UPDATE: For an opposing view, See Women-friendly Campus Rape Bill Sparks Disagreement _____After only a little more than a year, Robbie's law is getting the scissors treatment from Tennessee legislators. This legislation was signed into law last April and is now facing evisceration at the hands of the Tennessee General Assembly.
Signed into law by Governor Phil Bredesen in April of 2004,
posted 7:23 pm at Tennessee Guerilla Women
Check out the Princeton progressives who have a live webcam at their
filibuster against Frist the Terrible and his so-called "nuclear option."
Cool Blue Reason gives his report on
Daily Kos.
Thus far they have enlisted two Congressmen and the winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize in physics along with various professors, city council members and New Jersey assmebly members in their continuous and justifiable harangue decrying the overly ambitious senator from Tennessee.
-->stands and applauds<--
posted 5:19 pm at Tennessee Guerilla Women
The
Moscow Times
"arts and ideas" section called "context" has an excellent article today in Chris Floyd's Global Eye column. The well-documented piece entitled "
Buried Treasure
" connects the dots between the youngest Bush and Joseph Ratzinger now doing business as Pope Benedict XVI of Vatican, Inc.
His sources include everything from The Texas Observer to Newsday to the Financial Times along with Harper's, network news sources, bicoastal print media, and Americablog.
The article traces "Neilsy," the youngest of the Bush syndicate, along the highways and byways of his world travels beginning with the savings and loan scandal that cost us a pretty penny (around $1 billion from us, the American taxpayers. Neilsy paid a paltry $50,000 in fines.) From there we are treated to the tales of his escapades with the likes of the bin Laden family, Jiang Mianheng of Chinese Zemin Dynasty...er...Presidency.
The juicy stuff is in details of the Bush-Ratzinger connection. I won't repeat them all here, just suffice it to say that it has little to do with religious ecumenism and everything to do with possible tax shelters.
There's more if you're interested in Neilsy's longtime business relationship with Syrian-born businessman Jamal Daniel.
This is my fave from the entire article:
You see, the Bushes are robber barons, not capitalists. They never risk any of their own money in the competition of the marketplace. Nor do they ever pay the price when their deals go belly-up.
posted 8:47 pm at Tennessee Guerilla Women
The word is out.
On Tuesday, the
National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs
(NCAVP), a coalition of over 20 lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender victim advocacy and documentation programs, released their
annual report on the incidence of violence against LGBT people
in the United States. The news is definitely not good.
From
the report
:
In the continuation of a trend that started with the 2003 edition of this report, the number of offenders (which had remained stable or actually declined in previous years) rose by 7% from 2,467 in 2003 to 2,637 in 2004 - a rate almost twice as high as either victims or incidents.
The ongoing move away from fewer and fewer perpetrators involved in anti-LGBT incidents is perhaps one of the most distressing findings of this report. It signals a truly retrograde environment in which years of progress resulting in fewer people willing to violently act out anti-LGBT bias has been substantially reversed. With respect to hate related violence, we are in fact "back to the future."
This is depressing news, but this trend was not unexpected or suprising.
And before you let your regional biases show, let me tell you that these trends hold true in places like Chicago, Colorado, Columbus, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, and San Francisco.
There were a few places showing decreases: Cleveland, New York, and Pennsylvania. I'm glad to see that Pennsylvania's numbers are waning. They were known to be a hotbed of intolerance in the 90s, sprouting KKK rallies like ragweed and crabgrass.
Tolerance.org has a cool story
about how two Pennsylvania towns dealt with the growth of hate groups in their area.
We have to continue to struggle against hate crimes in every possible venue. With the hate speech spewing forth from the pulpits, publications, and Web pages of the religious supremacists who are determined to contort this country into a christian theocracy, it's no wonder that hate crimes against LGBT folks are on the rise.
I'm only beginning to understand a tiny bit of what black people have put up with all their lives. Oh, I understood it on a local scale. It's the entire nation seemingly foaming at the mouth that is so new.
Breathe deeply, my progressive friends. You will need all the energy you can muster for the next round of volleys against the gentle angry people they call "queer".
posted 1:37 am at Tennessee Guerilla Women
Microsoft reneged today on promised support of an LGBT rights bill in Washington state.
Imaginary dana posted a link to an article in
Stranger that charts the move away from the gay rights bill under consideration by the Washington legislature.
DED space
noted the turncoat Microsoft betrayal of the LGBT community as well.
Word has it that Mr. Gates' company gave in to pressures by the wingnuts (who else?) headed up by pastor Ken Hutcherson of Antioch Bible Church in Redmond, Washington. It appears that Hutcherson's February meeting with some higher-ups at Microsoft during which time he threatened a boycott of all Microsoft products by the religious supremacists who are trying to reshape our country into the Fourth Reich.
Imaginary dana reminds us that this fellow is one and the same guy who organized the fiasco otherwise known as
Mayday for Marriage last October.
She also provided a nice link to a
Seattle Post Intelligencer article that sheds light on the tidy little $20,000/month fee Microsoft has paid to your friend and mine, none other than Mr. Christian Coalition himself - Ralph Reed. To be technically correct, they are paying Reed's company,
Century Strategies.
