So, yesterday, I wrote about professional jerk, nincompoop, rage machine, award-winning running mate picker, and general asshole John McCain's new campaign advert, in which he strolls along the border fence with Pinal County, Arizona Sheriff Paul Babeu, discussing the awesomeness of the McCain/Kyl Border Security Action Plan.
Guess what?
As Andrea Nill explains on the Wonk Room, "Chances are McCain didn't feature a local border town police chief because that person probably would've told him his ten-point plan is a waste of manpower and resources." Indeed, the assistant police chief in Nogales has said that they have not "witnessed any spillover violence from Mexico." The Santa Cruz County sheriff has also said that the state's new anti-immigration law — which McCain called a "good tool" — is downright racist.
Awesome.
John McCain, you are the WORST.
[H/T to Spudsy.]
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[Trigger warning for violence.]
Shaker Unree sends along this article from Sports Illustrated about the murder of University of Virginia lacrosse player Yeardley Love (about which I first wrote here). The article is headlined: Why did Yeardley Love have to die?
Have to die? Um. She didn't. That answers that question!
But let us grant that the headline was possibly intended to ask, simply: Why did she die?
It's a question that remains unanswered by the article below, which speaks of the "tragedy" with the same sort of mystified, confounded tone that is usually reserved for philosophical investigations of why a child is struck with cancer. The description across the browser bar reads: "The tragic story of Virginia lacrosse player Yeardley Love." The piece ends with references to "God's plan" and "senseless death."
No conclusion. No "because" to the "why." Only the equivalent of a bewildered shrug—despite the fact that a huge chunk of the story itself is dedicated to painting a portrait of alleged murderer George Huguely as a privileged, entitled, aggressive dude with an unchecked substance abuse problem who became obsessive with multiple women and presaged his murder of Love with threatening emails, texts, and at least one violent encounter witnessed by other lacrosse players.
And yet the question remains somehow unanswered. Or, rather, the dots remain unconnected.
That is merely the beginning of the myriad problems with this story. I will leave it to you to fisk in comments, but not before highlighting this jaw-dropping passage:
When they resumed working out on Thursday, nine days before the NCAA championships were to begin, the women were missing the speedy and clever defender whose exuberance had made some describe her as the heart of the team, and the men were without the burly midfielder who, ironically enough, had been described in game programs as one of the Cavaliers' fiercest attackers.
No. That is not irony. No.
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That is certainly the inevitable result of "Drill, Baby, Drill!", as several dolphins are now the latest victims of BP's catastrophe.
Already, brown pelicans, sea turtles, and various types of fish have turned up dead. Now, the National Marine Fisheries Service is reporting that six dolphin carcasses have also been found in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama since May 2.
[H/T to
Amanda]
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[Background.]
See Deeky's archive of all previous Conniving & Sinister strips here.
[In which Liss reimagines the long-running comic "Frank & Ernest," about two old straight white guys "telling it like it is," as a fat feminist white woman and a biracial queerbait telling it like it actually is from their perspectives. Hilarity ensues.]
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From a piece in the New York Times which is headlined with the question "For Crime, Is Anatomy Destiny?" and investigates the "connections" between physical attributes and criminal activity:
[Gregory N. Price, an economist at Morehouse College and one of the authors of a paper on height and crime] suggested that there may be policy implications in his work, saying, "Public health policies successful at reducing obesity among individuals in the population will not only make society healthier, but also safer."
Sure, because if there is a correlation between fat and criminality, it's definitely not the lifetime of being ostracized, bullied, ignored, and/or denied equal pay and opportunities that underlies the elevated potential for a fat person to commit crime, but the fat itself. So we should definitely focus on eradicating fat, rather than prejudice.
"I couldn't help myself, Your Honor! My fat made me do it!" WICKEDFAT!
[H/T to Shaker Miriam_Heddy.]
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This sounds GREAT:
After years of trying, New Line is close to making the workplace murder comedy "Horrible Bosses."
…"Bosses" centers on three best friends who, frustrated by their jobs, come to the conclusion the only solution is to kill one another's bosses.
