Tuesday Reads: Rocks and Hard Places.

Good Morning!

Sometimes I feel like things are just getting a lot more complex and time consuming than they should be.  I’ve found some interesting stories about people that have been caught up in what appears to be a very complicated and unfair system.  The first story is about the woman that was arrested for leaving her children in a car while trying to find a job.  She was in a set of circumstances that certainly had a large amount of rocks and hard places.

On the morning of March 20, Shanesha Taylor had a job interview. It was for a good job, one that could support her three children, unlike the many positions she’d applied for that paid only $10 an hour. The interview, at an insurance agency in Scottsdale, Ariz., went well. “Walking out of the office, you know that little skip thing people do?” she said, clicking her heels together in a corny expression of glee. “I wanted to do that.”

But as she left the building and walked through the parking lot, she saw police officers surrounding her car, its doors flung open and a crime-scene van parked nearby. All the triumphant buoyancy of the moment vanished, replaced by a hard, sudden knot of panic. Hours later, Ms. Taylor was posing for a mug shot, her face somber and composed, a rivulet of tears falling from each eye. A subsequent headline in The Huffington Post said it all: “Shanesha Taylor, Homeless Single Mom, Arrested After Leaving Kids in Car While on Job Interview.”

The article ricocheted across the Internet. Many viewed her story — that she, unable to find child care, had left her two sons, aged 6 months and 2 years, in her 2006 Dodge Durango while she went to a 70-minute job interview — as emblematic of the harsh realities of today’s economy, where jobs are scarce and well-paid ones even scarcer, and where desperate choices have become common. Certainly, many people could identify with the cruel math of Ms. Taylor’s pretrial report, which put her monthly income at $1,232 (including food stamps), while her monthly expenses totaled $1,274.

Ms. Taylor, 35, was charged with two counts of felony child abuse, and soon became the subject of syndicated columns calling her the “true face of poverty,” petitions asking the prosecutor to drop charges and a crowd-sourced fund-raising campaign that gathered $115,000. After 10 days in jail, she was freed after strangers paid her $9,000 bail. Her story was featured on the “Today” show; her lawyer was interviewed by Bill O’Reilly. Then came the backlash, as critics contended that a woman who had put her children in peril was being made into a hero. Bill Montgomery, the Maricopa County attorney, contradicted news reports that Ms. Taylor was homeless and unemployed, saying she was actually neither. Her children — she also has a 9-year-old daughter who was in school at the time of the job interview — were removed from her custody.

All at once, Ms. Taylor had become a symbol of both economic desperation and shirked responsibility. Her story became fodder for polemic and preaching. But until a recent interview with The New York Times in a conference room at the office of her lawyer, Benjamin P. Taylor II (no relation), she had not spoken publicly.

You may read more about her story at the link.

Charlie Rangel’s frustration with the gridlock in Congress and the flair up in racially-based politics has lead to an interesting set of comments about pols from slaveholder states.  The congressman can’t imagine being a politician that would screw over his own voting base just to get back at a President.

New York Democratic Rep. Charles Rangel, locked in a contentious primary battle, suggested in an interview that aired Monday that the level of Republican opposition to President Barack Obama is partly due to race.

When asked by MSNBC’s Kasie Hunt whether GOP opposition to the president is “based on race,” Rangel paused and said, “You know, that’s a subjective question. But, let me say this: Are most of the states that they represent, are they in the Confederate states that fought the Union? Were they slaveholder states? And when they come to Washington, do you see more Confederate flags than American flags?

Rangel, an 84-year-old, African-American congressman who has served in Congress for more than four decades, added that he thought some Republicans were willing to hurt themselves politically by opposing the Obama administration’s domestic agenda just to attack him.

“Who would hurt their own people — in terms of cutting off health, job opportunity, food stamps — to get after this president? It takes a lot of hatred to hurt yourself just to embarrass the president. So, I’m trying to think with the tea party — and basically what they have said and what their spokespeople have said — this would not be the same if the president was not of color,” he said.

