Louisiana Representative Anh (Joseph) Cao was the only Republican to vote for the health care bill:

“I have a constitutional duty to make the right decision for my district whether or not the decision was popular. I had to make a decision of conscience based on the needs of the people of my district. A lot of my constituents are uninsured, a lot of them are poor.”

NYT:Louisiana Republican Breaks Ranks on Health Bill

LA Times: Cantor: No retaliation planned against Cao, only Republican to vote for health care bill

CNN: Update: Lone GOP vote came after call from President Obama

Think Progress: GOP Threatens Retribution Against Cao For Health Care Vote

The Washington Independent: The War on Joseph Cao

Fox News: White House Spent ‘Weeks’ Courting Lone GOP Vote on Health Care Bill

Washington Post: A vote to make or break a career
Lone House Republican backed health bill after abortion was limited

Politico: Shenanigans: Get to Know Rep. Anh ‘Joseph’ Cao

Michelle Malkin: What GOP Rep. Joseph Cao got from Obama

TPM: Cao To Steele: Come And Get Me — Just Remember You Need My District

“The rich, giving part of their enormous earnings [to create universities], became known as philanthropists. These educational institutions did not encourage dissent; they trained the middlemen in the American system—the teachers, doctors, lawyers, administrators, engineers, technicians, politicians—those who would be paid to keep the system going, to be loyal buffers against trouble.”

-Howard Zinn
A People’s History of the United States

“Just a reminder that the year is 2009, and white people talking to black people is still a controversial issue in the Republican party.”

-Wonkette

Did you know that there is a “backlash that glorifies obesity” and that “people celebrate clinical obesity”?

I didn’t, but apparently it’s all the rage with the kids these days according to The Root. The Root, a normally good blog, took the opportunity to bash actress Gabourey Sidibe (star of Precious) for her obesity, because they kindly hope she can “get a handle on [her] health”.

Us Weekly, I would expect. But from The Root?

In an article titled ‘Precious’ and the Pushback and subtitled “Congrats on the role of a lifetime, Gabourey Sidibe. Self-esteem is a beautiful thing. But we should celebrate your performance, not your size. Obesity is a national epidemic.” writer Alicia Villarosa is very concerned that if we don’t repeatedly and publicly censure Sidibe for her weight, everyone in the country will want to be fat like her. Because, you see, it’s a total secret that obesity is bad for one’s health, and society doesn’t already make life miserable for the obese, and if Villarosa and all other Precious viewers don’t speak out now, everyone’s going to mistakenly think you can be fat and happy and successful.

Villarosa goes so far as to berate anyone who would look at her as a role model or who would make a positive comment about her body.

Yes, Sidibe is a promising performer, one who’s already generating Oscar buzz. So if we just stick to her acting, kudos. But if we’re talking about her size—which has become part of the conversation—are people delusional? A five-foot-something woman tipping the scales at over 300 pounds is not something to celebrate. That’s SUPER fat, and no matter how passionately you argue the opposite, medical science will pull the plug on that position: Your health will suffer from carrying such an extreme amount of weight.

Then she plies us with helpful health advice that no one could have possibly thought of themselves.

So the message is to be the healthiest you. That means not hauling around a mountain of excess of weight that limits activities and invites health problems. Nor does it mean starving yourself or over-exercising to the brink of cardiovascular failure. It’s about being comfortable in your own skin and loving yourself, but always striving to be better. If you’re overweight, say yes to dropping some pounds, but do so with an emphasis on obtaining better health.

DEAR FAT PEOPLE: ALWAYS BE TRYING TO LOSE WEIGHT. ALWAYS. DO NOT HAVE A CAREER. DO NOT BE SUCCESSFUL. AND DO NOT, DO NOT PASS GO. Also, please stay out of public view, because as soon as someone sees you there’s going to be an OBESITY CRAZE!

cease to resist, giving my goodbye
drive my car into the ocean
you’ll think i’m dead, but i sail away
on a wave of obesity
a wave
wave

i’ve kissed mermaids, rode the el nino
walked the sand with the crustaceans
could find my way to mariana
on a wave of obesity,
wave of obesity
wave of obesity
wave

WAVE OF OBESITY
wave

whew… uh… so we had a little interlude there. Um, as I was saying…

Do we really need an article in the Root reminding us all to fat-shame Sidibe?