[Jason Bateman] is a man who believes that his hard work will be rewarded but hits bottom when he gets passed over for a promotion. [Charlie Day] plays a hapless guy who's always in the wrong place at the wrong time. A part still to be cast is a ladies' man who gets a rude awakening when his boss dies and he is replaced.
…New Line is in the process of attracting A-list names for the roles of the bosses, including a master manipulator, a sexually aggressive dentist and a weaselly scion. … Part of the movie's go status hinged on getting big names as the bosses, and New Line is locking those in place, with [Jennifer Aniston] to play the aggressive dentist who is hitting on Day, and [Colin Farrell] as the weasel.
I mean: WTF, Hollywood? Seriously. WHAT. THE. FUCK.
You know, if you've so thoroughly mined the lives of Highly Privileged White Men that the best plot for a
comedy film you've got is "a ragtag group of Highly Privileged White Men PLOT TO MURDER THEIR BOSSES," as though workplace violence (particularly committed by entitled, aggrieved, disgruntled white men) is such an extraordinary absurdity that it's totes appropriate for a punchline, maybe that should be a clue that it's time to investigate the lives of people OTHER THAN Highly Privileged White Men.
Or, you know, just option a remake of
Turner & Hooch. Whatever.
By the way, I love how it's the female boss who's the sexually aggressive one. OF COURSE.
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Last night's episode will be discussed in infinitesimal detail, so if you haven't seen it, and don't want any spoilers, move along...
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[Trigger warning for violence.]
"If I could issue hunting permits, I would officially declare today opening day for liberals. The season would extend through November 2 and have no limits on how many taken as we desperately need to 'thin' the herd."—Congressional District 11 (California) Republican candidate Brad Goehring, engaging in a little eliminationist rhetoric on his Facebook page yesterday.
The Facebook entry has since been removed, and Goehring naturally explained he was just joking. Har har. "I intended to include the wording 'we would use votes and not bullets' (but) hit the share button by accident before I finished and decided to leave it, thinking it would not be taken in a literal sense. I'm sorry if I confused anyone."
Yeah, the real problem was the "confusion" he caused; not the fact that he was obviously playing on an eliminationist "joke" (and would have been even if he'd added his allegedly intended voting clause) that has been around for years:
Note the above-linked post is from '05, and I'm certain I wrote about the "liberal hunting license" even earlier (although I can't find it at the moment). These things, and others like them, have been onsale at gun shows and conservative conferences for quite some time.
Digby
notes: "
Here is the story of some of these adorable jokes... These are the kind of things they sell [at] CPAC every year. It's perfectly common right wing rhetoric."
Indeed so.
Despite the fact that many of the marginalized populations who comprise the liberal bloc in the US are disproportionately targeted for actual violence in real life, outside the absurd imaginary world in which conservative jokes about killing liberals are totes hilarious.
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[Trigger warning for sexual exploitation.]
Sexual harasser and alleged rapist Joe Francis, convicted of child abuse and prostitution and accused of much more throughout his career of building the "Girls Gone Wild" exploitation video franchise, has been given his own un-rated, 12-part, half-hour reality series, "Search for the Hottest Girl in America," which has been given the greenlight to air with uncensored nudity.
The controversial franchise will feature complete nudity on a station many viewers get with basic cable.
…["Search for the Hottest Girl in America"] will air in the 1 a.m ET/10 p.m. PT slot on Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban's HDNet channel. The independent network is generally included automatically in HD packages with leading providers such as Comcast, DirecTV, Dish Network and Verizon. In fact, it's not even a pay-to-order station like HBO or Showtime.
…Francis argues that the reality show is suited to a "“mature audience" – although an edited version will also be made available for a "run on all stations" and will be acceptable for all time periods and all viewers.
"The show is by no means anything harder than anything that's been on HBO. Cuban has brilliantly designed this programming block, what he's done is taken HBO's whole niche and made it for free. You get HDNet as part of your basic cable package," Francis told us. "'Girls Gone Wild' has been demonized for all these years, it's been made out to be controversial when in fact HBO has ten times the harder core stuff and Cinemax is what we call 'Skin'emax. Mark (Cuban) is genius and taken it into the free market."
