The common media image of today’s youth is that they have, under a steady barrage of sexually charged images, become increasingly precocious – engaging in intercourse at a younger and younger age and with a dizzying array of partners.
But the reality, according to a new report entitled Sexual Health in Canada, is that adolescent sexual practices have remained largely unchanged for decades. "Young people aren’t having sex any younger than their parents or grandparents," Linda Capperauld, executive director of the Canadian Federation for Sexual Health, said in an interview.
Nor – despite suggestive music videos, ready access to Internet porn and creeping hemlines – are more teens having sex.
Nationwide, only 28 per cent of adolescents age 15 to 17 report having had sex, a figure that rises to 65 per cent by age 18 to 19.
All told, the mean age for sexual intercourse is 16.5 years, about where it’s been since the sexual revolution that was launched by today’s baby boomers.
Despite the closing gender gap – equal numbers of boys and girls now say they have had sex – the primary reason for not having done so remains remarkably unchanged from previous generations: Most girls said they were not ready, while most boys reported a lack of opportunity. The No. 2 reason for both sexes is the same: "I haven’t met the right person."
But when they do, teens are remarkably faithful. The number with a single sexual partner is on the rise.
It’s not all good news though
The 150-page report also contains some grim news. The number of teens with sexually transmitted infections like chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis is soaring.
Gosh…that wouldn’t be because they’re being given adequate sex education, on the theory that if we don’t tell them how to have sex they won’t have it? Sex is a basic instinct, older then the fish, let alone the mammals, let alone the primates, let alone humans. Human couples are perfectly capable of figuring out how to have sex on their own. What they need to be taught is how to avoid pregnancy and disease. And…a little responsibility please. But responsible sex is the last thing they’ll learn from the Family Values crowd…
OCTOBER 8–An Alabama minister who died in June of "accidental mechanical asphyxia" was found hogtied and wearing two complete wet suits, including a face mask, diving gloves and slippers, rubberized underwear, and a head mask, according to an autopsy report. Investigators determined that Rev. Gary Aldridge’s death was not caused by foul play and that the 51-year-old pastor of Montgomery’s Thorington Road Baptist Church was alone in his home at the time he died (while apparently in the midst of some autoerotic undertaking). While the Montgomery Advertiser, which first obtained the autopsy records, reported on Aldridge’s two wet suits, the family newspaper chose not to mention what police discovered inside the minister’s rubber briefs. Aldridge served as the church’s pastor for 16 years. Immediately following his death, church officials issued a press release asking community members to "please refrain from speculation" about what led to Aldridge’s demise, adding that, "we will begin the healing process under the strong arm of our Savior, Jesus Christ."
GREEN BAY — The chairman of the Republican Party in Brown County faces criminal charges for allegedly fondling a 16-year-old Ethan House runaway and providing him with beer and marijuana late last year.
Donald Fleischman, 37, of Allouez, was charged last month with two counts of child enticement, two counts of contributing to the delinquency of a child and a single charge of exposing himself to a child.
If convicted on both felonies and all three misdemeanors, Fleischman faces up to 52 years in prison.
Fleischman’s attorney, Jeff Jazgar, said he plans to confront the charges at the preliminary hearing set for Oct. 29.
“My client is innocent of the charges,” Jazgar said Friday. “Our plan is to get some witnesses to testify and present enough information to dismiss the case.”
Efforts to reach Fleischman were unsuccessful.
Fleischman has resigned his post with the Brown County Republicans, said Kirsten Kukowski, communications director for the Republican Party of Wisconsin.
The teen, now 17, told authorities Fleischman took him to a hotel in Appleton during that time and then to a cabin near Florence for several days before returning to Fleischman’s Allouez home. The boy said Fleischman provided him with beer and marijuana, the complaint said.
The boy told police that when he would go to bed, Fleischman would fondle him and that on one occasion he awoke to find Fleischman at the foot of his bed masturbating.
To neighbors here, J. D. Roy Atchison was a deft federal prosecutor, an involved father and a devoted volunteer, coaching girls’ softball and basketball teams year in and year out.
His wife is a popular science teacher; his youngest daughter, an honors student who was on her high school homecoming court last year. Their house, with rocking chairs on the porch, oaks in the yard and a wrought-iron fence, is among the prettiest in town.
