Left In Lowell

Howie Carr should have been fired a long time ago for his many misdeeds on radio/TV, not the least of which is lying through his teeth, but no respectable outfit ANYwhere should retain this asshole on their staff after he literally blames rape victims for their own rape. I demand that he be fired. Blue Mass Group has the post, but I will embed the despicable audio segment here, as well.

Howie Carr mocks rape victim 11.03.2011 by ScoutSound

I literally could not believe my ears when listening. It’s bad, really bad. Bad enough that if someone gave me a list of his commercial sponsors, I’d call for a boycott. If you want to associate your brand with this piece of shit, then my dollars will go elsewhere.

Call WRKO and tell them to fire this total jerk: (617) 779-3400.

Write to the Boston Herald via this contact form and tell them to stop running anything written by this slimeball. I just called the City Desk and the lady there hadn’t heard the clip, but pulled it up and assured me they would look into it, but we need to see enough call for action to warrant firing a regular columnist. I expressed my heartfelt disgust at anyone who would associate themselves with Carr.

And if you see any other media outlet with this guy spewing his crap on it, let us know in comments. I know he’s often a regular commentator on TV and in other print media.

Mocking and blaming rape victims is so far beyond the pale, it ought to be in the category of using racist terms, and, for most people, it IS.

Longtime readers of the blog know that I have a peculiar dislike of our neighbors to the north. I was born there, so I’m allowed. There has been some progress there, like the passage of same-sex marriage in 2009 (though that’s in danger of repeal next year). But by and large, I wasn’t impressed with their education system…I was angered by the near-loss of all music and art programs in Manchester schools in my last year of high school…and I was furious when the NH legislature yanked funding out from under UNH, my alma mater, mid-year (ie after the budget had been passed and UNH started their fiscal year) which caused no end of chaos for departments, professors, and administrators, and the year after I left, their tight budgeting caused the loss of some of the best teachers in the departments of my major and minor. That was all between the years 1994 and 1999. You know. The boom years of our economy. *rolls eyes*

So the fact that New Hampshire (which I like to call “New Hamster” because the state is about as dumb as one) has managed to one-up the stupidity of its past actions, believe you me, is quite a feat. But it has. By defunding Planned Parenthood of Northern New England (PPNE) (bold mine).

Planned Parenthood has stopped providing birth control pills and other contraception in New Hampshire after the state’s executive council rejected up to $1.8 million in funding for the group” because it also provides privately-funded abortions. After losing its contract — which paid for education, distributing contraception, and the testing and treatment of sexually transmitted infections — the centers have “turned away 20 to 30 patients a day who have arrived to refill their birth control prescriptions.
[…]
Some women have told the center that the will likely “stop taking birth control because they cannot afford the higher prices charged by pharmacies” and an estimated 70 percent don’t have insurance to cover the prescriptions.

Did I emphasize enough that the public funding is not for abortions in any way, shape or form? PPNE does privately funded abortions. The public money helps them deliver other services, particularly for the underprivileged.

Let me tell you a little story as to why this makes me even madder than seeing my favorite Brit Lit professor laid off.

I’ve mentioned before that there was a period of time my husband and I were uninsured. Due to the great, fabulous “employer-based” system we have, we were employed by people who don’t give insurance - ie contracting and temp agencies. Yay for the American work environment.

Those same temp jobs (at the time) didn’t pay well (before we started working in MA, where the real jobs are). So we didn’t go to any GPs, desperately afraid of finding preexisting conditions, and not really in the fiscal situation to afford out-of-pocket expenses, anyway.

Except for Planned Parenthood. You see, I qualified for their sliding fee scale. In doing so, I could get heavily discounted birth control and GYN exams. In the case of birth control, it was a godsend.

Ever since those lowly days as a temp administrative assistant in NH, I have felt a profound gratitude to Planned Parenthood, so much so that I still use their services, as a full-paying insured client, so I can at least support them in that way. I have to hike to Boston to do it but it’s worth it to me. I do not know what we would have done without those services, and the fee help, during the first years of our life together. I would have been one of those women who would have lost access to birth control, which could have been devastating.

This is why New Hampshire is one of the stupidest, most backwards, idiotic states in the union. I will never live there again, you couldn’t pay me to educate my kids (if I had any) there, and if you are a woman, they’ll screw with your access to safe, legal birth control.

