Tuesday Reads: Margaret Thatcher’s “Dark Legacy,” Death of a Feminist Revolutionary, and Mitch McConnell’s Ugly Plans
Posted: April 9, 2013 Filed under: morning reads, U.S. Politics, War on Women, Women's Rights | Tags: Andrew Sullivan, Ashley Judd, austerity, David Corn, feminist history, Margaret Thatcher, Mitch McConnell, Poverty, Shulamith Firestone, Susan Faludi 33 CommentsGood Morning!!
The death of Margaret Thatcher is still dominating the news this morning. It seems she was one of those public figures that inspired varied but passionate reactions–you either loved her or hated her.
Andrew Sullivan loved her it seems.
I was a teenage Thatcherite, an uber-politics nerd who loved her for her utter lack of apology for who she was. I sensed in her, as others did, a final rebuke to the collectivist, egalitarian oppression of the individual produced by socialism and the stultifying privileges and caste identities of the class system. And part of that identity – the part no one ever truly gave her credit for – was her gender. She came from a small grocer’s shop in a northern town and went on to educate herself in chemistry at Oxford, and then law. To put it mildly, those were not traditional decisions for a young woman with few means in the 1950s. She married a smart businessman, reared two children and forged a political career from scratch in the most male-dominated institution imaginable: the Tory party.
She relished this individualist feminism and wielded it – coining a new and very transitive verb, handbagging, to describe her evisceration of ill-prepared ministers or clueless interviewers. Perhaps in Toynbee’s defense, Thatcher was not a feminist in the left-liberal sense: she never truly reflected on her pioneering role as a female leader; she never appointed a single other woman to her cabinet over eleven years; she was contemptuous toward identity politics; and the only tears she ever deployed (unlike Hillary Clinton) were as she departed from office, ousted by an internal coup, undefeated in any election she had ever run in as party leader.
Her policies “inspired” the revolutionary reactions that created a “cultural transformation.”
Thatcher’s economic liberalization came to culturally transform Britain. Women were empowered by new opportunities; immigrants, especially from South Asia, became engineers of growth; millions owned homes for the first time; the media broke free from union chains and fractured and multiplied in subversive and dynamic ways. Her very draconian posture provoked a punk radicalism in the popular culture that changed a generation. The seeds of today’s multicultural, global London – epitomized by that Olympic ceremony – were sown by Thatcher’s will-power.
And that was why she ultimately failed, as every politician always ultimately does. She wanted to return Britain to the tradition of her thrifty, traditional father; instead she turned it into a country for the likes of her son, a wayward, money-making opportunist. The ripple effect of new money, a new middle class, a new individualism meant that Blair’s re-branded Britain – cool Britannia, with its rave subculture, its fashionistas, its new cuisine, its gay explosion, its street-art, its pop music – was in fact something Blair inherited from Thatcher.
Of course Sullivan no longer lives in Great Britain, and he has the means to avoid the worst effects of the elite’s austerity policies regardless of where he lives. Others aren’t so fortunate.
The Guardian reports: Margaret Thatcher’s death greeted with street parties in Brixton and Glasgow; Crowds shout ‘Maggie Maggie Maggie, dead dead dead’ during impromptu events.
Several hundred people gathered in south London on Monday evening to celebrate Margaret Thatcher‘s death with cans of beer, pints of milk and an impromptu street disco playing the soundtrack to her years in power.
Young and old descended on Brixton, a suburb which weathered two outbreaks of rioting during the Thatcher years. Many expressed jubilation that the leader they loved to hate was no more; others spoke of frustration that her legacy lived on.
To cheers of “Maggie Maggie Maggie, dead dead dead,” posters of Thatcher were held aloft as reggae basslines pounded.
Clive Barger, a 62-year-old adult education tutor, said he had turned out to mark the passing of “one of the vilest abominations of social and economic history”.
He said: “It is a moment to remember. She embodied everything that was so elitist in terms of repressing people who had nothing. She presided over a class war.”
Builder Phil Lewis, 47, a veteran of the 1990 poll tax riots, said he had turned out to recall the political struggles the Thatcher years had embroiled him in. “She ripped the arsehole out of this country and we are still suffering the consequences.”
Just as Ronald Reagan did to the U.S.–and we’re still suffering the consequences.
Here’s a video from Brixton.
