George Zimmerman was Fired from his “Under the Table” Security Guard Job for Aggressive Behavior

Posted: March 30, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Crime, Violence against women | Tags: , , , , , , , | 23 Comments

George Zimmerman

More details keep dribbling out in the Trayvon Martin case. This morning the New York Daily News published an anonymous account from someone who worked with George Zimmerman between 2001 and 2005 [UPDATE: The Zimmerman family moved to Florida in 2002, so the 2001 date at, at least,must be incorrect.] when they acted as paid security guards for “illegal house parties,” earning between $50 and $100 per night, paid under the table. Zimmerman would have been between the ages of 17 and 21 during those years.

Zimmerman, at the center of a firestorm for shooting an unarmed black teenager a month ago, worked for two different agencies providing security to illegal house parties between 2001 and 2005, the former co-worker said.

“Usually he was just a cool guy. He liked to drink and hang with the women like the rest of us,” he said. “But it was like Jekyll and Hyde. When the dude snapped, he snapped.”

Zimmerman was fired and his class G security license was revoked after a particularly violent incident:

“He had a temper and he became a liability,” the man said. “One time this woman was acting a little out of control. She was drunk. George lost his cool and totally overreacted,” he said. “It was weird, because he was such a cool guy, but he got all nuts. He picked her up and threw her. It was pure rage. She twisted her ankle. Everyone was flipping out.”

As the Daily News points out, 2005 is the same year in which Zimmerman was arrested for fighting with a cop and also had a physical fight with his former fiance Veronica Zuazo that led to each of them taking out restraining orders. The anonymous source said that Zimmerman “loved the power” that came with the job.

When I read this article, I had no idea what “illegal house parties” were, but via Google, I learned that they are drinking parties or maybe raves? thrown by underage kids, perhaps when their parents are out of town–like in the movie Risky Business perhaps. According to the Daily News article, there are actually agencies that provide security for these parties.

Times sure have changed since I was in high school. I admit I’m biased, but is anyone else getting the feeling that Zimmerman is a much better candidate for being called a “thug” than Trayvon Martin?

Joe Oliver

More recently, Zimmerman has been working as a “forensic loan review analyst” (an underwriter) at Digital Risk, LLC. One of his co-workers was Joe Oliver, a man who has been appearing regularly in the media to defend Zimmerman. Oliver, a former local and CNN news anchor, has worked at Digital Risk for the past three years as a “forensic chart review specialist.” According to Oliver’s Linked-In profile, that involves “process loans in default for forensic underwriting.”

It sounds like Oliver could have worked closely with Zimmerman. Given that Oliver’s wife is a close friend of Zimmerman’s mother-in-law, I wonder if Oliver helped Zimmerman get the job?

Women Of Courage

Posted: March 11, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: abortion rights, Feminists, Festivities, fetus fetishists, Hillary Clinton: Her Campaign for All of Us, Human Rights, Violence against women, War on Women, Women's Healthcare, Women's Rights | 9 Comments

To read the biographies of this year’s recipients of the Women of Courage awards is nothing short of inspiring.  These are women who have put their lives and futures on the line to improve the quality of life for others, most specifically women and girls in parts of the world where to be female is extraordinarily difficult, even life-threatening.  These are women who would make our Bread and Roses mavens proud, infuse enough energy to conjure those slumbering spirits for another boisterous rally, another yelp for dignity and freedom.

Maryam Durani, a member of the Provencial Council, Kandahar, Afghanistan was one of ten women cited and honored last Thursday in a ceremony, hosted by First Lady Michelle Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.  Here’s a wee bit of her story:

Afghanistan as we all know is not an oasis of women’s liberation.  But Ms. Durani  has pitched herself against the traditional Afghani sensibility, standing as a role model and leader in a country of ancient tribal traditions and strict paternalistic mindsets.  She is the director of the nonprofit Women’s Center for Culture and owns and operates a radio station, which focuses on informing women of their rights.  And the inherent risks of demanding those rights.

She should know.  A suicide bomber nearly ended her life, leaving her with serious injuries.  The death threats haven’t stopped.  Yet, she persists as do the women she serves because in a world where women, by virtue of their gender are considered the enemy, a threat by merely existing as autonomous human beings, there is only one response: fight back.

