Arizona Racist? You Decide

OK, remember when the State of Arizona and its Queen of Prunes, Jan Brewer, passed SB 1070? That hideous piece of legislation that basically criminalizes all brown people who might cross the State borders or dwell therein? And Jan Brewer even dragged Scary Failin' away from her special-needs child to come help whitewash the law?



Less than a month after that, Brewer signed into law HB 2281, which will ban ethnic studies in that benighted state. No more Native American history classes for the half-million Native Americans living in Arizona. No more Mexican history classes for the 2.x million American citizen Latinos who comprise one-third of the state's population.

Meanwhile, the state has begun targeting teachers "with heavy accents." The state has not specified which accents it finds unacceptable. However, the fact that Latinos are being audited, and white teachers are not, makes one go "Hmmm."

Given that during the 1990s, Arizona hired native Spanish speakers from Latin American nations for its bilingual-education program, one can't help but wonder what the difference is between those apparently well-qualified yet accented speakers then and now.

The year George Bush was elected, Arizona voters passed an English-only bill, and bilingual teachers switched to English-medium classes. Those teachers have, apparently, been teaching their students just fine for two decades. But what a coincidence! Now that SB 1070 is law, their performance has miraculously degraded in a mere matter of weeks to an unacceptable level. These teachers will be "reassigned" (to what? If their accent is deemed to be incomprehensible to their students, what purpose is served by reassigning them, and where will they go? And if it is not incomprehensible, what purpose is served by such reassignment?) or fired. Of course, the fact that Arizona is facing a dire shortage of teachers is not even mentioned. Does that rate another "Hmm"? Hell fuckin' yeah. In fact the number of "Hmms" these actions have, and should, cause has us all here sounding like fucking hummingbirds.

Together, the Latino and Native American population of Arizona comprise approximately half the total population. And that, apparently, has some Bush cronies really worried. Apparently, Arizona racists like Russell Pearce, AZ state senator who thinks Latinos breed like bunnies, is hoping that by creating this legislation he will force undocumented migrant workers out of the state, and bugger all the documented American citizens who end up thrown in jail or out of the country because they don't have their papers on them.

And before y'all get all self-righteous on us with "That would never happen, the law says no racial profiling," go read these here links and then make up your mind.

Let me tell you just how bad things are right now: Some fucking witless bunch of teabaggin' ball-slurpers in fucking Ohio has announced a contest. Winners are invited to spend a week in Arizona "chasing aliens," and are reminded to "bring their green cards" with them.



This is why we all need to protest whenever shit like this happens, people. The idiot who dreamed up this incredibly insulting racist shit got his quantity of assholes increased by several as irate citizens contacted his radio station. The station manager has since apologized for this piece of shit (who has yet to offer his own fucking apology, by the way). So keep it up. You might not think you're being heard, and you might not think that you make a difference. But you are, and you do.

Without your calls and emails and letters, these fuckers would just have carried on being the fucking fuckety fucked fuckacious assholes that they've always been and will always be. At least now they know we're listening and if they don't want multiple rectal orifices, they'll quit spewing shit out of them.

Mind you, this is far from over. Just this month, artists painting a mural at a school in Prescott were told by the principal to lighten the skin colour of the pupils that they painted in the mural to a lily shade of white. Excuse me, what the FUCK? WHAT? These are actual real fucking live fucking children who attend this fucking school, the mural is part of revitalizing the downtown area, funded by a private organization and depicts the actual fucking children for christ's fucking sake!



How crazy fucking insane do you have to be to insist that black and brown children who attend this school be depicted as white? FTA:

City Councilman Steve Blair spearheaded a public campaign on his talk show at Prescott radio station KYCA-AM (1490) to remove the mural.

In a broadcast last month, according to the Daily Courier in Prescott, Blair mistakenly complained that the most prominent child in the painting is African-American, saying: "To depict the biggest picture on the building as a Black person, I would have to ask the question: Why?"

You would, you fat wrinkled rapidly aging bigot. Jesus. Holy quacking duckshit! What kind of people are these. It never occurred to me (or to any of you, I'll bet) to ask the question "Why" someone decided to paint a black face in a mural. Of course, the principal is now claiming this was simply a question of art, not actually whitening the children. Yeah, right. Just like your fucking laws aren't racist, Arizona.

You'll be happy to hear that the parents and teachers love the mural as it is. Upon questioning, the principal admitted that he had received a whole three complaints about the mural. As for those miserable fucks who drove by to scream epithets like "Nigger" and "Spic" at the kids who were helping on the mural, you ought to be ashamed of yourselves, but you're troglodytes, so you aren't. Fortunately, there's not as many of you as you thought. You pigs. Oh, wait, that's a terrible insult to pigs which are actually very nice animals.

At any rate, a big thank you to those of you who complained. Steve Blair has been fired from the radio show. Your right to free speech has not been infringed, Mr. Blair. You're free to get on your soapbox in the local park anytime and yell your hate speech. You're not free to use the public airwaves to felch the haters though. So fuck you very much, and may you live the rest of your life in a bitter oblivion, you anal afterbirth.

Stumble It!

Politics: Torturing Your Children

This is what making war does to us, people. This is what it's done historically, except we just can't seem to learn, can we?

What's "this," you ask? Yeah, I know, nobody wants to click a link anymore because you just don't know what kind of malware or spam or really depressing shite is on the other end.

See, what we have here, in today's story of the military and war and chickens coming home to roost is, we have a 27-year-old soldier admitting to the cops that he pushed his four-fucking-year-old daughter's face into a kitchen sink filled with hot water and held her under because "she could not recite her alphabet," and didn't know her colours and numbers.

The child had "severe bruising on her entire back," "scratch marks on her back made in a downward motion" and "bruising on both of her arms, her legs and her buttocks," the police report said.

Jesus fucking J.H. Christ. A fucking four-year-old. Oh, and, he

allegedly told police he'd chosen a water-based technique because his daughter was terrified of water.

I wonder why. He did it three or four times. He has sole custody of his daughter.

Now, why would a man do this to his own kid? I don't know. Lots of parents abuse their kids, and the things they do to them are often so horrible as to make you wish for the immediate destruction of the entire human race because, by god, what the fuck happens to a kid who has to live through something like that, can they ever trust in the goodness of any human being again? Do they all turn into malevolent little psychopaths themselves, lighting their little classmates on fire, or raping men or women at random or breeding their own little next generation of victims?

It is enough to choke a person with the bitter taste of despair.

But why I bring this story to your attention, dear ones, is: what he did to his kid, rather than why. Which is, something very close to waterboarding.

Technically, there are a few differences. The kid was not tied to a flat surface, did not have fabric covering mouth and nose, did not have water poured on those until it experienced a simulated drowning. I'm not sure, though, that it's a hella improvement. I am pretty sure that poor child really would not care to dispute the finer points of the difference.

This is why we, as a nation, should eschew torture: because we risk finding it used against ourselves, not just by "bad guys in black hats." Not just by terrorists. Not just by those who capture our troops on the battlefield, and, having heard of our despicable actions in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, want vengeance for our rape and sodomizing and beating and blinding of their brothers and sisters, whether biological or religious or cultural.