But in an instant last week, the community pillar became an object of community loathing. Mr. Atchison, 53, was arrested getting off a plane in Detroit on Sept. 16 and charged with the unthinkable. The authorities there said he was carrying a doll and petroleum jelly, and that he had arranged with an undercover agent to have sex with a 5-year-old girl.
Now Mr. Atchison is awaiting trial in a federal prison in Michigan, and the people of Gulf Breeze, an affluent bayside suburb in the Florida Panhandle, are outraged, baffled and repulsed.
…
Mr. Atchison has worked at the small United States Attorney’s Office in Pensacola since the 1980s, most recently handling asset forfeitures in criminal cases as an assistant United States attorney. In one high-profile case, Mr. Atchison oversaw the government seizure of a popular beach bar at the center of a cocaine-trafficking ring.
His is considered one of the most conservative United States attorney’s offices in the country, known for refusing plea agreements and seeking the stiffest sentences.
Mr. Johnson said Mr. Atchison was close with the other prosecutors in his office, going with some on an annual lobster-diving trip in the Florida Keys. A big white fishing boat sat in his otherwise-empty driveway this week. His interests, according to the Yahoo profile that the police said was his, include “surfing, skiing, diving, boating, young girls, petite girls, skinny girls.”
And yes…according to a commenter at Daily KOS who looked up the public election records for the Pensacola suburb of Gulf Breeze, Atchison was a republican. Surprise, surprise. And here’s another anti-gay republican with a wide stance…
A Florida state representative and co-chairman of John McCain’s presidential campaign was arrested Wednesday for offering to perform oral sex on a male undercover cop in a Titusville, Fla., public restroom, police said.
Rep. Bob Allen, R-Merritt Island, was booked into the Brevard County jail on a charge of solicitation to commit prostitution, the Orlando Sentinel reported, then released on $500 bail. The charge, a second-degree misdemeanor, is punishable by a year in county jail and a $500 fine.
Titusville police told the Sentinel that they were carrying out a burglary detail in a city park when they saw a disheveled, unshaven man enter and leave the park restroom three times. They decided to send in an undercover officer; minutes later, they told the Sentinel, the man knocked on the stall door and offered to perform oral sex on the officer for $20.
"After he was arrested, he (Allen) mentioned he was a state legislator," Lt. Todd Hutchinson told the paper.
Allen, 48, is married with a daughter, according to his legislative bio.
First elected in 2000, Allen is the chairman of the House Committee on Energy. He received the Rainbow Democratic Club of Orlando’s worst possible rating.
In March, he co-sponsored HB269, the Lewdness and Indecent Exposure Bill, which proposed enhanced penalties for "offenses involving unnatural and lascivious acts or exposure or exhibition of sexual organs committed within specified distance of certain locations." The bill never made it to a vote.
About six years ago, he was one of 21 Florida legislators to sign Gov. Jeb Bush’s friend-of-the-court brief supporting the state’s ban on gays adopting children, Rainbow Democratic Club secretary Carol Bartsch told Gay.com
"Practically as soon as he got into office, he wanted to go on record as being anti-gay," Bartsch said.
Due to be termed out of the House next year, Allen, however, had been considered a likely state Senate candidate, Sentinel writer John Kennedy blogged Wednesday.
Just a few of your friendly neighborhood Family Values folks who know what’s best for the rest of us when it comes to having sex…
The little door hatch in the center console, just above the air vents, is where the video display comes out when you activate it. It will show the navigation screen and the stereo system display. There are a lot of buttons there but in practice you don’t really have to use them. Just behind my furry little car mascot in the cup holder is a little knob that you can use a bit like a joystick when the video display is active, and cycle through a series of menus that control just about everything.
Below the stereo system controls, just in front of the shift lever is the climate control. The knobs on either side set the temperature for the driver’s side and passenger side independently. In the center of the speedometer is a display that you can cycle through with the buttons on the steering wheel to show you things like the odometer and trip odometer, miles per gallon, miles left before you need to refuel, the direction of travel, your street location, what’s playing on the iPod, and the caller ID when there is an incoming call on your cell phone. The car talks to my iPhone via a Bluetooth wireless interface and when the phone is in the car I can take and make calls via the voice control system.
The wood trim is real burled walnut. Mercedes backs the wood panels with aluminum so if there is an accident the wood won’t splinter. Some Mercedes fans are bellyaching online that they don’t like this new dash design but I just love it. I really hated the look of the old C class cockpit. This new look really appeals to me.