Here is Secretary of State Hillary Clinton introducting Ms. Durani during the Awards Ceremony last week:

Many of the women honored this year and in the past have put themselves on the frontline, encountering serious security threats to themselves and their families.  They are not the first and sadly, they won’t be the last.  The complete list of awardees can be found here.

In January 2011, many people were horrified when the body of Susana Chavez was discovered in a shallow grave.  Chavez, a young poet activist, gave voice to the disappeared women in Juarez, Mexico, nearly 800 women at the time, only to be ‘disappeared’ herself. She was later found tortured, strangled, her body mutilated.

What was her offense?

She would not stop questioning, haranguing, annoying public officials for their inadequate investigations into the deaths of so many women. She was making trouble because she gave voice to those who had no voice, often no identity because their bodies had been disfigured, disposed of, forgotten.

Chavez refused to forget. She refused to be silent.  Giving voice to the abuse of others seems to be a constant thread in all these stories.

In addition to the official US awards, PEN International remembered the murdered women writers of Mexico, eleven murders in 2011, five of whom were women. Since 2006, forty-five writers/journalists/bloggers have been murdered or disappeared because of their investigative/ activist work.

Susana Chavez is on the PEN International list. So is Yolanda Ordaz de la Cruz, the mother of two and a veteran crime/political reporter.  She was abducted by gunmen in front of her home, only to be later found decapitated.  The message is clear: remain silent or this could be you.

Threats, torture, rape, imprisonment and murder is too often the fate of women who will not be silent, who refuse to get with programs that would restrain and silence them and their sisters.  And yet, like Maryam Durani and others, they persist.  They refuse to back down.

We have our own homegrown fight in the United States, those who would roll back a woman’s right to direct her reproductive life, choose her own destiny.  Here the punishment is humiliation, censor, scorn, name-calling, legislative measures to equate a woman’s fully realized life with that of a zygote, even the willingness to probe a woman’s decision-making process [because authoritarians find women incapable of ‘right-minded’ action, otherwise known as ‘their way or the highway’].

In all these efforts, the purpose is to demean, limit, control, even eliminate women because the Daughters of Eve are traditionally viewed as a danger, a threat to the status quo.  There’s a reason Lilith is rarely mentioned.  She was wa-a-ay too uppity.

But here’s the thing: even for those of us not facing mortal danger, we can have an impact by the way we live our lives, support other women, raise our daughters and sons and in the way we give voice to those who have pushed back against female abuse in all its forms, here and around the world, past and present.

Because to quote Hillary Clinton’s famous line: Women’s Rights are indeed Human Rights.  Our quest should be to fulfill Susana Chavez’s words:  Ni Una Mas.  Ni Una Mas.

Not One More.

Women's Empowerment

Thursday Reads: Sophia Loren, the Zombie Brain, the War on Women, and Much More

Posted: February 16, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Foreign Affairs, Greece, Human Rights, morning reads, U.S. Politics, Violence against women, War on Women, Women's Rights | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 45 Comments

Good Morning!!

The news has been so depressing lately that I thought I’d at least start out with something nonpolitical. Last night I read a fascinating interview with Sophia Loren from the new Vanity Fair. Loren talked about her painful childhood:

Raised in Pozzuoli, a small town of fishermen and munitions workers outside of Naples, Sophia experienced some of the worst privations of the Second World War—terror, bombing, starvation. Born in a charity ward for unwed mothers in Rome on September 20, 1934, Sofia Scicolone was taunted throughout her childhood for being illegitimate. Her mother, Romilda Villani, was a proud beauty who returned to her family home in Pozzuoli to live down her shame; in Catholic Italy then, being an unwed mother was not just a scandal, but a sin. They moved in with Romilda’s parents, an aunt, and two uncles; Romilda soon had another child with Riccardo Scicolone, who still refused to marry her and who would not even give Sophia’s younger sister, Maria, his name. Now eight people shared their apartment. Until she left Pozzuoli, Sophia never slept in a bed with fewer than three family members.

By 1942 they were starving, living on rationed bread, hiding from the air raids at night in a dark, rat-infested train tunnel, full of “sickness, laughter, drunkenness, death, and childbirth,” as she described it in A. E. Hotchner’s 1979 authorized biography of her, Sophia, Living and Loving: Her Own Story. Romilda foraged for food for herself and her two daughters, but Sophia was so skinny her school-mates called her “Sofia Stuzzicadenti”—toothpick.