But because, worse yet, when we stand up and say that what we are doing is not wrong, we are giving permission to all those people that we train in these methods, or who hear about or read about these things, to practice them on us. On the civilians to whose supportive embrace they return after getting their heads well and truly fucked up out there, wherever they've been simulating drowning anybody they identify as "bad guys," regardless of whether those are defenseless women like Aafia Siddiqui or teenage boys. Or their own four-year-old daughters.

Who knows why this little girl is in her father's sole custody? I see many people blaming the mother, speculating about how much "worse" she might be than the father. We don't know. The mother might be terminally ill. Or mentally unstable. She might be a drug addict. She might have lost her job, or her home, or have no source of income. She might be so afraid of the child's father that she did not contest custody.

He was, after all, arrested for threatening to break his neighbours' windows with his Kevlar helmet.

Maybe he's psychotic. Maybe that resulted from his deployment. Maybe PTSD has finally broken him and made it impossible for him to distinguish anymore between the four-year-old child of his own body and the last guy he waterboarded.

According to his estranged wife, the guy has "anger management issues." Yeah, I'll just fucking bet he does. His current girlfriend agrees. When the police showed up at his home at 2 am, they had to coax the little girl out of the bathroom, where she had locked herself for fear of her father.

The child is now in the custody of her maternal grandparents, and has said she never wants to leave. Her mother flew in from Kansas to get the child, but the maternal grandmother apparently filed to assert custody. The father is out on bail, but restricted to base (Fort Lewis).

Somebody please get the father some help now. And the mother, too, if she needs it.

Stumble It!

Human Rights: Why Reproduction Should Be

a licensed activity

Otty Sanchez and her baby

This is Otty Sanchez, a 33-year-old woman from San Antonio, Texas. Otty is in the news today because she killed her only child, a 3.5-week-old boy named Scott Wesley Sanchez Buchholz. Ms. Sanchez then proceeded to skin, gut, and decapitate the infant, and then, according to one or more news reports, eat parts of its body.

This last fact is disputed by Ms. Sanchez' family. Understandably. While the specter of your sister or daughter killing her kid is bad enough, the idea of said person actually cannibalizing the defenseless sprog has to make the toughest stomach churn.

Also understandably, the tabloid press, or gutter press, or yellow press, whatever you call it, is going hog wild with cries of "Cannibal Mom!" while a large number of Ms. Sanchez' fellow-Texans and fellow-Americans, most likely Republicans from the tone of their comments, are calling for her death, accompanied, preferably, by prolonged suffering.

La Casa de Los Gatos has only this to say to this last pack of hyenas: Shut the fuckety-fucking-fuck UP! You fucking morons. You fucking-fuckety-fucked-up fucking morons. Exclamation points, multiple. Do you seriously think a human being who has been trying to have a baby for something like five fucking years is going to kill and mutilate it just for fun? Do you people have any idea what pregnancy does to a woman's body and mind? No, of course not, or you couldn't make your moronic pronouncements. All you want to do is cannibalize the tragedy, and it is a tragedy, you worthless fucking fucks.

La Casa de Los Gatos is also using this tragedy, but for a different purpose: to point out that procreation is indulged in way too casually by all and sundry, with never a thought to the consequences. To argue for contraception as a basic human right (and, yes, that includes abortion, adoption, birth control, chemical or mechanical, sterilization, and anything else in our population control armory). To call attention to the incredible hypocrisy with which our society yawps about the sacredness of sprog and human life and procreation while ignoring the real needs of children, mothers, mentally ill people, poor people without resources.

This issue is our favourite (if one can grace it with such a description) bugbear.

Otty Sanchez was diagnosed as a schizophrenic approximately a year ago. The father of the baby, Scott Buchholz, is also a schizophrenic. Otty and Scott met at a local college where they were both training for careers as dental or medical techs. It is not clear whether either of them has a job. What is clear is that both of them are seriously mentally ill with an illness that requires them to remain on medication for the rest of their lives, and that, absent regular medication, they are or could be a danger to themselves or others.



So riddle me this, children. What are two seriously mentally ill people doing having a fucking baby? Srsly. We don't know if schizophrenia is hereditary, but the NIMH (National Institutes of Mental Health) has this to say on the topic:

If you have a close relative (parent or sibling) with schizophrenia, you have a 10 percent chance of also developing schizophrenia. In identical twins, the chances are much higher, at 40 to 65 percent.

Theories/Speculation

In July of 2008, a study came out looking at the genetic causes of schizophrenia. So far, it looks as if there are three kinds of genetic material (microdeletions) present in non-schizophrenics and lacking in schizophrenics, and it's thought that this factor can make a person more prone to developing schizophrenia, but may not be the actual cause. These microdeletions do seem to run in families. Other factors thought to combine together with these genes include problems with brain chemistry, injuries to the brain during birth that leave the brain smaller than normal, and traumatic or very stressful events.

NIMH states that one per cent of the planetary population is schizophrenic. That would be some sixty million people who suffer from this mental disease. Most mentally ill people pose no danger to others. However, symptoms of schizophrenia include hallucinations, auditory and visual, and disorders of thought. Schizophrenics might not understand the nature of the thoughts they are having and might not understand cause and effect when in the grip of their personal, let's call them, demons.

This would explain why a woman who wanted and loved her child might pick up a knife and inflict fatal damage on the child and near-fatal damage on herself.

Otty Sanchez was also diagnosed with post-partum psychosis. Post-partum psychosis (PPP) is a rare mental illness that affects one out of 1,000 women who have borne a child. Unlike the more common PPD (post-partum depression), PPP, which results from the same causes as PPD, can cause a new mother to suffer hallucinations, lose contact with reality, and become a danger to herself, her child, and possibly, others.

Ms. Sanchez has been institutionalized in the past for mental illness. And, to the credit of her poor, disordered mind, she tried to get help shortly before she killed her child. Surprisingly, the hospital to which she went released her. Or perhaps it's not so surprising. She went to the emergency room for treatment (let me guess — no health insurance). And, as everyone knows, emergency rooms are not staffed with mental health workers, in addition to being horribly overcrowded, overused, and understaffed. So they sent her home to her baby. FTA:

Had deputies been called to the home, they might have been able to intervene, said Deputy Chief Dale Bennett of the Bexar County Sheriff's Office.

"Most of our officers have been trained in mental health awareness, so they had a strong probability of recognizing what was going on," Bennett said.

Many of the people involuntarily committed for psychiatric evaluation initially are arrested by law enforcement officers investigating domestic disturbances, said Kevin McManus, a public defender who works with Bexar County clerk's Mental Health Office.

State law doesn't permit health care providers or authorities to detain a mentally ill patient against his their will unless that person is considered an immediate threat to himself or others.

"A lot of times, the officer is the best person to tell if someone appears to be a threat," McManus said.

Ironic, innit? Would you call the cops on your sister/cousin/kid? Otty Sanchez' family does not appear to be wealthy. In addition, they're Latina, and if a renowned scholar like Dr. Gates gets hassled by the cops in an upscale University town, just imagine the relationships between poor Latinos and the cops in Texas.