The car wants to do a lot for you automatically. I’ve been running the climate control on auto and just setting the temperature and its always been right. There are sensors that determine the ambient temperature inside and out, and which way the sun is beaming down on the car, and adjust the AC and fan speeds and vent openings accordingly. You can also set the headlamps on auto and the car will figure out when and which ones to turn on and how bright to set them. The turn signal lamps each have a backup, and when the active one burns out, and the backup is being used, you are notified in the speedometer info panel that you need to replace it. The dealer had to tell me about that because, she said, I might one day see a notice that I’ve got a burned out turn signal and I’ll go look at it and see that it’s still working and I might think the warning system is broken. But no…I really do need to replace the lamp. The rearview mirror is not adjustable for day/night operation. There is a sensor in it that darkens the mirror when it detects headlights behind you. The darkening varies according to the intensity of the light coming in behind you. The sideview mirrors do the same. I can’t begin to tell you how nice it is to have auto darkening sideviews. So many times I’ve had to turn my sideviews away when some idiot, particularly in an SUV, comes alongside with headlights that aren’t aligned right, and then reset them after they’ve passed.
You notice I’m not even talking about the ride. That’s mostly because I can’t push it yet. I’m still in the break-in period. I’ll say more about the ride when I’m free to do that. I’m looking forward to it. They say this car is as good on the road as any Mercedes sedan ever built. Not quite as good as the best of the E class…but good. And that’s probably way better then most other sedans. One thing I am noticing now though, is the difference between a rear wheel drive and the front wheel drives I’ve been used to driving since 1993 and my Geo Prism. But my first cars were rear wheel drive and it’s more like remembering how it was then learning something entirely new. This car has a very solid feel to it on the road. In part that’s probably because it’s heavy. But it’s also a Mercedes sedan, and they just feel like that.
There’s a lot I still haven’t tried yet, particularly the voice command system. I’ve been using the joystick to control the Nav system and the stereo. And I’m still working on a way to copy my iPhone’s phone book over to the car. The car will accept vCards, but the iPhone doesn’t do vCards yet. However the Apple address book does. There’s a slot in the console that accepts a PCMCIA memory card and I’m working on transferring the phone book that way. Once I get the phone book transferred, I can not only make and receive calls with it, I can get directions to the addresses in it from the Nav system.
The cockpit is so…sensual…to just sit in. When you buy a luxury grade car, you get (or damn well ought to for the price) a degree of fit and finish above the basic. It’s not just the finer quality materials, it’s the degree of care that goes into the making of it. Everywhere your eye looks, everything is fitted together just so…nothing is misaligned or out of place. You can see the care that was taken in the assembly of the car everywhere you look. It’s not the bells and whistles. it’s the solid feel of quality and care throughout the whole passenger compartment, and every other part of the car. It’s the real thing.
The folks who put this car together can be proud. It is a real fine piece of work. It was made in Germany, so the whole car actually rode the boat over to the U.S, unlike the previous two Japanese cars I’ve owned, which were made in factories here in America…the Geo Prism in California, the Honda Accord in Kentucky. I have the Mercedes factory tag with the chassis number, order number and production number info on it…in German. I’m still looking around the car to see if I can find a sticker somewhere with the actual factory location and production date on it.
Brown County GOP Chairman Donald Fleischman has resigned his post, says a spokesperson, after being accused of enticement and fondling of an underage boy, reports the Green Bay Press-Gazette Saturday.
Fleischman, 37, is free after posting a $20,000 bond on September 28. "My client is innocent of the charges," says attorney Jeff Jazgar, who "declined to discuss specifics."
"Our plan is to get some witnesses to testify and present enough information to dismiss the case."
The boy was found by police in Fleischman’s home on two occasions in late 2006 while being sought as a runaway from Ethan House, a home for at-risk youth. Now 17, he says he stayed with Fleischman at his house and a cabin, where he was provided with alcohol and cannabis, and regularly fondled.
On November 19, 2006, according to a September 7th complaint obtained from the WisPolitics Courtwatch Blog, the boy in question was found hiding in a bedroom closet, and a pipe was found in the house, which tested positive for THC. Shortly after, on December 8, 2006, Fleischman said he was trying to convince the boy, discovered again in the home, to turn himself in as a runaway.
Fleischman faces two counts of child enticement, two counts of contributing to the delinquency of a child, and one count of exposing himself to a child. He returns to court on October 29.
