So much blood in the carpet
It always had such a lovely pile.
But the house needs to eat…again.
You left me worse than last time,
I hope you’re having fun at the tavern.
And I will wear your bruises
While I clean the sanguine marsh.
These bruises, lacerations, and lumps
Are in fact yours, but you say
They look so much better on me.
So I will wear your bruises
Because you can’t. Continue reading
Posted in Lady Bits, Read Me!, Submissions from Readers
Tagged lady stuff, poetry, Thundarkitteh, violence against women
Defending Life For Just Nine Months, At A Cost To All Others
Defeated once before in Florida, the issue of Personhood is making a comeback. In spite of defeats in other states as well, Personhood Florida plans to push for another “fetal personhood” amendment in 2014.
“Personhood” holds that a person exists at the very moment of conception. Not only does it ban abortion without exceptions for rape or incest, but it would even ban contraception, in vitro fertilization, and could even interfere with cancer research.
A petition to get a Personhood amendment on the ballot would require 676,811 signatures. Despite previous opposition from even anti-abortion supporters because it was too extreme, one big supporter is Senate President Mike Haridopolos who signed a petition last year. Given the numerous draconian abortion bills that have made their way through the legislature the past couple of years, it’s hardly a stretch to predict that others may soon follow suit.
I stand corrected. I stand dumbfounded. Due to this debacle The Ultrasound Opportunity Bill, I’m standing up for the rights of women in my state.
In my previous post, I mentioned that Illinois has a Democratic Governor and State House. I said that there were no direct assaults on the rights of my wife and daughters. Well I was wrong.
The Ultrasound Opportunity Bill was brought to the floor of the House by the House Agricultural Committee. Let that sink in for a moment . Here in Illinois, we don’t just treat women like chattel, we treat them like cattle. It passed with votes from Republicans and Democrats and many of the sponsors on the floor are DEMOCRATS and by my count at least two Democratic women co-sponsored. What the hell?
This outrage cannot stand. The bill calls for a transvaginal ultrasound be taken 24 hours prior to an abortion, then the pregnant women is offered a chance to view the ultrasound. If she declines she has to sign a waiver that stays on file at Public Health. So not only is a woman treated like livestock, but if she refuses to view the grainy computer image of the Area 51 experiment growing in her gut, she goes on a list! Great idea, truly grand. Continue reading
According to a law passed by a Tea-Bagger Texas statehouse and signed as an “emergency measure” by Governor Rick Perry, and mis-presented to the public at the time the bill was passed, along with the 5th Circuit’s decision that this procedure CAN proceed even as the law itself is being appealed–women can now be legally raped in the state of Texas if they see a physician about getting an abortion.
By “rape,” I mean that the sonogram which is required by this law for all women seeking abortions in the first 10 weeks–which nearly all women now do–is not a “jelly on the belly” procedure, as State Rep. Carol Alvarado pointed out, in which you take off your clothes, put on a flimsy gown, climb up onto a cold table, have some colder jelly smeared on your stomach, and then wait while a technician or doctor rolls the wand around and interprets the picture that appears on the computer screen. Continue reading
Posted in Body/Health Shenanigans, Please Die in a Fire, Rick Perry Presents "Rick Perry", Submissions from Readers, Teabilly and GOP Mendacity, War on Women
Tagged @deaniemills, abortion rights, Personhood Amendment, Planned Parenthood, reproductive rights, Rick Perry, Texas, transvaginal ultrasound, uterati, women's health
I had a very strong reaction to reading Glenn Greenwald’s latest article titled Progressives and the Ron Paul Fallacies. But if you’d like a raging post about the evils of Greenwald, I’m afraid you’re going to have to look elsewhere. My plan is to try to respond reasonably – whether or not he would be inclined to do so in return. I’ll also fall short of tackling everything Greenwald said that I disagree with. Instead, I have a particular point to make and for today, I’ll stick with that.
It was when I got to the part in Greenwald’s article where he extolled a piece written about Ron Paul by Matt Stoller that I thought of Reinhold Niebuhr.
Cenk Uygur, late of MSNBC, now of Current, is featured in a new Huffington Post opinion piece urging Democrats to vote against President Obama in the Iowa caucuses. To support his underlying aim, Uygur cherry-picks a handful of issues on which he disagrees with the president’s actions, and in the process either purposefully misleads or, alternatively, has conducted so little research as to unintentionally mislead. Either way: He misleads. Let’s look at what he’s arguing.
Uygur opens his HuffPo piece with a screed about the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA); he takes issue with the final language contained in the NDAA sections pertaining to the detention of al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorists. Uygur asserts that the NDAA allows for “the indefinite detention of US citizens by the military inside the US.” To bolster this frightening claim, Uygur links to this Glenn Greenwald post on Salon.com, in which Greenwald makes the same assertion: that the NDAA is the “indefinite detention bill.”