Hugo Young, Thatcher biographer, writes in The Guardian: Margaret Thatcher left a dark legacy that has still not disappeared. For Young, a positive was Thatcher’s indifference to her popularity with the public.
I think by far her greatest virtue, in retrospect, is how little she cared if people liked her. She wanted to win, but did not put much faith in the quick smile. She needed followers, as long as they went in her frequently unpopular directions. This is a political style, an aesthetic even, that has disappeared from view. The machinery of modern political management – polls, consulting, focus groups – is deployed mainly to discover what will make a party and politician better liked, or worse, disliked. Though the Thatcher years could also be called the Saatchi years, reaching a new level of presentational sophistication in the annals of British politics, they weren’t about getting the leader liked. Respected, viewed with awe, a conviction politician, but if liking came into it, that was an accident.
But this attitude “didn’t come without a price” and “Thatcher left a dark legacy…”
What happened at the hands of this woman’s indifference to sentiment and good sense in the early 1980s brought unnecessary calamity to the lives of several million people who lost their jobs. It led to riots that nobody needed. More insidiously, it fathered a mood of tolerated harshness. Materialistic individualism was blessed as a virtue, the driver of national success. Everything was justified as long as it made money – and this, too, is still with us.
Thatcherism failed to destroy the welfare state. The lady was too shrewd to try that, and barely succeeded in reducing the share of the national income taken by the public sector. But the sense of community evaporated. There turned out to be no such thing as society, at least in the sense we used to understand it. Whether pushing each other off the road, barging past social rivals, beating up rival soccer fans, or idolising wealth as the only measure of virtue, Brits became more unpleasant to be with. This regrettable transformation was blessed by a leader who probably did not know it was happening because she didn’t care if it happened or not. But it did, and the consequences seem impossible to reverse….
[I]t’s now easier to see the scale of the setback she inflicted on Britain’s idea of its own future. Nations need to know the big picture of where they belong and, coinciding with the Thatcher appearance at the top, clarity had apparently broken through the clouds of historic ambivalence.
At least the British media isn’t trying to canonize Thatcher as the corporate media in the U.S. did to Reagan.
A Less Remarked Upon Death: Shulamith Firestone
At The New Yorker, Susan Faludi pays tribute to a feminist icon of the 1970s, “Death of a Revolutionary: Shulamith Firestone helped to create a new society. But she couldn’t live in it.”
When Shulamith Firestone’s body was found late last August, in her studio apartment on the fifth floor of a tenement walkup on East Tenth Street, she had been dead for some days. She was sixty-seven, and she had battled schizophrenia for decades, surviving on public assistance. There was no food in the apartment, and one theory is that Firestone starved, though no autopsy was conducted, by preference of her Orthodox Jewish family. Such a solitary demise would have been unimaginable to anyone who knew Firestone in the late nineteen-sixties, when she was at the epicenter of the radical-feminist movement, surrounded by some of the same women who, a month after her death, gathered in St. Mark’s Church In-the-Bowery, to pay their respects.
The memorial service verged on radical-feminist revival. Women distributed flyers on consciousness-raising, and displayed copies of texts published by the Redstockings, a New York group that Firestone co-founded. The WBAI radio host Fran Luck called for the Tenth Street studio to be named the Shulamith Firestone Memorial Apartment, and rented “in perpetuity” to “an older and meaningful feminist.” Kathie Sarachild, who had pioneered consciousness-raising and coined the slogan “Sisterhood Is Powerful,” in 1968, proposed convening a Shulamith Firestone Women’s Liberation Memorial Conference on What Is to Be Done. After several calls from the dais to “seize the moment” and “keep it going,” a dozen women decamped to an organizing meeting at Sarachild’s apartment.
I well remember reading Firestone’s book, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. It was mind-blowing stuff in those days.
In the late nineteen-sixties, Firestone and a small cadre of her “sisters” were at the radical edge of a movement that profoundly changed American society. At the time, women held almost no major elected positions, nearly every prestigious profession was a male preserve, homemaking was women’s highest calling, abortion was virtually illegal, and rape was a stigma to be borne in silence. Feminism had been in the doldrums ever since the first wave of the American women’s movement won the vote, in 1920, and lost the struggle for greater emancipation. Feminist energy was first co-opted by Jazz Age consumerism, then buried in decades of economic depression and war, until the dissatisfactions of postwar women, famously described by Betty Friedan in “The Feminine Mystique” (1963), gave rise to a “second wave” of feminism. The radical feminists emerged alongside a more moderate women’s movement, forged by such groups as the National Organization for Women, founded in 1966 by Friedan, Aileen Hernandez, and others, and championed by such publications as Ms., founded in 1972 by Gloria Steinem and Letty Cottin Pogrebin. That movement sought, as now’s statement of purpose put it, “to bring women into full participation in the mainstream of American society,” largely by means of equal pay and equal representation. The radical feminists, by contrast, wanted to reconceive public life and private life entirely.