Neither HBO nor Cinemax have, to my recollection, been sued by women who allege they were coerced into appearing nude or their nude images were used without their permission.
I've nothing to say about the loathsome Francis that I haven't
said before. He is the WORST.
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[Trigger warning.]
A perfect example of why crime stats and conviction stats (such beloved tools of rape apologists) don't really say anything about the actual frequency of rape, care of the NYPD:
Last week, the Voice revealed that a cop had audiotaped his superior officers during roll calls at the 81st Precinct in Brooklyn for more than a year.
Those tapes show vividly that NYPD street cops are told by superiors to "downgrade" crime reports whenever possible, such as convincing a victim to file a "stolen property" complaint even after being physically assaulted in a robbery.
Now, the Voice has learned that the NYPD downgraded a felony sexual assault in a park in upper Manhattan earlier this year to a misdemeanor.
The incident was only reclassified and upgraded to a felony after the victim, journalist Debbie Nathan, protested and the Manhattan District Attorney took the extraordinary step of interviewing the police officers involved and confirming her account.
Nathan was walking in Inwood Park when she was "grabbed by a young man who pushed her off the path and into the woods," telling her he wanted to "have sex with" her. She tried to free herself, but could not.
He grabbed her from behind and pinned her arms at her sides. He began masturbating against her, for a couple of minutes, had an orgasm, and then fled.
What's particularly chilling about this incident is that it's a classic starter attack by someone with the potential to become a serial rapist, the violence of whose acts tend to escalate over time (and with practice). Catching this guy, intervening early, is hugely important.
Nathan went immediately to a café and called 911: "She knew that her attacker had entered the woods, and there were only a couple of ways out of the park. She figured if the police arrived in time, they would be able to catch him." When police didn't arrive, she returned to her apartment and called again. Law enforcement did not arrive at her apartment until "two hours and three 911 calls" later.
After hearing her account of the attack, they told her the crime was a misdemeanor for "forcible touching." Nathan, forced to tenaciously pursue justice under the duress of having survived a sexual assault like so many women before her, would not go away quietly.
Nathan insisted that it was an attempted rape, a felony. "I argued that the force used against me, the masturbation, and the veritable kidnapping constituted far more than a misdemeanor," Nathan says.
The officers ignored her protests and left.
On February 22, Nathan called the Inwood Safety Patrol, a citizens group which monitors neighborhood safety. That group called the local state assemblyman, Adriano Espaillat, and the 34th Precinct commander to complain.
After that, Nathan's complaint was upgraded to felony attempted rape. At a packed community meeting, the precinct commander apologized to Nathan, and promised an investigation.
...Nathan was in for a second shock when she got her complaint report. "My story had been scrubbed of everything except the fact that the perp grabbed me, pushed me, and mentioned sex," she says. "Almost every detail of the crime was missing from the report."
The officers had left out her being overpowered and pushed into the woods, the duration of the assault, the masturbation. The report, she says, even said she had reported no sexual assault.
"After special victims downgraded my crime to a misdemeanor, an officer from my precinct tweaked my report so it described a misdemeanor," she says. "They had written non-report to conform to a misdemeanor. They were so sloppy, they forgot to rewrite the report to conform to felony."
Nathan says she was told by Assistant District Attorney Lisa Friel, chief of the Manhattan District Attorney's sex crimes unit, that there was no question that the crime she described was a felony.
Friel, Nathan says, interviewed the police officers involved and learned that they admitted to omitting many details from the report. "It is difficult to believe the omissions were accidental," Nathan says.
Nathan says she spoke with rape crisis advocacy groups, which told her that her case is not unique, that it has been happening across the city over the past year-and-a-half.
"The difference here was that I was a well-educated journalist, someone who knew how to get action," she says.
