Just a quick one to say that B&T will be back next Monday; this past Monday was a civic holiday here in Canadialand, so I was at my leisure. :)
We now return you to your regularly-scheduled feminism.
Inspired by this post at Chris' place: Do you have health insurance and/or some other kind of healthcare coverage, e.g. Medicare/Medicaid? (Or do you live in a country with universal healthcare?) If you have insurance, do you get it through your job, your partner's job, through a private insurer? If you don't have health coverage, when was the last time you had it? Have you tried to get coverage and been denied?
I am extremely fortunate and privileged to have health insurance through Iain's job. If I didn't have the privilege of marriage, or if his company didn't extend partner benefits, I would be without healthcare—because I sure couldn't get private insurance. Even thinking about it makes me panicky.
Shaker Thumbs
Last Tuesday, I asked as the QotD: What product or service have you purchased/used lately that you'd like to recommend to other Shakers (or recommend against)?
Several people requested it become a regular feature, so here is the first installment of "Shaker Thumbs," in which you've got the opportunity to give a thumbs-up or thumbs-down to a product or service you'd recommend to other Shakers or warn them away from.
My recommendation today is for plus-sized grrls, and it's Torrid's gray rainbow shirt, now on sale for $19.98.
As lobbyist-run groups encourage conservative activists to "rattle" members of Congress at local town hall events, Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA), the president of the freshman Democratic class has revealed that "at least one freshman Democrat" has already been "physically assaulted at a local event." Connolly warned that conservative groups had taken things to a "dangerous level":But, hey, Glenn Beck said not to be violent, so I'm sure that will take care of everything."When you look at the fervor of some of these people who are all being whipped up by the right-wing talking heads on Fox, to me, you're crossing a line," Connolly said. "They're inciting people to riot with just total distortions of facts. They think we're going to euthanize Grandma and the government is going to take over."Recent events have given congressman good reason to be "fearful for their safety." Last week, a protester hung an effigy of freshman Rep. Frank Kratovil (D-MD) outside his district office, and after a June 22 town hall meeting was disrupted by an "unruly mob" of tea party activists, Rep. Tim Bishop (D-NY) had to be escorted to his car by police. ThinkProgress contacted Connolly's office regarding the identity of the congressman who was physically assaulted, but we have not yet received a response.
I updated my earlier post, but I just want to put it front-and-center for those in the southwestern PA area who are interested.
The Women and Girls Foundation is organizing a candlelight vigil to be held in the portico of the City-County Building in Downtown, Pittsburgh, Thursday August 6th at 5:30pm to offer support and non-denominational prayers to the victims and families of the Collier Shooting.Thank you to Elizabeth at WGFPA for the information.
“We are organizing this vigil so that we can join together as a community to send collective prayers to the families of the women who were killed and the women who are still in critical condition, as a result of this horrific and violent act against women,” said Executive Director Heather Arnet. “From the murderer’s own blog and note, it is more than evident that the focus of his rage and violence was women. This vigil is intended to send strength and prayers to the families who are grieving and for those women and their families who are hoping to heal from this horrific event.”
All members of the community are encouraged and welcome to attend. Participating in the vigil will be representatives from the Women and Girls Foundation, local elected officials, the National Organization of Women, National Council of Jewish Women, Pittsburghers Against Domestic Violence, local victims service agencies, and many other community organizations. All are welcome.
Also participating in the vigil will be members of Women and Girls Foundation’s Regional Change Agents, a diverse group of 15 teen girls and 15 adult women from Allegheny, Fayette, Greene and Washington counties, who have come together to engage in civic advocacy in their communities to support women. The tragic events of Tuesday night have moved the Allegheny County team of Regional Change Agents to call attention to the inexcusable acts of violence against women within our community and beyond it.
Please help support WGF's efforts by passing this information to your friends and networks! For questions or more information, please contact WGF at 412.434.4883 or info@wgfpa.org .
Feel the Homomentum!