I'm guessing the family figured if they called the cops, Otty would be manhandled, thrown in jail, and further traumatized, not to mention the issue of what it would do to her already fragile mental health. So they didn't call the cops. They figured, she had a therapist appointment on Monday, they'd tell the shrink she was "hearing voices," and try to figure out how to handle the whole thing then. Except right before that, she killed the baby.

I know it sounds harsh to say that people like Otty Sanchez and Scott Buchholz have no business having a baby. And it sounds like eugenics to ask for population control measures that prevent people who have inheritable diseases that will permanently and negatively affect a child's health or life from having a child. But how do you propose to protect children from danger otherwise? Implementing such a scheme would undoubtedly raise cries of racism, discrimination, class warfare, undemocratic actions not consistent with human rights and civil liberties, et cetera, ad infinitum, ad nauseam.

But I am so fucking heartily sick of seeing the most defenseless of victims fall prey to the needs and wishes of others. How could this tragedy — like Andrea Yates' tragedy, and countless others — have been prevented? Anybody have an idea? All I can come up with is reversible sterilization the minute people's gonads become active, followed by a reversal only when an individual has shown that they are ready, willing, and ABLE to provide the kind of care a helpless sprog needs. Otherwise, what we're saying to ourselves and each other is that the wishes of individuals to procreate outweigh the basic right to safety of the result of the procreation. If we're not willing to do this, then we should just come out and bag the whole "human life is sacred" crap and start using fetii or even children as food material. Yaknow, Soylent Green, and all that.

For the record, I think abortion is far more humane than killing a child after it's born.

And this is how much the issue of PPD is finally affecting the collective consciousness of this country: none other than Rupert Murdoch catbox litter, aka Faux Noise, is actually calling for mandatory pre- and post-partum screening for new mothers. Good idea, Fox, but won't we need to finance this, as in, have some kind of single-payer health plan in order for this to happen? Otherwise, what's the solution? Screen them and turn them loose? So they can kill their kids?

Stumble It!

LGBTQ: Teh Effect of Teh H8

Good God Almighty! This is so revolting, it has me, an atheist, calling on a deity in which I do not believe.

What, you ask, has my knickers in a wad? Me, wot tolerates anything short of someone actually crapping on my living room floor and has friends with a wide variety of, um, interesting paraphilias or interest in paraphilias, including the very sexy Sirenita Lake who gladdens my heart with her detailed descriptions of adventurous sex?

Hate, that's what. I don't have a problem with people doing anything to each other, as long as I don't have to watch the parts I don't like and, more importantly, as long as it's consensual between adults. (Animals cannot consent, and neither can children under an age as defined by law in their community; nor can the mentally disabled, the mentally ill, and the unconscious, regardless of whether their unconscious state is self-inflicted.)

But here we have what we used to quaintly call "shock-jocks" broadcasting from a Sacramento radio station. And they're using their bully — and I mean bully — pulpit to hate on children, and recommend violence against them. The station is KRXQ 98.5 FM in Sacramento. The show is called Rob, Arnie, & Dawn in the Morning. Here's a little of what they had to say on the issue of transgender, or gender-dysphoric, behaviour in children:

"Allowing transgenders to exist, pretty soon it becomes normal to fall in love with the animals," they said.

For his part, [Arnie] States bragged that if his own son were to ever dare put on a pair of high heels, States would beat his son with one of his own shoes. He urged parents whose own little boys expressed a desire to wear a dress to verbally abuse and degrade them as a viable response. "Because you know what? Boys don't wear high heel shoes. And in my house, they definitely don't wear high heels.

"I'm going to go, 'You know what? You're a little idiot! You little dumbass!'" States sneered, adding later, "I look forward to when [the transgender children] go out into society and society beats them down. And they wind up in therapy."

What kind of bullshit is that? You want to beat a child with a shoe? Pick on someone your own size, you walking shit-receptacle. If, by all I hold dear, you ever hit a kid with a shoe in front of me, I'll break both your legs off and stick them down your throat. You puke-sucking anus on legs.

What the fuck is this? We allow people like this to say these things on air? Some idiot hears this and decides his kid is not "masculine" enough and hits the kid, and then what?

Mind you, these two assholes have long spread this kind of vitriolic hate on the air. Their attitude towards women is just as reprehensible and disgusting. You can read about it here in a decision from the FCC to penalize the motherfuckers for their creative ideas on sexual intercourse with women. No, fuck it, it's not sexual intercourse because there's nothing consensual about it. This is their diatribe on how to rape women in the most humiliating and degrading way.

As nasty and misogynistic as they are, I suppose it's no surprise that they should turn from attacking women to attacking children. Do they have any idea how much harrassment children already face from their peers? Especially gender and gender-identity related harrassment? Have they ever heard of Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover? Carl, a sweet-faced eleven-year-old, hanged himself recently because of homophobic harrassment by his classmates. The saddest thing is, Carl wasn't gay. He was just a child, a child who happened to be less than macho enough for his classmates. Or maybe his classmates had daddies who listened to the kind of shit that Arnie and Rob spout. Thus, for instance, Jaheem Herrera, who hanged himself because he couldn't take the antigay taunting and slurs. An eleven-year-old boy. And the murder of Lawrence King.

Jill, over at Feministe, has posted a list of Arnie and Rob's advertisers. She thinks you should contact these people and tell them to pull their advertising.

CARLS”S JR. (CKE RESTAURANTS):
pr@ckr.com Press Room

HOME DEPOT
public_relations@homedepot.com

TOBACCO REPUBLIC:
trcigar@aol.com

ALBERTSON”S:
Alicia Rockwell
arockwell@savemart.com

FLEX YOUR POWER
enewswire@fypower.org Editor
info@fypower.org

NISSAN:
Darryl Harrison - Media
Darryll.harrison@nissan-usa.com

BANK OF AMERICA:
joseph.l.goode@bankofamerica.com
AT&T
John Britton
E-Mail: john.britton@att.com

VERIZON:
Debra Lewis
908-559-7512
Debra.Lewis@VerizonWireless.com

McDONALDS:
Walt Riker
Vice President, Corporate Media Relations
walt.riker@us.mcd.com
Heidi Barker
Sr. Director, Corporate Media Relations
heidi.barker@us.mcd.com

WELLS FARGO:
Media Relations: corpcsf@wellsfargo.com

GRIFFIN & REED EYECARE:
info@LASIKworld.com

PRO CITY MORTGAGE:
procity@procitymortgage.com

Thanks to William for the link.

I couldn't agree more. What kind of sick fucks are we letting on our public airwaves? For the love of Mike, get these fuckers off the air. Nobody should deny them their freedom of speech, but that does not include this kind of hate speech. Moreover, they're free to set up soapboxes at the local park and spout whatever they like. What they're not free to do is use public resources, such as the airwaves, to make themselves tons of money by advocating beating one's children with shoes.

Please do your part by writing the sponsors of these lowlife scum. Booting them off the air should be the least to be done to them.

Stumble It!

Human Rights: Why Reproduction Should Be

A licensed activity.


This 34-year-old woman, Theresa Platt, is homeless. She sleeps where she can, depending on the kindness of strangers who will let her bed down in their garage or carport, or wherever.