It’s been like a week doesn’t go by that some GOP operative or religious right nutcase turns up in the middle of some kind of sex scandal. And they’re lecturing us on sexual conduct?
The venue is owned by the Lynnwood Public Facilities District, a public taxing district that operates the convention center but is separate from the city.
“Our understanding is that they’re law-abiding. They have a right of free speech just like any other group,” said Mike Echelbarger, the board’s chairman.
“If we were talking about the (Ku Klux Klan) we’d have a totally different take on it. Of course we wouldn’t rent to the KKK,” he said.
Of course, they wouldn’t rent to the KKK. But as we reported earlier, they may as well. The rhetoric the Watchman use has often been violent, using the rhetoric of warfare in their speeches and writings. Founded by Redmond, Washington by preacher Kenneth Hutcherson, holocaust revisionist Scott Lively, and Latvian megachurch pastor Alexey Ledyaev, Watchmen on the Walls have gained a tremendous amount of influence in Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine and Russia. Ledyaev’s fomenting of anti-gay hatred in Riga, Latvia led to violence when skinhead and other demonstrators threw excrement and eggs at Gay Pride participants in 2006.
And as the SPLC recently reported, the Watchmen also represent an increasingly violent anti-gay movement among Slavic evangelical immigrants in several U.S. cities which have previously been known as being gay friendly. In July 2007, a group of Russian-speaking men killed Satender Singh, a 26-year-old gay Fijian of Indian near Sacramento, California. Two men, Andrey Vusik, 29, and Aleksandr Shevchenko, 21 were charged in connection with Singh’s death. Vusik fled to Russian in July and is being sought by the FBI. Ledyaev and Lively have refused to publicly condemn the killing.
Jim quotes Lively, who employs rhetoric chillingly similar to the eliminationist what the Third Reich once emplyed against Jews:
There is a war that is going on in the world. There is a war that is waging across the entire face of the globe. It’s been waging in the United States for decades, and it’s been waging in Europe for decades. It’s a war between Christians and homosexuals.
This is a war you haven’t seen yet. You’ve only seen a little bit of it, because Russia had been protected against the homosexual movement by the Communists. One of the few good things that the Soviet Union did is that it stopped the sexual revolution from infecting the Russian people. But all across the West, the sexual revolution changed the culture of the nations. The sexual revolution embraces the idea that there should be no limits on sexual conduct.
And this is the design of the Devil to destroy civilization, because civilization is based on the natural family. One man and one woman united in marriage bringing children into the world and training them to replace them in the next generation. That’s the foundation of civilization and the heart of Christian living.
And in the United States where the sexual revolution began, it was the homosexual political movement that designed this strategy to attack Christianity. The homosexual movement teaches sexual freedom, and its first target is the heterosexual people. The homosexual activists stayed hidden but they taught this philosophy through their activists. And out of the philosophy came the principalities and powers that is destroying the West: The pornography industry, the abortion industry, and the destruction of marriage through divorce.
These things are the product of a way of thinking. They deny the Truth of God. They deny the design of God for human beings. And their purpose is the change the cultures of the world.
Now, the homosexual movement has been winning this war in the United States, and it has been winning this war in Europe. And we’re looking at the future collapse of Western civilization. And Watchmen on the Walls is an organization to fight against this collapse. Watchmen On the Walls is an organization of men and women with courage, who will stand on the Truth of God and without compromise demand that the culture will follow the guidance of God. That marriage and family must be held at the highest level.
So Lively and his pal Ledyaev have been feeding this to the Slavic immigrant community in several west coast cities and it did its work. Two of their useful tools killed Satender Singh and Lively isn’t merely refusing to condemn the act, he’s making excuses for it:
Now, I’ve been working with the Russian community in Sacramento. And I want to tell you this is an example of how bad things are in the United States. Because we’ve come to a place in the United States where the homosexuals have achieved very high power. And they’ve begun to punish… They’ve begun to cause the political powers to punish anyone who says that homosexuality is wrong.
There was a situation in Sacramento a few weeks ago in a public park. There was a group of homosexuals and they were very drunk and one of the homosexual men was taking off his pants. And there were children in the park. And a Russian man went over to these homosexuals and he was rebuking them and there started a fight. And the Russian man punched the homosexual. [The audience starts to shout and applaud.] No, no, no, don’t… The man was very drunk… the homosexual was very drunk. He was very drunk and he fell down and he hit his head and he died. [Some in the audience start to applaud and laugh] No…. no…
Now the Russian man has been accused of murder and the FBI is seeking him. And all of the powers in Sacramento have been accusing all of the Russian community of being murderers. And the goal is to silence everyone who speaks against homosexuality. And this is a very dangerous situation because we don’t want homosexuals to be killed. We want them to be saved. Amen?
