Bad American

The spirit of John Blutarsky lives every weekend at the honors and scholars dorms at The Ohio State University.

Today’s Contemporary Americana!

OSU Lantern (you may need to register)

Ah, student ‘journalism!’ Here’s the headline:

Alcohol consumption low

Most students consume alcohol one time a week or less, said Student Wellness official

But you’d never know that from the article which seems to focus on the drinking exploits of an OSU student named Vince B (not his real name, of course):

Vince B.*, a senior at Ohio State, spent $100 on alcohol Sunday after bar-hopping Friday and downing bottles of wine on Saturday.

“Honestly, my habits are such that last night I got hammered drunk and I don’t remember going to Taco Bell and I threw up,” Vince said. “I would say I drink heavily three to four nights a week and drink lightly the rest and by light I mean five or six beers.”

snip

For some students, such as Vince, the limits they set are above average.

“I like to drink, I like beer a lot,” he said. “When else in my life can I do this? My lifestyle facilitates how much I drink. I have no responsibilities.”

Wow. Where do you begin here? First, the excuse that a lot of college students use to justify their drinking and drugging lifestyles in college is that this is the last time they’ll be able to ‘cut loose’ before ‘The Man’ makes them put on the goddamn suit and earn a freakin’ living.

This is alluded to here:

Vince also said his drinking is more of a phase. Blake would agree.

“Studies show that heavy drinkers in college are more likely to develop a problem, but I wouldn’t say its an indicator,” Blake said.

I call bullshit on that and so would most reputable addiction counselors. Some of these kids won’t make it out of college and those that do tend to carry their addictive drinking personalities to their jobs, their marriages and their families. But it’s so much easier to dismiss the warning signs to let the university and the local booze merchants off the hook.

I suppose it would be better if we allowed kids to have supervised drinking at home prior to college to demystify alcohol (like my father did with me) but fat chance on that. We’ll keep the lid on the kids’ consumption of demon run until they get to the unsupervised air of the state college - then all hell breaks loose and we wonder why.

Now back to the ‘lifestyle’ issue: the thing is, social trends being what they are, most of these kids can enjoy an extended adolescence well into their adulthood. And I don’t just mean the guys living in their parents’ basements designed like the USS Enterprise bridge, working at Taco Bell and playing endless hours of World of Warcraft. And I’m not just talking men either - what do you think the whole idea of women emulating the girls of “Sex and the City” is all about?

Life for many of these people is one long drawn out party.

This, of course, is about to change. And it’s going to be a hard rain that’s going to fall on the perpetual children of Ohio State and other universities around the nation. The coming economic catastrophes are going to rattle windows from Wall Street to your parent’s basement. And it’s not going to be pretty.

I suppose there will always be the bottle - alcohol can be made locally from common grains and recipes abound. While we’re no longer able to drive, work, or find endless entertainment options, the two college stand-byes will always be readily available - alcohol and sex.

What a wonderful world this will be; what a glorious time to be free. . .

Anyway, back to the story at hand: I think OSU officialdom really turns a blind eye to their own problems for the sake of PR and liability. From what my son tells me, drinking is rampant both in the college bars and the college dorms and most of the RAs and the rest of OSU officialdom either are clueless or refuse to see.

My son lives in an honors and scholars dorm on campus which simply means the kids invent more clever ways to get alcohol, drugs, weapons and all other manner of contraband through the clueless RAs. Every Friday, the suitcases full of beer get wheeled by the front desk of the dorm upstairs where thirsty students await. It happens every Friday, courtesy of the local beer store than knows how to make a good student dollar when they see it.

And yet, the amazing thing, is that most of the students stay just within the (loose) rules and just this side of flunking out. Now I’m not going to tell you my boy’s never taken a nip - he has. But never to the extent of the rest of his dorm mates. Because he knows if his grades suffer the next thing he’ll be doing is bagging groceries back at the Hy-Vee or asking someone “do you want fries with that?” And he knows we’re not kidding. Unlike a lot of OSU legacies, our money is pretty tight right now.

But parents, don’t be like the university and kid yourself - the campus is awash in booze and drugs and the university turns a blind eye to it.

After all, how many beer serving and retailing jobs would be affected by a crackdown? How many of mummy and daddy’s little darlings would be thrown out of school by such a crackdown?

Can’t have that.

So raise your glasses for Cardinal Puff and good old Brutus Buckeye and thank the beer and alcohol distributors of America for making the college experience what it has been for the last hundred years!

