reasons for Democrats to smile

The website ThinkProgress has had a great couple of days:

77 percent of Arizonans want Obama to pass immigration reform – they prefer a federal law over their own brand-new, idiotic state law. (elsewhere on the net, Republican operatives have admitted privately that they chose Tampa rather than Phoenix for their 2012 convention partly because the new Arizona immigration law would make the GOP look bad. Ouch!).

Maine Republican caucus-goers were forced to apologize for vandalizing a junior-high building. They tore down a poster, went through a teacher’s personal effects, and stole property. Even the kids were incensed. My favorite quote: “Republicans opened a closed cardboard box they found near Clifford’s desk and later objected to the fact that it contained copies of the U.S. Constitution donated to the school by the American Civil Liberties Union. “ After busting into the guy’s private effects, they complained that he had a copy of the Constitution!

More frat-house hijinx! The House GOP killed a jobs bill by attaching poison-pill language calling for any federal worker who even sees pornography to be fired. One giggling Republican brayed “We certainly should do more of this type of thing!” And actually they have played this kind of frat-house stunt to obstruct an energy efficiency bill, a health care bill, and a health and education bill. And if the Democrats don’t fold, the Republicans run ads like “Barbara Boxer Votes To Allow Convicted Sex Offenders To Receive Taxpayer-Funded Viagra!”

[ As we noted earlier, the Republicans are stomping all over Democratic ideas because, as they have admitted, they have no ideas of their own. They launched an abortive effort to set up a fancy cool-ideas council which really consisted of holding town halls so the party leaders could crib from the ideas that the voters themselves suggested. Then they set up a remake of “Contract With America” which, again, is just a suggestion box so that voters can do the party’s homework for them. And now House GOP leader Cantor has set up a website called “YOUCUT”, and again the idea is that you, the voter, come up with ideas for how to cut government spending. The problem with the plan is that the cuts proposed on the site are described dishonestly, and even if voters chose all of the cuts, it would only save a billion out of a trillion-dollar budget. So the Republicans are dishonest AND lazy AND futile. ]

The Oklahoma legislature has passed legislation mandating that abortion patients must: give up their personal details so they can be posted on a website, look at an ultrasound of their embryos, give up the right to sue a doctor if he lies about the state of the fetus, and give up any form of insurance coverage for abortion, unless you get a special policy.


http://thinkprogress.org/

And some other reasons to smile:

A new poll shows that a majority of voters would not support Sarah Palin for presidency. A majority of ALASKANS. One of the most conservative, Republican states in the union, and they don’t want her to run. Meanwhile, her opponent should she get the nomination, Obama, is hitting his highest approvals since October 2009, according to a new PPP poll.

The latest USA Today analysis shows that Americans are paying less tax than at any time in the last 60 years – going all the way back to Harry Truman. This is largely based on the middle class tax cut in the stimulus bill that the GOP opposed. So much for the teabaggers – their whole reason for existing is a gigantic fraud. “Taxed enough already” indeed.

Not that this is really good news, but Obama’s effort to pass climate energy legislation seemingly gets another boost every week: coal mines blow up, oil wells spill, nuclear reactors leak radioactive waste into drinking water….just as the nonsense in Arizona gives new momentum to another Obama initiative, immigration reform. Two other issues are also boosting the immigration effort: evangelicals who hope Latinos will vote GOP if the GOP stops fighting immigration reform, are defying rightwingers who want to block reform; also, people are beginning to ask how the Republican plan to build some sort of Maginot Line along the Mexican border can possibly work, when almost half of illegal immigrants cross the border legally and then overstay their visas. And a lot of the rest of them use tunnels, which makes a fence kinda stupid.

As we learned earlier, the GOP leadership said publicly that they would not defend its incumbents against attacks from the right by teabag candidates. Senator Bob Bennett was just tossed out of his own reelection race by the Utah GOP, and some raised the prospect of Bennett running as a write-in; John Cornyn, head of the Republican committee that is set up to elect Republicans to the Senate, reiterated that Bennett will get not a nickel from the party. Wouldn’t it be neat if Bennett stuck it to the Republicans by (a) switching parties, or (b) backing Harry Reid in shooting down GOP filibusters?