Rangel’s comments come after Sen. Jay Rockefeller last month said that Republican opposition to the Affordable Care Act was motivated in part by race. The retiring West Virginia Democrat said that some in the GOP don’t want the implementation of the health law to succeed because they don’t personally like the president and maybe he’s of the wrong color.”

Before going too far into other things, I’d like to show you something funny that really inspired me to this theme.  A US student had to be rescued from a statue that basically was a huge stone vagina.  He got stuck and had to be dislodged.

On Friday afternoon, a young American in Tübingen had to be rescued by 22 firefighters after getting trapped inside a giantsculpture of a vagina. TheChacán-Pi (Making Love) artwork by the Peruvian artist Fernando de la Jara has been outside Tübingen University’s institute for microbiology and virology since 2001 and had previously mainly attracted juvenile sniggers rather than adventurous explorers.

According to De la Jara, the 32-ton sculpture made out of red Veronese marble is meant to signify “the gateway to the world”.

Police confirmed that the firefighters turned midwives delivered the student “by hand and without the application of tools”.

I wonder if he had one of those epiphanies that are supposed to come with a rebirthing exercise?

The White House had a summit yesterday on Working Families.  It’s still difficult to hold down a challenging, poorly paying job in the US at nearly every level of responsibility and raise a family.  Here’s a list of the administration’s priorities.  Notice that we’re one of the few countries in the world does not have paid pregnancy leave yet.

Supporting the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act. While the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978 took a crucial step toward protecting pregnant workers, too many women still face discrimination in the workplace and a serious and unmet need for reasonable accommodations that would allow them to keep working while they are pregnant. For that reason, President Obama will urge Congress to pass the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which would require employers to make reasonable accommodations to workers who have limitations from pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions (unless it would impose an undue hardship on the employer). The legislation also would prohibit employers from forcing pregnant employees to take paid or unpaid leave if a reasonable accommodation would allow them to work.

Empowering Pregnant Workers with Better Information About Their Rights. At the President’s direction, DOL will release a new online map that will be a one-stop shop where working families can learn about the rights of pregnant workers in each state. The map will also allow families to see which states are leading the charge in protecting their rights and which are lagging behind. This live map will continue to reflect any future changes in state and federal policy.

Other priorities include supporting nontraditional families.  It’s amazing that after so many years of women being an important part of the work force that we still struggle for family friendly policies.

Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and other top administration officials took turns telling their personal stories about the struggle to balance work and family at a campaign-style “summit” stacked with cheering Democratic supporters at a posh Washington hotel.

“I remember taking the night shift when Malia was born and when Sasha was born and being up at two in the morning and changing diapers and burping them and singing to them,” Obama said, talking about his daughters, who are now teenagers.

“The point is, I was lucky enough to be able to take some time off,” he said. “I want every father and every child to have that opportunity.”

Obama issued an order requiring federal agency heads to expand flexible workplace policies as much as possible. The goal is to make it easier for parents or workers to take care of family needs and to enable more people to find and keep jobs.

Praising businesses that have taken similar steps, Obama said family leave should be available across the country.

It’s nice to know at least one President that fesses up to changing his children’s diapers and considers spending time with them to be “parenting” and not “baby sitting”.

Another issue that puts women in hard place is being open about their sexuality.  

Sandra Fluke heard it when she talked about insurance coverage for birth control. Sara Brown from Boston told me she was first called it at a pool party in the fifth grade because she was wearing a bikini. Courtney Caldwell in Dallas said she was tagged with it after being sexually assaulted as a freshman in high school.

Many women I asked even said that it was not having sex that inspired a young man to start rumors that they were one.

And this is what is so confounding about the word “slut”: it’s arguably the most ubiquitous slur used against women, and yet it’s nearly impossible to define.

