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Generally speaking, I try to avoid using the word crazy to mean “bizarrely wrong.” It wasn’t always so, but after years of online discussions with people smarter than I am, I’ve come to the conclusion that that usage of the word reinforces negative stereotypes about people suffering from mental health issues. As a person who suffers from my own share of mental health issues (depression and ADHD, plus a grab-bag assortment of behavioral issues related to those two), I should be the last person perpetuating the myth that being mentally ill is a moral failing. Being mentally ill is like having cancer — it’s probably not your fault, and it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Unlike, say, hoping God smites Barack Obama with brain cancer and sends him to Hell. In earlier years, I might have called Pastor Steven Anderson crazy. But he isn’t crazy. Just evil.

But while I have decided that I’m not going to use crazy to mean evil, I still intend to use crazy when I mean to describe someone as, well, crazy. After all, some people are crazy.

Take Michele Bachmann. Please. Because Rep. Bachmann, R-We There Yet, is crazy.

I don’t mean she holds a lot of bizarre right-wing views, though she most certainly does. But holding bizarre right-wing views doesn’t make one crazy. That falls more into the “evil” category, and I’m only too happy to talk about them as such.

No, I mean Michele Bachmann is crazy. She has serious, deap-seated, untreated mental health issues that are deeply affecting her ability to carry out her job.

Last night’s speech in Colorado is a fine example. Bachmann, as could be expected, spoke out against health care, using rather typical Republican rhetoric:

“Something is way crazy out there,” Bachmann said in her remarks, billed as a “personal legislative briefing” by the Golden-based Independence Institute, which bills itself as a “free market think tank.”

“This is slavery,” Bachmann said after claiming many Americans pay half their income to taxes. “It’s nothing more than slavery.”

In a speech filled with urgent and violent rhetoric, Bachmann — who proudly acknowledges she is the country’s “second-most hated Republican woman,” behind only former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin – drew a clear line on health care reform.

“You’re either for us or against us on this issue,” she said after deriding U.S. Rep. Betsy Markey, a Fort Collins Democrat, for “[sitting] on the fence” about health care proposals at recent town halls.

Okay, well, that’s overheated and over-the-top. But it isn’t crazy. Sadly, it’s only slightly to the right of mainstream, right-wing discourse on health care these days.

No, crazy is this:

“This cannot pass,” the Minnesota Republican told a crowd at a Denver gathering sponsored by the Independence Institute. “What we have to do today is make a covenant, to slit our wrists, be blood brothers on this thing. This will not pass. We will do whatever it takes to make sure this doesn’t pass.”

That’s crazy. As in completely disconnected from reality crazy.

Now, I don’t know if Michele Bachmann meant to call for mass suicide to stop health care reform; I frankly don’t know what exactly she was trying to say. I do know that, from calling on Americans to rise up against tyrrany to declaring that health care reform will be defeated “on our knees in prayer and fasting,” Bachmann is reaching new, messianic heights in her rhetoric, and slipping the surly bonds of sanity in the process.

I mean this sincerely: I believe Michele Bachmann is mentally ill. She’s certainly demonstrated a strong paranoid streak, including this charming anecdote from her time as a state senator:

Bachmann said both women stood in front of the bathroom door and then one woman put her hand on top of the door and her other hand on the door handle and leaned her body weight toward the door to hold it shut. The other woman put her hand on the door as well. … [Bachmann said she] was absolutely terrified and has never been that terrorized before as she had no idea what those two women were going to do to her.

These were not just women, of course, but lesbian women. (The complaint was dropped, as there was no evidence anybody had done anything but talk to Bachmann.)

And of course, who could forget this classic:

Michele Bachmann has a mean streak.

On May 6, 2006, the day she was endorsed by the Sixth District Republican Party for the nomination to become a U.S. Representative, she threatened to retaliate against a woman who had opposed her nomination.

“You will pay, you will pay,” Bachmann said to the woman in front of a dozen or more witnesses. The woman grew increasingly upset at the non-specific threat and demanded to know how Bachmann was going to make her pay. She didn’t get an answer. But Bachmann, continued to repeat “you will pay” until the woman was led away from the incident, in tears, by her husband.

I witnessed the confrontation myself. It was in the lobby of Monticello High School, just outside the auditorium where the delegates were in the process of endorsing Bachmann.

Quite simply, Michele Bachmann is not sane. She’s able to function in society because her insanity has been channeled into service to conservative politics, but that doesn’t mean that she’s well.

Unfortunately, rather than living in a society where this sort of behavior would lead to one’s loved ones suggesting counseling, and perhaps a psychopharmacological agent, Bachmann lives in a society where Republican politicians claim with a straight face that a provision in a health care plan to give people control over end-of-life decisions will lead inexorably to death panels. Yes, most of the Republicans know they’re lying. But Bachmann doesn’t. She believes it, with the white-hot fervor of a true believer.