But that’s not what happened in the park. Singh and his friends, three couples including a pregnant woman, were taunted by a group of young slavs who hurled racist and homophobic insults at them. One of the Slavs called some friends on his cell phone and they came and joined the group just as Singh and his friends were leaving the park. There was no fight. One of the Slavs sucker punched Singh hard in the head and he fell and hit his head again on the sidewalk. He remained in a coma until eventually taken off life support.
Make no mistake…Lively is excusing murder there. Note not only the audience response to Lively’s telling them that the gay man was struck and died, but Lively’s half hearted attempt to quell their enthusiasm for murder. He’s not telling them their blood thirsty hatred is wrong, he’s telling them to shut up because his speech there is being recorded.
Burroway’s right, The Lynnwood Convention Center might as well be hosting a Ku Klux Klan gathering. The Watchmen On The Walls aren’t just some anti-gay right wing religious group. They are the public face of a violently anti-gay movement that has already killed at least one gay person. And that’s not the only act of violence associated with this Slavic religious community. People will die as a result of the hatred that will be passionately inflamed at The Lynnwood Convention Center on October 19, 20 and 21. They might be gay. They might be family or friend to a gay person. They may be straight and merely mistaken for being gay in the wrong place at the wrong time. But look at the rhetoric this movement employs. …this is the design of the Devil to destroy civilization…it was the homosexual political movement that designed this strategy to attack Christianity… We better wake up. This is a war. They aren’t using that word "war" metaphorically.
Someone will die as a result of what is said in the Lynnwood Convention Center in the coming weeks. Some of that blood will be on the hands of the The Lynnwood Convention Center Management. Just sayin…
I’m fortunate enough to be working for an employer that takes diversity in the workplace serious. I have never, Never, felt more comfortable as a gay man in the workplace as I have at Space Telescope. The work environment I’ve experienced has been pleasant, professional, and genuinely good-natured. But I have worked in a hostile environment too, so I know how it is. I’ve been told to my face that there was "no place for homosexuals in our company". And I’ve been let go in situations that I was certain were about my sexual orientation and nothing else, even when other excuses were being made. I’ve been harassed, I’ve been threatened. I’ve seen the atmosphere turn on a dime, the instant my sexual orientation became known.
365Gay.Com has a good post up today, about the Gay Glass Ceiling. There’s an interesting little tidbit in it…
In one ingenious study at Rice University, undergraduates were fitted with one of two hats: one of them said “Texan and proud”; the other, “Gay and proud.” The students didn’t know which hat they were wearing, but they were instructed to apply for retail jobs.
The researchers found something interesting: the gay hat-wearing students were just as likely to be hired as the Texan-hat wearing students. There was no hiring discrimination (and in fact, the students were in a municipality that protects against gay employment discrimination). But the interviewers were more hostile toward the gay hat-wearing students and more likely to end the interview early.
Most students were able to tell which hat they were wearing from the treatment they received.
I’ll bet they were. The difference between being gay, and being black or Hispanic, is that you can’t usually tell someone’s gay just by looking at them. Unless something in their job application or resume alerts them to it, a prospective employer isn’t likely to know that the person they’re interviewing for a job is gay. So white gay folks don’t generally experience job discrimination upfront. But unless the gay person is deeply, and I mean Deeply closeted, sooner or later their co-workers figure it out and then things change.
The glass ceiling is what you experience if you’re lucky. Otherwise you are simply ushered out the door. Sometimes they tell you to your face it’s because you’re gay. Sometimes they make some other excuse. When the religious right points to studies that they claim prove that gay people earn far more money then heterosexuals, what they’re really pointing to are studies that prove that rich people aren’t as afraid of being open about their sexual orientation on a job survey form as someone barely making ends meet has to be.
I knew I was in for it when I bought a car that runs on premium instead of regular. I accepted that as part of the joy of owning a Mercedes (The Mercedes Experience…as my friend Dan puts it…). But still I had visions of all the gas station signs I saw while on the road last July, particularly in Nevada for some reason, advertising premium gasoline for over four dollars a gallon. We were having a gasoline price peak back then, right as I was taking my annual road trip vacation. I was driving the Accord, and counting my blessings that I had a car that was doing about 33 miles per gallon. I’m still in the break-in period on the Mercedes, but it looks like I’ll be getting at best around 25 mpg in it.