What a brilliant tribute by Faludi. It’s well worth the read.
Mother Jones’s David Corn has gotten his hands on a tape of “a private meeting between the Senate GOP leader and campaign aides reveals how far they were willing to go to defeat” Ashley Judd.
On February 2, Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the US Senate, opened up his 2014 reelection campaign headquarters in Louisville, Kentucky, and in front of several dozen supporters vowed to “point out” the weaknesses of any opponent fielded by the Democrats. “They want to fight? We’re ready,” he declared. McConnell was serious: Later that day, he was huddling with aides in a private meeting to discuss how to attack his possible Democratic foes, including actor/activist Ashley Judd, who was then contemplating challenging the minority leader. During this strategy session—a recording of which was obtained by Mother Jones—McConnell and his aides considered assaulting Judd for her past struggles with depression and for her religious views….
For much of the Judd discussion, McConnell was silent as aides reviewed the initial oppo research they had collected on Judd and weighed all the ways they could pummel her. The recording was provided to Mother Jones last week by a source who requested anonymity. (The recording can be found here; a transcript is here.) McConnell’s Senate office and his campaign office did not respond to requests for comment.
The aide who led the meeting began his presentation with a touch of glee: “I refer to [Judd] as sort of the oppo research situation where there’s a haystack of needles, just because truly, there’s such a wealth of material.” He ran through the obvious: Judd was a prominent supporter of President Barack Obama, Obamacare, abortion rights, gay marriage, and climate change action. He pointed out that she is “anti-coal.”
But the McConnell gang explored going far beyond Judd’s politics and policy preferences. This included her mental health. The meeting leader noted:
She’s clearly, this sounds extreme, but she is emotionally unbalanced. I mean it’s been documented. Jesse can go in chapter and verse from her autobiography about, you know, she’s suffered some suicidal tendencies. She was hospitalized for 42 days when she had a mental breakdown in the ’90s.
So what? Mitch McConnell is a sick, closeted, hateful old freak who appears to lack any semblance of human feelings.
I’m running out of space, so I’ll add a few more links in the comments. I hope you’ll do the same. What are you reading and blogging about today?
Monday Reads
Posted: October 29, 2012 Filed under: 2012 elections, Libya, morning reads | Tags: Andrew Sullivan, Benghazi, Ohio, Romney Campaign Lies 105 Comments
Good Morning!!!
All things surrounding the elections are now up to 11. I’ve seen some weird things in my days but I’m beginning to check my history books for more bizarre examples of crazy campaign antics. Andrew Sullivan turned my last week’s observation of the similarities between the election maps of 2012 and those of the US directly before the civil war into a national conversation yesterday on ABC. I’m just pointing to ABC right now because I’ve had enough virtual visitations from the KKK for the time being.
During this Sunday’s edition of ABC’s This Week, Daily Beast writer Andrew Sullivan claimed that if Republican nominee Mitt Romney wins back Florida and Virginia in the upcoming 2012 presidential election, especially due to the white vote, then the South’s electoral map will look exactly like the pro-slavery United States Confederacy during the Civil War.
This observation came in response to host George Stephanopoulos noting that the latest polls show that six out of ten white Americans intend to vote for Romney.
PBS reporter Gwen Ifill said that “we can’t ignore” the possible factor racial animus may play in deciding the election, noting that the poll indicates that, on some level, people are still willing to admit “racial bias.”
Sullivan then added: “If Virginia and Florida go back to the Republicans, it’s the Confederacy. Entirely. You put a map of the Civil War over this electoral map, you’ve got the Civil War.”
Perhaps we all really need to have a big conversation on racism in America. It appears white people think they are victims of racism while still using racial stereotypes for people of color. I’m confused. Hasn’t any one had read any literature or history on institutional racism. White people screaming racism is about like the current crop of republican men shouting they’re victims of misogyny.