The problem is, she has three children, all under the age of 10 years. She doesn't want them. She doesn't take care of them. Their father is in prison. Hardly surprising, you say? You've heard lots of loser/hard luck stories like that, you say?

Florida sheriff's deputies recently arrested Ms. Platt on charges of child neglect, and took the children into state custody. However, she has apparently been released.

What do you do with people like this? What do we, as a society, do? Her oldest child is six. The other two are three-year-old twins. So she's not exactly a case of teenage pregnancy. Do you think she's a junkie? Or just a person with perhaps a less-than-average IQ, or poor coping skills? An adult who was abused as a child? An alcoholic? She doesn't look like a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed cheerleader, that's for sure. But really, what do you do with her?

Jailing her is not an option if she hasn't committed a crime. So far, her main "crime" appears to be her failure as a mother. She is neglectful and abusive. But couldn't that have been avoided by ensuring that NOBODY has a child without a prior certification for fitness?

The civil liberty crew (of whom I'm often one) will howl about how this would be an infringement on basic rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They have a good point. But we live in an increasingly crowded and overexploited world, and your right to reproduction as part of your search for liberty or happiness might well conflict with MY right to curtail your reproduction in the interest of my greater enjoyment of my own earnings (as opposed to paying for the city, county, or state to raise your already abused and traumatized sprogs), not to mention my enjoyment of not having to compete with your sproggen for clean drinking water, air, land or space, jobs - the resources of a reasonably happy life, in other words.

Mainly, it's about the sproggen. This is a child-centric world we live in, but only in the most hypocritical meaning of the word. That is to say, we glorify the act of reproduction, we "adore" children by making them the centre of our materialistic focus, as "things" to have, adorn, display, and talk about. We don't give a fuck about their actual welfare. When it comes to their physical safety, their need for emotional fulfilment or security, then we get all self-righteous about parents' right to discipline their children however they wish. Then we whine about how the state has no right to interfere. Then we shriek about the nanny state.

When it comes to adults' right to get stoned on a little weed, or play bouncy-bouncy with the naughty bits of a same-gender pal, or decide not to play host to another life, we want a nanny state. We want the state to peer into your bedroom, check your genitalia for evidence of disallowed use, stick its collective nose into your vagina to ensure that a cell or two that might be attached to what normally equates to gooey menstrual blood "has a right to life," even though everybody (with a working brain) knows that more than two thirds of those cells end up plopping out with blackish clots of menstrual tissue.

But where we really need the state — to ensure that those with the "right to life" don't live a hideous life filled with beatings, bitings, torture, cruelty, indifference, neglect, emotional, physical, and mental stress, suffering, and pain — then we're all on the side of individual rights to liberty and freedom and deity alone knows what other shit.

Well, I'm sick of it. I'm sick of those moronic "right to lifers," or "pro-forced-birthers" wanting to interfere any time a woman spreads her legs. They're the last to oppose war, the death penalty, the hideous foster system that exploits children. They won't support realistic measures to ensure that every pregnancy is a wanted, safe pregnancy, every child a wanted child. They just want to root through women's panty collections.

Fuck you, you self-righteous ass-sucking shills. I don't want to read another story like this. Why the hell should a 19-year-old girl be forced to bring to term the baby of her 20-year-old boyfriend? Two children having a child? This is the result. They beat their weeks-old baby, and break its leg in two places. What kind of person beats a child barely one month old?

The kind of person who never wanted that child, who lacks the means to cope with that child but has been forced to have it anyway, and is filled with rage and frustration and gets no training or help on how to deal with it. You self-righteous godbags, how do you deal with this? Jail the mother, or the father, or both? Put the baby into foster-care? That's really helpful. We end up paying for the care and feeding of one to three people for varying lengths of time instead of having one to three economically productive citizens who contribute to society.

Here's another 19-year-old mother whose kid got squashed by a falling TV set. Why? Because the girl's a kid herself, and had two other kids in the room to deal with. The article doesn't say how old the other kids were, and whether the teenager was supposed to be keeping an eye on all the kids, but adults find it hard enough to watch three children, why is a teenager supposedly better equipped to do so? Chances are the baby will die or be seriously injured.

And here's a kid whose story you do not want to read. This sweet little boy's father, Angel Vidal Mendoza, is wheelchair-bound. He OD'ed on PCP while his wife was not around, attacked the four-year-old, who may be blind for life as a result, and then hacked at his own legs with an axe. Who knows what was going through his head. No, I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for him, except that I sure as hell can understand why someone in a wheelchair might want to do some drugs. What happens to the kid? Will the state take him away from his parents? He probably should not be allowed around his father ever again without adult supervision. His mother is probably a poor working woman who relies on his father's disability income to help around the house. Certainly, the single mother of a blind child is going to be severely economically disadvantaged

Alma Beatriz Frias

And what about this paragon, a mother of a two-year-old and a two-month-old? She is wanted on charges of child abuse and neglect, for beating her two kids. Beating a two-month-old? What kind of madness is that? If you see her with or without her two little girls, you might want to let the police know.



Or what about this cute little kid? Malachi Magana was allegedly abused, tortured, and murdered by his mother and her boyfriend. Not that ugly kids don't deserve just as much protection from torture as cute kids, but how could someone look at this kid's face and then hit him? The kid was TWO years old at his death.

Or this loving soul who threw her four-year-old and seven-year-old into a river? The boy is dead, the girl is recovering at a local hospital. The mother is alleged to have "a history of domestic violence" and is in the process of separating from her children's father, with whom she shared custody of the children.

Tell me if you think any one of these tragedies could have been prevented if all human beings were rendered reversibly sterile at birth. In order to reproduce, they would have to take between two and three years' worth of classes, resulting in a certificate or diploma. This would include things like child development; nutrition; basic health and hygiene; life skills including job interviews; sufficient math to balance a checkbook, and create and live within a budget; anger management; conflict resolution; food preparation; diagnosis and management of common childhood ailments; and the like. People would have to be drug- and alcohol-free for five years, including before conception and during the first three years of a child's life; and would have to show that they had sufficient resources to raise a child.

I don't believe that only the rich should reproduce. Some of our finest human beings, including Albert Einstein and Carl Sagan, were the children of poor families. And, in fact, I'd rather have a hundred Carl Sagans than a single Paris Hilton. However, there is no denying that some resources are required to raise a child. Perhaps we could make it possible for certain types of government subsidies to be paid on behalf of a child to would-be parents who had the courage and persistence to take such courses and excel in them. Perhaps we could give them financial incentives to offer part-time childcare to other parents in return for an assumption of their childraising expenses by society at large.

All I know is, I don't want to see one more kid have their head chopped off with a hoe, or their eyes bitten out, or their leg broken because these fucking pro-forced-birthers want to put a padlock on a woman's uterus while baying like pie dogs about the sacred right to fucking reproduction. You lot, the world would have been better off if alla youse had been aborted. Unless you're willing to do something about this type of domestic tragedy, shut your fucking pie-holes.

We need real solutions.

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Health: Subjects Guaranteed To Make Me Unpopular

Overpopulation, Abortion, and Fertility Treatments are the triune deity of today's topic, I'm afraid. Just raise any one or more of these three as a topic of conversation in your venue of choice and prepare to be pelted with, let's call them ungracefully aging fruit and vegetable matter, if not invective and threats against life and limb.