What I didn’t expect was how widely the price of premium varies. At least around here. The price of regular only varies by a few cents locally. Last night as I was looking to fill up, I noticed the price of premium here in the Baltimore area running between $3.10 and $2.80. I saw stations right down the street from each other, having the same exact price for regular, differing by as much as 20 cents a gallon on the price of premium. I’ve no idea why that might be.
There’s A Period Of Adjustment In Every Relationship
First, you have to understand that for years…decades really…I’ve considered driving a stick shift to be the only kind of real driving there is. Everything else is merely riding. When looking at a new car, the stick was a manditory feature. If the dealer couldn’t sell me a stick it was a deal breaker. Every new car I’ve ever bought, has had a stick.
Until now. Because I always wanted a Mercedes…
So I’m driving my new Mercedes-Benz c300 to Arlington Virginia, to visit some friends that I visit most every Friday evening. There are a group of us middle aged gay guys who get-together every Friday for happy hour drinks, and then a good restaurant, and then maybe a little clubbing afterwards. I usually stop first at Jon’s house, where we meet up with Joe, and then the three of us all go in Joe’s nice new Acura TL to the 30 Degrees lounge where we meet up with the others in our group.
It was admiring Joe’s Acura when he got it, that got me thinking about actually buying the Mercedes I’ve always wanted. We’re both IT professionals, both of us in pretty well paying positions. If he didn’t feel ostentatious about owning a car like that, then maybe I shouldn’t either.
I took delivery of the Mercedes Friday morning. I put the key in the ignition at 1PM (actually an infrared dongle thingy that only vaguely resembles a key…there’s a picture of it a couple posts down…), started the car up, drove it off the dealer’s lot and headed right to Jon’s. I left early so I could take my first drive in the new car casually, unhurriedly, learning its road feel, keeping its speed and revs within the limits set by the manual for the first thousand mile break-in period. The car is a pure pleasure to take down the highway.
When I get to Arlington, I realize I haven’t eaten all day and I’m famished. As soon as I get off the beltway, I head for a Subway shop I know is in a shopping center near the exit. I pull in to a parking spot, set the parking brake, switch off the ignition, and for a few moments savor the feeling of being surrounded by the car I’d always dreamed of owning. Then I go to pull the key out of the ignition.
It doesn’t budge. What the hell…??? The damn key is stuck in the ignition and I can’t get it out. I turn it this way and that…turn the motor back on and off again. Nothing works the key is frozen in the ignition.
Damn! Damn! My new car…and it’s already broken. When Jon and Joe hear about this they’re going to laugh their tails off… I could hear the teasing already… Nice car Bruce…guess you’ll always know where the key is… Hey…that’s one of those Mercedes safety features…so you’ll never loose the key…right…? I’d hear about it for years…I just knew it.
Damn! Damn! How do I get this goddamned key out of the ignition? My eyes begin to wander around the dash, which is still activated because the key is still in the ignition. I try pulling out the key again. It won’t budge. My hand drops down to my side…taps randomly on the shift lever while I try to think. And then I realize…
…I’d forgotten to put the car in Park.
Oh. Right.
Once I do that, the car gives me my key back. See…I could just turn the engine off and leave the car in gear when I was driving a stick. All you people who only drive automatics and hate sticks can go ahead and laugh at me now.
I’ve wanted to own one of these since I was a teenager…
Reisender
Now there’s a happy face. That’s my new 2008 Mercedes-Benz c300, the U.S. version of which was just released for sale last month on my birthday. I took it as an omen. Also, the rush of satisfaction I experienced the first time I sat in one at the dealership.
It was more, much more then I Like It. It was This Is Me. I’ve seen very few cars in my lifetime that didn’t have at least one small detail of style and design that I didn’t care for. A nice body with a weirdly shaped grill. Nice leather seats over carpeting that seemed to have been borrowed from the local miniature golf course. Instrument panels that were either too cluttered or not informative enough. But from the moment I set eyes on the new c class, I was completely entranced. There is nothing, nothing about the design of this car that I don’t find attractive. It drives with that same solid, substantial feel to it that every Mercedes sedan I’ve ever rode in has. It not only has state-of-the-art technological gizmos galore, they all make sense. This car is, to my eye, extravagantly beautiful, inside and out, and yet there is not one superfluous thing about it. Naturally, your mileage may vary, but if a car is a statement, no car I have ever owned has ever been more Me then this one. I knew it the moment I sat in one.