Racial prejudice has increased slightly since 2008 whether those feelings were measured using questions that explicitly asked respondents about racist attitudes, or through an experimental test that measured implicit views toward race without asking questions about that topic directly.
Fifty-one percent of Americans now express explicit anti-black attitudes, compared with 48 percent in a similar 2008 survey. When measured by an implicit racial attitudes test, the number of Americans with anti-black sentiments jumped to 56 percent, up from 49 percent during the last presidential election. In both tests, the share of Americans expressing pro-black attitudes fell.
“As much as we’d hope the impact of race would decline over time … it appears the impact of anti-black sentiment on voting is about the same as it was four years ago,” said Jon Krosnick, a Stanford University professor who worked with AP to develop the survey.
Most Americans expressed anti-Hispanic sentiments, too. In an AP survey done in 2011, 52 percent of non-Hispanic whites expressed anti-Hispanic attitudes. That figure rose to 57 percent in the implicit test. The survey on Hispanics had no past data for comparison.
The AP surveys were conducted with researchers from Stanford University, the University of Michigan and NORC at the University of Chicago.
The Romney campaign continues its strategy of lying by planning on using an ad in Ohio about a false, conspiracy theory on a jeep plant closing to move to China. It’s been completely denied, debunked, and disproved so, Romney’s continuing to put it out there. They’ve even put together an ad.
As you may have heard, Romney on Thursday scared the bejeezus out of Ohio autoworkers when, during arally, he cited a story claiming that Chrysler was moving Jeep production to China. Thousands of people work at a sprawling Jeep complex in Toledo and a nearby machining plant. Many thousands more work for suppliers or have jobs otherwise dependent on the Jeep factories. It’s fair to say that they owe their jobs to President Obama, who in 2009 rescued Chrysler and General Motors from likely liquidation. If Chrysler moved the plants overseas, most of those people would be out of work.
The story turns out to be wrong. As Chrysler made clear the very next day, in a tartly worded blog post on the company website, officials have discussed opening plants in China in order to meet rising demand for vehicles there. They have no plans to downsize or shutter plants in the U.S. On the contrary, Fiat, the Italian company that acquired Chrysler during the rescue, just spent $1.7 billion to expand Jeep production in the U.S. That includes $500 million to renovate and expand the Toledo facilities, with 1,000 new factory jobs likely to follow. On Monday, about the same number of people will report for their first day of work in Detroit, when Chrysler adds a third shift to a Jeep plant it operates there.
This is as bad as all the false narratives out there being repeated about Benghazi including the completely false narrative that Hillary Clinton asked for more security and Obama denied it. Then, there’s the they didn’t send the military in to help meme that points to the White House too. All of this is patently false but still harped on by Romney surrogates. The desperation of Romney supporters is evident in all these lies. That and the contempt they must have for the American people. Even former Bush SOS Condi Rice says these Republican narratives are ridiculous.
It is being charged that requests for extra security in Benghazi were denied by the administration.
The suggestion is that the attack would have been stopped, and the ambassador still alive, if the requests had been granted.
But at a hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee this month, Charlene Lamb, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State and head of the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, testified that the request was for added security in Tripoli, the capital of Libya, and not Benghazi.
The added manpower would have been based 400 miles away from the violence.
In addition, U.S. security officials report more guards could not have repelled heavy weapons used by the attackers.
The Wall Street Journal has reported “a four-man team of armed guards protecting the perimeter and four unarmed Libyan guards inside to screen visitors.”
In addition, “Besides the four armed Libyans outside, five armed State Department diplomatic security officers were at the consulate.”
There is an air of hypocrisy about this second charge from Republican critics.
House Republicans voted to cut nearly $300 million in funding from Embassy Security as part of their most recent budget.
Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) conceded this in a CNN interview.
“Absolutely. Look, we have to make priorities and choices in this country… When you’re in tough economic times, you have to make difficult choices how to prioritize this.”
Dean Baker has an excellent article up on the future of Social Security and Why Big Bucks Donors don’t like political discussions that strongly support the program. He argues that any highly vocal support of Social Security by Obama would dry up his campaign contributions.
