Uppity Women Unite!!

Last night on All In with Chris Hayes, who was home cuddling his brand new son, it was Ari Melber who was All In, which is OK under the circumstances, considering that I also like his style.

The subject under discussion was the $1 million report, paid for by New Jersey tax payers, that exonerated Chris Christie, and blamed Christie’s Deputy Chief of Staff, Bridget Anne Kelly, for the mess because she was emotionally upset over having been dumped by Bill Stapien, Christie’s campaign manager and longtime friend.  Nothing in the report mentioned Bill Stapien’s emotional condition.  I have long called this bridge scandal the “Ongoing Saga of Trenton Place”, even though the George Washington Bridge is nowhere near Trenton, NJ.  This scandal is better than Peyton Place ever was.  I believe that there was some reference to the Mayor of Hoboken, NJ, Dawn Zimmmer, as being somewhat emotionally fragile.  So far I haven’t heard anything about the Mayor of Fort Lee, Mark Sokolich, being emotionally unstable. 

But then take a look at the chief attorney, Randy Mastro, an older white male who had to come up with something to try to exonerate Christie, who from a casual observer across the nation, appears to be, in my opinion, not truthful at all times.  So who can Mastro pin this whole thing on?  Why the attractive, young female Chief of Staff, and the intense young Dawn Zimmer. Does anyone around here detect a bit of sexism?  But a Professor Butler, former federal prosecutor, on All In last night came right out and called it sexism from the 1950’s.  Really?  What would we expect from Mastro?  Someone who would write whatever he was told to write if offered a million dollars to do so?  Integrity?  (I hope my sarcasm is coming through here.) 

But if Mastro is a buddy of one of the leading lights of the current Republican party, which is like night and day from the Republican Party of the 1950’s to 1979, when Ronald Reagan was elected, he is not above denigrating young women (or old ones either) in order to try to get his buddy out of trouble.  She may be guilty as hell of something, but it will be because she made a conscious choice to act in a manner that causes her to be guilty.  Not because she was emotionally upset over a broken date!   

Which brings me to the fact that in Texas over 60 women’s health clinics have closed either because they provided abortions, or it was feared that they might.  But along with the provision of abortions, poor women also lost basic screenings for other reproductive health issues such as pap smears, mammograms, screenings for STDs, and basic reproductive health education, including birth control.  

And we have the case of the little girl who can no longer attend a “Christian” school in Lynchburg, VA, whose great-grandparents have adopted her, because she has short hair, wears jeans and t shirts, likes to collect hunting knives and shoots a BB gun.  This is a paragraph from the AP article, “School says girl is too boyish”.  “The principal sent a letter home last month that her tomboy appearance does not follow the school's religious affiliation and that it goes against a "biblical lifestyle."”   In my reading of the Bible, I don’t believe that I ever read that jeans and a T-shirt were not appropriate clothing for a girl!  Further, jeans and a shirt (no T-shirts when I was a girl) were my favorite things to wear.  I had to wear skirts or dresses to school, and I hated them with a passion.  I still do, and although I do have one for summer and one for winter, never wear either.  I learned to shoot a .22 rifle with a great deal of accuracy, still enjoy target practicing with my pellet rifle, have been married to the same man for nearly 61 years now, have four daughters, two granddaughters, and four great-grandchildren.  What in the name of all that’s holy does what a second grade girl wear or do have to do with Christianity? 

The connection between these three points?  It is a total and complete denigration of women as fully functioning human beings, capable of making rational decisions at the worst of times, just as men are capable of doing.  Too many men think women can’t make decisions regarding their reproductive health because they are emotionally unstable, so we big, rational men must make these decisions for them.  And, hey, what the heck, if we get in trouble, we can blame it on the closest woman.  Except we have to start training them at a very early age to accept the blame!! 

Fortunately not all older white males, or young ones either, have this mindset.  We are making progress.  But when one is on the receiving end of this way of thinking, after so many millennia it really gets old!!  An old 1960’s slogan comes to mind.  “Uppity women unite!!”  If women all over the world could unite, not to dominate or take over, but simply walk equally, side by side, with men in all aspects of life, including wearing jeans and a T-shirt, think what we, all of us, could accomplish. 

 

C-Span and New Times

This blog is late this week because life got in the way.  But, a good time was had by all in the meantime!  One of the life events was attending a fundraiser for our local Congresswoman Lois Capps.  I particularly wanted to attend to thank her for always voting the way I would have, so that when the call comes out to contact “your member of Congress”, I don’t have to!  Saves me a lot of time. 

