t yet shown us much in the way of mad peace-making skills.  But what’s really curious is that Obama did whatever it is he did to earn the prize in less than two weeks.

You see, there is a February 1 deadline for Nobel Peace Prize nominations … meaning that the Nobel Committee considered Obama prize-worthy just two weeks into his term.  We don’t specifically remember those 12 or so days between Janurary 21 (the day Obama took office) and February 1, so maybe we’re missing something.  Surely something peace-y must have happened by way of Obama …

But then again, maybe not.  In explaining its choice, the Committee could hardly point to any concrete change brought by Obama. Apparently, mere hope for change is enough, these days, to merit the Nobel Peace Prize – a prize which, according to its founder, should be awarded “to the person who shall have done the most or the best work” with regard to peace.  That directive points to the prize’s intended focus on results rather than aspirations … but hey, Alfred Nobel is so yesterday.

Anyway, congratulations to Barack Obama for winning the Nobel Peace Prize.  Now, go earn it …

EDITOR’S NOTE: “Or don’t,” says Sic Willie.

When you get right down to it, recently deceased Patrick Swayze’s professional legacy was inextricably tangled in his classic film role as pedophile Johnny Castle.

Wait, what’s that?  Pedophile, you say?

Obviously that’s a remarkably reductive, distilled take on Dirty Dancing – a movie which is every bit as dimensional as it is iconic.

But there’s no sugar-coating the fact that Swayze’s character bedded a young, impressionable teenage virgin.  Everybody called her “Baby,” for crying out loud – and not as a term of endearment, but as an actual first name.

Yet Dirty Dancing – with its unrequited “us-versus-them” romantic construct, close proximity gyrations and “Time of My Life” soundtrack – is remembered not as a cautionary tale but rather as a fairy tale, while Swayze’s character is remembered as more of a white knight than a big bad wolf.

Swayze’s death last month brought with it a dizzying flood of commemoration for Dirty Dancing, and, especially, his role in it.

The movie is timeless.

Of course in spite of – or maybe because of – that timelessness, Dirty Dancing could never be made today.  Nobody would write, direct, produce or distribute a movie about a grown man seducing a teenage girl … particularly, as is the case in Dirty Dancing, when that grown man is in a position of some authority, and the girl is, clearly, desperate for identity and acceptance.

How can I be sure that the movie would never been made today?

Well, just look at the Roman Polanski fiasco, much ado about which was resurrected last week when the Swiss police arrested him for possible U.S. extradition.

Three decades ago, filmmaker Polanski pled guilty to unlawful sex with a minor, following a champagne-and-Quaalude-fueled escapade with a teenage model.  To avoid sentencing, he fled America and has since been living abroad, making movies and making money and making waves.

Now that he’s in Swiss police custody, Americans demand that at last he serve his sentence. It’s mad-making to people: Here’s a man who screwed a teenager and got away with it, right?

Which is, in a nutshell, is equivalent to Swayze’s role in Dirty Dancing.

So where’s the equality, people?

One guy seduces a teenager and subsequently becomes a cinematic legend, a cultural hero.  Another guy seduces a teenager and subsequently becomes a villain, and a fugitive.  How did Polanski get cast as a predator, while Swayze is cast – now memorialized – as an irresistible, benign Romeo?

And more to the point, if art imitates life, isn’t this Polanski-Swayze parallel one hell of a scary reflection of our cultural devolution, of our loss of judicious humanity?

Think that headline is misogynistic?  So did we.  But Sic insisted we use it because (presumably like the photo) “it’s eye-catching.”

Also, according to the authors of a new book, it’s not misogynistic at all – it’s scientific.  Or psychological, actually.

It’s from Why Women Have Sex, which offers an empirical examination of, um, why women have sex.

Of particular interest is the “sexual economics” part of the book, an entire chapter of which is devoted to the barter-and-bargain dimension of even marital and routine sexual encounters.

Says co-author David Buss, an evolutionary psychologist:

“The degree to which economics plays out in sexual motivations surprised me. Not just prostitution. Sex economics plays out even in regular relationships. Women have sex so that the guy would mow the lawn or take out the garbage. You exchange sex for dinner.”