For that matter, since the Maine GOP has been hiacked by teabaggers, and has approved a platform slamming Obamacare, unions, motor voter which helps minorities too much, apparently), gay marriage, climate change legislation….isn’t this the perfect time for Collins and Snowe to quit a party that clearly doesn’t want them anymore, and join the Democrats? Particularly when their fellow Maine Republicans are acting like a Mongol horde?

And lastly, I finally figured out why I keep laughing involuntarily whenever John Boehner comes on TV to yell and scream about Obama’s evil communist plots. It’s because he sounds exactly like Sylvester the Cat. Suffering succotash! That one had been bothering me all year.

Women paid to kill women?

Depends on how you look at it.

We have now learned that Wellpoint, the health insurer who "covers" 33 million customers, is not only targeting new breast cancer victims to have their coverage dropped -- they actually paid someone to write a computer software algorithm to do it, to find their victims. They undertook a deliberate program to systematically make it easier to ruin the lives of these women.

So I wonder: were there any women on this software team? And if so, what the hell were they thinking, when they wrote this computer code, expressly aimed at giving those cancer patients the choice between bankruptcy and death?


**UPDATE** -- Wellpoint, caught with their pants down, promised to execute the new requirements on recissions next week.

Also, the retreat away from recissions has now spread to the umbrella insurance organization, AHIP.

Wisconsin DA wants to criminalize sex education

Just another attempt by the wingnuts to go nuclear with every stupid political dispute.

Teaching kids how to keep themselves safe is a good idea. If the wingnuts want to oppose the policy for their own goofy evangelical reasons, that's fine. But elevating sex ed from a mere political dispute into throwing teachers in jail is...just another sign that these yahoos are completely out of control. Anyone who disagrees with them is a criminal, dangerous, un-American, jail em or shoot em.

We must be really really right because we're really really mad!

Birth of the women's movement, 463 BC

The great causes in the progress of mankind – freedom, justice, democracy, the abolition of slavery -- often have deep roots, lost in the mists of the ancient world. But the cause of female empowerment, I think, can be given a pretty firm birth-date: 463 BC.

The ancient world was an inhospitable place for women. For more than a thousand years, the lives of women in ancient China were described as “unbearable”, and they were likely to have, not names, but numbers, i.e. “Daughter Number Two”. In theory women of ancient Egypt had legal rights but in practice they were seen as second-class citizens and child-bearers only. Greek women had little control over their own lives, virtually no property of their own, and virtually no rights.

Misogyny in Greece extended to the arts. The Greeks didn’t want women writing plays, performing plays, or even seeing plays in the audience – according to some accounts, “proper” women would never dare see a show, and only the prostitutes and female slaves would show up.

Enter Aeschylus. In 463 BC, women suddenly had a new voice, or at least an advocate. Aeschylus’s play The Suppliants told of the daughters of Danaus, who were fleeing for their lives to avoid arranged marriages. Five years later he told the story of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra: Agamemnon agreed to slaughter his own daughter in order to appease the gods and win favour on the battlefield, whereupon his wife (the girl’s mother) killed him and was killed in turn by her son and daughter.

A few years later, Sophocles followed with Antigone, about a woman who defies the death penalty in order to give her dead brother a decent burial.

And then the big one, Euripedes.

Euripedes was a trailblazer, a destroyer of conventions, and like most such men he paid a price for it. In an age in which playwrights were creating characters, kings and gods, who were impossibly grand and noble, Euripedes was truly the first realistic artist, showing humanity in all its folly, warts and all. Sophocles admitted that he portrayed characters as they ought to be, whereas Euripedes portrayed people as they really are.

In a civilization which treated women with contempt, Euripedes put women downstage center to tell the story of life and war from their point of view. To Euripedes, women mattered.

Euripides, starting in 438 BC, gave us plays which said a lot about female sacrifice. First, the play Alcestis, about a wife who agrees to die in place of her husband; Medea, about the Mother Of All Nasty Divorces; Hippolytus, about a woman who dies for love; Heracles’ Children, about a girl agreeing to be sacrificed to appease the gods.