Romilda was so beautiful that people mistook her on the street for Greta Garbo. She was once offered a screen test in Hollywood, but her mother wouldn’t allow her to go to Hollywood. So she became a stage mother.

Sophia Loren in 1950

At 14, Sophia blossomed. “It was as if I had burst from an egg and was born,” she often likes to say. Suddenly, she started hearing wolf whistles when she walked down the street. Romilda entered Sophia in a beauty contest—Queen of the Sea and Her Twelve Princesses. They had no gown for her to wear, so Sophia’s grandmother pulled down one of the pink curtains in the living room—like Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind—and made an evening gown. Romilda took Sophia’s scuffed black shoes and applied two coats of white paint to them. When they showed up, Sophia was intimidated by the more than 200 contestants in their real gowns, jewels, and flowers, but when it came time to parade in front of the judges, she comported herself with serene dignity. She was chosen as one of the 12 princesses, winning $35, a ticket to Rome, and several rolls of wallpaper, which the family happily used to cover the cracks in the plaster of their apartment caused by the wartime bombing.

And the rest is history. Go read the article. It might make you feel more cheerful than the political news. I’ll leave it to you to read the part about Sophia and Cary Grant and why she turned down his marriage proposal to stay with her much older, shorter lover Carlo Ponti.

Next up is an article from last October that I just happened upon a couple of days ago. If you have a somewhat warped sense of human like I do, you’ll get a kick out of it: How to Survive a Zombie Attack
A fight-or-flight primer to outliving the urban undead. Hey, it might even help us deal with the Republican presidential candidates. My favorite part is the explanation of the zombie brain by two neuroscientists.

“Zombies have attention-locking problems. When they see something, they fixate. It resembles damage to the parietal lobe (1)—a condition called Bálint’s syndrome. So a zombie will fixate on you, but if you can distract it, it might lose track of you entirely. Zombies are stiff and have balance problems because of damage to the cerebellum (2). It’s the same way you feel when you’re really drunk—you’re suppressing the cerebellum too.” —Timothy Verstynen, Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition

“In a human, the brain stem, at the top of the spinal cord, is responsible for the core functions of life—respiration, heartbeat. But since zombies don’t breathe or have heartbeats, the core function of the zombie’s existence is controlled by the part of the brain that controls appetite: the hypothalamus (3). If you hit a zombie right between the eyes with enough force, you can go straight back horizontally into the hypothalamus.” —Bradley Voytek

Getting back to true life horror, Dakinikat sent me this article from The American Prospect by Sally Kohn. It’s about Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York who is going be made a Cardinal soon–undoubtedly a reward for leading the war on American women. On the occasion of his promotion Dolan plans to give a speech about the need to attract lapsed Catholics back into the fold.

Read the rest of this entry »

Spending on Domestic Violence becomes a Pawn in the Culture Wars

Posted: February 11, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Violence against women, War on Women, Women's Rights | Tags: | 13 Comments

The Purity Police that are now omnipresent in the Republican Party are now balking at refunding programs aimed at helping victims of domestic violence because those victims include illegal immigrants and the GLBT community.  Just when I think my outrage may diminish, yet another item that primarily benefits women becomes a pawn in their culture wars.   Are they appealing to their base or just trying to get our minds off the slightly improving job situation and US economy?

The NYT scathing op ed has been lost in the war on women’s access to birth control waged by the Catholic Bishops.   This is something we should not overlook.

Even in the ultrapolarized atmosphere of Capitol Hill, it should be possible to secure broad bipartisan agreement on reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act, the 1994 law at the center of the nation’s efforts to combat domestic violence, sexual assault and stalking. The law’s renewal has strong backing from law enforcement and groups that work with victims, and earlier reauthorizations of the law, in 2000 and 2005, passed Congress with strong support from both sides of the aisle.

Yet not a single Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee voted in favor last week when the committee approved a well-crafted reauthorization bill introduced by its chairman, Senator Patrick Leahy, and Senator Michael Crapo, a Republican of Idaho, who is not on the committee.