(PS: if you’ve wondered why my neither my son nor I have ratted out my son’s dorm mates myself, he has specifically asked me not to since he feels threatened by one of his dorm mates who has the booze, the bong and the aforementioned non firearm weapons. And no, I don’t trust housing or the OSU police to protect him before he can get assigned to another dorm - if you ask anyone who knows the campus cops, they can barely get out of their own way)

Today’s (sigh) Contemporary Americana!

And yes, this was in so-called liberal Minnesota.

Minneapolis Strib

Three small-town eighth-graders in Minnesota were suspended by their principal for not standing Thursday morning for the Pledge of Allegiance, violating a district policy that the principal now says may soon be reworded to protect free speech rights.

“My son wasn’t being defiant against America,” said Kim Dahl, mother of one of the students, Brandt, who attends Dilworth-Glyndon-Felton Junior High School in northwestern Minnesota.

Brandt told the Forum newspaper in Fargo that Thursday’s one-day in-school suspension, “was kind of dumb because I didn’t do anything wrong. It should be the people’s choice.”

Kim Dahl said the “punishment didn’t fit the crime. If they wanted to know why he didn’t stand, they should’ve made him write a paper.” She said her son has been declining to stand all school year, offered no reason for sitting and was not obligated to explain his actions.

The school’s handbook says all students are required to stand but are not required to recite the pledge. The same is true for all four schools in the district, a school official said.

“These three [students] didn’t, and they got caught,” said Mel Olson, the district’s community education director. He said he backs the punishment, “being a veteran and a United States of America citizen, absolutely.” Olson served in the Marines in Japan during the Vietnam War.

The head of the Minnesota American Civil Liberties Union said that the school’s actions against the students are unconstitutional, and his office informed the district of that today in a strongly worded letter.

“The school can’t do that; that’s illegal,” said Chuck Samuelson, the civil liberties group’s executive director. “Wow.”

“but nobody paid much attention to the law anymore” - from Gattaca.

Of course if you look at the human material commenting after the story, there are many in the Land of the Free ™ who think these kids should probably be shot:

Not necessarily illegal Edma

Just because some clown from the ACLU says its illegal, doesn’t make it illegal. The head of the ACLU doesn’t get to decide how case law is applied here and a 13 year old kid certainly doesn’t either. Besides, if they reword the rule to state that the kids are allowed to sit or stand, how will all the belly-aching liberals protest? They will have to lie down in order to break the rule, which is the position they usually take anyway.

posted by monkeydave on May 12, 08 at 1:41 pm |

7 of 14 people liked this comment.

AND THIS WAS THE “FEATURED COMMENT” IN THE STRIB WEBSITE:

Featured comment

Any word is they were or were not wearing a flag pin? I say fry the little troublemakers for not showing respect to this great country.

See, I really don’t have to make this shit up. People just flat out say things like this now. And no, I don’t know if these commenters came from the Lone Star Times.

So. Is this what we really want from our ‘youth?’

Mit unsern fahnen ist der Sieg!

Wilkommen zum Amerika!

This is another topic I’ve been meaning to write about.

This column in CommonDreams

Spurred this post in response from Siouxrose, whose posts I have always appreciated reading:

1. Siouxrose May 9th, 2008 6:13 pm

   What’s really tragic about this is that INTELLIGENT PEOPLE are often clueless. I have friends who are attorneys and heads of businesses and when I see them and we have lunch together and I start going down the checklist of WHAT’S GOING ON they think I am speaking in deluded hyperboles. The LIES have so saturated so many arteries of the MSM that people have TAKEN them to be true. Many do not have the time or inclination to seek our alternative media.

   My best female friend refuses to read the majority of commondreams articles I forward her. Others have also asked me to stop! There is an aspect to the “New Age” spirituality camp that makes existence into a merely personal matter, as if each person has the OPTION to choose their “reality,” and which perceptions they intend to focus upon. A woman I otherwise admired asked me to PLEASE NOT SPEAK of these things (newsworthy events), and for Iraq blithely dismissed the agony of its citizens as “just some karma playing out.” This idea that we are FREE to enjoy OUR lives and OWN no responsibiity to others is a dangerous extension of an advertising/PR concept that has managed to sell to the lowest common denominator: the single digit consumer. How to re-weave the WEB of humanity will become the great challenge. However, communities that have been hit by dangerous weather events often DO work together. It may take hits of this and other nature to rouse the necessary compassion to rebuild the body politic, one far more HUMANE.