Euripedes’ women, on stage, began to grow in power. Next he wrote Andromache, a woman who saves herself and her child from death; Hecuba, who avenges her child’s murder; Ion, about rape and infanticide; The Trojan Women, about war’s impact on women; Electra and Orestes, retelling the Agamemnon story; the Iphigenia plays, about a woman who agrees to die for her country and is later rescued; Helen, who finds and reconciles with her husband and escapes a horny king who wants to marry her; and The Phoenician Woman, about women trapped in the middle of a war.

Even more striking for a man of the ancient world, Euripedes despised war and said so in his plays: he wrote “Trojan Women” just as the Athenians were mulling over the prospect of invading Sicily, a notion which repelled Euripides. But speaking out for women and against war, of course, cost Euripedes a lot: in the annual drama contests Euripedes was regularly defeated by lesser men, partly because he refused to kowtow to the judges, and he was constantly ridiculed by the more successful Aristophanes. In the end, of course, Euripedes was proved right: just after “Trojan Women” was staged, Athens invaded Sicily despite the objections of wiser men, the operation was a disaster, Athens’ enemies in Sparta and Persia formed an alliance, and within eleven years Athens itself was destroyed. Euripedes may have been comparatively lucky, however: a few years after the fall of Athens another iconoclast, Socrates, was executed.

Neatly enough, though, Euripedes seems to have shaken the will of his opponents. After Euripedes condemned war in script after script, his enemy Aristophanes wrote his own anti-war story, Lysistrata, about women forcing their men to end an endless war, by denying them sex. And like Euripedes, Aristophanes shows kings and generals as realistic, all too human, and he focuses on the women. Of course, Aristophanes being Aristophanes, his version is a lot funnier. But once again, women were downstage center, taking charge of the story.

Euripedes and Aristophanes both endure to this day because they appeal to all audiences: whether you favor or oppose the war of your own age, everyone can agree about the terrible toll which war takes not only on the men who fight but also their families. Homer endures for the same reason: his first book, “The Iliad”, tells us a lot about the folly of both men and gods, but his sequel, “The Odyssey”, shows vividly how even the victors suffered terribly.


Oh, and a footnote about Berthe Morisot. She was a painter of a century ago, who not only managed to shove her way into the ultra-male Paris art world, but also defied the existing traditions of all the male artists painting Hercules and Napoleon killing people. Instead she focused on depicting women and girls simply living their lives: reading a book, picking cherries, playing with their children. Women and girls mattered to Morisot, as they did to Euripedes. Of course by painting women and children she also made life easier for her husband, who was worried about her spending long hours painting male models. So, as often in the world of women, multiple motives were at work.

And she also painted a portrait that is a dead ringer for my two daughters.

Another Democratic Senator wanders off the reservation

Thirty Republican Senators voted against the Franken amendment which would have allowed rape victims to access U.S. courts even if they are defense contractors. To commemorate the vote, somebody started up www.republicansforrape.org .

The problem is that now the Republicans have a Democratic ally, Senator Inouye, who is under pressure from defense contractors.

Can't Reid keep the caucus in line on anything?

Wingnuts demand impeachment!

The World Net Daily demands Obama’s impeachment – “high crimes and misdemeanors' does not refer to a criminal act…Our Founding Fathers fully intended to allow for the removal of the president for actions which include: gross incompetence, negligence and distasteful behavior….For those who mistakenly hold the illusion that impeaching Barack Hussein Obama would be a simple matter of 'playing politics,' the founders fully intended that the impeachment of a sitting president be a political act."

Okay, let me write up the Article of Impeachment against Obama: violating Congress’s prerogatives by lying to them to get us into a war, blackmailing them into funding unnecessary troop deployments, defying subpoenas, using illegal signing statements and administrative actions, perverting the executive branch into a partisan political weapon, illegally prosecuting opposition politicians and firing opposition attorneys, directing government offices to spread dishonest political propaganda, failing to uphold Article II responsibilities by keeping or financial system safe or enforcing product safety laws, sending thugs to disrupt officials from counting votes while screaming “don’t count the votes!”, trying to convert the Vice Presidency into a fourth branch of government with no oversight, violating the prerogatives of the courts by defying orders to preserve emails and concealing evidence, illegal spying and secret prisons and torture, and keeping innocent people behind bars indefinitely.

