Lazy Caturday Reads

Posted: July 15, 2023 | Author: | Filed under: cat art, Cats, caturday, Crime, just because, Violence against women, War on Women | Tags: , , , , , , , , | 11 Comments

F0sXCSXaIAIdHS0Happy Caturday!!

There’s not a lot of exciting political news today, so I’m going to share a bit about the apparent solving of a high-profile cold case crime. After that, some articles about Ron DeSantis and what he’s done to Florida.

Police in Long Island announced yesterday that they have identified the man popularly known as the Long Island serial killer.

I wrote a post in April, 2011, about the series of bodies that had been found on Long Island. The women were identified as working in the sex trade. I have often argued that the massive number of murders and rapes of women in the U.S. should be a political issue. Often the women who are targeted are seen by both the criminal and the police as throwaways–poor women, women of color, and sex workers. In that post I quoted from a Salon article: Why do serial killers target sex workers? Read the rest of this entry »

Here We Go Again: the Political Prop Wife

Posted: November 12, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , | 15 Comments

I was hoping that maybe this scandal would be different.  When Anthony Wiener was caught in a series of mutually stupid sexting scandals,  wife Huma  Abedin stayed away from the role of adoring political prop wife.  She let him handle the reporters and the public on his own.  I admire Mark Sanford’s wife who has completely turned the stereotype of political prop wife on its head.   After these kinds of public humiliations, the least you should be able to hang on to is your dignity and self respect.  That’s far more important than staying in a marriage with a Lothario.

The worst and most shameful abuse of a wife of a politician had to be by David Vitter who got caught with his diapers down on a prostitute’s call list.

Looks like one more manipulative political husband just can’t resist trotting out his probably long suffering wife just one more time.  Herman Cain may be getting some big donations from men in denial of their treatment of women, but his numbers with women voters–who know that men frequently overstep their boundaries–have dropped like an avalanche.  So, he’s going to do the knee jerk damage control thing and  trot out political man’s best friend, his prop wife.  After enduring the Vitter presser, I’ve decided this is nothing less than domestic abuse.  I still remember Eliot Spitzer’s wife blaming herself for his problem with call girls.  What campaign manager thinks the public humiliation of a wife is good politics?

Introducing … Gloria Etchison Cain.

At long last, the political spouse who has kept the lowest profile of the campaign season is preparing to make a network debut. Mrs. Cain, who has been married to the former restaurant executive Herman Cain for 43 years, is expected to sit down this weekend with Greta Van Susteren of Fox News, for a segment that could air on Monday, according to a source familiar with the planning.

Mrs. Cain has, to date, not appeared on the campaign trail with her husband, and is said to prefer her home life in Atlanta, far away from the national spotlight. But since allegations of sexual harassment began to engulf the Cain campaign almost two weeks ago, it had been rumored that Mrs. Cain would eventually come to her husband’s defense on television.

Mr. Cain has been talking about his wife and family more of late, perhaps to offer a counterpoint to the multiple women who have come forward to accuse him of inappropriate behavior while he was chief of the National Restaurant Association in the 1990s.

While in New York City on Friday for a major fund-raising drive, Mr. Cain stopped at Fox News and was asked about his wife by the host Neil Cavuto. “What’s she saying to you?” he questioned.

Mr. Cain replied, “She’s saying to me that the family has your back. We’re not going to let them, you know, continue to … We are there.”

Worst example to date of making your humiliated wife act as your prop for the purposes of shoring up your hypocritical ass comes from selfish David Vitter.

Gotta admire the former Mrs. Stanford for leaving her bum of a husband and getting on with her life.  She seems to be one of the few wronged political wives that didn’t accept her role as prop and pulled herself away from a man that obviously didn’t have her or her family’s best interests at heart.  I can only imagine what  Gloria Cain will be put through to prop up her husband’s stalled ambitions.

Tuesday Reads: Victims of LI Serial Killer Were More Than Just “Hookers”

Posted: April 19, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Crime, morning reads, Violence against women | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | 46 Comments

Good morning, everyone. I’m going to do something a little different today. I want to focus on the unfolding story of the presumed serial killer on Long Island and take a look at the lives of the murdered and missing women who have been identified.

A couple of days ago, I decided to try reading Matt Taibbi’s latest screed in Rolling Stone. I commend Taibbi for his research and his efforts to explain in plain English what the Wall Street criminals are up to, but I simply couldn’t make it past the first paragraph of his piece. Here is the portion that stopped me in my tracks:

According to popular legend, we’re broke and in so much debt that 40 years from now our granddaughters will still be hooking on weekends to pay the medical bills of this year’s retirees from the IRS, the SEC and the Department of Energy.

Really. Is that the only job Taibbi can imagine for our struggling grandaughters? And what will “our grandsons” be doing? I’ve got a really low tolerance for misogyny these days, and Taibbi long ago showed himself to be a woman-hater. The idea that this man thinks his offhand remark about “hooking” is humorous just turned my stomach.

Thanks, but no thanks, Matt. I’ve just about had it with your pathetic attempts to imitate Hunter S. Thompson. He was pretty crude, but he also managed to be funny. I think I’ll just stick with reading Dakinikat’s writing on economics. She actually knows what she’s talking about too.

I was especially sensitive to the rude remark about young women prostituting themselves for money, because I’ve been following the story of the latest vicious murderer of women–the Long Island serial killer, who murdered women who advertised their sexual services on Craigslist and other on-line sites.

Serial murderers often target women who work in the sex trade because they see these women as throwaways who probably won’t be missed right away. They are also easy to pick up, because their jobs involve interactions with strange men. From Salon

A report was released last month finding that 70 percent of known victims of serial killers are women (consider that only 22 percent of homicide victims in general are female); and it turns out sex workers are 18 times more likely than “normal” women to be murdered. Why might this be? Well, in the words of the Green River Killer, who targeted prostitutes:

I picked prostitutes as victims because they were easy to pick up without being noticed. I knew they would not be reported missing right away and might never be reported missing. I picked prostitutes because I thought I could kill as many of them as I wanted without getting caught.

Since they’re doing illegal work, sex workers have to be secretive and discreet. They often work in isolated and industrial areas. They get in cars with strangers. There are rarely detailed records of transactions. Many are drug addicts and estranged from their families, so they are less likely to be reported missing. Anyone who knows anything about a girl’s whereabouts is likely involved in the trade themselves, so they aren’t super eager to speak with police. What’s more, as we saw with the Robert Pickton case in Vancouver, police sometimes discount tips from working girls (all the more reason to not risk talking to them in the first place).

From what I’ve read about sexual serial killers, they tend have a lot of rage and hatred against women, often because of their relationships with their mothers or some other powerful woman in their lives. They may have difficulties connecting with “normal” women, and so they seek out women they can get easy access to and make them pay for their own inadequacies.

But women who work as prostitutes are human beings, and they have families just like everyone else. When they disappear or die, someone usually cares and grieves at the loss.

I’m going to summarize what is known about the four victims who were discovered back in December 2010. They all appear to have been murdered by the same perpetrator. The women were strangled and their bodies were found in burlap bags.

So far ten bodies have been recovered by police on Long Island beaches, and six are still unidentified. It isn’t yet clear if all of these bodies are connected to the four identified victims, but they were all disposed of in the same general location. Shannon Gilbert, a woman whose disappearance sparked the search that led the police to locate the bodies, is still missing.

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