I’d just finished paying off the Accord, and I stressed for weeks about whether or not to do this now, or wait a bit longer. But I’ve been waiting for so long. I have several old Mercedes-Benz brochures going back to the 1980s in my storage bins, from when I almost thought one of the least expensive sedans might…might just…finally be within my reach. It never happened. Mostly it was that for so much of my life I’ve lived right at the edge of poverty. Partly it was that when I was living well, I was too afraid to spend a lot of money on anything, let alone a new car. And then, in the 1990s, Mercedes quality took a nosedive. I’d begun making good money as a software developer by then, and I could have afforded the c-class then, but I kept taking a pass. The old Mercedes reliability wasn’t there, and I just hated the design of the dash and the passenger compartment. And it was too small a car for the asking price.
As I said, I’d just finished paying off the Accord, and for kicks and grins decided to look around. A friend of mine in Northern Virginia had bought himself an Acura TL, and it was just lovely. It had a nicely fitted leather interior, the bluetooth cell phone connectivity and the video navigation system. And you could control almost everything via spoken commands if you didn’t want to be taking your hands off the steering wheel. I looked at that car and though to myself that I’d been making good money now for over a decade, why don’t I have a nice car like this?
Well for one thing, I was raised not to want luxuries. Of all the deadly sins pounded into my head while growing up Baptist, I think my household regarded Pride as the worst, followed closely by Vanity. So all my life I’ve pulled back from spending more for something, just because I found it beautiful. When comparing products, if the plain no-frills version did the job just as well, then I bought that, and…no kidding, this is how thoroughly they pounded it into me when I was a kid, felt a twinge of guilt just for desiring the more beautiful one.
But to want beauty in your world, for its own sake, isn’t vanity. Rationally and logically I’ve accepted this for years. But emotionally, down in my gut, it’s been hard to overcome the way I was raised. There is a difference between spending a lot of money on something like a car, just for the status value, just to make people envy you, and spending the money because you you really admire the craftsmanship, the engineering, and the art of its makers. It takes your breath away, verses you think it makes you somebody. I know this rationally. I think I’m finally comfortable with it now emotionally. I was raised for so long, so very very long, to fear taking joy in material things, lest I loose sight of spiritual things. But there are harmful extremes on both sides of that scale.
I did the math, and looked long and hard at my budget. I’d paid off the Accord quickly, and so it had a lot of trade-in value, and that made buying the Mercedes make more financial sense then it would have otherwise. Thing is, paying for this car will not be a hardship, even with the other obligations I have currently. Of course, I could put the money to some more practical use, or just stash it away in savings until I needed to spend it on something more practical. But…see that smile? There’s, really, all the reason beauty needs. I only wish I could thank each and every person whose hands called steel and copper and aluminum and glass and fabric and plastic and rubber and leather and little bits of silicone and software code into becoming this car. All the engineers, all the assembly line workers…everyone. Thank you for wanting more then good enough. I promise from now on, not to feel guilty about wanting it too.
According to global marketing information firm J.D. Power and Associates, 42 percent of all car buyers … won’t even look at a vehicle built by a U.S. company.
Dave Sargent, J.D. Power’s vice president of auto research, said [that is] a mistake.
"Many consumers still have a view of the Detroit automakers that the products are not as reliable as the imports, but what our studies show is that that is simply not true," he said.
Detroit has been closing the quality gap in recent years, Sargent said. In a study this summer of three-year-old vehicles, J.D. Power said Buick tied Lexus as the most dependable brand. In another J.D. Power study on quality, Ford won in five categories — more than any other company.
But Sargent said when it comes to cars, it takes years for perception to catch up to reality.
I appreciate the dynamic J.D. Powerman is describing. My own experience with cars designed by the Big Three is an unbroken string of hoopdies. My Honda Civic has run for more years and more miles than my Dodge Colt, Ford Escort, Chevy Cavalier and Chevette combined. Those earlier cars all broke down so often, stranding me at so many key moments, that I can still feel the anxiety of those strandings in my muscle memory. Just thinking about it makes my stomach churn. I can’t imagine easily coming around to feeling secure about relying on another Ford or Chevy to get me from point A to point B if I need to get there.