The article goes on to credit
Americablog with originally breaking the story. Their story provides links to the invoices that are apparently verifiable. In fact, it looks like old Billie Gates retained Ralphie and the CenStats 'way back
before the 2004 election.
It all gets curiouser and curioser, Alice.
posted 1:03 am at Tennessee Guerilla Women
The spectacle of religious supremacist zealotry that the Wingnuts dubbed "Justice Sunday" is nothing more than a display of their intolerance for anything left of Billy Graham.
Faith and Policy Blog notes that the People for the American Way (PFAW) has revived a 25-year-old television ad giving voice to opposition of the religious supremacists' view that all of Busch's judicial nominees should
posted 1:50 am at Tennessee Guerilla Women
TruthOut has an article by Marjorie Cohn, one of their contributing editors, who is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, executive vice president of the National Lawyers Guild, and the US representative to the executive committee of the American Association of Jurists.
In "Right to Choice under Nuclear Attack," Cohn outlines the herstory of choice in Amerika and with sparkling clarity shows how the religious supremacists are attempting to ransack our government, destroy our Constitution, and lay in place the groundwork for the Fourth Reich headed by none other than Herr Busch.
The stakes are high. I can attest to that. My Mother gave her life for my right to choose the size of my family. She gave her life by taking me to New York City on November 21, 1971. We went to New York because it was much closer than California. Those were the only two states in the U.S. in which a legal abortion could be obtained at that time.
One day later, she was shot and killed in a dental office owned by her husband in a small town in East Tennessee. It's that same small town I referenced a few entries back in the interview with Esther Kaplan. It is a hotbed of Southern Baptist extremism, their denials of such notwithstanding.
She was killed as her dentist husband lost his temper as he had so many times over the course of their 13 year marriage. She was killed because he was angry.
"His women don't get abortions." Those words will ring in my ears until the day I die. They were among the last words my Mother heard as her lifeblood ebbed away on that Fall day two years before my right, our right to have contol over our bodies became law in the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973.
As Frist the Terrible of Tennessee readies his nuclear arsenal, he aims directly at women. Make no mistake about it, this battle is for our very lives.
posted 1:30 am at Tennessee Guerilla Women
I see that Hillary and Rosa are working for a
living wage for women What a radical notion! I feel grateful for that today.
From the article on the Feminist.org Web site:
The Paycheck Fairness Act aims to empower women to negotiate for equal pay, as well as strengthen enforcement of Equal Pay laws, according to Sen. Clinton’s office. The legislation would reinstate the Clinton Administration’s Equal Pay Matters Initiative and demand the continued collection of data on women workers, despite the Bush Administration’s efforts to cease this practice.
“According to the National Committee on Pay Equity, working women stand to lose $250,000 over the course of their career because of unequal pay practices,” according to a recent statement from Rep. DeLauro.
I am grateful that someone in our government noticed that women are working harder for less. And as fuel prices soar, all consumer goods are costing more. We are in an upward spiral that is disastrous for those of us with limited incomes.
Surfing around a bit, I
found a thoughtful article on the Womens eNews site regarding the situation in Iraq's new government in which women elected to the new government represent the patriarchal regions of their origin and have no interest in women's rights - a situation that is frustrating to advocates in the area. Particularly troubling is the lack of protection from domestic violence and other basic needs.
Meanwhile back at the ranch, W made his appearance in East Tennessee today, but it was
not in the mountainous region where my ancestors lived as had been planned. I am a direct descendent of Martha Huskey who along with her sons founded a little place called White Oak Flats. Today they call it Gatlinburg, Tennessee. It is the commercial gateway to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Fortunately the Mother Goddess let loose with a tremendous thunderstorm, preventing W from exploiting the park for his evil plan to further pollute Her air and water.
He showed up at the McGee-Tyson Airport to promote a
disastrous environmental package that makes any self-respecting Green cringe and have nightmares. Of course, he has a
long record of bad environmental policy. This is just more of the same.
Then he had to hurry back to Texas in order to rest up for his visitor on Monday. He's expecting the Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. Won't the boys just have fun! They can talk over old times and plan for their futures.
posted 9:05 pm at Tennessee Guerilla Women
A
Citizens for Legitimate Government link connected me with a
Newsday article that sheds light on an interesting if somewhat puzzling connection between Joseph Ratzinger, recently renamed Pope Benedict XVI and Neil Bush, W's younger brother.
The article describes the supposedly nonprofit ecumenical organization as:
The Foundation for Interreligious and Intercultural Research and Dialogue was founded in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1999 to promote ecumenical understanding and publish original religious texts, said a foundation official.
While the article does not give any clear reason for Bush's involvement,
it does say that the organization is listed by Dun & Bradstreet business credit reports as a "management trust for purposes other than education, religion, charity or research."
Hmmm....
posted 2:45 pm at Tennessee Guerilla Women
Most of the time I think of myself as a citizen of Earth. Occasionally I reflect on the fact that I live in the Western Hemisphere in North America in the United States. I frequently think of myself as residing in the Southeastern U.S. in the state of Tennessee. To be more accurate, I live in central East Tennessee.
Almost everyday I identify as Appalachian. Culturally, genetically, and, last of
posted 3:43 pm at Tennessee Guerilla Women