But the Senate bill take moneys from food stamps to pay for it.   The Senate also cut food stamps to help pay for the aid-to-states bill [a $26.1 billion bill that will help states sustain Medicaid and avoid teacher cutbacks] they passed last week.  The House’s version doesn’t cut food stamps, and it would do much more to strengthen summer, breakfast, and after-school programs that get meals to kids who might otherwise go hungry, but has not yet voted on the aid-to-states bill.  We can only hope they don’t follow the Senate’s lead.

In the wealthiest nation on Earth, people are still lacking basic nutrition.  It’s a common pity plea to chant “what about the children,” but real action never quite seems to happen.  With unemployment pushing 10%, higher in some areas, this is criminal.  What good is a government that can’t/won’t feed its most vulnerable citizens?

If this makes me a socialist, so be it.  No one should go hungry.  Ever.

Update: The House passed the $2.6 billion aid package for teachers, cutting the money out of food stamps, and Obama has already signed it.  They should be ashamed.

Via Newsweek

Institutionalized racism comes to Arizona.  I can guarantee that the blond-haired blue-eyed governor won’t be the one be forced to show a birth certificate on demand.  Her neighbor with dark skin, however, won’t be so lucky.

Via Buzzfeed

Note the limiter “especially if she were the head of the house.”  A married woman remained under the assumed dominion of her husband for another fifty years.

Via Boing Boing, via Scott Westerfeld

A short excerpt:

Hypocrisy

You can’t flip out — and threaten impeachment – when Dems use a parlimentary procedure (deem and pass) that you used repeatedly (more than 35 times in just one session and more than 100 times in all!), that’s centuries old and which the courts have supported. Especially when your leaders admit it all.

You can’t vote and scream against the stimulus package and then take credit for the good it’s done in your own district (happily handing out enormous checks representing money that you voted against is especially ugly) —  114 of you (at last count) did just that — and it’s even worse when you secretly beg for more.

You can’t fight against your own ideas just because the Dem president endorses your proposal.

You can’t call for a pay-as-you-go policy, and then vote against your own ideas.

Are they “unlawful enemy combatants” or are they “prisoners of war” at Gitmo? You can’t have it both ways.

You can’t carry on about the evils of government spending when your family has accepted more than a quarter-million dollars in government handouts.

You can’t refuse to go to a scheduled meeting, to which you were invited, and then blame the Dems because they didn’t meet with you.

Page after page of documented points that should be in the mainstream media but aren’t.  Please, read the whole thing and post your favorites.  Spread the word.  We’re not going to roll over anymore.

h/t Jeff Hess

Rep. Randy Neugebauer (R-TX) has come forward and admitted that he was the one who yelled “baby killer” during the House debate on the health care bill last night.

In his statement, Neugeubauer said that he meant to refer to the bill as “a baby killer,” not Stupak himself. That said, he has apologized to Stupak.

…

It should be noted that in addition to the “baby killer” outburst, Neugebauer is also a sponsor of the so-called “Birther Bill,” introduced by Rep. Bill Posey (R-FL), to require presidential candidates “to include with the committee’s statement of organization a copy of the candidate’s birth certificate, together with such other documentation as may be necessary to establish that the candidate meets the qualifications for eligibility to the Office of President under the Constitution.”

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) — A state senator wants Missouri to collect information from women about why they choose to have abortions.

Legislation by Republican Sen. Tom Dempsey, of St. Peters, would require doctors and clinics to ask women about the specific medical, social or economic reasons for seeking an abortion. Women would not have to respond.

Dempsey says it would be useful for policymakers to know if most abortions are sought because of relationship problems, finances, health concerns, a desire to limit family size, or a variety of other reasons.

Senators briefly discussed the bill Wednesday without taking a vote. The legislation also would expand the information provided to women during Missouri’s 24-hour waiting period before abortions.

Another day, another asshat Republican male attempting to intimidate and control women.  If this passes I hope every woman answers “none of your damn business.”

The basis for these asinine charges is an 1805 law forbidding “crimes against nature.” Of the 861 sex offenders currently registered in New Orleans, 483 were convicted of a crime against nature, according to Doug Cain, a spokesperson for the Louisiana State Police. 78% of those are people of color, and almost all are female. When asked about the discrepancy, New Orleans Police Department spokesman Bob Young responded: “Persons are charged according to the crime they commit,” even though if this law were equally enforced, he himself, like the rest of New Orleans, would probably be in jail.

How does this affect women already working on the lowest and most dangerous tier of prostitution?

From Her Crime? Sex Work in New Orleans:

The law impacts sex workers in both small and large ways. Tabitha has to register an address in the sex offender database, and because she doesn’t have a permanent home, she has registered the address of a nonprofit organization that is helping her. She also has to purchase and mail postcards with her picture to everyone in the neighborhood informing them of her conviction. If she needs to evacuate to a shelter during a hurricane, she must evacuate to a special shelter for sex offenders, and this shelter has no separate safe spaces for women. She is even prohibited from very ordinary activities in New Orleans like wearing a costume at Mardi Gras.

That’s a tough sentence for a rapist — an outrageous one for a woman who, because of drugs or poverty, is working a street corner. A prostitution bust on her record is hard enough, but being labeled a sex offender pretty much eliminates any hope she has of building a future outside of the illegal sex trade.

Do I think prostitution should be legal? I don’t know. I’ve very mixed feelings about how voluntary low level sex work is, and I’m distressed about the high number of women who are trafficked into the business. But this one thing I know for sure: a blow job shouldn’t cost a woman the rest of her life, particularly when her john skates.

Ideally, the Louisiana legislature can be persuaded to repeal the law. At a minimum, the police and district attorney must be pressured stop selective enforcement. But best of all would be if someone would take the case on constitutional grounds, because if challenged I don’t think this law would stand up to scrutiny.