There are so many points in this excellent post.

First, is the ignorance organic or willful? That’s a big question. And what Siouxtrose is dealing with here are supposedly intelligent people who are supposed to know what is going on.

I’ve been of the opinion that most people aren’t really as clueless as they seem - they know in their gut there is something very wrong. But they are scared of speaking the truth for fear of losing their jobs or friends or landing up on some no fly list.

The true kool aid drinkers - the Limbaugh listeners, we’re not considering here. They have enthusiastically drank the kool aid and they like it just fine.

I found Siouxrose’s comment about friends refusing to read articles she sends them to be revealing. This has also happened to me. In my case, the people in question have pretty much given up all hope of any positive change and just want to have a little fun before they die. The longer I live the more I can understand and sympathize with that position. It just isn’t in me to do that.

But her comment on new agers is very telling. As I have written before, many people get into new age practice and philosophy as an escape from the real world. They also believe they can tap into some kind of ‘force’ like power in which they can somehow psychically separate themselves from the real world and work on their own perfection while everything around them goes to hell.

The comment from one of Siouxrose’s friends about the situation in Iraq as “some karma that is just playing out” is sadly too common. For many people, new age philosophy (increasingly an upper class affectation) is a convenient excuse to do nothing. It is the flip side of fundamentalist Christianity, which also does nothing to save the planet because the Lord will take care of everything come Armageddon time, which is always drawing near.

And of course, the average American, as she correctly surmises, doesn’t want to know because they don’t want to have to face the truth about the nation that they pledge allegiance too. AND they don’t want to be reminded of how powerless they are or cowardly, to stand up and speak out. They wish to live in their own private bubble until they die.

It can make those of us who are aware feeling quite mad. Many other CommonDreams posters feel like alien beings walking among the remnants of the body snatchers as if they had been transported into some kind of weird science fiction movie or Twilight Zone episode.

In any case, we still have CommonDreams, other lefty sites and the Internet to communicate with each other. At some point in the future, I expect the Internet to be a lot more carefully policed than it is even now.

And when that happens I’m sure there will be many who will try to save themselves and their sanity by repeatedly typing:

This is a free country

This is a free country

This is a free country

This is

Today’s Contemporary Americana!

I had been meaning to write about this so today’s the day.

Brian Dickerson in the Freep

And if you ask Christopher Ratte and his wife how they lost custody of their 7-year-old son, the short version is that nobody in the Ratte family watches much television.

The way police and child protection workers figure it, Ratte should have known that what a Comerica Park vendor handed over when Ratte ordered a lemonade for his boy three Saturdays ago contained alcohol, and Ratte’s ignorance justified placing young Leo in foster care until his dad got up to speed on the commercial beverage industry.

Even if, in hindsight, that decision seems a bit, um, idiotic.

snip

The 47-year-old academic says he wasn’t even aware alcoholic lemonade existed when he and Leo stopped at a concession stand on the way to their seats in Section 114.

“I’d never drunk it, never purchased it, never heard of it,” Ratte of Ann Arbor told me sheepishly last week. “And it’s certainly not what I expected when I ordered a lemonade for my 7-year-old.”

But it wasn’t until the top of the ninth inning that a Comerica Park security guard noticed the bottle in young Leo’s hand.

“You know this is an alcoholic beverage?” the guard asked the professor.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Ratte replied. He asked for the bottle, but the security guard snatched it before Ratte could examine the label.

OK let’s stop there. One of the very worst problems we face in America is that most Americans lead such meaningless lives devoid of any spiritual or natural fulfillment that they cannot handle being put in positions of authority. There are millions of little Napoleons in uniform with badges and some with guns running around this country just waiting to stamp down on some poor schmuck that runs afoul of the millions of laws in this country that tie us all down.

So we have this lowlife security guard at Comerica Park who sees his big chance to nail someone and he takes it. A simian simpleton could see the dad made a mistake and let it go with a warning. But not in 2008 America. We now train authority figures to have a Gestapo-like adherence to the letter of every law and every violation must be stamped out ruthlessly.

An hour later, Ratte was being interviewed by a Detroit police officer at Children’s Hospital, where a physician at the Comerica Park clinic had dispatched Leo — by ambulance! — after a cursory exam.

Leo betrayed no symptoms of inebriation. But the physician and a police officer from the Comerica substation suggested the ER visit after the boy admitted he was feeling a little nauseated.