And just to kick women when they’re down:

“I am opposed to abortion,” said Raymond Wieczorek, a council member who voted against the contract. “I am opposed to providing condoms to someone. If you want to have a party, have a party, but don’t ask me to pay for it.”

Go fuck yourself, Raymond Wieczorek. No really, go and have an unwanted pregnancy because you couldn’t afford birth control, you whiny tiny-minded privileged old white asshole. Go back to the eighteenth century when you were born and get a leech treatment for your warts. The rest of us want progress, not old moldy assholes dragging us back to the Dark Ages.

New Hamster or Florida, both compete for Redneck Stupid State of the Year. By the by, Wieczorek is the former mayor of Manchester. Guess which years he was in charge??

I keep hearing the phrase, “let’s listen to the other side” and “we need to stop condescending to people, and stop making fun of people who live in the South, for instance, as being backwards.”

And then I read something like this (bold italics mine):

They’re considering a new law to keep women ignorant and ashamed.

The governor of Oklahoma is considering tough new abortion bills that would allow doctors to withhold test results showing foetal defects and require women to answer intrusive questions.

The results of the questionnaires would be posted online.

Women would also be required to have a vaginal ultrasound and listen to a detailed description of the embryo or foetus in a third bill passed by the legislature on Monday.

Again, I ask you, how the fucking HELL do you justify invading a woman’s privacy with her doctor like this, and then (falsely, albeit) claim that government should stay the hell away from your medical care? Goddamned hypocrites. First, you push a bill to WITHHOLD IMPORTANT MEDICAL INFORMATION from a patient. Next, you invade her private life with a required Q&A and THEN POST THE ANSWERS PUBLICLY - obviously to shame her from doing it in the first place. Then, if that weren’t enough, you also force her to listen to claptrap by prolifers who are NOT SCIENTISTS telling her her baby has fingernails and praying on her emotions exactly like cults do (oh wait, they are cults), in a time when she’s already dealing with enough, not to mention her fluctuating hormones?? And this isn’t some fringe contingent putting something crazy on the ballot, folks, THIS IS THE DULY ELECTED GOVERNOR pushing for this.

If you think I’m overreacting, there’s this. And take a look at this. And this. And remember this? And this? That’s just like from the last month or two. It’s like a disease down there, a goddamned plague, for which no one can find a cure.

Sometimes, I damn well wish the whole damn South had successfully seceded, cuz then they’d have gone down in flames economically as they tried to keep up with the rest of the world, instead of having us productive northern/midwestern/westerners propping their dumb asses up economically year after year. Why the hell did we northerners bother giving life and blood to keeping these idiot states in the union?? Seriously, I can’t see many redeeming reasons, except of course to force the end of slavery (no doubt had we let them go, they’d still be holding black slaves - just listen to the rhetoric down there regarding minorities). 150 years later, they’re still bassackwards.

Every day, someone is posting a link to some stupid ass bill that is either passed or on the brink of passing in (mostly) the Southern states (all right also Arizona and Alaska, so let’s oust them too). Sure, we’d have to move our capital north, since Maryland acts like one of them most of the time, but it’s a small price to pay. We’d have to keep Michelle Bachmann but once she has no idiot cronies from the South, she’ll just be an eccentric and entertaining loony instead of a dangerous minority-sometimes-majority legislator.

These people revere ignorance. They abhor science and education. They SUCK UP OUR TAX DOLLARS. The states from whence comes the bulk of these news items are a known drain on our income redistribution tax system. Most of them give less on the dollar than they receive in federal tax aid. And what do we get for propping up their economies? Shit like this. It’s enough to want to drive off a cliff at times.

They either better get their ignorant selves into the 21st century (hell I’ll settle for the 20th, even) and stop electing these crazy cult-driven hate mongers, or maybe we should just send their asses packing. Enough is enough. Give us our damn tax dollars back, they’re obviously a terrible investment. And of course, these are also the same morons, that are dependent on the largess of our taxes from the federal government, who want to abolish it. Not only dumb, but suicidal to boot. I say, give them what they want. Then close the borders so that they can’t illegally immigrate to the real United States. After, of course, we allow reentrance to all our northern/midwestern/western retirees who don’t want to remain there without Medicare and Social Security.