What the fuck, why not live dangerously? I need the excitement. (You try sitting in an eyrie-like bedroom for a year with the very rare trip down the stairs to visit with friends or, worse yet, doctors and lawyers.)

So here goes. Today's topic happily combines all three abuse-inviters, and if you're going to comment, just remember, this here is my territory and while I am absolutely committed to freedom of speech, I have no problem retaliating in kind when someone, anyone, attempts to kick my behind in a hostile fashion. Respectful disagreement is, OTOH, always welcome.

Alright, alright, I'm cuttin' to the chase already, geeze. Nadya Suleman. Who, you ask? Surely everybody from Monterey to Mauritania has heard of Ms. Nadya Suleman, who recently delivered eight babies in California? The media lickspittles, terrified of incurring the venom of the rightwingnut insane elements, keep referring to the sproggen as healthy. Well, according to my research, they were born 9 weeks premature, and anyone with a basic knowledge of biology, anatomy, human health, or medicine knows quite well that the earlier before term a fetus is expelled or delivered, the worse its chances at life. We now have technology that will keep a 1.x-lb preemie alive, but nature did not intend such creatures to live, so what we end up with is a disabled human at some point along the way. Severity of disability depending on various factors, but usually proportionate to the unripeness of said oven-bun. Incidentally, some of Nadya's octuplets weighed less than 2 lb at birth.


In case you're one of the seven people on the planet who hasn't heard of Nadya Suleman, here is all the information you'll ever need.

Nadya Suleman is 33 years old. She lives with her parents, Edward and Angela Suleman, in the community of Whittier, a bumpule in the megacarcinoma of Los Angeles. It would appear from the facts available via teh Googles that Ms. Suleman (and, of course, her parents) is an Iraqi Christian. Her father, Edward, who is in his sixties, is a former Iraqi army dude. He continues to work with the U.S. Army as a translator in Iraq. Her mother Angela is a retired schoolteacher. Reasonably intelligent, well-educated people, wouldn't you say? And clearly very fond (deity alone knows why) and supportive of their daughter.

Nadya is an only child, and apparently always wanted siblings, which her mother declined to provide. Apparently, this caused Nadya to attempt to break world records in procreation. Nadya's name was originally Nadya Doud, which is why it wasn't easy to discover the facts about her immediately. Sometime in the late 90s, she married one Marcos Gutierrez. She left him four years later and returned to the parental home. There were no children born of the marriage. Around that time, she legally changed her name to Nadya Suleman. She divorced Gutierrez last year.

She has a degree in child and adolescent development which, I suppose, is a good thing. Pity she didn't get a degree in something like the effects of overpopulation, or basic biology (you know, a human body takes around two years to recover from each pregnancy, and all that). She started a master's degree in counselling, but dropped out early last year — presumably to start work on her current litter.

Apparently, shortly after that, Nadya's mother, Angela, filed a Chapter 13 bankruptcy involving a house that she had bought as an investment. Debts involved in that action totalled a little over a million dollars. However, Mrs. Suleman and her daughter Nadya still own several properties in California.

At some time or another, Nadya was employed at a fertility clinic. There is a rumour that she was injured on the job, and received a settlement that enabled her to afford the (expensive~!) treatment that makes her the mother of a potential sports team.

Now here's where things get very squirrely (no offense intended to squirrels, who can't help being crazy little rodents with megaquantities of teh cute). Nadya has six previous children, all under the age of 7 years. (7, 6, 5, 3, and 2-y.o. twins.) The oldest four were conceived with the assistance, apparently, of a sperm donor named David Solomon.


Nadya's mother, Angela Suleman, claims that all the children were fathered by the same sperm donor. (Who in the universe would be so batshit-crazy as to donate 14 times to the same loony tune? Or if he donated only once, did she just get all 14 started at the same time and stick them in the deep freeze for thawing whenever she felt like having a baybee? Is this woman the poster child for Seriously Wrong Wrongitude?)

Ed and Angela Suleman are divorced, but continue to live together, no doubt in the interest of providing the auxiliary child care that this dingbat needs. (No, I'm not sorry to be so judgmental. A little judgment, applied early and often, would have ensured that cases such as this don't happen. They shouldn't happen.)

Incidentally, Solomon and Suleman are (obviously) the same name. So who is this David Solomon dude? Why isn't he stepping up to the cameras for HIS 15 minutes of fame? How come Ms. Suleman chose not to have Mr. Gutierrez' babies? Or did Mr. Gutierrez precipitously flee when he realized her potential as a baby manufactory?

After all, her father has fled to Iraq, preferring the comfort of a war zone and some chance of death or dismemberment to the joys of hanging around with 14 screaming children. Her mother is threatening to leave the family home before Nadya returns, thereby saddling the imprudent one with all fourteen bundles of joy or, more likely, effluvia (good luck with that, girlie).


Now, the fact is that reproductive endocrinologists, which is what we call folks who, for a living, help the infertile to reproduce, have to adhere to certain standards, in this country, in order to continue practising their brand of medicine. I know lots of people have their knickers in a knot and want to personally hang the IVF folks who made Nadya Suleman's plethora of pregnancies possible, but folks, really. There's more here than meets the eye.

KevinMD says, at his fine blog, while admitting that the subject is outside his own field, nevertheless raises some interesting questions and provides us with links that might help explain exactly how this woman ended up with her own football team of sprog.

Mind you, what has occurred is statistically very rare indeed. A woman carried to term eight fetii, which have ALL survived. AFAICT, this is only the second recorded case in the US.

Over at Fertility File, a reproductive endocrinologist and med school professor with a passion for math and statistical analysis is happy to give you the likelihood of success of Nadya's pregnancy. Dr. Lee combines wit and wisdom with humanity, and provides a good take on this woman's drama.

So how exactly did Nadya Suleman end up with 14 IVF babies? You don't have to be a genius to realize that there is something very wrong with a woman who keeps having children without any visible means of support, economic or practical. Does she really think her mother will be alive for the next 33 years or so to assist with childcare and support?


She already has one autistic child (it's not clear which of the previous six it is, but it's most likely to be a child over 3 years of age, as the diagnostic tools are unable to accurately spot autism in children below that age). Autistic children are a handful. Depending on the severity of the child's autism, it might never be able to live an independent life, and will always need some level of care and assistance.

Moreover, the more premature a child, the greater its chances of autism, according to a recent study. From the article:

Pre-term birth is associated with a long list of health risks for a baby such as mental retardation, cerebral palsy, lung problems and vision and hearing loss.

Who is going to pay for the medical care that these children will require?

In addition, safe delivery of the children required 46 staff at the Kaiser Permanente Bellflower hospital. That has to cost a bundle. Who is going to pay the cost of delivery and hospitalization of the mother and children? The mother certainly does not seem in a position to pay.

She showed up at Kaiser three months pregnant, at which time she was advised that she could selectively reduce some of her fetii in order to give the others a better chance. She refused selective reduction, doubtless because of her Christian beliefs, which, apparently, don't extend to being able to feed what you breed.