The Comerica cop estimated that Leo had drunk about 12 ounces of the hard lemonade, which is 5% alcohol. But an ER resident who drew Leo’s blood less than 90 minutes after he and his father were escorted from their seats detected no trace of alcohol.

“Completely normal appearing,” the resident wrote in his report, “… he is cleared to go home.”

But it would be two days before the state of Michigan allowed Ratte’s wife, U-M architecture professor Claire Zimmerman, to take their son home, and nearly a week before Ratte was permitted to move back into his own house.

And if you think nothing so ludicrous could happen to your family, maybe you should pay a little less attention to who’s getting booted from “Dancing with the Stars” and a little more to how the state agency responsible for protecting Michigan’s children is going about its work.

Yes indeed. Here we have two upper middle class white educated couple being treated like this. So imagine what would have happened if the parents were poorer, minority, or unable to use the University of Michigan’s legal department to bail them out of this mess? Yes, it can happen to you. Don’t believe me - get thee to an airport. And remember it’s to protect the children!

And you if you really think you can tear the average ‘Murkan from his/her trash TV, you’ve got another thing coming buddy.

Now I’m not a big fan of CPS in general but they’ve been taking a lot of heat for this incident. In truth, once a court order is made, CPS basically has to act like robots - they must enforce the order.

Almost everyone Chris Ratte met the night they took Leo away conceded the state was probably overreacting.

The sympathetic cop who interviewed Ratte and his son at the hospital said she was convinced what happened had been an accident, but that her supervisor was insisting the matter be referred to Child Protective Services.

And there you have it. The officer at the scene who had a real sense that this was an honest mistake and not a crime was overruled by her ’supervisor’ who, in reality, is the one who really escalated this incident out of control. Of course it’s easy if you’re sitting at a desk and you’re only real concern is covering your ass, to flop the case over to CPS. Once that happened, what happened next was probably inevitable.

And Ratte thought the two child protection workers who came to take Leo away seemed more annoyed with the police than with him. “This is so unnecessary,” one told Ratte before driving away with his son.

But there was really nothing any of them could do, they all said. They were just adhering to protocol, following orders.

And so what had begun as an outing to the ballpark ended with Leo crying himself to sleep in front of a television inside the Child Protective Services building, and Ratte and his wife standing on the sidewalk outside, wondering when they’d see their little boy again.

Again, it was a decision made at the supervisory level at CPS that compounded the idiocy made at the police department level.

Now there are a lot of letters at the end of the story defending the caseworkers and that’s understandable as far as it goes. There may be no ‘quota’ as they say, for the amount of children seized. BUT, you cannot deny that every child taken is recorded and used as a justification for the budgets of the office and the supervisors. If they don’t seize a certain number of children, perhaps the next budget go around in Lansing, they won’t get so much money. Careers and nice suburban houses are on the line here. So you know what happens.

You can read the rest of this sad and sorry case. Ratte naively believes CPS will learn from this case. They will not. There is a vested interest in seizing children under any pretext. It’s a corollary of the Iron Law of Institution - the institution will do anything necessary to preserve itself - even at the expense of its core principles.

And you know as well as I do how many clear cut cases of child abuse fall right through the cracks of many state CPS investigators. But let some dad mistakenly give a kid a hard lemonade at a ball game and the whole system swings rapidly into gear to take the kid. Seriously, what is going on here?

I liked the response to Dickerson’s column here:

Freep reader reaction

In response to Brian Dickerson’s April 28 column, “Hard lemonade, hard price; Dad’s oversight at Tigers game lands son in foster care”: What hath God wrought, here in the People’s Republic of Michigan? What’s next for Christopher Ratte? Will he be sent away to be rehabilitated? Will the Ministry of Truth seek to delete the Detroit Free Press’ reportage of this episode?

Fortunately, the Ministry of Love reunited Mr. Ratte with his family, rather than submitting him to a purge. The party must have been satisfied he had not committed a thought crime.

When one reads this story, hard on the heels of the previous day’s exposé of the flawed prosecution process for sex offenders in Oakland County, it is clear that in its zeal to protect our children, our state and local law enforcement agencies have gone completely haywire.

Unquestionably, our children are the most powerless and vulnerable of our citizenry, the least able to defend or speak for themselves. Their protection is simply paramount. Nonetheless, whither sanity, reason and justice along the way?

After the Free Press reported the structural failure of the foster care system in Michigan, it would appear that overkill is the state’s solution to that problem. It is not enough that the state ran roughshod on Mr. Ratte; his son, the very victim they sought to protect, must have been traumatized to no end. Meanwhile, how many other children who are truly in grave danger of one form or another are left unprotected by Child Protective Services?