Oh, wait, sorry, that was the Article against Bush. I’m a big silly!

Going back to the original Wingnut Daily quote, the “does not refer to a criminal act” bit is an admission that Obama didn’t really commit a “high crime” or any other kind of crime; too bad they had no explanation for how they were going to persuade Pelosi and the House Democrats to impeach, and then the Senate Democrats to convict, for “crimes” as yet unspecified.

But they’re wussies anyway. Their partners at Newsmax are calling for Obama’s violent overthrow, to “resolve” the “Obama problem” (I think the term they were looking for was “final solution”). And of course others are calling for outright assassination. Amazing.

Elsewhere on Planet Wingnut -- while we were all paying attention to the 30 Republican Senators who wanted to deny rape victims the right to take their case to court, and the Republican politicians screeching that Pelosi is an enemy of the Constitution who needs to be put in her place, we all missed the new Oklahoma law which will now mandate publicizing personal details about abortion patients on a website. The website won’t have the name, but patients will be forced to reveal the date, county, age, marital status, race, years of education, previous pregnancies, previous abortions – all which, taken together, wouldn’t make it all that hard for women to be identified, particularly in small towns. Just another effort to terrorize women, using taxpayer money.

The White House is finally beginning to lose patience not only with the wingnuts but their cowardly enablers. After watching the mainstream media report the wingnut garbage as straight new – dead grandmothers, brainwashing schoolchildren, the evil czars – the White House is escalating. Instead of just shooting down the lies, the White House is now going to smack down media outlets that out-and-out lie, or don’t bother to check their facts. "The best analogy is probably baseball," Gibbs said. "The only way to get somebody to stop crowding the plate is to throw a fastball at them. They move." This may have been prompted in part by the NY Times effort to “tune in” more to wingnut “buzz” stories – sexy is better than accurate, right?

Wingnuts targeting two more doctors for murder?

http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/jill-stanek-posts-photos-addresses-t

Fox contributor Jill Stanek has put the pictures and addresses of two doctors on the web, so any "lone wolves" can exercise a little frontier justice.

The whole point of this is terror: terrorize the doctors and patients with the threat that their "evil deeds" will be put on the internet, so that any wingnut with a gun can target them. The aim is to scare doctors away so that they stop offering services -- which is the whole point. Why make abortion illegal if you can make it impossible, through a terror campaign?

You know, when terrorists actually work out in the open like that, why aren't they being incarcerated? Is it sheer gutlessness on the part of the law? We do know that anti-abortion vigilantes have been operating and terrorizing with impunity for eight years, since Bush refused to enforce the law protecting the doctors and patients from these terror tactics.

http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/heather/maddows-devastating-expose-tillers-assassin-tied-to

Obama must openly and publicly reverse this "open season" policy on physicians.

Rape as an instrument of U.S. foreign policy

More details on the censored torture photos:


At least one picture shows an American soldier apparently raping a female prisoner while another is said to show a male translator raping a male detainee.

Further photographs are said to depict sexual assaults on prisoners with objects including a truncheon, wire and a phosphorescent tube.

Another apparently shows a female prisoner having her clothing forcibly removed to expose her breasts.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/5395830/Abu-Ghraib-abuse-photos-show-rape.html


For starters, it means that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld could easily be indicted on charges of conspiracy to commit rape. For years we thought Nixon was the most vile president in U.S. history, but compared to Bush, Nixon is Mahatma Fucking Gandhi.

And characteristically, the gutless GOP leadership will evade all responsibility for their actions and blame it all on a few "bad apple" buck privates who allegedly did it all on their own initiative. These American soldiers just woke up one day and said "ya know, it's time we took a flashlight and jammed it up that girl's ass."


**UPDATE** -- And since a Bush holdover at the Pentagon is denying everything, here's some substantiation, from two Republicans, a general and the Red Cross. Way back in May 2004, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham not only knew about the really bad photos with the rapes, but demanded they be publicized. "The American public needs to understand, we're talking about rape and murder here”. Rumsfeld said there were more photographs which were more damaging. The Red Cross was warning U.S. officials about systematic prisoner abuse way back in 2003, and a U.S. general disclosed that military intelligence agents and contractor-interrogators told U.S. soldiers to abuse prisoners.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/05/08/RUMSFELD.TMP&type=printable

New GOP ad: Pelosi = Pussy Galore

GOP is targeting Pelosi because of her gender -- they ran an add allegedly attacking her leadership skills, and portraying her as James Bond babe Pussy Galore. And then it shows her being shot.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0509/22894.html

Systematic violence against women in the Congo

A must-read from founder of V-Day, a global movement to end violence against women and girls.