But there is another set of economic considerations affecting the politics of social security. These considerations involve the economics of the political campaigns and the candidates running for office. The story here is a simple one: while social security may enjoy overwhelming support across the political spectrum, it does not poll nearly as well among the wealthy people – who finance political campaigns and own major news outlets. The predominant philosophy among this group is that a dollar in a workers’ pocket is a dollar that could be in a rich person’s pocket – and these people see social security putting lots of dollars in the pockets of people who are not rich.
Cutting back benefits could mean delays in repaying the government bonds held by the Trust Fund . The money to repay these bonds would come primarily from a relatively progressive income tax revenue. The wealthy certainly don’t want to see changes like raising the cap on wages that are subject to the social security tax, which is currently just over $110,000.
For this reason, a candidate who comes out for protecting social security can expect to see a hit to their campaign contributions. They also can anticipate being beaten up in both the opinion and news sections of major media outlets. While, in principle, these are supposed to be kept strictly separate, the owners and/or top management of most news outlets feel no qualms about removing this separation when it comes to social security – and using news space to attack those who defend social security.
So, that’s my offerings this morning. What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Evening Reads: Albóndiga… Polpetta… Meatballs, Coochies and Hoodies
Posted: March 28, 2012 Filed under: Crime, Discrimination against women, Food, Hillary Clinton, House of Representatives, Injustice system, PLUB Pro-Life-Until-Birth, racism, Religious Conscience, Reproductive Health, Reproductive Rights, Republican politics, SDB Evening News Reads, War on Women, Women's Healthcare, Women's Rights | Tags: Andrew Sullivan, Birth Control, Bobby Rush, face transplant, GOP, hoodies, Meatball recipe, Rep. Ron Johnson, Richard Norris, Trayvon Martin, women's issues 16 Comments
Good Evening
Tonight I have a special treat for you…a meatball recipe, my very own, but first let’s get to the evening news round-up.
First a couple of items on the Hoodie controversy going on lately. Today, in the House of Representatives, a bit of a protest got one member kicked out. Bobby Rush and the Hoodie of Doom – Esquire
Rep. Bobby Rush, still the only man to beat Barack Obama in an election, apparently offended against the dignity of the House Of Representatives this morning by wearing a hoodie onto the House floor in tribute to Trayvon Martin, the Florida teenager who was shot to death by a trigger-happy police officer wannabe for the crime of carrying snack food in the wrong neighborhood:
A long prohibition has barred House members from wearing hats on the floor and Rep. Gregg Harper (R-Miss.), presiding over the floor as Rush delivered his remarks wearing the hood on this head, ruled his clothing out of order and gaveled his speech to a close. Rush was then escorted from the House floor.
Why do I believe that, in the extraordinarily unlikely event that the Cubs ever won a World Series, Rush could’ve worn his Cubs cap while introducing a resolution congratulating the team and Congressman Harper would’ve let that one slide?
The political cartoonists have been busy as well:
Cagle Post » Trayvon Shooting Hoods
Cagle Post » Trayvon Martin hoodie
Which brings me to this scene from the movie Hot Fuzz…it seems hoodies have had a bum rap years before the Zimmerman killing of Trayvon Martin. Watch this clip from the movie Hot Fuzz (2007): The Neighborhood Watch – Video
The clip The Neighborhood Watch from Hot Fuzz (2007) with Edward Woodward, Jim Broadbent.
Well, well, well, I see we have visitors.
Nicholas, this is Tom Weaver.
Civilian liaison with the Neighborhood Watch Alliance.
You’ll find that we run a very tight ship here.
From this command center I can see what the whole village is up to.
I must say I was rather admiring your handiwork last night.
It’s a pity you didn’t do the same to those bloody hoodies.
Hanging around. Loitering. Sitting.Actually, I did notice some minor graffiti on the fountain.
Graffiti? They’ve gotta be dealt with, Frank.
They’re nippers, Tom. They’ll come round.
Which reminds me,
our friend, The Living Statue, was here on Saturday.
11:00, 12:00, 1:00, 2:00.
If we don’t come down hard on these clowns,
we are gonna be up to our balls in jugglers.We’ll get right onto it, Tom.
We like to let them think they run the place.
It looks like the movies aren’t the only place where neighborhood watch folks “run the place.”
BAR has published some articles on the Trayvon Martin murder, and I have to say I was waiting for their comment on this.
I will link to the articles, and I encourage you to go read them…or at least bookmark them for later.