So, is it? How can we determine if the NDAA is the “indefinite detention bill” Uygur and Greenwald (to name just two) claim it is? How about if we look at the legislative language? The pertinent detention section of the NDAA is Sec. 1021/1022. Here’s the final language that came out of the House/Senate conference committee (the NDAA went to conference because the House-passed and Senate-passed NDAAs differed in key aspects, as we’ll discuss below.) I’m clipping at some length the key provisions at Sec. 1022, and have taken the liberty of bolding certain sub-sections:
When I was 19, I was engaged to a monster who drugged and raped me on multiple occasions. Since I had blocked out whatever I remembered from it, the relationship continued and got worse, to where physical abuse started. I also miscarried twins. By the time I left, I was 20, scared shitless, depressed, and still trying to process what the fuck had happened to me. Since I couldn’t process it all, I decided to marry my schoolwork instead. I graduated with a 3.6 GPA (3.8 in my field (Ancient Greek), it would have been a 4.0 were it not for that bastard Plato), got accepted to Tulane University, packed, moved, and tried to carry on from there. I swore I was fine.
Then it happened. I remembered.
It was as if a trapdoor had opened and I fell to rock bottom. Then another trapdoor opened, to a place I didn’t know existed. I now call it Rock Bottom’s Basement. It is the scariest place in this world to find yourself. It is so dark, so bleak, so utterly hopeless. I had to get out of there as quickly as possible. I had no idea how to do this. But I knew that if I didn’t, I would die.
The next day, after getting no sleep because I was too scared of what my brain would produce, I went to a professor of mine, briefly told him what happened, and told him I needed time off. He told me to go home and he would cover for me. I doubt he’d be reading this, but if he is: Thank you, Dr. N.
I do not remember much of the next week, other than I didn’t leave my apartment. I couldn’t eat, I would pass out from exhaustion due to constantly bawling, wake up in full fight-or-flight mode. The skin under my eyes turned raw and red. All I did was drink coffee and smoke. If I tried to walk across a room, I’d literally collapse on the ground and cry. I didn’t want to exist. But I didn’t want to die. I had no clue what I wanted. I call this the “un-being” phase.
Posted in Lady Bits, Submissions from Readers, War on Women
Tagged rape, Thundarkitteh
As a Brit with a keen interest in American history and politics, it always tickles me to see Americans, especially prominent ones, talk out their asses when it comes to their understanding of Britain and our history.
So take a bow, Rick Santorum.
Now, we already know that history is not the current GOP field’s strong point. Michele Bachmann, who has cast herself as the American ‘Iron Lady’, placed the Falklands conflict that defined Margaret Thatcher’s premiership in 1992, 10 years after it actually happened and a whole 2 years after Thatcher had resigned as Prime Minister. Seriously failtacular stuff. And Rick Perry of course presides over a state whose textbooks provide, shall we say, a less than factual account of history. But Santorum’s grasp of the fall of the British Empire is, as Conor Friedersdorf puts it, cartoonish:
“If you look at every European country that has had world domination, a world presence, from the French to the British — 100 years ago, the sun didn’t set on the British Empire,” Santorum said at an appearance in Sioux City, Iowa. “If you look at that empire today — why? Because they lost heart and faith in their heart in themselves and in their mission, who they were and what values they wanted to spread around the world. Not just for the betterment of the world, but safety and security and the benefit of their country.” “We have taken up that cause,” Santorum added. But now, he said, “We have a president who doesn’t believe in America.”
In the context given by the Huffington Post, Santorum was saying that what caused the decline of Britain’s empire wasn’t the 2 devastating world wars or restless natives getting rather fed up of being exploited and treated as non-citizens of their own countries, but the British social safety net. Wow – to think Gandhi could have had himself a good meal instead of fasting and struggling non-violently for Indian independence in 1947, by just waiting for the NHS created just the year before in 1946 to fell the mighty Empire. Poor guy. Continue reading
image via Osborne Ink
Well, there’s an election year next year, and I wonder what the hyper-vocal Professional Left will do if Newt or Mitt come to sit in the Oval Office. They whine and whinge and name-call and block the people they perceive to be unwitting plebs of little knowledge, those of us who call out their short-comings and their less-than-subtle race issues. Maybe they think they’ll be loved and listened to once more if the Republicans win the White House.
They can think again. There are those of us who know who screwed this pooch, and your names have been taken.
Not a week goes by that the Professional Left doesn’t go actively looking for a stick with which to beat this President.
This week’s stick come in the form of Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sibelius’s overruling the Food and Drug Administration’s decision to allow girls under the age of seventeen to buy the Plan B morning after pill without prescription.
That got some people’s knickers twisted. Continue reading