On my way down to the fundraiser I had stopped to pick up something at our local pharmacy, and picked up our local freebie newspaper, New Times.  Usually nothing really upsets me in New Times since we generally share the same political views, but since I was way early to the fundraiser, I took the time to read some of the paper.  And there, right in front of God and anybody who read the paper was the statement, “Asked about her reasons for running, especially on a historically left-wing issue like climate change in a Republican district against a Republican incumbent…”  Wow!!  I found this statement and the one below cut from the same cloth, however, and believe it or not, I can tie them back to Ronald Reagan and his infamous statement, “Facts are stupid things”. 

At the fundraiser I visited with someone I don’t often see anymore, Charlotte Alexander.  In our conversation I mentioned that the program of her husband, Dave Congalton, talk show host, that I remember the most was one, years ago when I was on my way home, after dark, and driving on a rather lonely stretch of the highway.  (For locals, north of Cayucos.)  All I remember of the program was the caller from quite a ways south of where I live who commented, “That program, C-Span, is the most liberal program on TV”.  Since at the time I was trying desperately not to run off the road because of my shock at such a remark, I couldn’t tell her what Dave’s response was.  Charlotte and I had a nice chat, and we both moved on to other people. 

I’m not sure when a disbelief in facts and science became so ingrained in our thinking, that someone cannot understand that C-Span merely televises and records what is actually happening in our governments at both the state and federal levels.  C-Span is completely factual when it is recording what is being said and done in our halls of government.  It is not liberal and it is not conservative, it simply is.  A fact.  A stupid thing, perhaps, but still a fact.

Climate change is supported by about 95% of all professional and reputable scientists.  It is a fact.  It is neither liberal nor conservative.  It is a fact.  One can argue over the best ways to combat climate change, but one cannot attribute it to any political ideology.  That is a negation of what can be proven scientifically.  In science, one collects data (the kind generally is determined by the field of interest one is involved in), examines the data, and presents a paper on what data was collected, how it was examined, and how the hypothesis presented in the paper was achieved.  This is a long and complicated process, and one I have lived with now for some 60 years.  The hypothesis presented in the paper that has been derived from the data, and how the data was analyzed must be able to be replicated by other scientists, or it is not valid.  Climate change has gone through that complicated system so many times, and has been confirmed to be a fact.

And I apologize to all of the scientists out there who have had their laborious work simplified to the point of absurdity by the above paragraph, but then, I am not a scientist.  But what I am is someone who understands that there are many things, seen and unseen, that are true as well.  But belief in these things, seen and unseen, need to have a rational and logical base to them or that belief will lead one to eventually disbelieve facts.  And, by definition, “a true fact” is a stupid remark, since a fact, by definition, is true.

 

Stuff, Big Mo and Rain

What to write about this week?  The horribly stupid law in Michigan requiring women to have insurance before they can get medical treatment after being raped?  Or the closing of women’s health centers in Texas that diagnose and treat women for ovarian cancer, mammograms, STD’s obtained from less than careful partners, etc., all because they also provide women with abortions without caring one whit about why a woman might need an abortion?   

No.  Too much.  That along with the loss of 227 people in an airplane that is somewhere, and one doesn’t know what the definition of ‘loss’ is.  Does it mean the people simply are lost somewhere, or does lost in this sense mean dead?  (I will never forget the night a good friend called to tell me they had lost her husband.  The wrong definition of ‘lost’ popped into my head, but thanks to something or someone, I kept my mouth shut until I knew which definition she was using.)  Or I could write about the really tense situation in Crimea and the Ukraine, except I know so little about what is actually going on, although that doesn’t seem to bother some right-wing pundits.  Or I could write about how really disgusting the right-wing politicians are who are bad-mouthing President Obama while he is in some really tense conversations with Putin, who hasn’t a clue about civil rights like free speech.   

So, in an effort to not write about all of that I will instead relate the experiences with our over-sized house cat, Big Mo.  When we got Big Mo he weighed only 8 ounces.  He now weighs in at about 20 pounds.  I have described him before, how he has a passion for scones from Costco, and how he tried to get inside my bathrobe one night because I had dropped a crumb there while eating some scones while reading in bed.  Ever try to extract an intent 20 pound house cat from going where he really wants to go? 