The one thing we do know about “slut” is that it’s the last thing a woman should want to be. Society is so concerned over women and girls’ potential for promiscuity that we create  dress codes, school curricula,even legislation around protecting women’s  supposed purity. Conservative columnists opine that women having sex is tantamount to a “mental health crisis”, and magazine stories wonder if we’re raising  a generation of “prosti-tots”.

Leora Tanenbaum, the author of  SLUT! Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation, told me that “a ‘slut’ is a girl or woman who deviates from norms of femininity. The ‘slut’ is not necessarily sexually active – she just doesn’t follow the gender script.”

This nebulous, unquantifiable quality of the slur is what makes it so distressing – there’s no way to disprove something that has no conclusive boundaries to begin with. And because it’s meant to be more of an identity than a label, it’s a term not easily shaken off. “Slut” sticks to a person in a way that “asshole” never will.

So what makes you a slut? It seems the the only hard and fast rule is that you have to be a woman.

So, have you found yourself between a rock and a hard place recently?  What’s on your reading and blogging list this morning?

Friday Reads: How Can People be so Heartless (and wrong)

Good Morning!

Well, I’ve been looking at a lot of things recently but nothing sticks out to me more than the insane ideas that right wingers cling to even in the face of overwhelming evidence. Let’s look at a few today.

This one is really delusional.  Mike Huckabee thinks that MLK would think that marriage equality is “like the holocaust”.  You’ve got to be kidding me!!! Does he really say these things because he believes them or because he needs to boost the ratings on his show?

“We are under an obligation to obey God and the law, and if necessary, to defy an institution that is out of control,” the former Arkansas governor continued.

To make his point, Huckabee quoted from a letter that Martin Luther King’s Jr. wrote while spending eight days in the Birmingham Jail for fighting to end segregation.

“One may well ask, ‘How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?'” King had written. “The answer is found in the fact that there are two types of laws: there are just laws, and there are unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that ‘An unjust law is no law at all.'”

Huckabee continued reading from King’s letter: “We can never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was “legal” and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was ‘illegal.’ It was ‘illegal’ to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany. But I am sure that if I had lived in Germany during that time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers even though it was illegal.”

“I wish I had penned those words,” Huckabee exclaimed. “But they were penned by someone who understood freedom, and understood that there was a time to stand up against law when it has become unjust. Those are the words that were penned in 1954 by Martin Luther King Jr. in his letter from the Birmingham Jail.”

Some one, please explain how this Texas judge decided that the fathers of two babies weren’t the appropriate parents? Two married gay Dads were denied the right to adopt each other’s biological son born as twins. Here’s the story of their conception and surrogate mother.

 No matter, everyone gets a thank-you note with a special image — the same ultrasounds of the “twins” that Hanna posted on Facebook. (“They’re actually half-siblings,” says Riggs. “Two dads, one mom. But we say twins.” “Actually,” Hanna says, “We call them ‘the boys.’”) To him, the images say quite clearly, “This is where your money went.”

Here’s the story of the Texas judge that will tear the brothers apart if one of their fathers accidentally dies before they come of age.

Jason Hanna and Joe Riggs are the proud fathers of Lucas and Ethan, who were born in April, after they’d connected with a surrogate mom, CharLynn.

Each of the men is a biological father to one of the babies. But, because Texas has a ban on gay marriage (it was ruled unconstitutional by a federal judge last February, but the decision was stayed pending appeal), and because a judge can use his or her own discretion in these cases, neither of the men is currently on the birth certificates of either of the boys, nor have they been able to co-adopt each other’s biological child.

So, here’s some more craziness. It’s this week’s latest in second amendment overkill.  First up,  the case of instant karma.

A man in Macon, Georgia accidentally shot himself in the penis while attempting to holster his gun last week.

According to WMAZ Channel 13, the man was parked at a gas station and was attempting to put away the .45 caliber pistol when it discharged, striking him in the groin.