From NYPD Spying to Trayvon Martin | Black Agenda Report
Police and their prey are locked in a dance – with the cops leading the morbid shuffle. In New Orleans, where the author hails from, a white officer who just this month shot a young Black man to death was found to have recorded a racist rant against Trayvon Martin, calling for the Florida teenager to “go to hell.” Meanwhile, New York cops travel to New Orleans to record the author’s speech at a film festival.
White Picket Fences, White Innocence | Black Agenda Report
George Zimmerman, the watchdog of a gated community, “was upholding the time-honored tradition of white homeowners’ associations that protected white communities from dark interlopers.” His “lesser white status” as a person of partial Latino ancestry, “is part of what legitimized Zimmerman’s self-defense claim.”
Oh, and by the way, don’t miss this one either: Angela Davis Has Lost Her Mind Over Obama | Black Agenda Report
Let’s move on to some other news items, presented to you in a link dump of sorts.
First a series of articles on vaginas, birth control and the war on women:
Global Roundup: Catholic Church Opposes Women’s Health Care in the Philippines; Have Anti-Choice Extremists Invaded Britain? Yup they sure have, as Boston Boomer pointed out last week, Britain has their own problem with PLUBs. But they are not the only one…this article gives you the low down on what the global war on women looks like.
Vagina enters stage left — or is it right? –From CNN International, guess we have to go to the non US site to get some news about protest here in the US…
The Pill Makes Women Richer – Really? I bet it does…this MoJo article talks about the positive effects of birth control on the “gender wage gap.”
When birth control isn’t for birth control – I love this one…
In 1957, when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first birth-control pills, it wasn’t for birth control. The contraceptives won approval as a treatment for severe menstrual disorders; temporary infertility was a side effect. Funny, women across the country suddenly started complaining in droves about severe menstrual disorders.
As religiously-affiliated organizations, such as Catholic hospitals and universities, continue to complain about federal policies that would require that health insurance cover family planning (President Obama worked out a compromise deal under which the insurance companies would absorb the cost, but the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops still sees this as undue interference), one issue hasn’t come up much: What about when birth control isn’t for birth control?
[…]
It appears to be protective against endometrial and ovarian cancer, and the longer women take it, the greater the benefit in this regard.
They are used to treat ovarian cysts, endometriosis, polycystic ovary syndrome, breakthrough bleeding and painful menstrual periods.
Why shouldn’t women who suffer from these very real ailments have access to appropriate medication? Not to mention women for whom pregnancy itself is medically dangerous?
The op/ed states that women will be forced into finding sympathetic doctors to prescribe their birth control…
… this takes us back to the early history of the pill in this country. Women who want to make their own choices about their reproductive futures will start claiming one of the related conditions.
You know, it is pretty sad state of affairs when the solution to the birth control mandate, getting a doctor to write the script for severe menstrual disorders, is something women had to do over 50 years ago to get birth control in the first place.
You may have heard about this next link: Ron Johnson Offers Women Contraception Advice: Google ‘What If I Can’t Afford Birth Control?’
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) weighed into the controversy surrounding President Barack Obama’s birth control mandate this weekend, dismissing the concerns of women who cannot afford contraception.
“My wife actually went online here in Wisconsin and typed in, ‘what if I can’t afford birth control,'” the freshman Tea Party senator told ThinkProgress. “Came up, bam. If you can’t afford it, you can get birth control in this country.”
Video at the link…
A couple more links for you tonight, before we get to the food…
Lawsuit: nurse severed infant’s finger
Veronica Olguin says she went to Heart of Florida Regional Medical Center in October of last year because her 3-month-old daughter Selena had a high fever she couldn’t break.
Selena stayed there for two days. Olguin says on the third day, as she was being released, a nurse was removing the tape that attached the IV.
“They were taking her IV off with scissors and she obviously wasn’t looking where she was cutting, so she cut off her finger,” Olguin recalled.
Veronica was holding her daughter and saw as the scissors cut into her, not realizing what she was seeing at first.
“I realized it because there was blood everywhere. It was all over her shirt, it was on my shirt. It was on my face. I held her face close to my chest. She was red, she was screaming,” Olguin continued.
About half of Selena’s pinky on her left hand was cut off.
Olguin is now suing Heart of Florida Regional Medical Center. Her attorney, Lou Pendas of Tampa, says the nurse and the hospital were negligent.
“The nurse threw the scissors used to sever the pinky in a panic. She rushed out of the room, screaming, and that’s when the doctors rushed back into the room,” Pendas said.