And yes, this is a rant. Read it as such, before you bother to post a comment about how mean and condescending I’m being, or how I am generalizing. Yes, yes, and yes. That’s why it’s called a rant. When my fellow women in Oklahoma are under attack like this from the loony not-so-fringe of their state, when they are being denied their rights and being shamed and humiliated as though they should be a subservient sex, I’ll damn well loose my venom on the idiots who allow this shit to happen. Goddamn, we’re in the year 2010 here. This just shouldn’t even be happening. It’s like the Dark Ages in some parts of our country for god’s sake. These people are being enabled to be batshit insane on my dime. So yeah, I’ll get angry about it.

The personal family trials of VP pick Sarah Palin should be off limits. Obviously the press has a right to report and discuss the pregnancy of her 17-year-old daughter Bristol, but hands off interviewing her, her friends and people surrounding her in a paparazzi-like frenzy.

That said, it’s still a legitimate discussion point, particularly because of Palin’s views on abstinence-only education.

Statistics (real ones, not the faked ones we get from the Bush administration) show that teens who get abstinence-only ed, instead of comprehensive sex ed (which always includes abstinence, as well as contraceptive and other alternatives) are just as likely to engage in sexual activity as their more educated counterparts, but of course less likely to know all the information that could prevent them from getting sick or pregnant.

A recent CDC report said that 1 in 4 girls has an STD (sexually transmitted disease). Another CDC report told us last year that abstinence-only was literally ineffective (information which the Bush administration tried to release as quietly as possible on a Friday).

Sadly, it seems that Sarah Palin’s daughter had become another statistic proving this point.

The right thing to do, the moral one, is to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies. I’m all for that. The route to do so, however, is not to lock your kids in a dark room blindfolded and hope they can trip and feel their way out on their own. I’ll say one thing - the McCain team is as opposed to real science and practical real-world solutions as the Bush administration has been. A fine legacy to take up if you ask me.

So I say let’s leave Bristol alone. However, her mother and her views on sex ed and a woman’s right to choose are totally fair game. And remember, the same right wingnuts who salivate over Palin and her family values are the ones who want to take contraceptives away - from consenting, even married, adults. Overturning Roe v Wade (which both McCain and Palin say they are for) overturns the reasoning for making bans on contraception unconstitutional.

And does anyone believe that McCain really knew about this? Of course he would say he did, even if he didn’t. “Uhhh…I meant to do that!” It’s like a comedy routine, only…it’s not funny.

All this, of course, shouldn’t overshadow Palin’s ethical troubles…which the McCain camp also says they knew about. Except they have now sent a campaign team to Alaska to, um, find out if there’s more to know. Oops!

I was going to post about how, despite my still-heartfelt opposition to Clinton as a candidate, that we now have a real horserace, which is good for democracy and for the rest of the states who have felt left out until now. Susan says it so much better, though, stating that “I can’t help but get a feeling that the whole election/primary process is like a slate being cleaned and we are starting anew.” That’s exactly what it feels like.

I also wonder: did the totally stupid, negative weekend coverage of the Clinton “verklempt” moment really turn women to rallying for her yesterday? After all, women, as a whole, are the first to judge another woman, but they are also the first to rally around one when they are attacked unfairly. Much as I wish we were beyond this whole societal imposition of “what women should be like,” and that I think it’s a lousy way to choose a candidate (instead of looking more at whether or not she can deliver what people in this country need), the women who rallied around Clinton in NH yesterday displayed a very mature, media-savvy rejection of what has been a shameful, knuckle-dragging, caricature-driven pundit class which has made a complete ass out of itself.

In that sense, go Clinton! The more she can defy the media’s constrictions about what a female presidential candidate is or isn’t, or what she can or cannot do, the better for furthering equality for gender in general. However, it’s too bad that this phenomenon had to come to the rescue of the least progressive candidate who is the least likely to push for the reform we need in this country.

Now, the race really has gotten interesting, something us super-dooper-expealidocious Tuesday primary voters can probably really have an impact in. I might even be forced to actually endorse someone before February 5th!

Update: Kos himself had something to say on this, really quite a cogent read.

Update II: Holy crap! The delegate count shows that there is no way in Poughkeepsie you can yet make any statements about who’s going to win this thing, not even the statement “no way Edwards comes back from this.” And look at the Republican side, with Romney in the lead of pledged delegates without ever coming in first in either early state.

There’s a political debate raging everywhere, in particular on Tony’s post. Not about different health care proposals or poll bounces. Nope, it’s about whether or not Hillary Clinton really shed those tears.