Feministe brought this article to my attention.  No fat-shaming in the comments please!  If you want to learn more about size acceptance, take a look at the Size Acceptance section of my 101 page.

Ok, here’s how it works. This is logic, Kansas-style.

The gheyz, you see, want to pass a hate-crime law that defines homophobic crimes as hate crimes. But everyone knows that gheyz ought to get beat, so that doesn’t make any sense.

What could they possibly be up to?

Well, they have a master plan.

First, they pass a bill to give themselves special rights, like the right not to get beat up. Look it up, that ain’t in the Constitution.

Then, after conditioning people to accept not beating gheyz as part of a “normal” lifestyle, they pounce on a lulled and unsuspecting citizenry and force marriage equality on God-fearing Christians and restrict the personal freedoms of straight people everywhere by being equal to them.

It looks kind of like this:

1 (Can’t beat gays no more)
+2 (???)
= 3 (Gays get married/Christians have no rights)

If that’s still confusing for you, please refer to the sage words of Kansas State Rep Lance Kinzer: “I could see a court using this as background for a type of argument advancing same-sex marriage.”

Hmmm, point 2 is still a tad unclear, but what IS clear is that gheyz are nefarious, dastardly, out to get your children, and not to be trusted. That they hate America almost goes without saying, but I will allow for the possibility that Mary Cheney loves her country. So we can chalk 2 up to fairy nancy rainbow trickery, knowledge of which probably leads to involuntary gayness alone. Speak Of the Gheyness, And Gheyness Shall Appear.

The ever-entertaining Kansas Liberty website has more.

Phillip Morris at the Cleveland Plain Dealer has written a very apropos column on Anthony Sowell and the eleven women he murdered.

And as the unmistakable smell of rotting human flesh enveloped the neighborhood around Sowell’s house, a community shut its eyes and held it’s nose, while Sowell kept making his run to the beverage store.

The registered sexual predator in their midst made little effort to conceal the horrors that police say he perpetrated on women, but a neighborhood — and a city — blithely ignored the parade of women walking into Sowell’s home without ever walking out.

It appears that a serial killer was able to kill with abandon and confidence in a congested neighborhood because he knew that no one would bother to come looking.

The killer knew that on his streets, a black woman can simply disappear. No questions will be asked. He arrogantly told one of his victims, who managed to escape, that no one would come looking for her because she was a “crack bitch.”

This reminds us of the vast differences between what happens when a white woman, or an owning class woman, disappears versus a black woman, or poor woman. Not only were these women murdered, but no one was even seriously looking for them after they died. Even when relatives did note their absence, authorities declined to look into the matter. What’s the worth of a drug-addicted poor black woman? It should be the worth of a human being, but we have unmistakable tiers for determining who is worthy of society’s resources and emotional investment. Our own memories serve as evidence: when we think of missing women we heard about in the news, who comes to mind? Who’s searches made the media?

Newsweek recently had a story on this exact topic. It discusses a situation in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, where ten women have been killed and several more are missing. Their profiles are strikingly similar to the women killed in Cleveland. All black. All poor. Most with a history of drugs.

“If it was someone of a different race, things would have been dealt with the first time around; it wouldn’t have taken the fifth or sixth person to be murdered,” says Andre Knight, a city-council member and president of the local NAACP chapter. “All these women knew each other and lived in the same neighborhood; this is the sign of a potential serial killer. When it didn’t get the kind of attention it needed, it made the African-American community frustrated.”

In Rocky Mount, the police only recently warmed to the thought of a serial killer, perhaps because a killer hasn’t been handed to them on a silver platter as Anthony Sowell was (though there is a local sex offender who was charged with one of the murders in October). Work hours and community resources would have to be expended to determine the existence of a serial killer and locate hir. Not worth it if the killer only strikes poor black victims. The community of Rocky Mount had better hold onto their resources for something more important. Sports stadium, anyone?

Sowell was, unfortunately, quite smart, and knew things like this. He struck upon a ‘winning’ formula, which probably also stroked his ego for its boldness, its audacity. He preyed on women whom he knew society valued little. He didn’t even bother to hide his deeds. He killed women and in some cases just left the bodies where they lay, allowing the stink of his murders oppress the entire neighborhood. Everyone knew something or someone had died. And collectively, they accepted it with few questions. He knew they could smell it. When they did nothing, surely he felt that the neighborhood was complicit.