So the rest of us are now stuck with eight kids who will have impairments at various levels that we taxpayers need to support (for those of you already fuming, consider that each healthy child costs about $1 million to raise, not including those full-potential-tapping pluses like music and dance lessons, or top-notch educational opportunities) over the next 18 years.

Consider the autistic sibling. Consider the mother's employment qualifications and status. Consider that she's going to be way too busy taking care of the kids to even look for work for at least 6 years, when the last of the sprog toddle off to pre-school. Consider that her parents, who appear to be saddled with the financial support of the brood, are in their sixties and might not live out another decade without increasingly expensive health problems or that old nemesis of us all, death.

Whatever happens, don't blame the staff of Kaiser Permanente, who actually managed to save this woman's life (instead, pray that they tied her tubes while she was unconscious so she can never do this again). They had nothing to do with getting her pregnant.

The most interesting aspect of this littering is the reaction to it. You'd think all those god-'n-gun conservatives who want all uterii regulated to ensure maximum fruitfulness would be falling over themselves to aid this woman, no?

No. Take a look around the InnerTubes if you dare, but there's some mighty venomous invective being hurled her way. A lot of it has to do with the fact that she's not white. Some are accusing her of personally trying to undo the Holocaust, and have to be gently reminded that she's not Jewish (you'd think Angela and Ed being her parents' names would've been a huge fucking clue). Some insist she's a Palestinian despite the stunning lack of evidence therefor.

Some want her summarily deported; others want her children forcefully removed; still others are campaigning to boycott any kinderjunk producer who donates to her cause. Why the hatred? After all, Kenny and Bobby McCaughey, proud IVF parents of a litter of seven, despite having produced a previous sprog, got themselves a house, an endless supply of diapers, baby formula, junk food, and god-knows-what-all.

From all accounts the woman appears to be a good mother to her kids, but that's only with the help of a nanny and her mother. Also, she's about to find out that 14 kids is a lot more work than six. And, of course, all of us who are watching our earth dying from too many damned people are eyeing her with a level of cynicism that make me nervous. If everybody had 14 kids, we really would have to stage mass suicide campaigns because we would otherwise starve to death in short order.

What do you think?

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Entertainment: Inauguration/Farewell

OK, I'm really not into cutesy kiddy stuff, but yaknow what?



She's saying exactly what I'm thinking. Thanks, little girl!

I guess I don't need to tell y'all that the conservatives have their knickers in an almighty wad over this. Some skank named Amanda Carpenter is saying the kid will never get a job because of this video clip. Hey, Amanda! Let's hope they lay you off right soon so you can feel what it's like to not have a job. It's not something most of the rest of us joke about. It's part of our reality, thanks to Gee Dumbya McDrinkerson. Also, hopefully our recent turnout at the polls is going to take away from assholes like you the ability to threaten our gainful employment.

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2008 Elections: More Entertainment!

OMG!! No, really, OMGWTFBBQLOL and ORLY to boot. Checkidout:



Okay, all you friends, neighbours, and visitors, you're all probly old enough to have kids the age of these. You so need to show these to your kids, too.

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Crime: Oh M'Gawd

Okay, we have determined by unanimous fiat that everyone involved in this is so stupid as to defy possibility. How do these people manage to breathe? Do they really have functional autonomic nervous systems? We want proof.

The authorities in Hidalgo County, Texas, are pondering the difficult question of how to bring a 1,000-lb bedridden woman to court, county jail, and trial for her role in killing her nephew. The child's mother has been arrested (presumably she weighs much less than Aunt Mayra) for her role in the crime.

First off, why on earth would anybody leave a child with a bedridden woman who has multiple medical conditions and weighs nearly 1,000 pounds? The kid was two years old, and anybody who's been around kids knows that that's not a good age to be dropping the sprog off with someone else, because not only are they ambulatory, they're curious as all hell, plus they're passing through the defiant stage where they've finally learned the word "No!" and are determined to use it.

And leaving the kid with someone who can barely get around — not a recipe for success. Mother awarded Thirty Points of Sheer Stupid for this one.

Next, why do we put people in jail before we try them for crimes? So they can't run off and escape consequences. Now, seriously, Mister Sherriff of Hidalgo County — a woman who can't fit through the doors of her own home and is barely able to walk is not, like, a huge flight risk, if you get our drift. Surely Hidalgo County can spend its time and money in better ways. It's not like this woman can jump in a car or on a bicycle and speed off someplace. She has multiple debilitating medical issues. If nothing else, you can always track her down by the trail of drug prescriptions and doctor visits she'll require.

So there's no need to put her in jail. She is already in jail, the prison of her own failing body. Yes, she committed a crime, and like everyone else (except our rich and powerful leaders), she should pay for her crime, but you can put her under house arrest. Because to attempt to move her into the county jail would be an exercise in futility and a most cruel and unusual punishment in that she would probably die just from being moved. Plus, the taxpayer will be saddled with the unnecessary cost of breaking her house down in order to get her out of it, machinery to move her (a regular ambulance couldn't handle someone her size), she'll probably need a new cell to accommodate her, and the taxpayer will then be stuck with the cost of her health care until her trial is concluded. So leave the malign creature where she is. It's just as good as jail. Sherriff awarded Forty Points of Sheer Stupid to be shared with the courts and anyone else wanting this woman jailed.

Finally, as to the criminal herself: Woman, what on earth possessed you to kill that child? You're his aunt, goddamn you, you share some of his genes. Your first duty should have been to protect him. OK, the kid was probably being a pain as kids at that age often are. Why did you accept custody of him, knowing that you're bedridden? Stupid, stupid creature. Now your sister? cousin? relative and the boy's father have lost their child, and your sister (or whatever) is sitting in the county jail waiting to be tried for her part in this crime. Your family is mourning the loss of this child, and they'll lose his mother (for some time at least) and his aunt, thanks to you. You may have killed yourself in killing this kid, because some people are going to want you in jail (because stupid, unlike common sense, is endemic).

And, finally, how does someone get to weigh so much? We can understand being "overweight," everbody we know has a panza and nice squeezable quantities of flesh, except for the druggies, exercise addicts, and born scrawnies, but sheesh! You really have to work at it to be this huge, and look what it's done to your health. This one's probably not your fault, so you get Sixty Points of Sheer Stupid for all the other stuff, but we're giving you a pass on the weight thing. It's gotta be something medical.

Why Sixty Points? She claimed the kid died because she rolled over on him. That, plus, why the hell would a non-ambulatory person agree to look after a very active little sprog? Lying to the family, lying to the police, taking responsibility for the kid, killing the kid, all adds up to Sheer Stupid in Spades. The only plus we see here is, at least her genes are not going into the pool.

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2008 Elections: This is the real McCain

And this is what he'll do (or authorize doing, or pretend not to know recruiters are doing) to your kids, your friends, your neighbours, your fellow-citizens. Threaten them with arrest and bully them into signing up, so that the rich Republicans who started the wars in the first place can shrug their shoulders like Dick "Dick" Cheney and say "So? They volunteered, didn't they?" when asked about the deaths of other people's children.