The problem with Big Mo now is that he is in seventh cat heaven now that Spring (albeit a very dry one here on the central coast of California – the driest of the drought areas) is here, the weather is a tad warmer, and the mice are out!!  And of course Mo believes that the appropriate place to play with them is in the house.  Since this habit of his is of long duration, we have gotten some “Rat Zappers”, which are little things that have batteries, and when a mouse is enticed into one, they are electrocuted.  More humane than the old fashioned ones, for sure.  Of course, Bill has a new toilet plunger with a bell shape, so he tries to entice the mouse into that first, flips it up, and goes outside and gives the mouse the ride of its life as he throws the plunger into the air on a trajectory that will eject the mouse in transit.  But back to the zappers.  We tried all sorts of things in them that we thought mice would like to nibble on, but mostly to no avail.  Then, one day we stopped on our way home and bought some fish and fries to go at one of the local restaurants.  Out of desperation, Bill popped one in the zapper and, voila, within hours, there was the zapped mouse.  I’m not sure if any French fry would work, or if only the ones from this particular place, but we don’t necessarily want to embarrass them by advertising that their fries are perfect bait for mice.  Although they are also tasty for humans.   

Mo brings in so many mice we have started naming them by location.  The chair mouse.  The pantry mouse.  The closet mouse.  Now that one was a real problem in that when one took a pair of shoes out, it required some care not to either put the shoe on with a mouse in it, or dump the mouse back out into the closet.  But at this point in time, thanks to the zapper and the fries, we have gotten them all.  This we know because of Mo’s actions.  If there is one around, he, of course, makes every effort to get it.  If he is sleeping, we know we are mouse-free. 

We really want Mo to catch mice, since that is basically what we have him for.  By keeping the rodent population near the house thinned out, he eliminates one food source for snakes.  Particularly rattle snakes.  We haven’t seen one close to the house for some time now.  Which is good, believe me.

We understand that it might rain in this next week or so.  Probably not too much, but it will keep Big Mo inside, which is a nice side effect.  Our desperate need for rain reminds me of the verse from St. Francis’, “Canticle of the Sun”. 

“We praise, You, Lord, for Sister Water,

            So useful, humble, precious and pure.”

 

WWII, Taxes and Greed

When WWII ended, millions of veterans returned to the States.  A grateful nation, and a united Congress, passed what was popularly called the G.I. Bill, which included but was not limited to, the necessary funding for a veteran to finish their education through to a PhD, if they so desired, or a low interest loan to purchase a home.  There were more than enough tax dollars to care for the veterans who required medical treatment and/or rehabilitation.  These men and women knew what they had fought for, and what they wanted in life.  Primarily it was an education and a chance to work hard and achieve more than their parents had been able to, and to provide for the families they wanted.  My brother was a part of that, as were several cousins and friends.  I was just a couple of years behind them. 

The income tax rate in 1950 was progressive from 10% if a couple made $4,000.00 a year (a whole lot of money in those days, by the way), up to 91% if a couple made over $400,000.00.  There were plenty of tax dollars for a new highway system (which we are still using), a fabulous public education system, with enough funding for the arts and humanities education.  A postal system par excellence, and enough tax dollars to take on the job of bringing electricity to rural areas through the Rural Electrification Act.  That is when electricity came up our canyon.  Before that, we used oil lamps, and about 4:00 PM my grandfather would build a wood fire in the furnace so there would be enough hot water for dinner, clean-up, and baths.  There was enough funding for a library system, because people recognized that education at all levels for everyone, was vital.  At least for white people.  Sadly some states did not concur, and probably still don’t.  It was not a halcyon time for everyone, white or not.  There was a lot of prejudice, and I remember learning in school, much to my Dad’s horror, that we had to “tolerate Negroes, Catholics and Jews”.  He was WASP to the core.  

The children of these post WWII veterans are now in their 50 and 60’s, and their children are in their late 30’s and 40’s, and some of them are in Congress.  Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Kevin McCarthy.  The list can go on.  They are the direct recipients of much of this largesse from a rightfully grateful nation.  What schools did they go to?  Private or public?  Whose highways did they drive on to get there?  What libraries did they have access to?   If their house caught on fire, what fire department responded?  If a burglary, what law enforcement agency did they call?  The list goes on, and on, and on.  We all had jobs if we wanted, unemployment was low, our nation was the strongest in the world. 

And then came Ronald Reagan.  And the “job creator” crap.  And the mythical “welfare queens”.  (I was a social worker, and I never saw one.)  It was Morning in America, all right, but only for a very few.  Taking care of God’s green earth with environmental concern became a part of the mantra of “those libruls” taking away our rights – for example, the right to pollute the Hudson River to the point it caught on fire.   