"Nothing I have heard or seen compares with what is going on in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where corporate greed, fueled by capitalist consumption, and the rape of women have merged into a single nightmare. Femicide, the systematic and planned destruction of the female population, is being used as a tactic of war to clear villages, pillage mines and destroy the fabric of Congolese society.

"In 12 years, there have been 6 million dead men and women in Congo and 1.4 million people displaced. Hundreds and thousands of women and girls have been raped and tortured. Babies as young as 6 months, women as old as 80, their insides torn apart. What I witnessed in Congo has shattered and changed me forever. I will never be the same. None of us should ever be the same.

"I think of Beatrice, shot in her vagina, who now has tubes instead of organs. Honorata, raped by gangs as she was tied upside down to a wheel. Noella, who is my heart -- an 8-year-old girl who was held for 2 weeks as groups of grown men raped her over and over. Now she has a fistula, causing her to urinate and defecate on herself. Now she lives in humiliation.

"I was in Bosnia during the war in 1994 when it was discovered there were rape camps where white women were being raped. Within two years there was adequate intervention. Yet, in Congo, femicide has continued for 12 years. Why? Is it that coltan, the mineral that keeps our cell phones and computers in play, is more important than Congolese girls?

"Is it flat-out racism, the world's utter indifference and disregard for black people and black women in particular? Is it simply that the UN and most governments are run by men who have never known what it feels like to be raped?"

http://us.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/africa/05/18/ensler.congo/index.html

Snowe and Boxer call Obama out on female Court appointee

Barbara Boxer and Olympia Snowe sent a letter to Obama:

Dear Mr. President:

The announced retirement of United States Supreme Court Justice David Souter—an outstanding jurist—has left you with the crucial task of nominating someone for a lifetime appointment to our nation’s highest bench.
The most important thing is to nominate an exceptionally well-qualified, intelligent person to replace Justice Souter – and we are convinced that person should be a woman.
Women make up more than half of our population, but right now hold only one seat out of nine on the United States Supreme Court. This is out of balance. In order for the Court to be relevant, it needs to be diverse and better reflect America.
Mr. President, we look forward with great anticipation to your choice for the Supreme Court vacancy.

And went public with it, apparently.

That's pretty much a public challenge, a double-dog-dare, practically a glove thrown in the president's face.

I'm thinking that Obama's response to Snowe was -- "I don't use that sort of litmus test for justices. If you vote for the public-option health care plan and get your buddies like Susan Collins to follow suit...we'll talk. If, however, you dig in your heels and obstruct everything like the other Republicans, then ciao, baby."

Our Saudi "partners" and their quaint views on women

A Saudi judge has declared that husbands are allowed to beat wives who spend too much money. He complained that women weren’t being held responsible for the increase in domestic violence in Saudi Arabia. To add insult to injury, the example he used was a wife spending too much on an abaya, the black covering Saudi women must wear whenever they leave the house – essentially an instrument of enslavement.

Welcome to the twelfth century.


http://us.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/05/10/saudi.court.wife.slapping/index.html

Why would a woman ever vote for a Republican?

So...how did the world’s women do, during Bush’s crusade to bring American freedom to the world?

Right here in America, the evangelicals are still fighting to take away a woman’s right to choose, in jurisdictions across the country. Moms are struggling to keep their families going in a deepening recession, and fighting battles against the evangelicals on book banning, intelligent design, contraception, HPV shots, sex education, and other educational issues; lesbians are fighting the one-man-one-woman battle. And the United States is the only developed country in the world that has not ratified the CEDAW treaty on discrimination against women.

But that’s just the beginning of our world tour.