The bill includes smart improvements aimed, for example, at encouraging effective enforcement of protective orders and reducing the national backlog of untested rape kits. The Republican opposition seems driven largely by an antigay, anti-immigrant agenda. The main sticking points seemed to be language in the bill to ensure that victims are not denied services because they are gay or transgender and a provision that would modestly expand the availability of special visas for undocumented immigrants who are victims of domestic violence — a necessary step to encourage those victims to come forward.

Did you read that? Every, single Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee voting against the reauthorization.  Did you notice that it was reintroduced by a Republican and a Democrat?  How have we arrived at this point when every single bill is gone over with a microscope to ensure that select right wing single issue groups are appeased?

A lot of this effort seems to be due to Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley.  Frankly, I wonder what he’s trying to hide.

Chuck Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, not only wants to eliminate those provisions, but has his own version of the bill that contains “a huge reduction in authorized financing, and elimination of the Justice Department office devoted to administering the law and coordinating the nation’s response to domestic violence and sexual assaults.” Grassley’s funding cuts are above and beyond the $135 million reduction in funding from 2005 levels already contained in the bill the Judiciary Committee Republicans unanimously rejected.

This Act has served us well and deserves to be refunded, renewed and strengthened.

One-third of violent felons in state criminal courts are charged with domestic violence; 50 percent of these offenders have killed their victims. Many of these murders occur during the time when couples are waiting to go to trial, highlighting the critical need for efficiency in court proceedings. Similarly, providing special domestic violence courts and court-appointed advocates can save foster children nearly 7 and a half months in the court system; that means they will experience fewer out of home placements and have significantly improved educational performance.

The programs reauthorized in the Domestic Violence Judicial Support Act do just this, allowing courts to specialize, thereby making them more efficient, consistent and able to incorporate a stronger focus on rehabilitation of offenders and deterrence of repeat offenses. These programs are not only the right thing to do, they also save states money. For example, training judges in effective case oversight resulted in significant foster care savings for several states. A 2009 Department of Justice Study found that Kentucky saved $85 million in one year alone through the issuance of protection orders and the reduction in violence resulting from the issuance of such orders.

Sexual Orientation and immigration status should not be issues in criminal investigations involving violent crimes.  Please take time to ask your Senator to re-authorize funding of this very important Act that was signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1994  that was strengthened during his administration and during the George W. Bush years.   It’s ridiculous to see that very important public health and safety issues have been plagued by attempts to appease angry, right wing ideological thugs.

Rick Santorum: Pregnant Rape Victims should “Make the Best out of a Bad Situation”

Posted: January 23, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, abortion rights, U.S. Politics, Violence against women, Women's Rights | Tags: , , , , , | 21 Comments

Rick and Karen Santorum were on CNN’s Piers Morgan show on Friday night. I saw a little of it, but I missed this part. Via Think Progress, Morgan asked Santorum about his extreme anti-choice opinions–his goal of criminalizing all abortions, (and prosecuting doctors who perform the procedure) even in cases of rape or incest. Morgan also asked Santorum how he would respond if his own daughter were raped and became pregnant.

SANTORUM: Well, you can make the argument that if she doesn’t have this baby, if she kills her child, that that, too, could ruin her life. And this is not an easy choice. I understand that. As horrible as the way that that son or daughter and son was created, it still is her child. And whether she has that child or doesn’t, it will always be her child. And she will always know that. And so to embrace her and to love her and to support her and get her through this very difficult time, I’ve always, you know, I believe and I think the right approach is to accept this horribly created — in the sense of rape — but nevertheless a gift in a very broken way, the gift of human life, and accept what God has given to you. As you know, we have to, in lots of different aspects of our life. We have horrible things happen. I can’t think of anything more horrible. But, nevertheless, we have to make the best out of a bad situation.

Morgan didn’t ask Santorum about incest victims. What if an 11-year-old girl is impregnated by her own father? Should her father then tell her she has to “make the best of a bad situation” because the embryo or fetus is a “person?”

What about the girls and women who have been brutalized by rape and incest? Santorum seems unconcerned. Not only should they suck it up and take care of the “life” that has been forced upon them, they should also have to follow laws based on Santorum’s personal religious beliefs.

Santorum even had the nerve to claim that references to persons and life in the Constitution were “intended” to include fertilized eggs, embryos, and fetuses. Yet at the time of the writing of the Constitution, abortion was not even illegal.

This man is dangerous to all girls and women.

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