The entire child welfare system, from state agencies to the courts to the law enforcement agencies, is overworked and underfunded. Nonetheless, knee-jerk Orwellian overreaction is not the answer. We must have a thoughtful dialogue on this issue, starting in Lansing.

Lawrence D. Hadley

Can’t add anything more to that except this:

In reality, the state assumes ownership of your children once they are born. You are merely the legal custodians under the law. If any any time, one of the minions of the state feels you are no longer a fit parent for any reason, the state can and will, with guns drawn if necessary, take your child. Yes, there are legitimate cases where kids need to be seized for their own safety - absolutely. But more and more we hear about stories like the Ratte’s. And we wonder what the real aim of all these laws are.

So be ultra-careful at all times when you’re out in public with your children. You never know who is watching - and itching - to be a good German.

Today’s Contemporary Americana!

Say kids! Grand Theft Auto IV has hit the market!

PC World

Who is mad? First MADD is!

Grand Theft Auto IV gives players the option to drive drunk after consuming digital alcohol, but the game suggests taking a cab after drinking with in-game buddies.

Nevertheless, MADD has called upon the Entertainment Software Ratings Board to reclassify Grand Theft Auto IV as an Adults Only game, effectively banning the game from sale in the U.S. since neither Sony nor Microsoft allow the sale of AO games on their respective consoles in America.

Nearly 13,500 people die in drunk driving crashes each year, with another half million injured in alcohol-related crashes, asserts MADD.

BUT I bet none of those people died after drinking “digital alcohol.” As a side note, I wonder if you drink REAL booze while playing this game, if the level of your impairment matches the level of impairment if you were actually driving a real car?

Say, don’t try this at home kiddies. Wait, maybe it’s better if you DO try this at home - but stay there. The life you save may be mine.

And, in any case, the real stuff, marketed ruthlessly to kids by Corporate America’s booze dealers, is readily available, probably right in you old man’s bar cabinet.

Drink/Play responsibly!

And now, the NYPD has a word to say about the VIOLENCE!

Regarding the game’s violence, the NYPD association president Pat Lynch told the New York Daily News on Wednesday that, “being involved in a shootout in a video game has no consequences and that is the wrong message to send to young people.”

New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg and the mother of a killed NYPD officer echoed similar sentiments in the same report, saying GTA IV “doesn’t exactly teach the kind of things that you’d want to teach your kids,” or more descriptively put, “teaches children to kill.”

Hmmm. Say, you know what else teaches kids to kill? The US ARMY! - America’s Army video game!

BUT, I’ll bet you never hear the Bloomberg and the solid citizens of the NYPD come out against THAT, eh? Because THAT kind of killing (and learning to kill) is hunky dorey - as long as brown-skinned people in foreign lands are doing the dying for oil and empire!

See, there’s killing and then there’s killing. Get it? Sure you do.

Today’s Contemporary Americana!

And now for something completely different. . .

I link to this HuffPo story on sex-starved women advisedly. It’s not the story that’s so interesting but the COMMENTS that follow it.

Here’s the story:

“. . . do you hear that sound Mr. Anderson. . . that is the sound of . . . inevitability.”

Food riots - coming here soon?

Wall Street Journal

Associated Press - UN Secy Gen’l says its an emergency

To paraphrase Charlie Daniels - didja ever think it could happen in America again? This time, no World War II as an excuse either.

As Brett Arends writes:

I don’t want to alarm anybody, but maybe it’s time for Americans to start stockpiling food.

No, this is not a drill.

Here’s the solid economic rationale:

Stocking up on food may not replace your long-term investments, but it may make a sensible home for some of your shorter-term cash. Do the math. If you keep your standby cash in a money-market fund you’ll be lucky to get a 2.5% interest rate. Even the best one-year certificate of deposit you can find is only going to pay you about 4.1%, according to Bankrate.com. And those yields are before tax.

Meanwhile the most recent government data shows food inflation for the average American household is now running at 4.5% a year.

And some prices are rising even more quickly. The latest data show cereal prices rising by more than 8% a year. Both flour and rice are up more than 13%. Milk, cheese, bananas and even peanut butter: They’re all up by more than 10%. Eggs have rocketed up 30% in a year. Ground beef prices are up 4.8% and chicken by 5.4%.

These are trends that have been in place for some time.

And if you are hoping they will pass, here’s the bad news: They may actually accelerate.