The Missouri Housing Development Commission (MHDC) recently added sexual orientation to its non-discrimination policy. The addition is part of an overall ethics reform package.
The MHDC supports the financing, development, and preservation of affordable housing for Missourians, finances developers of affordable rental properties, funds loans to first-time home buyers, and provides 0% interest loans to non-profits that provide housing for moderate- and low-income individuals. It also administers the federal and Missouri Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) programs, federal HOME funds, and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Project Based Section 8 rental assistance contracts.Show me some homomentum!
Clint Zweifel, Missouri State Treasurer, became the head of the commission in May 2009 and quickly called for a comprehensive ethics reform package, including the addition of sexual orientation to its non-discrimination policy. The policy will not only guarantee equal employment opportunities within the MHDC but also ensure that sexual orientation does not affect a first-time home buyer's ability to receive a loan or mortgage refinancing assistance from the agency. Any company doing business with MHDC will also be held accountable for discrimination based on sexual orientation.
Zweifel stated, "Access to dignified, affordable housing for all Missourians is a core value for me and central to the mission of the Missouri Housing Development Commission. It is vital that we build a culture of tolerance and inclusion at MHDC so we can ensure that we are renewing the promise of responsible homeownership and providing equal access to quality affordable housing for all Missourians and the expanded non-discrimination policy will help us do that."
You know what the best comic strip ever is? Frank and Ernest.
It just doesn't get better than two sassy old white doodz commenting sassily on the issues of the day. The best part is how frank and earnest their observations are—just like you'd expect, since, as we all know, old white doodz embody the very essences of the sort of frankness and earnestness that keeps America great.
I wish they were real, just I could chuck them on the chins and give 'em the old 'atta boy they deserve.
Because I can't, I'm just going to start my own comic strip, starring Deeky and me, called "Conniving and Sinister."
As people are being swept into the pitchfork-bearing frenzy over the evils of healthcare reform (no thanks to the hired assclowns that are being planted at these townhall events), I'm in awe of how many people are screaming just for the sake of screaming. They don't even know what they're railing against anymore.
From a recent meeting in Texas comes this gem:
During the town hall, one conservative activist turns to his fellow attendees and asks them to raise their hands if they "oppose any form of socialized or government-run health care." Almost all the hands shot up. Rep Green quickly turned the question on the audience and asked, "How many of you have Medicare?" Nearly half the attendees raised their hands, failing to note the irony.Even a former Reagan administration economist doesn't know his ass from his elbow:
[ART] LAFFER: I mean, if you like the Post Office and the Department of Motor Vehicles and you think they’re run well, just wait until you see Medicare, Medicaid, and health care done by the government.If knowledge is power, then the lack of it is servitude.
Anti-choicers are deliberately misrepresenting findings of the indispensable Guttmacher Institute in order to claim that healthcare reform would result in increased abortions. And, naturally, that's a BAD THING!!!eleventy! even if more women who want abortions are able to get them. But I digress… The point is that it's not even true.
Guttmacher's Director of Government Affairs explains here.
The other day I was scouring the internet for a copy of "Lapti Nek," a quest that went nowhere, as far as an MP3 was concerned. All for the best, probably.
Somewhere along the way I became sidetracked reading about Max Rebo (left) and his band, who appeared briefly in Return of the Jedi. That was early in the movie, before the teddy bears showed up and shat on everything.
While meandering my way through Wookiepedia (the Star Wars wiki!), I found out there was something in the Star Wars universe called jizz.
Hey, hold on. Just bear with me here a moment. It's not what you think.
Jizz is described as "an upbeat, swinging genre of music, most notably performed by the Modal Nodes [the band from the first movie] and Max Rebo Band."
Also: "Jizz-wail was an early form of jizz that was much softer than its later, more popular incarnation." An early form of jizz? Okay. And just so you know, jizz-wail is performed by jizz-wailers, "musicians who specialized in playing jizz songs."