The man immediately drove to a friend’s house. According to police, the victim dropped his pants to find that he had shot himself in the penis and that the bullet had exited his body through the buttocks. As he disrobed, the spent round fell to the floor.

Unfortunately, the next links I have are more tragic.

The father of a newborn is now dead because of stray bullets from his neighbor who was drunk and an ex-felon to boot.  This is from Florida, of course.

A musician, teacher and new father is dead after a stray bullet pierced the wall of his Florida home on Tuesday and struck him in the back of the head. The Panama City News Herald reported that 33-year-old Justin Ayers and his wife were welcoming their 3-day-old baby home from the hospital with relatives when Justin was killed.

The bullet came from the house next door, where 62-year-old Charles Edward Shisler picked up a .9 mm pistol by the trigger, causing it to discharge. When sheriff’s deputies arrived, they found Shisler standing on his porch, although he initially was “belligerent” and uncooperative.

“The damn gun doesn’t usually shoot,” said Shisler, according to his arrest report. “You have to squeeze the hell out of the trigger to shoot  it.”

I’m not sure if you read about this right winger who shot a BLM officer, but it’s a doozy.  This dude fits the perfect picture of a right wing conspiracy wing nut.

The man accused of shooting two law enforcement members in California, including a Bureau of Land Management ranger, has had at least one previous run-in with law enforcement and has described himself as the target of a massive government conspiracy.

Brent Douglas Cole, 60, was named by the Nevada County Sheriff’s Office on Monday as the suspect in Saturday’s shooting that also left him wounded.

Anna Ferguson, assistant district attorney for Nevada County, confirmed to TPM that Cole was also facing misdemeanor charges in Nevada County Superior Court for allegedly carrying a loaded firearm. He was charged on Jan. 26.

The Union newspaper in Grass Valley, Calif., published an article that quoted from court documents in the case. The documents showed Cole believed he was the target of a massive conspiracy…

It seems like every day, these folks just get crazier and crazier.  It’s not even the little nut jobs in the rural south or the rural west.  We often wonder if it’s truly mental illness or some really mad folks being whipped into a frenzy by the likes of Dick Cheney and Rush Limbaugh.  What do mental health professionals say about the connection between massing shootings and mental illness?  This is a MOJO interview with  “Jeffrey Swanson, a professor in psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Duke University School of Medicine, and one of the leading researchers on mental health and violence.”

In the face of it, a mass shooting is the product of a disordered mental process. You don’t have to be a psychiatrist: what normal person would go out and shoot a bunch of strangers?

But the risk factors for a mass shooting are shared by a lot of people who aren’t going to do it. If you paint the picture of a young, isolated, delusional young man—that probably describes thousands of other young men.

A 2001 study looked specifically at 34 adolescent mass murderers, all male. 70 percent were described as a loner. 61.5 percent had problems with substance abuse. 48 percent had preoccupations with weapons. 43.5 percent had been victims of bullying. Only 23 percent had a documented psychiatric history of any kind—which means 3 out of 4 did not.

People with serious mental illnesses, like schizophrenia, do have a slightly higher risk of committing violence than members of the general population. Yet most violence is not attributable to mental illness. Can you walk us through the numbers?

People with serious mental illness are 3 to 4 times more likely to be violent than those who aren’t. But the vast majority of people with mental illness are not violent and never will be.

Most violence in society is caused by other things.

Even if we had a perfect mental health care system, that is not going to solve our gun violence problem. If we were able to magically cure schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depression, that would be wonderful, but overall violence would go down by only about 4 percent.

Amanda Marcotte believes there are five issues where the wing nuts are getting wing nuttier by the minute. They are immigration, sexual violence, Gay rights, Domestic violence, and bare minimum standards of politeness.  Let me quote from her example of sexual violence.