Amy Goodman tells us:

After the story broke, Marquette was suspended, and the military says it is conducting an investigation, but neither Martinez nor Gonzalez has been contacted. Recent history does not bode well. In 2005, Sgt. Thomas Kelt, who like Marquette worked at the Greenspoint Recruiting Station in Houston, left a phone message for potential recruit Chris Monarch, saying if he didn’t show up at the recruiting station that afternoon: “We’ll have a warrant, OK? So give me a call back.” The story went national. The military conducted a daylong “stand down” on recruitment to retrain their recruiters. They said they removed Kelt. In fact, he was promoted to head up a nearby recruiting center.

Because you can't have a war without cannon fodder, can you? And Dick's kids, grandkids, and his rich Republican friends' kids are too good to fight in his dirty wars. It's your kids that get that honour.

You want to vote for McCain? First be sure to kiss your kids goodbye. Or your relatives' or friends' or neighbours' kids. Because if he wins this election, there will be quite a few that you'll never see again.

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Human Rights: Children

La Casa de Los Gatos generally skirts children's issues because they're so upsetting. We do not believe reproduction is a right. It is, or ought to be, a privilege. Because if you do not want children with all your body, heart, and mind, you really shouldn't have them.

As we said recently, our Mummy's popped her clogs, which means we're free to state a few things that we couldn't risk saying while she was alive. For what it's worth, she had a terrible relationship with all her children, two of whom haven't spoken to her in decades. She had children because "that's what you do when you're married." Surely, condoms and birth control, even of a rudimentary sort, were available even back in the dark ages when she was born. She liked babies in the simpering way that some women affect. Babies, after all, are like flesh-and-blood dolls, to be dressed and cooed at. They're not ambulatory so you can dump them when they bore you. If you have enough money you can hire other people to deal with their screams and tears.

Of course, when you're getting paid to look after someone else's child, you are under no obligation (except a general, moral one) to treat it well. Basically, you can get away with pretty much anything, and no matter what people say only their own children are attractive, everyone else's children are a royal pain in the arse. So it comes as no surprise that people, whether biologically related to a child or not, often abuse children. They're a lot of work, kids. From the day they're born till the day they leave home, they require cleaning, feeding, amusing, managing. You have to plan their activities for them, take them to school or to the doctor or to camp or daycare. You have to make sure they're clean, fed, and healthy regardless of your own condition.

And they're yours for life. If your 50-year-old kid has to move home because they've lost their job and their home, well, what do you do? You take them in, of course. So, if you're not ready to devote a substantial part of your life to putting someone else first, for mercy's sake, get your reproductive bits snipped or removed. Because from the day your sprog is conceived to the day it dies, that sprog must come first. Sure, once it's an adult, you get part of your life back. But that takes at least two decades of love and dedication. It's a tremendous sacrifice.

The downside is, if you fuck up the job of raising your kids, you're not the only person affected. Your kid gets their hands on your gun collection and goes all Columbine on their high school; or grows up to be Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer, and countless other people and their families and the taxpayer as well gets stuck with the cost of your kid's mental and emotional health, or lack thereof.

Today's collection of stories for your edification about raising your kids right should suffice to make you sufficiently gloomy about the whole business. Maybe you'll even decide to send money to Planned Parenthood or NARAL or any of the fine organizations that deal with health issues for women. Yes, the consequences of reproduction can be pretty bad. It should be a privilege that you have to get licensed for, or work towards, or something. For your delectation:

• When your kid prefers prison to home or school, we gotta wonder what the hell kinda useless parents and teachers/administrators they had;
  
  
• How on earth do you justify locking your kid up and starving them to death without a drink of water?
  
  
• This is a big reason why children should not have children. Not that age improves things.
  
  
• Nixzmary Brown — the poster child for horrendous child abuse cases. Prosecutors are adding a charge to the long list her mother will face, in the hope that it will increase their chances of a conviction.
  
  
• Who the hell raised these creatures to believe you can force love with a gun?
  
  
• The parents of this princess should have been spayed
  
  
• Negligent parenting can have fatal consequences
  
  
• Your children are your responsibility and yours alone. You can't hand them off to your druggie sister or anyone else just because you need a break.

So, why are we raising this issue today? Because the Bushies have just launched a sneak attack on women's reproductive freedom — and men's as well. Pertinent snippet:

Last week, the Department of Health and Human Services proposed a new rule that would force hospitals and clinics to hire people who refuse to provide the full range of reproductive options to women, denying women important health care information and access to basic forms of contraception.

Bush's new rule would deny federal funding to health care institutions that refuse to follow the new rule, limiting health care access when more Americans are struggling with rising health care costs. Further, this rule could allow health care providers, driven by their own personal ideology, to deny emergency contraception to sexual assault victims.

By redefining abortion to include the most common and effective methods of birth control, including oral contraceptives and emergency contraception, the Bush Administration is attempting to deprive basic contraceptive services to women around the country.

Unwanted children are at a much greater risk of abuse. This increases if the mother has a difficult pregnancy or delivery, or if the child has physical or developmental disabilities. Additional risk factors include poverty, premature delivery, lack of societal support, mental health problems in either parent, domestic violence, a history of child abuse for either parent, and poor coping skills.

Given that middle-class and upper-class women tend to be (a) educated; (b) able to procure contraception or abortion; (c) not at risk of poverty, lack of societal support, or poor coping skills, it is not unreasonable to assume that the impact of Emperor Jor Jee's law will fall on the already burdened working class and lower-middle-class women. So, if you have a shred of human decency or feeling, consider the plight of all those unwanted children Emperor Jor Jee is about to create for his puppet masters; and consider the plight of the women who will have to bear the consequences of caring, or failing to care, for such children. And do something.

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Civil Rights: Holy Quacking Duckshit

You know it's getting bad when you can hardly finish blogging one case of thuggish assault against the citizenry before another is reported.

So, Ohio, you got a little competition here. Missouri's trying for the crown. They're behind, but you never know.

Raw Story is reporting that Missouri police tasered a 16-year-old boy with a broken back and a broken foot NINETEEN TIMES. Read that carefully and slowly, because it needs to sink in. The kid is 16 years old. He's not the type of 16 year old who stands 6' 7" and weighs 350 lb. Judging from the photo, he looks like a skinny teenager, average size or less.

Not too long ago, police in Lousiana tasered a man nine times. He died after the seventh tasing. The man, Baron Pikes, was a healthy 21-year-old who weighed 247 lbs. The incident was clearly race-motivated and made us too fucking furious to blog it. So, if a healthy, large man dies after seven shocks with a taser, what the hell have the cowardly Missouri police done to this kid?

From the article:

Ozark Police Capt. Thomas Rousset attempted to explain why the taser was used:

"He refused to comply with the officers and so the officers had to deploy their Tasers in order to subdue him. He is making incoherent statements; he's also making statements such as, 'Shoot cops, kill cops,' things like that. So there was cause for concern to the officers."

Oh, wow. Real scary, huh, guys? First off, he's a kid. OK, maybe he was on meth or PCP, under which circs even a skinny kid could be a danger to others. But hey, looky here, the kid's broken his fucking back, fer crying out. What was he gonna do, whip his dick out and piss on you from a prone position? And what means "he refused to comply"? The kid's back was broken, you cowards. Did he refuse to get up against the wall? Well, he couldn't, could he? Does that mean you have to taser him nineteen fucking times?