The reason? The prices of many underlying raw materials have risen much more quickly still. Wheat prices, for example, have roughly tripled in the past three years.

And the suggestions on what to buy:

You can’t easily stock up on perishables like eggs or milk. But other products will keep. Among them: Dried pasta, rice, cereals, and cans of everything from tuna fish to fruit and vegetables. The kicker: You should also save money by buying them in bulk.

If this seems a stretch, ponder this: The emerging bull market in agricultural products is following in the footsteps of oil. A few years ago, many Americans hoped $2 gas was a temporary spike. Now it’s the rosy memory of a bygone age.

The rosy memory of a bygone age.

If you have children, now would be a good time to sit them down and give them “the talk.”

No, not the talk about sex although you need to give them that too so they don’t make the mistake of having children that will grow up in want the likes of which we can only dimly imagine but will become very real in the near future.

No you need to have the talk about how our generation and the two behind it, screwed their world into a death spiral through greed and predatory market capitalism.

And now, we’re all going to pay a dear price for that greed and the world they enjoyed as a child will not resemble the world they will know as adults. For our kids, still ensconced in the merry world of violent video games and facebook rituals, this shock will only be psychologically greater if we don’t prepare them NOW.

Perhaps, as a hard gift, you might want to give them James Howard Kunstler’s new book A World Made By Hand and tell them there’s perhaps more truth than fiction inside it.

I know this will be hard, but you owe it to them.

And I’ll see you at Sam’s Club.

Today’s Contemporary Americana!

Hat tip to Big Ass Belle’s blog which you should also be reading if you’re not. She’s mad like I’m mad.

Is rape too fine a point here? I mean, if a woman wants an abortion the state of Oklahoma says it has a right to place a probe in her vagina to do an ultrasound and put a picture of the fetus in her face.

But hey, she has the ‘right’ to avert her eyes if she wishes.

From BAB’s post:

My sorry assed fucking state just passed one of the most regressive anti-abortion bills in the country. In order to freely determine what happens to her body once SB 1878 goes into effect in Oklahoma, any woman who has made the decision to terminate a pregnancy will have to undergo an ultrasound an hour before the procedure.

This is a trans-vaginal ultrasound, which requires a probe to be inserted into the vagina. This will be mandated by the state. Along with this physical violation, “medical personnel must then provide an explanation of the ultrasound. They also must display the ultrasound so the woman can view it, although she may avert her eyes.”

She. may. avert. her. eyes. Really? Doesn’t the state fucking own her goddamned eyes too??? I have written about abortion before and I know from my own experience that it is a rare woman who makes that decision lightly.

Lynette (who is BAB) pointed out the the Democratic governor vetoed the bill because it didn’t have exceptions for rape/incest victims. But only for that apparently. The veto was overridden by Fascist Party members with the help of many spineless Democrats who would rather be in office than stand up for decency.

I suspect that one day Oklahoma will pass a law that outlaws abortion and dares a splintered and weakened Federal government to do anything about it. Then they will require that all pregnant women check in to local government officials to make sure they carry to term. Or have them followed around by men toting shotguns.

But there are a few more things about the bill covered by Dr. Dana Stone in Huffpo:

1) The bill dictates how doctors obtain informed consent in a way that does not conform to medically-accepted practice. Current state law already requires the doctor to refer patients to information about development of an embryo or fetus twenty-four hours before a pregnancy termination. The website is one required resource. She must also be notified about facilities that will offer her a free ultrasound.

2) This compels a physician to perform an invasive, vaginal procedure — not for the benefit of the patient, and possibly against her wishes — before the requested medical procedure can be done.

3) The fines for failure to follow the requirements begin at $10,000 go up to $100,000 or more for subsequent violations. The highest fines for negligent homicide or driving under the influence in Oklahoma are $1,000.

4) The bill defines “unprofessional conduct” if a physician does not perform this unnecessary procedure and suggests that the medical board may remove the physician’s license. This violates the standard medical practice that any patient has the right to refuse medical procedures or treatment.

This bill dictates how a doctor obtains informed consent, violates the patient’s right to refuse unwanted medical interventions, and places disproportionate punishments on physicians who do not comply.

Pro-choice and pro-life advocates alike should be appalled by this level of government intrusion. I hope that national attention to this outlandish regulation might encourage a veto by our Governor. Women’s advocates in other states need to watch for similar attempts by their own legislatures.