Saudi Arabia is a regime which the Bushes befriended, armed, and defended from the threat of Saddam. Women’s voting rights are restricted or removed in Saudi Arabia; they can’t even open a bank account without her husband’s permission; they are discriminated against in inheritance law; a woman’s home can be searched; her phone calls can be monitored; access to satellite TV and the internet s controlled.

In Saudi Arabia, there are many restrictions on working women: women comprise only 5 percent of the Saudi workforce, the lowest rate in the world; an effort to open up more jobs for women was fought by the religious police and the government. Saudi women cannot work in a coed workplace, work without their husband’s permission, go to school with males, teach boys over 10, or eat with men is restaurants. Saudi women can’t go out without the black cloak, head scarf and veil. Saudi religious police, charged with roaming the streets with sticks to beat disobedient women, prevented 14 girls from fleeing a burning school beause they were not veiled properly; they all died. Unless accompanied by a male relative, Saudi women cannot even enter a car (to include taxis) or ride a bike, or enter a hotel, or travel. Lesbianism is a serious crime in Saudi Arabia: sentences range from flogging and banishment to stoning to death; even speaking in defense of lesbians is banned.

There is no legal protection to stop violence against Saudi women, and women have little means to escape from abusive husbands. Women cannot testify in cases in which there are male witnesses, under the reasoning that women can’t be trusted, so it is exceedingly difficult for a women to lodge an accusation of rape.One woman was gang-raped by seven men, and then sentenced to 90 lashes because she had been sitting in a car with a man. Saudi Arabia has serious problems with the trafficking, enslavement and sexual exploitation of vulnerable women; girls from Africa and Asia are regularly enslaved. Saudis who reside abroad can take female slaves with them; one 17-year-old girl was held four years in Colorado and raped regularly.

Likewise Pakistan is allegedly our ally in the war on terror. But because Bush forgot who was really behind 911 – the Taleban’s guest, Usama bin Laden – he allowed both al-Qa’ida and the Taleban to hop over into Pakistan and infect that country with oppressive medieval attitudes toward women. Islamic extremists pose an increasing menace to Pakistani women: sharia, honor killings, segregation, veils, resctrictions on female employment; women and girls have no say in who they marry. Girls’ schools have been closed, demolished, bombed; female health workers have been threatened. A female provincial welfare minister was murdered because the killer felt that women shouldn’t work.

Afghanistan, the country we allegedly freed from the extremists: the Afghans are now arguing about a law that legalizes marital rape, imposes discrimination in custody cases, and controls when a woman can leave the house, or seek work, a teacher or a doctor. Girls’ schools have been bombed, and girls without veils have been disfigured with acid burns. Girls as young as 9 and 10 are sold off to 50-year-old businessmen to pay off debts; childbirth at that age risks labor complications, infection, haemorrhaging and death.

Iraq is the country we built out of the wreckage we ourselves created: this was supposed to be the model democracy we were going to show off to the world. Iraqi women are under threat from religious extremists. Unveiled women and women’s advocated have been killed. Kidnapping, rape, murder, honor killings, and suicides are rising among Iraqi women. Access to school and work is under attack. The Iraqi minister for women’s affairs quit because the government just wouldn’t give her the money she needed to do her job.

In 2005, while Bush slept, Hezbollah, the rightwing extremists who kidnap, torture and kill Americans, became part of the Lebanese government; their dream is Sharia law along the lines delineated by their sponsors, the Iranians. A year later, Hamas, the Palestinian hardliners, took over the Palestinian "government". Both groups are notorious for deliberately endangering innocent women and their children in terror attacks.

Republicans have been bragging about Bush’s work in Africa, but women unsurprisingly have a rough time of it there; rather than beat a dead horse I will merely cite two examples, rape as an instrument of genocide, and genital mutilation.

Iran is the true axis of terror, not Iraq, but Bush essentially ignored the Iranians. So welcome to the world of Sharia and the Islamic dress code; domestic violence is a problem; rape victims face adultery charges; stoning is used for accused adulterers. Women have been beaten, and sentenced to jail and the lash, just for protesting discriminatory laws on things like legal testimony, divorce and custody.

This is the second time I have raised stoning on this site. Look at the last picture in this post: a woman who is accused of adultery, and is not allowed the same right of testimony as her accuser, is buried in dirt up to her neck, and they throw a rock at her head. And another. And another. And over and over and over. All day long. Until she dies of a skull fracture, or massive bleeding, or shock, or chokes on her own blood. Beating her to death with baseball bats would be more humane.