In the Star Wars lexicon there is also something called a jizz-box, described only as "an instrument commonly used in jizz songs." Attempts to google an image of said device proved, ummm, fruitless.
Did no one, at any point in time, think to tell George Lucas that there as another, very common definition of jizz?
[Trigger warning.]
Chansa Kabwela, the news editor of Zambia's largest independent (i.e. not government-owned) newspaper, The Post, is currently on trial after sending "two photographs of a woman giving birth without medical help to the country's vice-president, health minister and rights groups," in an attempt to raise awareness about the dire state of the nation's healthcare system and encourage them to settle the nurse's strike.
The Post's news editor Ms Kabwela did not publish the controversial photographs, but sent copies to a number of prominent people and women's rights groups, along with a letter calling for the strike to be brought to an end.He subsequently called for a police investigation, because pornography is illegal in Zambia. Kabwela was arrested and charged with—make sure you're sitting down lest the irony bowl you over—"distributing obscene material with intent to corrupt public morals."
…The pictures are graphic. They show a woman in the process of giving birth to a baby in the breech position - when the baby's legs come out first. Its shoulders, legs and arms are visible, but the head has not yet been delivered. The photos were apparently taken in the grounds of Lusaka's main hospital.
The nurses were on strike and the woman had been turned away from two clinics. By the time doctors operated, the baby had suffocated. Ms Kabwela says she was given the photographs by the woman's relatives.
President Banda expressed his outrage at a news conference, calling the photographs pornographic.
Sign the petition to acquit Chansa Kabwela here.This blogaround brought to you by Shaxco, distributors of Lissie's Beck Repellent. (Also effective on some O'Reillys, Hannitys, and Savages.)
Recommended Reading:
Lindsay: Carnival of Feminists #1!
Lauredhel: Fifteenth Down Under Feminists Carnival: July 2009
Harriet: Another Post About Rape
mzbitca: Rape Culture: Making Paradoxes Possible
Steve: Does Obama Want 'Left-Wing Groups' to Back Off?
Angry Asian Man: Hate Crimes for Fun and Laughs in The Goods
Kevin: There's No Politics Like Texas Politics
Susan: White Noise: White Adults Raising White Children to Resist White Supremacy
Leave your links in comments...
After spending the past few years being a completely unhinged asshole—riling up his angry and disgruntled conservative viewers with inflammatory lies and half-truths, demonizing liberals, feminists, LGBTQIs, people of color, immigrants, atheists with provocative warnings about ominous conspiracies and agendas, and dehumanizing them with eliminationist language—now he's backing away from what is unerringly the foreseeable result of such incendiary rhetoric and telling his viewers not to get violent.
The best thing you can do right now is to let Congress know that you are watching them like a hawk. You show up. You, you let them feel your burning gaze on them at all times. But here's the thing that I, I'm concerned about—your interaction with them needs to be respectful, polite, forceful, and peaceful.
I've been warning Congress now for a couple of years, and the time has come and passed for them to be able to learn from this. I've been telling them, "You have to listen to the people," or they'll be in real big trouble. Well, now let me give the warning to you: If anyone thinks that it would be a good idea to turn violent—think again. It would destroy the Republic. I feel it with everything in me.
There is a great reason for hope right now, because I am telling you for the first time, since I started saying this in the last couple of years, for the first time I know it, I feel it, the American people are starting to wake up. These people in Washington have no idea what they have done; they have awakened a sleeping giant!
But just one lunatic like Timothy McVeigh could ruin everything that everyone has worked so hard for, because these people in Washington won't pass up the use of an emergency. Look how the media ran with the abortion doctor killing! They tried to pin that despicable act on Fox in general and specifically Bill O'Reilly and me! The only, the only thing either of us have ever said is there's no reason for that, ever.
I don't wanna ever hear from our own Americans, anyone, voicing some sort of Muslim extremist-type justification, as we heard in the circles after 9/11, "Well, I could see how they, ya know, how they felt they had to do it—course I don't agree." Absolutely not. There is no excuse for violence.