We hear from the radical Republican right that all of these programs sap the will out of people to work, that they make people lazy, etc., etc.  Therefore we have to balance the budget by cutting Social Security, Medicare, and food stamps, among other programs.  They ignore the fact that Social Security has its own funding source, to wit., the people that pay into it, along with Medicare, and that it is pretty difficult for people over 65 to find jobs to exercise their work ethic, and it is really difficult for children to go out and get a job while they should be in school.  But then, considering the billions of dollars that have been cut out of educational funding in Republican states, perhaps the Republicans next move will be to repeal the laws protecting children from having to work.  What a source of cheap labor that will be for them.   

Instead of these programs making people lazy and not wanting to work, it seems to have made some of the children of this largesse selfish and greedy.

Rain, AZ, Chris Christie, and the Keystone XL Pipeline

So, with everything that is going on everywhere it is difficult to know just what to write about.  Of course, one of the nicer and better things to write about is that it is RAINING!  This won’t stop the drought, but I do believe the grass grew at least an inch while the sun was shining yesterday.  The hills are finally green, a little bit, anyway.   

We can be glad that Arizona finally got its act together, or at least Gov. Brewer did.  It would have been much better had she vetoed the “religious freedom act”, which it wasn’t, on the grounds that it violated people’s civil rights rather than it would cost the state financially.  But at this point, almost any reason will do.  I maintained that the law, if passed, would violate my religious freedom as well as my civil right to associate with anyone with whom I was pleased to associate.  It would violate my religious freedom since my religious beliefs make me not want to associate with those who blatantly discriminate.  Or, unblatantly discriminate, for that matter.  Since we have family living in Arizona we didn’t feel we could boycott Arizona completely, but if visiting there would certainly spend as little as possible, and would only support those businesses that had signs that they were open to everyone.  But, now we only have to find the other states who are trying to pass similar laws so that we don’t go there, either. 

There is always Chris Christie to write about.  He is the gift, as they say…  On Rachel Maddow the other night, and I don’t remember if she just inferred it or came right out and said it, that New Jersey is the most corrupt state in the nation.  Which thought was not actually new to me.  If so, then think, as my husband did, that Chris Christie rose to almost the pinnacle (the Presidency) of political aspirations in the most corrupt state in the nation.  What with all of the information that comes out of New Jersey, almost hourly, it would appear that either he surrounded himself with extraordinarily stupid people, who sent multiple damaging e-mails constantly, and who drummed up a really ludicrous story about the bridge closure being a traffic study, without ever telling the local Fort Lee police about it ahead of time, and of not having a hard copy of a traffic study to hand around to people to corroborate their story, or even a thumb drive of a purloined study to exhibit, or he was directly involved.  There would have been plenty of time to take an already completed study from somewhere, and with search and replace capabilities, make it look sort of like the George Washington Bridge traffic study.  I remember one such occasion years ago when the subject of closing our General Hospital was before the Board, prior to my being elected.  This was during the floppy disc era when they only contained about 30 pages per disc.  I was reading the report when I realized that the first 30 pages were different than the rest of the report.  So I went back to the beginning and really paid attention, and, lo and behold, that is what had happened.  Even some 25 years ago it was possible to put together a boiler plate report, then as projects came in to be evaluated, with search and replace, make it applicable to the location.  Someone had goofed, and not done the search and replace on the first 30 pages.  I have never trusted hot-shot accounting firms ever since!!  But I digress.  If Christie was not directly involved, he is a complete bungling nincompoop. 

Then there was John Boehner on Ed Schultz’s program last night proclaiming about the Keystone XL pipeline, “This pipeline had been studied for over five years.  It’s time to get it built”.  As a result, I dreamt about developers and pipelines and time lines all night long.  It doesn’t make any difference how long something has been studied, for heaven’s sake, or any place else.  It depends on the quality of the work that has been done.  Whenever I used to hear that comment about an Environmental Impact Report (EIR), I knew it was flawed and would require an even more careful reading than I was used to doing.  And invariably, I would find the “fatal flaw”, which was generally hidden in a lot of unnecessary words and made-up charts.  If the writers of said reports had spent as much time doing good work as they had trying to hide the bad, something good might have come out of it. 

It is almost time to turn on my TV, hope the power doesn’t go out again, and catch up on, “The Never-ending Saga of Trenton Place.  Trenton, NJ, that is.”