Maybe we were better off when these assholes only carried guns. At least if they shot the kid, they'd be in clear violation of his civil rights. Now that they've got this deadly new toy, they can injure all kinds of people repeatedly and get off scot-free. Because, yasee, no one will admit (except for the victims and a few of us liberal bleeding-hearts) that it is a fucking deadly toy.

Come to think of it, why are such wussy, terrified people being hired as cops? Clearly they'd be better off working in daycare for infants or something. Oh, waitaminnit. They're the type to taser "dangerous" infants.

Geez, being cynical these days is a losing proposition. The more cynical you get, the faster reality exceeds your expectations. So, Jor Jee, about these here freedoms that teh terr'ists hate us for? The ones that you sent everybody's kids and relatives and friends off to fight for "over there" so we don't have to fight them over here? What are they exactly? Because, yaknow, not to nitpick or anything, but between FISA and the wholesale breakdown of law and order, we're not seeing a whole lot of these here fucking freedoms. Just sayin'.

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LGBTQ: The Face of Hate

Copyright Melina Mara, The Washington Post

The wretched bag of vituperation pictured above is one Elaine Donnelly, the president of an organization called Center for Military Readiness (CMR), a 501(c)(3) organization whose sole purpose appears to be keeping women and gay people out of the military. Judging from the tone of this excerpt from their statement of "principles," they're sadly in need of some sensitivity training themselves:

To repair the damage, strong leadership and sound priorities will have to be applied in all matters, including personnel policies that impose heavy costs in return for little or no benefit. These include co-ed basic training, dcounter-productive gender quotas, double standards in training and disciplinary matters, misinterpretation of the law banning open homosexuality in the military, overly generous pregnancy policies that worsen deployability problems, and universal "sensitivity training" to convince everyone that social engineering "works."

A less charming bunch of troglodytes one is hard put to imagine. Ms. Donnelly somehow found herself invited to the Congressional hearings on the "Don't Ask Don't Tell" policy towards homosexuals in the military.

Washington Post's Dana Milbank covered the hearings, which were also attended by several gay troops. Given that this is the first hearing on DADT that has been held in the past 15 years, you'd think Ms. Donnelly could stifle the bile and present some facts rather than the steaming products of her fetid and clearly unpleasant inner workings. But no.

She ranted and raved and waxed so wroth it's nothing short of a miracle that her clearly botoxed and overpainted face didn't just fall off with disgust and crawl under a chair. In her own words, hear ye, hear ye:

Donnelly treated the panel to an extraordinary exhibition of rage. She warned of "transgenders in the military." She warned that lesbians would take pictures of people in the shower. She spoke ominously of gays spreading "HIV positivity" through the ranks.

"We're talking about real consequences for real people," Donnelly proclaimed. Her written statement added warnings about "inappropriate passive/aggressive actions common in the homosexual community," the prospects of "forcible sodomy" and "exotic forms of sexual expression," and the case of "a group of black lesbians who decided to gang-assault" a fellow soldier.

Because, you know, all those lezzies are just dying to get some T&A shots in the showers. And what, exactly, is an "exotic" form of sexual expression? Doesn't this daft dunderhead realize, judging from the reports of rape and sexual harrassment in the military, that women are in much greater danger from their male comrades-in-arms than from shower photogs of the lesbian persuasion?

And forcible sodomy? Darlings, we're just not that into you, so to speak. Sorry to disappoint, but forcible sodomy is much more likely to occur in prisons or other concentrations of straight males who use sex as a means of asserting dominance and power. You know, just like heterosexual rape.

As for that "group of black lesbians who decided to gang-assault" a fellow soldier, Ms. Donnelly sounds much more focused on their blackness than their lesboness. There are plenty of existing procedures to deal with misconduct in the armed forces whether heterosexual or homosexual. What's got this woman's pantalones in such a wad, I wonder?

At any rate, she had the effect of getting Congresscritters' underroos in a similar bunch. Here's one of 'em:

Rep. Vic Snyder (D-Ark.) labeled her statement "just bonkers" and "dumb," and he called her claims about an HIV menace "inappropriate." Said Snyder: "By this analysis . . . we ought to recruit only lesbians for the military, because they have the lowest incidence of HIV in the country."

The Lesbian Army. Diamanda Galas would LOVE that.

Of course, the Washington Blade has considered Chris Shays a reasonably reliable backer of gay rights, but his performance at the hearing was the cherry on the sundae. He'd better watch it or his Republican buddies won't let him play with their toys.

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Politics: A Government That Works

We often wonder why government in this country is so inefficient. All over the world, other, poorer, smaller countries manage to do much more and much better with much less. The health care systems in France, Sweden, and Singapore are to be envied. The barefoot doctors of China and Bangladesh take medicine into rural villages without clean water or electricity.

Yet here we sit, so wealthy we can throw away up to half the food we grow, or give it away in aid to the less fortunate. But we can't give rural children vaccinations. And we let people die from lack of basic care. We can afford fancy pacemakers and heart surgery for worthless evil scum like Dick "I Shoot My Friends In The Face" Cheney. Basic dental care that could prevent a child from dying &mdash that, we can't afford.

We can't afford to monitor our food for poisons that will kill our elderly and our children.

We wonder about these things so much, we rushed out and bought Thomas Frank's What's The Matter With Kansas shortly after it was published and read it avidly. It left us feeling bitterly disappointed.

Today, we found a discussion on DailyKos (to which we never link because it would be like a fly trying to ride on an elephant fer cryin' out) about America and government and we think everybody in this country ought to read it, although DK has a much wider readership than we do and linking to this diary on our teeny-tiny blog will maybe just annoy some of our readers and amuse the rest. Nevertheless. Kos nails it. This is about why Republicans during the Clinton administration did everything in their power to kill Hillary Clinton's efforts towards health care for the masses.

[2008 Republican defeats] would probably also mean a national health-insurance program that would irrevocably expand government involvement in the economy and American life, and itself make voters less likely to turn toward conservatism in the future.

Ramesh Ponnuru and Rich Lowry, as cited at DailyKos.

Because these lousy scumballs would rather see you and your children, parents, friends, and neighbours die in your ones or tens or thousands if necessary, as long as they get another four, or eight, or umpteen years in power.

Republicans, riddle me this: Can you look in the eyes of this little girl's parents


and tell them it was OK for their daughter to die to ensure KKKarl Rove's "permanent Republican majority"? Can you?

Can you look at the face of this child

and tell his mother it was OK that he died because you don't want "government interference" in issues like health care?

Because if you can, you are fucking scum and should immediately kill yourselves rather than waste the oxygen, air, and other resources that you are consuming while condemning the poor, the helpless, the defenseless to death.

As for you "religious right" hypocrites: For what shall it profit you to gain a fetus or a hundred and lose the lives of these children? If you're serious about the "sanctity of life," start by ending war, hunger, starvation, disease, and the power of a system that deems fetii sacred but does nothing to provide for sick and hungry children except to institute harsh penalties including loss of life if they become so twisted from want as to steal or rob. Start by imprisoning those who steal from millions, who condemn others to penury so that they may live in luxury.

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