Not only does this practice deny survivors of justice; it creates more victims, as sex predators are allowed to remain free to continue their predation. It's difficult to overstate how wildly inappropriate and equally ineffective reducing crime rates by downgrading sex crimes is.
This policy also underlines the inherent ignorance in rape apologists' arguments that are contingent on the idea that law enforcement is sensitive and responsive to women alleging sexual assault. (And renders hilarious their ubiquitous argument that law enforcement is overzealous in response to allegations of sexual assault.)
Naturally, there are excellent cops all over the country who are sensitive and responsive to victims, but, when one of the biggest police departments in the country is actively and systemically working against victims—and quite literally allying themselves with sex predators, aiding and abetting their continued predation—to assume a robust response to allegations is universal is to deliberately engage in willful ignorance.
And it is to enthusiastically play a role in perpetuation one of the most pernicious myths of the rape culture.
[H/T to Shaker Bruno, who credits Gothamist.]
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UPDATE: Check out this great post by unusualmusic at Angry Black Woman: Why didn't you call the police? Part One.
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And sadly, I must report that the PM will be Cameron, the Tory, after the Lib Dems decided to throw in with them on a promise of a referendum on alternative voting. I don't know the details of the promise, but I can't help but feel the Tories wouldn't have offered it if they thought there were any chance of it actually happening, as the current system favours the two biggest parties disproportionately*.
Consider this basically an Open Thread on the UK election results, if you will.
* The current system, for instance, where Labour gained something like 23% (I think? can't be arsed to look it up, but the next part's true) of the vote, only a couple of per cent more than the Liberal Democrats, but were able to claim nearly five times as many seats in Parliament. This works because First Past the Post systems only reward victory in a binary/zero-sum fashion (one party wins the seat, all the others lose; you could come second in every riding in the land, take 49% of the popular vote, and still not win a single seat if each riding had someone from another party who was even 1% more popular). Lib Dems (and the Greens, and other small parties) would like very much to see a shift to some form of either mixed or proportional representation, where results are closer to those predicted by the popular vote.
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what is the best and/or worst birthday present you've ever gotten?
I can't think of any offhand that were really terrible. The best is easy. Eight years ago today, Iain and I were living in Edinburgh, and he surprised me by whisking me away to the charming little restaurant at which we'd had our very first date, and then to an absolutely splendid hotel, which had been arranged for by my sneaky and fabulous girlfriend Miller, who also saw that there were champagne and strawberries waiting for us, as well. They planned the whole thing without my ever cottoning on, which is no small feat.
And in our lovely room, he proposed to me (even though we had already gotten the fiancé visa, so it was truly a done deal).
It was a really wonderful evening, and what I remember most about it is how handsome Iain looked in his charcoal suit, and how nervous he was, even though I had already agreed to marry him in notarized paperwork submitted to the US government, lol.
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Shaker TG just emailed me this listing on Craigslist, advertising a "Man Sale."
[Click to embiggen.]
The text—which is superimposed over a background collage composed of images of, I guess, Things Men Own, like stereo equipment, guns, beer, and women—reads: "MAN SALE: Friday and Saturday, May 14th & 15th, 7am until whenever. 13311 W. Prospect Dr. New Berlin. BUY – SELL – TRADE. Whatcha have? Whatcha need? Whatcha want? [Image of a struck-through female symbol, followed by an image of Al Bundy.] NO MA'AM. Women welcome just not girlie items."
While my dear friend Butch Pornstache heartily approves of any and all linguistic masculinations (mandals, guyliner, bromance), I daresay that the host(s) of this spectacular event may not have thoroughly considered the implications of replacing the traditional "rummage" or "garage" or "yard" with "man." Mixed messaging, at best.
Or maybe not. In which case, I'm looking forward to seeing what kind of men are for sale at the "Dollar & Five Dollar Tables."
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See Deeky's archive of all previous Conniving & Sinister strips here.
[In which Liss reimagines the long-running comic "Frank & Ernest," about two old straight white guys "telling it like it is," as a fat feminist white woman and a biracial queerbait telling it like it actually is from their perspectives. Hilarity ensues.]
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