And there you have it. Nothing – not decades of virulent feminism, not the sexual revolution, not Desperate Housewives or the even the Real Housewives of Atlanta, not even Hillary Clinton – can change the course of sexual providence.

Feminists be damned, women continue to use their bodies as bargaining chips.

In fact – and this where I come along, injecting some actual novelty, and, with it, some controversy – women are, by their own machinations, pawns now more than ever before.

Think about it: Single motherhood, the “second shift,” the dual-income trap, the threat and throb of unemployment . . . modern womanhood is one giant feedback loop. It’s a twist on the old concept of give and take: Women give, and so they’re taken.

Sex – not cash, or credit – is the real currency of compensation. And – bonus! – it’s compensation that’s not even taxable.

Yet.

UPDATE: For those of you who keeping score at home, there are – according to Why Women Have Sex – exactly 236 other reasons why women have sex.

Whether or not anyone prefers to acknowledge it, Mitt Romney is already the default, de facto Republican presidential nominee in 2012 – and, too, he is already the clear loser.

Health care, singularly, will guarantee Barack Obama a second term – even if he never actually achieves meaningful “reform,” or even if he manages reform but it ends up becoming a festering, hemorrhaging mess … like anything the government runs.

Sure, the health care issue appears to be a political landmine for Obama right now, but he just can’t lose for winning, and there’s no area in which that rings more true than health care reform.

Pitted against Romney (as ultimately will happen, because who else is there, really?), Obama will come out looking every bit the better man for the job.

You see, Romney and health care … he’s been there, he’s done that.

As governor of Massachusetts, Romney socialized the state’s health care system, insuring nearly every resident by forcing people to choose between purchasing coverage or paying a penalty for non-compliance. (Yes, Romney’s a Republican; yes, he’s a business wizard; no, those traits don’t at all jive with his stateside socialization of a major private sector).

The success of Romney’s health care reform has, on balance, been lukewarm.

It’s been bad for business start-ups and expansions, but pretty good for people (well, not entrepreneurial people, but still …)

There is, naturally, a funding problem for Massachusett’s program, the solution for which would surely be increased corporate taxation, except that, um, that well has too run dry at the hands of Romney’s grand plan.

So when you think about it, Romneycare really isn’t a success at all.

Anyway, the relative merits of Romney’s reform are not really the point.  Even an entirely successful – fully-funded, business-friendly, quality-controlled, patient-primary – result would still leave Romney in the lurches come 2012.

Romney’s problem is, more to the point, that he’ll be running as a Democrat in disguise against a Democrat demagogue.

If there is to be one issue to set apart Republican from Democrat, it has to be health care.  It’s one thing for a Republican politician to triangulate on the issue of health care reform – to mildly oppose it, then to begrudgingly admit its merits – but it’s a whole ‘nother thing for a Republican to endorse, initiate, and institute a socialized system of health coverage.

In 2012, two Democrats will be vying for the presidency, and one of those Democrats is Barack Obama. He just can’t lose.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian despot – and noted Holocaust denier, wannabe Israel annihilator, and vitriolic anti-Semite – is himself a member of the tribe.

That’s right, the world’s preeminent Jew-hater is … a Jew.

From the Daily Telegraph (UK):

A photograph of the Iranian president holding up his identity card during elections in March 2008 clearly shows his family has Jewish roots.  A close-up of the document reveals he was previously known as Sabourjian – a Jewish name meaning cloth weaver.

The short note scrawled on the card suggests his family changed its name to Ahmadinejad when they converted to embrace Islam after his birth. A London-based expert on Iranian Jewry said that “jian” ending to the name specifically showed the family had been practising Jews.

Unfortunately for Ahmadinejad, Judaism is the one religion from which you absolutely cannot extricate yourself.  It’s in his blood, people.

And speaking of religion, this whole thing is a mighty fine validation of whatever religion it is that promotes the concept of karma …

Update: In case any of the ladies were wondering, we’re 99.9% sure it’s not that big.