President Obama promises support for Planned Parenthood.

DFR Daily French Roast

Anne is reading …

Photograph by Autumn De WildeHBO’s new show Girls doesn’t pick up where Sex and the City left off. Writing for New York Magazine Emily Nussbaum describes Lena Dunham’s new series airing on April 15 with gratitude.

I was a goner, a convert. In an office at HBO, my heart sped up. I laughed out loud; I “got” the characters—four friends, adrift in a modern New York of unpaid internships and bad sex on dirty sofas. But the show also spoke to me in another way. As a person who has followed, for more than twenty years, recurrent, maddening debates about the lives of young women, the series felt to me like a gift. Girls was a bold defense (and a searing critique) of the so-called Millennial Generation by a person still in her twenties. It was a sex comedy from the female POV, taking on subjects like STDs and abortion with a radical savoir-faire as well as a visual grubbiness that was a statement in itself. It embraced digital culture, and daily confession, as a default setting. Even before the Republican candidates adopted The Handmaid’s Tale as a platform, Dunham’s sly, brazen, graphic comedy, with its stress on female friendships, its pleasure in the sick punch line, its compassion for the necessity of making mistakes, felt like a retort to a culture that pathologizes feminine adventure. As my younger colleague Willa Paskin put it, the show felt, to her peers, FUBU: “for us by us.”

The world of Girls is no Sarah Jessica Parker wish list for Mr Big. Instead the show posseses an aesthetic that’s “raw and bruised, not aspirational”. For starters, the girls live in Brooklyn, not Manhattan.

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Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, who spent 22 years under house arrest was voted into office in a political landslide in Myanmar (Burma). The Guardian writes:

Swarms of chanting Burmese flocked to National League for Democracy’s (NLD) Rangoon headquarters as the sun set over the crumbling city, calling for the fall of “a sham democracy” and the return of “our fair leader, our beloved leader, Mother Suu”.

Estimates are that Suu Kyi won 65% of the vote in 82 polling stations. Local observers say the numbers are higher for her National League for Democracy party. It’s reported that the NLD won a minimum of 40 of the 44 seats it contest in the 664 parliamentary seats up for grabs. The Guardian continues:

All along the winding road to Wa Thin Ka, an ethnic-Karen village where Suu Kyi and her convoy spent Saturday night, supporters gathered in the hot afternoon sun to glimpse the so-called “living saint” as she drove past. Though just 40 miles from Rangoon, the village is a four-hour drive along unpaved, bumpy roads, either side of which villagers in red bandanas and Suu Kyi-emblazoned T-shirts clutched red and white roses – symbols of purity and bravery – and cried out as the motorcade wove slowly through the crowds.

War on Women

Dear Pro-Choice Women of Means The Nation

The faith factor: Religion’s new prominence in campaign 2012 Christian Science Monitor

Bishop Geoffrey Robinson: Total Re-examination of Catholic Faith, Culture Needed Huffington Post

Swing States Poll: A shift by women puts Obama in lead USA Today

The gender gap widens to a chasm in the USA TODAY poll of 12 swing states. By 41%-24%, women call themselves Democrats; men by 27%-25% say they’re Republicans.

The biggest change came among women under 50. In mid-February, just under half of those voters supported Obama. Now more than six in 10 do while Romney’s support among them has dropped by 14 points, to 30%.