Local advocacy groups are doing what they can, but we need to help.The Louisiana ACLU can be reached here. Urge them to read the Color Lines article and take action for all of us. I’m going to.

Step one was to get through security to get into the building.  I beeped, of course.   But my underwire bra wasn’t considered a weapon, so a few moments with the wand and I was ready to go in.  I waited with about 20 other people in a long, narrow hallway with bench seating for a dozen.  The people involved in my accident clustered together, including the woman at whose ticket was the reason for the occasion.  At precisely 1:30 we were ushered into a small room with benches like church pews for seating.  A young man, maybe 25, stood up and said he was from the prosecutor’s office and that each person fighting a ticket would be given two options: to mitigate it and automatically get the fine reduced, or appear before the judge and, if found guilty, be required to pay the full fine plus court costs.

Then he called all the witnesses to come forward.  We formed a line and one at a time gave him our stories, after which he signed our summons letters and told us to wait until he dismissed us.  After we had all filed through the line and sat back down, he called ticketees to come forward.  I knew from our pre-court discussions that Lisa (driver at fault) was fighting on the grounds that she was distracted by pedestrians, and that perhaps her brake cable had rusted through, making her unable to stop.  Her goal was to get her fine reduced and possibly the ticket rewritten to something that wouldn’t impact her insurance as much.  After a brief discussion with her boyfriend seated beside me, she decided to mitigate and get her fine reduced from $175 to $100.  After her meeting with the prosecutor, he announced that the witnesses in her case were allowed to leave.  Grand total of time involved:  1 hour 50 minutes, including the drive.

Final step was to locate the Public Safety Building and turn in my signed summons at the Municipal Court window.  In exchange for showing up I will be mailed a check for $10 plus a small amount for the 28 miles I drove round trip to get to the hearing.  I can expect the money to arrive in about a month.

What I learned is this: if it’s in town and you don’t have to travel to do it, always fight your ticket.  Just showing up guarantees you’ll save money on the ticket, and probably on your auto insurance as well.  But be prepared for any witnesses to be very annoyed with you.

Good to know.

22 years ago Phillip Paul was tried for strangling 78-year-old Ruth Mottley, who the voices in his head told him was a witch, and found to be criminally insane.  He has spent the years since in Eastern State Hospital undergoing treatment for schizophrenia.  Before I go any further, I want to make it clear that my heart goes out to Ms. Mottley’s family and friends who were left grief-stricken by her murder.   It is impossible to over-estimate their loss.  Ms. Mottley should not have died.  That’s a fact that I would never think of disputing.  But today’s incident brings up a lot of questions.

The fair board is claiming that it should have been notified in advance of the hospital’s plan to bring mental patients to the fair, and should have disclosed both the criminal and treatment histories of the patients when petitioning for permission.  The board assures us that had that procedure been followed, the request would have been denied and the hospital’s patients would have been barred from the fair.  All of them.

Some say they should never have been allowed off hospital grounds in the first place.  Eastern State Hospital has declined comment on the incident but Jim Stevenson at DSHS says that field trips are not uncommon, and that field trips are determined on a case-by-case basis by each patient’s treatment team who decides whether or not a patient can participate.  Stevenson said it has nothing to do with their crime but more to do with where they are in their treatment.  But as a response to the outpouring of rage over this, DSHS Secretary Susan Dreyfus has ordered a “lockdown on all future field trips,” according to KXLY’s Twitter feed.

The Spokesman-Review newspaper states, in the scariest possible terms, that Paul escaped once 19 years ago and assaulted a deputy who tried to apprehend him.  Yet in 1996 a judge ruled that he could attend Spokane Community College during the day as long as he returned back to the hospital at night, and two years later Judge Michael Leavitt ruled he could have overnight visits in Spokane as long as he was with an adult member of his family.

If Paul’s been in Eastern State Hospital for 22 years–longer than he likely would have served in prison, by the way–I can guarantee he’s been medicated that entire time.  His schizophrenia has been treated, successfully, I assume, given that judges have seen fit to give him short term releases in the past. Had there been any observable reason to consider him dangerous, those judges would not have accepted these conditions of temporary release.  His wandering away (or escape, depending upon the news source) could not have been anticipated.

I can’t know the current state of Paul’s treatment, nor at what stage of recovery he is, but I’m disturbed by the open scaremongering about the mentally ill going on.  The claim that a field trip by ANY mental health patients should be approved/denied by the fair board is outrageous.  Without the hope of reintegration into society, mental health treatment is much less successful.  Medication works near miracles for many, including me.  Schizophrenia is probably the most stigmatized mental illness there is, but most of the time it responses to treatment.

The days of warehousing the mentally ill are, thank God, over.  So too, for the most part, is the idea that they should be chained up as dangerous. Yet enlightened treatment has not been matched by enlightened public perception.  For every escaped “criminally insane” patient there are several thousand people quietly recovering and going about their lives.  The publicity and news coverage happening today does nothing to increase public safety, but needlessly stigmatizes the patients at Eastern State Hospital and other mental health facilities.

For his own sake, I hope Phillip Paul is returned to the hospital soon.  It’s not good for him to go off his meds cold turkey, and yes, after an extended period without drugs it’s possible he could become a danger to himself and others.  We don’t know.  But I don’t want to see that caution turn to fear and I certainly don’t want it to extend to other recovering individuals.  I take that personally.  As we all should.

Claim it was an accident and that the goal was to knock her unconscious with a “sleeper hold.”

Sentence: 5 years.

Selling an ounce of marijuana will get you more time than that.

Ergo, it’s worse to get someone high than to kill a woman.

Times like this I’m ashamed to live in Washington State.