Incidentally, stoning a woman to death for adultery is also prescribed in the Old Testament of the Bible, the book which some U.S. evangelicals would like to make the law of the land: they incessantly cite the Bible as their infallible guide for moral guidance, their justification for bitterly resisting civil unions for gay couples. If they can use the Bible to argue against civil unions, what’s to stop them from using the same logic to seek a stoning statute? Rightwing loons who can’t even admit that waterboarding is torture could quite easily cast the first stone at a woman they hate, or the second stone, or the hundredth.

The whole ethos of the Bush regime was to bring American values to the rest of the world, particularly the Middle East, to include regime change as needed. Mission accomplished!

**UPDATE** -- A Saudi judge has upheld a Saudi father's decision to sell his eight-year-old daughter into "marriage" (read: prostitution) with a 47-year-old man in repayment of a debt.

I am woman, hear me roar!

http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/04/12/saudi.child.marriage/

Thousands of kids sleep in the street: thanks, Dubya!

A recent VOA report stated that U.S. homelessness is ready to spike upward. With Bush’s recession blazing like a forest fire across the country, more of the unemployed are homeless. With the housing fiasco and the tidal wave of foreclosures, it’s easier than ever to end up on the street. States and cities, already strapped for cash, have less money for homelessness services.

More and more of the homeless are people who never thought it could happen to them.

In a typical week, almost a million people are on the street; over 3 million are homeless in a typical year.

And here’s the kicker: half are families with children, or children who have no adults with them at all – the fastest growing groups. In our America, one child in 50 is on the street. School becomes a distant dream. These kids are more susceptible to every kind of disease, exploitation and violence. Where do they get health care? Half the homeless have chronic health problems; half have no insurance.

Families, kids with moms, kids without moms, in the greatest economy in human history, huddle, exposed to the weather, in sleeping bags, tents, cardboard boxes, shantytowns, abandoned buildings, smack shooting galleries, cars, parks, tunnels, train stations, subway platforms, hospital lobbies, all-night diners. In California, parking lots are filling with car-sleepers; tent cities are popping up. The lucky few are in shelters or crashing with friends or relatives who have their own economic problems.

Imagine for yourself the disastrous long-term consequences of all this: for the next 10-20 years, kids who could have gone on to college, careers, families, are now destined for crime, drugs, prostitution, abusive relationships, violent ends. The luckier ones will climb up into blue-collar jobs, maybe. Custodians, housekeepers, fast-food. Our most valuable resource, wasted, because of catastrophically bad leadership from the Republicans, who ripped apart the network of laws and regulations that protect us from white collar crime and massive financial stupidity.

All those fatcat Republicans who will never miss a meal or worry about having a roof over their heads: guys who never did an honest day’s work in their lives. Crooked politicians, crooked bankers, crooked investors, crooked lobbyists, who waged war on our families and our kids. Because, for them, one house just wasn’t enough -- who cares how many laws we break, how many lives we destroy? I got my eye on that second home, and thanks to the economic crisis, I can snap up some other guy’s house real cheap, make me a fat little profit! And since they’re in bed with crooked lawyers, they are unlikely to pay for their crimes.

And while they did all this, they also gave themselves a fat tax cut that the rest of us will have to pay for, for years.

All thanks to George "No Child Left Behind" Bush.

But wait, it gets better! On Sunday these well-fed Republicans will waddle into church, and lecture the rest of us on how immoral we Democrats are.

And next Fourth of July, they will throw Tea Party II, so that the Republican party can blame all of these crimes, follies and woes on...the Democrats. The perfect crime! Blame your own actions on the people who tried to stop you!

Remember all this, come July. When all these addled rightwing hopheads go on Fox News, all dressed up like Betsy Ross, to tell us what traitors we are.

And you Republicans: look at the faces of these kids. Remember them well. Because when they grow up, they're going to demand an explanation for what you did to them.

http://www.voanews.com/english/2009-04-09-voa63.cfm

PS -- And another stereotype bites the dust: 35 percent of the homeless are white.