More here from the Associated Press on the override:

The Senate, which is split with 24 Democrats and 24 Republicans, voted 37-11 for the override. The House, where Republicans have a 57-44 edge, voted to override by a margin of 81-15. The votes came with little discussion in either legislative body.

It is the first time Henry has been overridden in his two terms as governor. In fact, it was the first time a bill has been overridden since Democrat David Walters was governor in the early 1990s. His successor, Republican Frank Keating, was not overridden in eight years.

Henry said he knew it would be an uphill battle to sustain the veto, “but I thought it was important to fight to protect rape and incest victims from additional distress.

“I do not think it is morally responsible for the state to victimize those victims for a second time by forcing them to undergo an ultrasound and hear a detailed description of it after they have made the difficult and heart-wrenching decision to end their pregnancy,” he said.

(but for other women who haven’t been raped, who gives a crap - they’re just selfish hussies, right Gov?)

Henry called the requirement “government regulation gone wrong.”

The original anti-abortion bill passed the Senate 38-10 and the House 80-12.

Before the Senate override vote, Lamb, R-Edmond, reminded his colleagues of their strong vote for the bill earlier.

“This is a bipartisan bill,” he said.

The bill expands on a measure enacted in 2006 that gave women the option of requesting an ultrasound before an abortion. Henry signed that measure.

Last year, Henry vetoed a bill that banned use of taxpayer funds for abortions because it did not exempt victims of rape and incest. He let the bill become law without his signature after it was amended to remove rape and incest victims.

Rep. Pam Peterson, R-Tulsa, moved quickly for an override vote on the latest anti-abortion bill after the Senate voted first.

Besides requiring an ultrasound examination, the bill allows doctors and other health care providers to refuse to take part in an abortion for moral and religious reasons.

It requires a woman to sign a consent form before having an abortion and mandates that federal guidelines be followed in the use of the chemical pill RU-486.

According to the Food and Drug Administration, RU-486 may be obtained only from doctors to end a pregnancy up to 49 days. It is commonly called the abortion pill.

The bill also seeks to prohibit so-called “wrongful-life” lawsuits that argue a disabled child would have been better off aborted.

You will all be FORCED to have a child and once that baby is born he/she is ON ITS OWN as far as health care, a decent environment, good schools, etc. are concerned. Of course, the parents should be well to do enough to provide private outlets for all of these things. The government should ONLY be in the business of war and war profiteering and providing corporate socialist to companies like Bear Stearns. Everyone is else dogmeat for the system.

And while were at it how about Janet Pearson’s column in the Tulsa World:

What ails us: Gov. Brad Henry took the courageous — remarkably courageous considering the political landscape here — step of vetoing an omnibus abortion bill that was opposed by the Oklahoma Section of the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology and the Oklahoma State Medical Association, among other groups. His veto was quickly overriden.

The ensuing political posturing was predictable. But what didn’t show up in print were behind-the-scenes comments from some lawmakers. One told an advocate this is the annual anti-abortion bill designed to give lawmakers useful campaign fodder, whether it’s a good law or not; another said he could be sure his female family members could get abortions regardless of the bill’s provisions, so he had no problem voting for it.

(oh, and be sure to read the comments of brain dead fascist Oklahoman right wingers under the story)

Wow.

I don’t know who that second legislator is but I’d like to see a group of women quite literally kick the shit out of him. That’s tyranny all right in Oklahoma and the (once free) USA. Fuck up the ass the other women in the state as long as MY FAMILY members can get an abortion. Seriously - I want to see this legislator, who ever he is, beaten to an inch of his life. He richly deserves it.

I think anyone with half a brain and a heart should get the hell out of the hopelessly backwards state of Oklahoma while they still can.

Yeah, I know, I live in Ohio which thanks to the downstate fascists, is only marginally better.

Today’s Contemporary Americana!

AOL News

Many times being a “nation of laws” doesn’t help the accused when the prosecutor’s office is run by political animals who only care about winning cases, any cases with any evidence, to keep their cushy jobs. Witness the so-called “breast implant killer” now released from over two years of incarceration:

Cynthia Sommer, 34, said she barely slept herself on her first night of freedom after a San Diego Superior Court judge Thursday dismissed charges that she poisoned her husband in 2002.

“The only question I have for (prosecutors) is how they sleep at night?” Sommer said.

You have to remember something very fundamental about how American law works: being a prosecutor (or in the Texas polygamy case, a CPS official) means NEVER having to say you’re sorry.

And in this case, of course, they didn’t.