Our founders sailed across the ocean—battled killer storms, smallpox, they vomited for three months on a tiny little wooden ship with a bedsheet for a sail!—just to get a grievance before the king. They did that for twenty long years. What have we done? [sniveling voice] "Well, I sent an email, I made a phone call, they won't even listen to me anymore." [back to regular voice] So the next logical progression is email, phone, a gun? Only for a crazy person.
If you ever hear something thinking about or talking about turning violent, it is your patriotic duty to stop them. The only way to save our Republic is to remain peaceful. Forceful, but peaceful.
From New York—good night, America.
Yesterday, Deeky mentioned that US journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee had come home after being held for months by North Korea. Following are (warning: blub-inducing) images of their emotional homecoming.
Freed U.S. journalists Laura Ling (top left) embraces her husband Iain Clayton while fellow freed journalist Euna Lee (bottom left) is hugged by her husband Michael Saldate and daughter Hana Saldate in Burbank, California August 5, 2009. Ling and Lee were freed from North Korea after being held there since March, 2009.
American journalists Laura Ling (top) and Euna Lee disembark from the plane that brought them back from North Korea in Burbank, California August 5, 2009. Former President Bill Clinton met with North Korean leader Kim Jong-il to release the two women after months of detention.
Former U.S. Vice-President Al Gore hugs freed U.S. journalist Laura Ling (R). Ling and Lee are reporters for American cable television venture Current TV co-founded by Gore.
Freed American journalist Euna Lee hugs former U.S. Vice-President Al Gore (R) while holding her daughter Hana as her husband Michael Saldate (rear, L) looks on.
"Thirty hours ago, Euna Lee and I were prisoners in North Korea," Ms. Ling said in brief remarks to reporters, blinking back tears. "We feared that at any moment we could be prisoners in a hard labor camp. Then suddenly we were told that we were going to a meeting.Welcome home, Ms. Ling. Welcome home, Ms. Lee.
"We were taken to a location and when we walked through the doors, we saw standing before us President Bill Clinton," she said, recounting the final moments of her ordeal. "We were shocked, but we knew instantly in our hearts that the nightmare of our lives was finally coming to an end. And now we stand here home and free." (link)
George Sodini killed three women and injured at least nine more women in an L.A. Fitness club last night after apparently planning the attack for nine months. The reported number of injured is still inconsistent. Furthermore, the medical examiner is working to identify the deceased. So I will not say much at this point except to pass on the most reliable information I can find. KDKA's report of four dead includes Sodini, who shot himself at the scene.
COLLIER TOWNSHIP (KDKA) ―This is the second major gun massacre in Allegheny County in four months.
Four people are confirmed dead and nine others were wounded when a gunman opened fire inside the L.A. Fitness in Collier Township Tuesday night.
The shooting happened shortly after 8 p.m.
Published reports identify the gunman as 48-year-old George Sodini from Scott Township.
KDKA-TV has learned that Sodini was keeping an online diary where it appears as if he was planning the shooting for about nine months. He also detailed on the site how he attempted to carry out the shooting once before, but backed out.
The gunman, who was carrying a bag with him, reportedly turned off the lights in a workout room and started shooting.
KDKA-TV's Brenda Waters learned that two women died at the scene and a third later died while being transported to St. Clair Hospital.
Police say the gunman was a member at the gym and that he had several handguns in his duffel bag. Police estimate that he fired at least 50 rounds in the cardio room.
KDKA-TV's David Hall has learned that five women were taken to UPMC Mercy Hospital after the shooting. At this time, three of those women are listed in serious condition. The other two remain in critical condition.
At this point, the official count of the victims is fluid.
--snip--
Relatives of victims are being asked to report to the Bower Hill Volunteer Fire Department to receive information.
The police superintendant says at least 60 or 70 people were inside the gym during the shooting.
Eyewitnesses who have not spoken to police in addition to relatives wanting to know information should call 412-473-3000.
Radio Shakesville