I am concerned about where Bachmann is heading. She has come awfully close to calling directly for violence against Democrats, and I have a feeling that at some point, she will. Not out of malice, exactly — but because she doesn’t really seem to understand that her words have consequences. I’d pity her, except she’s got a say in how the country runs.

Ultimately, I don’t wish ill on Michele Bachmann. I’d like to see her get help, and get stable, and heck, maybe even become an effective legislator. But until she does, her behavior and her words will get more and more bizarre. And there will be at least one politician in America who I can say, without judgment or anger, is crazy. Oh, she’s evil, too. But that’s something separate entirely.

The folks at Firedoglake seem to be serious about that public option thingy. Now they have a contest going on. Democrats who are from liberal districts have no excuse for not signing the pledge to support a strong public option (65 progressive Dems have signed). Those who haven't signed are in for a little fun. Well, they might not call it that. In this contest, Democrats from liberal districts are being scrutinized to discover: "Who's the worst Democratic sell-out to the special interests?"

The first 5 Dem candidates up for scrutiny are: Rep. Xavier Becerra CA-31; Rep. Steve Cohen TN-09; Rep. Jim Moran VA-08; Rep. John Larson CT-01; and Rep. Tammy Baldwin WI-02.

An organizer for liberal House Democrats says the bloc “isn’t bluffing” as it prepares to take a reputation-defining stand to protect a public insurance option in the health care overhaul.

Darcy Burner, executive director of the American Progressive Caucus Policy Foundation, said the health care debate has rallied traditionally disparate Congressional liberals to hang together, while galvanizing support for their position from an array of left-leaning outside groups. The result, she said, is that Democratic leaders will not be able to clear a package through the House if it does not include the public plan.

“We have never had the Progressive Caucus organized the way it is right now,” Burner said during a Friday roundtable with Roll Call. “This is not the normal scenario. And Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi [D-Calif.] knows it.”

The group’s organizational strength faces its most serious test this fall, and Burner acknowledged it is incumbent on liberals to convince the White House it will have an easier time getting a bill through the Senate with a public insurance option than getting one through the House without one.

“If Progressives aren’t willing to do the work to make the president do the right thing, it’s unlikely he will,” she said.

In honor of the upcoming labor day weekend, I'm giving away the children's book ¡Sí, Se Puede! Yes, We Can! Janitor Strike in L.A. written by Diana Cohn.

The book is a fictional bilingual story about the Los Angeles Justice for Janitors Campaign in the year 2000 organized in part by labor activist Dolores Sanchez. The book tells the story of Carlitos' mother as she goes to work every night as a janitor after she tucks him into bed, only to see him again briefly in the morning before he goes to school. One day Carlitos' mother comes home and tells her son that in order to make more money and buy medication for his grandmother, she must go on strike. Carlitos watches his mother make union speeches on television, and one day Carlitos goes to the picket line carrying a sign, "I love my mamá! She is a janitor!"

This book is a great book about working class Latina and immigrant labor activists!

The giveaway will end at 8:00 Pacific Standard Time, this Wednesday.

To win-(participants have the potential to submit their name in the raffle up to four times):
1 entry: leave a comment with your email address
2 entries: leave a comment about your favorite female labor activist
3 entries: tweet about the giveaway (please leave a comment with your twitter link) 4 entries: blog about the giveaway (leave a comment with the link to your blog)

Did you know that? And did you know that you are most likely every bit as frightening and dangerous, hmh? Certainly that's the case if you support feminism. Yes, my dears, we are the new Bonnie and Clyde of this great country of ours, speeding down sleepy suburban streets, rifles under our garter belts, ready to kill the traditional American family.

I really liked where that paragraph was going. Now it has to come down to earth which means that I have to add that I'm talking about the ultra-radical Talibanic Republican candidate for governor in Virginia, Robert F. McDonnell. He was trained in Regent University (where Jesus would go if he was somehow born fundie, wealthy and white in this country), and in 1989 wrote a thesis on the Family:

He argued for covenant marriage, a legally distinct type of marriage intended to make it more difficult to obtain a divorce. He advocated character education programs in public schools to teach "traditional Judeo-Christian values" and other principles that he thought many youths were not learning in their homes. He called for less government encroachment on parental authority, for example, redefining child abuse to "exclude parental spanking." He lamented the "purging of religious influence" from public schools. And he criticized federal tax credits for child care expenditures because they encouraged women to enter the workforce.

"Further expenditures would be used to subsidize a dynamic new trend of working women and feminists that is ultimately detrimental to the family by entrenching status-quo of nonparental primary nurture of children," he wrote.

He went on to say feminism is among the "real enemies of the traditional family."