San Diego County District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis defended her handling of the case Friday, saying that justice was served and that her office acted appropriately.

“We had an expert who said it was arsenic and no reason to doubt that evidence,” Dumanis said. “The bottom line was, ‘Was there arsenic in Mr. Sommer causing his death?’ Our results showed that there was.”

I’m sure that Ms. Dumanis, like her colleagues in the so-called criminal justice system including the cops that lie on the stand, the bought off judges and the sadistic jail officials, sleep very very well at night because they know that out there are a seething mass of frightened and stupid Americans who will vote them back into office based on two things:

1. Public pronouncements about being “tough on crime” and

2. Jimmied up conviction rates.

Not only do we get the government we deserve, we get the judicial system we deserve as well.

Too bad Ms Sommer lost two years of her life she’ll never get back but, hey, that’s the breaks. The system ALWAYS works - even when it doesn’t. And if you have a badge or an office, you almost never have to be held accountable.

Oh, the Duke rape case? The families were wealthy and could afford far more “justice” than the average slob. And that’s a rare, rare case and most prosecutors know it.

After all, its not what you do in office that really makes much of a difference anyway. Most people who aspire (and I use the term advisedly) to top positions in the Criminal Justice Industry, Inc., do so out of ravenous ambition and a desire for power and status - NOT the public good. Believe me, in my years as a journalist I got a front row seat watching the sausage being made. The vast majority of people have no idea how corrupted the entire system is. And as a generally merciful person, I would hope most of them never find out.

Because it’s so easy and intellectually lazy to say ‘if you weren’t guilty you wouldn’t be in court.’ Most people go through their entire lives never interacting with lying cops, lying prosecutors and disinterested judges and dumbed down juries. They never see the defendants get worked over by the Sheriff’s deputies out of sight after a contentious court hearing. They never see how evidence can be compromised or dummied up. They don’t understand the political implications of so much that goes on in the Criminal Justice Industry.

So it’s easy to assume as long as you don’t have to face the beast as Ms. Sommer did. It’s easy to fall back on the platitudes about America and the system we were taught in school. They require us only to recite rote verse about “and justice for all” when “justice” in so many cases is illusory and corrupted. Ms. Sommer’s case is one of the few you will ever get a chance to hear about. I assure you there are many, many more innocent people locked up in our prison gulag who lack the resources ever to have their stories heard. And the Bush administration, under the guise of fighting terrorism, is making writs of habeas corpus even harder to file and appeals even more difficult to obtain.

I’m sorry to have to disabuse people of their fairy tale beliefs about our justice system but life is NOT television. In real life, innocent people do get screwed and go to prison, sacrificed for the political ambitions of petty men and women who play God in our courtrooms every day. But one aspect of television’s portrayal of our Criminal Justice Industry is true: if you are a prosecutor, wear a badge, or a judges robes, you almost never, ever have to account for your actions.

Today’s Contemporary Americana!

When I see stories like this, I’m reminded of the movie Election. In America, we train our kids in the ‘win at all costs’ mindset early. In this case, this story, from The Ohio State Lantern, details the disqualification of two student government candidates for spending more than $2,000 on their bid.

From the story:

Undergraduate Student Government presidential and vice presidential candidate team Peter Koltak and Amanda Graver were disqualified from the presidential race last night.

According to the EGB, there were 41 violations filed against Koltak and Graver during the election. The other two presidential and vice presidential teams only had a combined five violations filed against them .

And the thing is, the vast majority of undergrads at OSU (my son among them) knows not nor cares about the people running for student government. After all, in almost every academic environment, student government officials have very limited, if any, real power to affect anything at their schools, except to perhaps have an extra pep rally scheduled or some other kind of entertainment event bankrolled.

The real power, is, as always, with the institution. And when you look at most student governments, sad to say, that’s probably where it belongs.

It seems that most of these kids run for the benefit of their own resume than to really do much for the students or school; at least that has been my experience. When I was at Cleveland State, the vast majority of the students completely ignored the student government. But the races were waged with all the cutthroat viciousness we see in every other grownup election from school board to POTUS.

Because, of course, it looks good on that resume. And how many of these races are run with a generous dose of mommy and daddy’s money to make junior look good? I would guess quite a few.

But make no mistake about it - the people running take it very seriously. And perhaps that is funny and sad in a rather tragic way.

And I wonder how many of these kids see themselves running for President one day? Someone said we should never vote for president anyone who wanted to run for the office when they were a kid. Seems Bill Clinton was one of those kids.

Ah, we never learn.