This case is really a story about complicity. Anthony Sowell did the raping and murdering. But so many others made it possible for him to do so. Don’t they deserve any credit for their work? The prison system, the police system, our “war on drugs”, drug dealers, the community, the city leaders, the economic system, institutional racism?

The number of people complicit in these rapes and murders of black women is staggering.

UPDATE: Someone who agrees with me:Cleveland, You Know You F&@ked Up, Right?

I hope I get a chance to catch this very interesting exhibit at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. It’s called “IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas” and it looks into the lives of Americans who have both African and indigenous ancestry. Apparently, up to 60% of African Americans may have some indigenous ancestry.

From an article in Indian Country Today:

The exhibition takes the long view of history, traveling in a few short panels that illustrate the 1600s, when intermarriage and slavery brought Native peoples and African slaves together, to present-day families for whom this dual identity is indivisible.

…
Ideas about the identities of mixed-heritage people grow out of colonial policies, which viewed black and Native people as dangerous.

“In colonial Mexico (the word) lobo, the wolf is the blend of Indian and black,” Tayac said. “The combination was thought to be dangerous, that you could have two colonized and enslaved people, if they come together it could be dangerous. How much did we absorb those ideas?”

This mixed heritage comes from times when Indians and Blacks were enslaved side-by-side, or when enslaved Blacks were able to escape white communities and chose to join Indian communities. Also, some Indians owned black slaves and subsequent intermarriage took place.

Whites were much more comfortable with Indians owning slaves than working alongside of, intermarrying, or welcoming blacks into their communities. If these two oppressed peoples could come together, why, it could threaten white hegemony!

More information on this topic here.

Hallelujah! Of course it was money that finally convinced the racist City Council in this Louisiana Parish and not a sense of justice, but whatever. The result is that St. Bernard Parish will not hold a referendum to try banning multi-family (read: affordable) dwellings. This ban would naturally have targeted, SURPRISE! blacks and poor people of whichever race.

From the Times-Picayune:

After pressure from federal housing officials and a pending lawsuit in federal court, the St. Bernard Parish Council on Tuesday officially rescinded an item on this month’s special election ballot that would have given voters the chance to permanently ban large apartment complexes in the parish.

The move came on advice from the parish’s lawyers, who last month told the council that they believed the potential apartment ban would jeopardize federal financing for recovery projects and hurt the parish’s appeals of its ongoing fair housing lawsuit.

There is a lot of backstory to this, which you can discover by reading my previous posts on this topic: I, II, III, IV, and V.

Dallas artists create an action in support of universal health care!

PAC -WE 2009 – The Beginning from Cindy Chaffin on Vimeo.

Rob Long, at the Wall Street Journal, is concerned that the world may no longer be able to protect itself from terrorist transvestites.

His hilarious fear stems from a UN report notable for its nuance and sensitivity towards people who find themselves marginalized due to their gender expression.

Martin Scheinin, UN Special Rapporteur, wrote a report for the UN General Assembly titled “Protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism”.

In it, he makes ‘controversial’ statements like:

Gender is not synonymous with women but rather encompasses the social constructions that underlie how women’s and men’s roles, functions and responsibilities, including in relation to sexual orientation and gender identity, are defined and understood. This report will therefore identify the gendered impact of counter-terrorism measures both on women and men, as well as the rights of persons of diverse sexual orientations and gender identities. As a social construct, gender is also informed by, and intersects with, various other means by which roles, functions and responsibilities are perceived and practiced, such as race, ethnicity, culture, religion and class. Consequently, gender is not static; it is changeable over time and across contexts. Understanding gender as a social and shifting construct rather than as a biological and fixed category is important because it helps to identify the complex and inter-related gender-based human rights violations caused by counterterrorism measures; to understand the underlying causes of these violations; and to design strategies for countering terrorism that are truly non-discriminatory and inclusive of all actors.

And

These abuses on the basis of gender are amplified through war rhetoric (such as with the “war on terror”) and increased militarization in countering terrorism. It is well documented that utilizing conflict or war rhetoric serves to stereotype, marginalize and profile those who challenge or fall outside the boundaries of predetermined gender roles, including women’s human rights defenders. In addition, the privileging of a militarized response to terrorism has meant that funds to combat terrorism have been diverted from addressing the socio-economic conditions that may be conducive to terrorism, such as those involving gender inequalities.