The finger was found on the floor and the infant was airlifted to Tampa General Hospital. But the nerves were too small, and the veins too little to reattach it.
And then we have this tidbit about Andrew Sullivan: Hillary Clinton Is Not A Real Feminist Have you heard about this? I completely missed it…
There are a lot of things that apparently disqualify women from being feminists these days. Wearing heels, putting on lipstick, and compromising for your spouse’s career. Falling into the third category won’t fly by Daily Beast blogger Andrew Sullivan, who said on Bill Maher’s HBO program late last week that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is “not a feminist” for “[subordinating] herself to her husband’s career in politics.”
First discussing former Britain Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Sullivan said the Iron Lady was “amazing” and a true feminist whereas former first lady Clinton used her significant other’s political status to advance her own career:
“Unlike Hillary Clinton, Margaret Thatcher made her own political career, [and] didn’t latch on to her husband. That’s called real feminism…[W]hy did she subordinate herself to her husband’s career in politics? She made a choice to put a man ahead of her. That’s not a feminist.”
What? Huh?
When Brown University associate professor Wendy Schiller argued that Clinton “was maligned and abused since the minute she stepped into public life with her husband,” Sullivan asked the academic to pull out “the world’s tiniest violin.” Nevertheless, Sullivan said that Thatcher had thicker skin than Clinton because the English female never played the victim.
What an asshole Sullivan is…but that is my own non-feminist opinion…at least according to Sullivan’s definition of feminism.
I don’t know…the article cites a post from the Daily Caller, did anyone hear about this happening on Bill Maher?
This next link is amazing: Face transplant man Richard Norris has ‘life restored’
You have to see the pictures of the before and after…
A puppy, so small it may qualify for the Guinness Book of World Records, had to be revived by mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and chest compressions when she was born.
The Grace Foundation, which takes in unwanted animals, said animal control picked up the puppy’s pregnant mother, and she gave birth to a litter of five on March 8.
The foundation, which has called the Dachshund mix Beyonce, said she would soon be ready for adoption.
It has submitted an application to the Guinness Book of World Records to see if Beyonce is the world’s smallest puppy.
Now for a quick meatball recipe…I’ve got over 7 pounds of ground chuck in the fridge for tomorrow’s meatball marathon. So I figured I would share my way of making meatballs with you.
Here is what I mix together…most of it is to taste.
Four pounds ground chuck
2 nice size heads of garlic
good olive oil (to roast the garlic in)
one onion, chopped fine
dash of sugar
handful of fresh parsley, chopped fine
6 eggs, beaten
half a can of evaporated milk
2 good-sized squirts of catsup
1/3 cup merlot or burgundy wine
1 cup of grated parmesan cheese
Italian bread crumbs…enough to make the mixture stick together…but not too much that the meatballs are all bread like.
Salt and Pepper, of course to taste
Get separate bowl of plain bread crumbs…keep this aside for after the meatball is formed.
Get the heads of garlic whole, with skin on them and put them in a large piece of aluminum foil, I double the foil and make a little bowl shape. Then pour good olive oil on top and over the garlic, add salt and pepper. (sea salt and fresh ground pepper is the best.)
Put that in the oven at 350 degrees for 30 min…at least.
When this is done peel the garlic cloves…save the oil…that is one of the best things about the roasted garlic.
Get the oil from the roasted garlic and pour that into frying pan, add onion garlic parsley and a dash of sugar (not too much) and add salt and pepper…again not too much.
When this is cooked slowly on med low heat and becomes translucent move it to a big bowl. Then add the beef, and the rest of the ingredients. Mix well but not too much, if you do the meat balls will be tough…when it is mixed, form little flattish round ball and then toss this raw meatball in a bowl of plain bread crumbs.
Set aside.
Make the rest of the meatballs like that…when you give them a quick toss in the plain bread crumbs it makes them a crispy golden when you fry them in canola oil.
I usually will fry till it turns a little golden brown in color on both sides, and then finish them in the oven so they do not get too overcooked on the outside. I will put them in a 200 degree oven while I finish the meatballs in batches. Usually I need to throw out the oil after it starts to get nasty…about every 1 in a half to 2 pounds of meatballs.
Well that is it…have a wonderful evening. I have a box of Krispy Kreme donuts downstairs with my name on them. Mmmmm….donut….
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