Actually, feminism IS an enemy of the traditional family, if the word "traditional" refers to a male-dominated theocratic family without love or joy. Feminists want to replace that with a real family, of equality and mutual support and such. Or at least I want to do that. But yes, I'm aftah you, Mr. and Mrs. Traditional-Family-Values.

Now, twenty years is a long time, and perhaps Robert F. McDonnell has changed his mind on these weighty issues altogether. That sort of thing CAN happen, especially in an election year when one needs to appeal to fence-sitters and people who live in reality. And lo and behold! Mr. McDonnel indeed backtracks on some of his utterances:

McDonnell said in his statement that he is "fully supportive of the tremendous contributions women make in the workplace. My wife and daughters work. My campaign manager in 2005 was a working mother. I appointed 5 women to my senior staff as Attorney General."

I'd like to now more about his conversion experience. How did he move from his 1989 views to his present admiring stance? Did it hurt at all? And what are his current views on us frightening feminists?

Rachel Simmons, author of best-seller Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls, has followed up with her latest, The Curse of the Good Girl: Raising Authentic Girls with Courage and Confidence. The first book addressed societal pressure on girls to always be sweet and nice, which represses powerful emotions, especially anger. That’s why the aggression winds up “hidden,” expressed indirectly and passively.

The books chronicle years of Simmons’ research, including case studies and informal exercises with young girls. “A really great exercise,” she says, “is to ask girls to sit the way a typical guy sits and then ask girls to sit the way a typical girl sits. And you will see two completely different postures. Guys have way more permission to take up space in every sense of that phrase. There just aren’t the same rules as there are for women, and that’s going to lead to a different consciousness and a different set of concerns.”

The problem isn’t confined to American society, either. “The very first countries to translate Odd Girl Out were all Asian,” Simmons says. “I think that there is a huge, huge indirect aggression problem in Asia. It has to do with the Asian culture’s very inflexible expectations of women and girls.”

The Curse continues meditation on this trend of suppression, and takes it a step further to advise parents on how to raise their daughters differently. By letting them be honest about their full range of emotions, however unpleasant, we can guide them out of mean-girl culture and into well-adjusted womanhood.

Source:

“When Being a Good Girl is a Bad Thing” (Frances Romero) Time Magazine Online. August 31, 2009

I've written before about the importance of not assuming causality in studies which only find correlation, and I plan to write more about the oh-so-common misuse of simple correlation between two variables as somehow the Final Word On Something when the situation might be much more complex and full of sneaky omitted variables. Today's topic is related to that one but also serves as an example of some other difficulties that one stumbles upon in interpreting empirical research.

Sounds like fun, eh? I can't make it simpler because I'm fatigued (says she while reclining on her recamier). Here's the news that provoked all this:

No vacationer plans on getting sick, but many do fall ill, and seriously. All too often they land at hospitals that are anything but temples of healing.

In the popular sitcom Royal Pains, ritzy folks in the Hamptons hire a concierge doctor to tend their ills rather than an inept local hospital.

In reality, it's no comedy. A USA TODAY analysis finds two dozen hospitals near popular travel destinations, as compiled by the National Travel Monitor, have death rates among the worst in the USA. A separate analysis shows that one of every four hospitals with high death rates for heart attack, heart failure or pneumonia — 94 of 402 — are near state parks.

The quoted article recommends that travelers do some checking before picking a particular travel destination. But here's the problem with this interpretation: A hospital could have higher death rates for the very reason that it's close to a large tourist attraction. Tourists, by definition, are strangers to the place, far from their own doctors and their medical records, and that combination is unlikely to improve the outcomes of any illness attacks they may have.

This isn't necessarily the case, of course. It could be that the discussed hospitals just have worse outcomes, even when they treat local people. But in general outcomes are only meaningful if we control for the types of patients which enter the hospital. If those patients are, on average, high-risk cases then even an excellent hospital can look bad in the outcome statistics.

Dear Any Enemy or Player Hater that I've Ever Had,

As many of you know, I'm like the fucking energizer bunny-there's no stopping me when I set out to do something. I accomplish what I want, when I want and I don't let anyone let me tell me otherwise. You've tried to derail my plans, persuade me against doing something, told me that I wouldn't be successful or something wouldn't work, and all such jealous hogwash. You've slandered my name, turned weak people against me, and tried to make it hard on me.

Yet I still come out on top, bitches. People like you have kept me on my toes and keep me at the top of my game.

Fuck you very much!

Silly Site o' the Day

I often brag that my son is the coolest kid in town, so it's probably high time that I proved it. I submit the following clip as evidence. Please note the crowd that starts to gather to watch this adorable nine-year-old match a teenager step-for-step on the arcade's Dance Dance Revolution machine.



For the rest of our afternoon at the State Fair, I had a huge grin on my face. What other parent can brag that their son's DDR moves are so hot they draw crowds??