And

The breadth of Governments’ counter-terrorism measures have resulted in significant gender-based human rights violations. In many instances, Governments have used vague and broad definitions of “terrorism” to punish those who do not conform to traditional gender roles and to suppress social movements that seek gender equality in the protection of human rights. For example, Governments have alleged terrorism links to justify the arrest and persecution of “suspected ‘homosexuals’” and regularly accuse women’s human rights defenders of being members of terrorist groups.

Now he’s really on a roll…

It is of special concern to the Special Rapporteur that some Governments have used gender inequality to counter terrorism, employing the rights of women and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex individuals as a bartering tool to appease terrorist or extremist groups in ways that have furthered unequal gender relations and subjected such persons to increased violence. For instance, the Government of Somalia reportedly failed to enact measures enhancing women’s rights for fear that it would alienate conservative forces. Similarly, in February 2009, following the Pakistani army’s failure to defeat an 18-month Talibani insurgency in the Swat Valley, Pakistan signed a peace accord with the militants agreeing to implement the Taliban’s version of Islamic law in exchange for peace.

And here’s where he just gets crazy with all this human rights talk:

Counter-terrorism measures disproportionately affect women and transgender asylum-seekers, refugees and immigrants in specific ways. For example, enhanced immigration controls that focus attention on male bombers who may be dressing as females to avoid scrutiny make transgender persons susceptible to increased harassment and suspicion. Similarly, counter-terrorism measures that involve increased travel document security, such as stricter procedures for issuing, changing and verifying identity documents, risk unduly penalizing transgender persons whose personal appearance and data are subject to change. This jeopardizes the right of persons of diverse sexual orientations and gender identities to recognition before the law. In this regard, the Yogyakarta Principles on the application of international human rights law in relation to sexual orientation and gender identity identify that States must “ensure that procedures exist whereby all State-issued identity papers which indicate a person’s gender/sex … reflect the person’s profound self-defined gender identity”.

Fox News can’t refrain from piling it on, finding the following conclusions of the report objectionable:

Among [Scheinen's] proposals:

• “Repeal all counter-terrorism measures” that sanction the ill-treatment of women and children as a way to put pressure on terror suspects within their families.

• Loosen terror financing laws to ensure “safe and effective channels for funding … of organizations devoted to gender equality”

• “Repeal restrictive immigration controls” that violate human rights by “unduly penalizing transgender persons whose personal appearance and data are subject to change” as their “self-defined gender identity” changes.

Critics say the suggestions are part of an “absolutely insane” agenda at the U.N. that too often seems intent on undermining efforts to blot out terrorism across the globe.

“I would be surprised and disturbed if the U.S. took any of these recommendations seriously,” said Steven Groves, a fellow and international law expert at the Heritage Foundation.

Mr. Long, describing the annoyance of airport security, mockingly writes:

And of course your first thought is: “I know all of these security measures are hard for me, but they’re probably worse for the transgendered.”

He writes this because he assumes it’s obviously ridiculous to consider the needs of trans people. Mr. Groves at Fox says that it would be disturbing if anyone took discrimination against women or LGBT individuals seriously. He says unnamed critics find equal treatment and protection “absolutely insane”.

These men are not alone in these sentiments, nor in feeling free to publicly mock mistreatment of women and queers, so long as it’s in the name of counter-terrorism. There are dozens of male bloggers out there who join with them in the derision parade, as a few quick google blog searches reveal.

What sickening sentiment. Straight white men, who will never suffer gender or sexual orientation discrimination, are disparaging equal protection of the marginalized and think they can get away with it by shouting equality = TERRORISM THREAT!!!!

It’s a cover. These men are simply using TERRORISM!!! as an excuse to publicly exhibit their misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia. If they are this shameless, I don’t understand why they need an excuse. I guess they are worried that their naked chauvinism would normally make their opinions seem less credible to others, but that certain situations provide a safe opportunity to sneak it in.

How convenient that they find so necessary counter-terrorism methods that just so happen to have disparately negative effects on women and queers. They find such a strong voice to defend this sort of unequal treatment. Why is it the conserarati are so thrilled to give up basic rights and freedoms in the name of FIGHTING FOR FREEDOM AGAINST THE TERRORISTS!!!!! ?

Kitty cats and records.

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