For my own part, I suspect the tears were sincere, but to me it seemed more like the stress of her tailspinning campaign is getting to her and I think that may have had a hand in it.

I do sympathize with Clinton, despite the fact I do not want her as our nominee. The question she must have had to ask herself when she entered politics on her own terms is, “Do I act extra-tough because I need to prove that it doesn’t matter that I’m a woman?” But when she does, she winds up acting out of expectations for a woman (ie, people start calling her “bitchy”), therefore making her less electable or attractive (less human).

It’s a stupid, stupid world, where these questions are asked. To my mind, she should be able to be herself, whatever that is, and not have to worry about expectations of being the first woman with a real shot at the White House. But there it is. It’s a hard balancing act, and as she has taken on the mantle of “war hawk” in the Dem primary, she leaned towards “tough” instead of “feminine.” Then when she exhibits emotions, everyone leaps on her. She can’t win.

Truth to tell, this silly teargate is less important (for me, in choosing a candidate) than her actual votes in the Senate or her Establishment hawkishness or neoliberal economic policies or her taking lobbyist money. I only wish the MEDIA, and by extension the American people, were as capable of setting aside the stupid expectations of our glass-ceiling society and looking at the candidates carefully.

Maybe that’s the case. The media throws itself into a tizzy because of the tears…were they faked or calculated…is she showing her female (aka “soft”) side finally? But I think the voters in New Hampshire, and indeed in Iowa before and in the states after, know in general they are looking for “change,” and know in general that she is Old Guard. Maybe we’ll have a real democracy despite ourselves.

And the media will be left scratching its head trying to analyze it all.

The question that started it all at last week’s forum (the full video of which I still have yet to post, sorry, been busy looking at real estate in my spare time! but I will, I promise) in the flesh. We post, you decide.

Click To Play

Although we’ve got plenty on our political plate in Lowell, with the 5th CD and the city council race, when something really telling happens in the very early ‘08 Presidential race, it should be noted. And these quotes from Richardson are highly disappointing, given his very credible foreign policy resume, and the admiration from the blogosphere, many of whom believe he’s a credible candidate:

Two recent stories illustrate the bumbling reality of Richardson’s campaign, and how it contrasts with his glowing résumé. The first concerns the Guv’s dumbass decision during last week’s debate to name Byron “Whizzer” White — one of the two dissenters in Roe v. Wade, and a dissenter from the majority in Miranda — as his model Supreme Court justice. Yet that’s not the worst part. When pressed to square his professed admiration for White with his alleged support for reproductive freedom and civil rights, Richardson made two more boners. Which one bothers you more?

A) He cited the fact that White “was an All-American football player besides being a legal scholar” as a justification for describing the often retrograde White as his model High Court member;

B) He apparently doesn’t really know or care about Roe, given that he excused his White pick by saying, “White was in the 60s. Wasn’t Roe v. Wade in the 80s?”

I can’t find another source other than the samefacts.com one for the second quote, though Mark Kleiman appears to have been liveblogging the CA Dem convention, but if true, it’s got to be numbered among the most stupid statements from a presidential candidate on our side. Richardson seriously doesn’t know when Roe was decided? And lists one of the dissenters as his model Justice but doesn’t know White’s judicial history because he thinks Roe is less than three decades old? Do I want a woman’s right to choose in the hands of someone who doesn’t even know its most basic history?

You can hear my interview from this morning with Jesse Mermell, Executive Director of the Massachusetts Women’s Political Caucus on the Community Connections website (thanks once again to Jim…wow that was fast!)

Tomorrow we’ll be kicking off Women’s Month with a discussion about women in politics and leadership. Our invited guest is Jesse Mermell, Executive Director of the Massachusetts Women’s Political Caucus, which is dedicated to encouraging and helping women run for office in the state.

I promise this topic will be very relevant as we move into the rest of the month in the midst of a potential Congressional race! Future guests expected in the next few weeks include Doreen Manning, editor of the Middlesex Beat; Niki Tsongas, Dean of External Affairs at Middlesex Community College; and Lowell City Councilor Eileen Donoghue . Unless you live under a rock, you know that Donoghue and Tsongas are both known to have interest in running for Meehan’s seat should he vacate it.

You can listen live tomorrow at 10 am on 91.5 FM or online live here. We’ll try to have the archive up pretty quick as well.