In the past four decades, relentless feminist campaigning on the issue of sexual abuse and rape has created some amount of consensus about what rape is and what it isn’t. Until recently, even the most belligerent rape apologist had to admit that “date rape” is a thing that actually happens in the real world and that no really does mean no. Sure, anti-feminists still try to deny the extent of date rape and argue that consent is more confusing than it actually is, but even they had to admit that clear-cut cases of non-consent amount to rape.

But ever since Obama started a White House task force to combat campus rape, suddenly we’re back in the ’80s again, with conservatives trying to argue that women can literally be forced to have sex against their will and this somehow doesn’t count as rape. In a recent Washington Post column, George Will accused women of making up rape to gain the “coveted status” of “victimhood”. His evidence? A story of a woman who said, “No, I don’t want to have sex with you,” to her alleged assailant. But no apparently doesn’t mean no to Will, not if the victim knows her attacker and/or she doesn’t fight him off with violence. Similarly, both A.J. Delgado of the National Review and Stu Burguiere of The Blaze argued recently that because consensual sex under the influence of drugs or alcohol happens, all non-consensual sex under the influence should not be considered rape.

Let me just end this foray with a shout out to the St Louis Dispatch that dropped George Will over his comments on the “coveted status” of rape victims on campus.

The Saint Louis Post-Dispatch announced today that it has dropped conservative columnist George Will’s column from the paper, citing a recent piece in which Will asserted that sexual assault victims on college campuses enjoyed “coveted status.”

In the controversial column which drew a letter of reproach from four U.S. Senators, Will wrote that college administrators are being “educated by Washington.” Will wrote, “they are learning that when they say campus victimizations are ubiquitous” they are promoting the idea that victimhood is “a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate.”

In a letter to readers, the Post-Dispatch apologized for running the offending column, calling it “offensive and inaccurate.”

Here’s a great “Bizzaro world” example of a Republican on Sexual Assault and Abortion and a little nutso ideas on GLBT too.

Republican Maine state Representative Lawrence Lockman is under fire for comments he’s made in the media regarding rape, abortion, and homosexuality.

An investigation by Mike Tipping, an activist with Maine People’s Alliance, found numerous offensive comments made by the Republican in various newspaper interviews.

Perhaps the most inflammatory was a press statement from 1995 in which Lockman says “If a woman has (the right to an abortion), why shouldn’t a man be free to use his superior strength to force himself on a woman? At least the rapist’s pursuit of sexual freedom doesn’t (in most cases) result in anyone’s death.”

That wasn’t all.

According to the report, Lockman once implied that the HIV virus can be spread through mosquitoes and bed sheets. Lockman also asserted that liberals helped exacerbate the AIDS epidemic by assuring “the public that the practice of sodomy is a legitimate alternative lifestyle, rather than a perverted and depraved crime against humanity.”

In a letter to Bangor News, Lockman once wrote “Clearly the practice of sodomy is learned behavior, and those addicted to this form of biologically-insane sex are at high risk for all manner of serious medical problems.”

Lockman also spoke out against HIV infected students attending school, saying “It’s peculiar that the government is telling health care workers that surfaces contaminated with bodily fluids should be thoroughly disinfected, but at the same time they are telling us that toilet seats have some magical property that they are able to resist viruses.”

He also tried to alert people to a “secret gay affirmative action plan,” saying “You can bet the rent money they will demand that employers set up goals and timetables to achieve 10 percent homosexual representation in the workforce and in government contracts.”

How do people with such poorly wired brains wind up in positions of authority?

I’m still at a loss as to why there seems to be a perfect storm these days in which the wingiest and nuttiest of the right wing seem to have risen to the top of the septic tank.  I have decided it has something to do with our president’s racial heritage, the right wing media being so outrageous and so available, and the funding provided by complete idiots like the Koch Brothers.  There is, of course, the total take over of the Republican party by religious extremists, libertarians, and corporate lobbyists. I really can’t decide if we should rejoice in the fact that demographics will soon put an end to this or hunker down because it’s going to continue to get bad in the short run.

So, what’s on your reading and blogging list today?