I have no problem with buying an American-made car — my Civic was built by the UAW in Ohio, my Escort was built in Korea — but it will be a long while before I overcome my hard-earned, visceral distrust of Detroit engineering.
That’s me. My first car was a 1973 Ford Pinto and I loved it, and got 135k miles out of it (by taking care of the motor fanatically…changing the oil every two-thousand miles and so forth…) and still it broke down on me repeatedly. But it was 1973 and that was just what you expected of cars back then. Except for the Mercedes, which back then was legendary for its bombproof reliability. My mom’s first car was a 1968 Plymouth Valiant slant six (we were carless for most of my childhood), which just ran and ran and ran. But after she traded that one in, she endured a string of just awful Chryslers and I swear I wouldn’t trust a Chrysler motor any further then I could throw it.
I endured a string of really marginal used cars myself after the Pinto…but that was mostly because I was flat broke more often then not, and couldn’t afford more then a couple hundred buck junker. Then I started getting work as a software developer, and could actually afford a new car, and bought a 1993 Geo Prism on the recommendation of Consumer Reports. I got over 200k miles out of that car, and it never once left me stranded. Under the skin, that car was a Toyota Corolla.
My next car was the Honda Accord I just traded in. I drove that thing across the Imperial Valley and the wastelands of Western Wyoming and Idaho and eastern Oregon and never once worried that it would break down on me in the middle of nowhere. Thing is, that Accord, and that Geo Prism, were both made in America, by American labor.
American labor can build solid, reliable cars. But for ages it seems to me, Detroit just doesn’t want to design cars that way.
So I understand that aspect of what the J.D. Power guy is talking about. But he fails to notice another equally significant reason that the Big Three automakers have a lousy reputation: They’ve spent millions of dollars over the past several decades on a PR campaign designed to persuade us that they don’t know what they’re doing.
General Motors, Ford and Chrysler have loudly insisted for years that they are technologically incompetent. They have spent millions of lobbying dollars to explain all the things they cannot do, all the improvements they are unable to make, all the ways their abilities, designs and engineering are inferior to those of their competitors. All of that money spent advertising their limits and incompetency has had an impact. American car buyers listened. We believed them.
Consider, for example, CAFE standards — targets for corporate average fuel economy. Every time that Congress or Al Gore or the Sierra Club has suggested these standards should be higher, Detroit shrieks that they can’t take the pressure, that it couldn’t possibly be done, that they don’t have the skill, the know-how or the basic competence to pull it off. Toyota, Honda, Mercedes and Volkswagen, on the other hand, just said, "More fuel-efficient vehicles? Hai. Ja. We can do that. We’re good at making cars."
The same thing happened earlier with air bags and emissions standards. When California passed strict new emission standards in the 1990s, GM and Ford shipped their top lobbyists to Washington and Sacramento to argue that the new rules were technologically impossible. Toyota and Honda didn’t send lobbyists — they sent cars that met the new standard. The same dynamic occurred even earlier with seat belts. With GM’s lobbyists arguing that the company wasn’t capable of meeting the technological challenge of the seat belt why should consumers trust them to build reliable engines?
You know…I hadn’t thought of this before, but it fits. I can appreciate the big three arguing against government dictating auto design…I don’t agree with it on the basis of safety and emissions standards…but I can see them making that argument. But that’s not the argument that emphasized. Instead, like Fred says there, they cried doom and gloom and said repeatedly, over every friggin’ safety or emissions requirement, that it couldn’t be done. Meanwhile, Europe and Japan just kept..well…doing it.
It’s not that Americans can’t build good cars. It’s not that Americans can’t engineer good cars. It’s that corporate management didn’t want to. The mindset was, good enough to roll out of the factory is good enough. If there are problems, fix them after the fact, until the warranty runs out.
It’s not that they just didn’t design them to be maintained or repaired either…I remember one car, I think it was the AMC Pacer, which needed to have the engine jacked up to replace one of the spark plugs…a routine operation, something you did with every tune-up back in those days…but they didn’t design them to be Assembled either. I remember looking under the hood of the Toyota a friend bought in the late 1970s, when Japan was starting to actually worry Detroit. It was a marvel. Not only where there all sorts of little things they did in there to protect vulnerable hoses and electrical cables from the engine compartment environment, and thus decrease the likelihood of a breakdown, but there was all kinds of little things they did, that you could see, to the individual components to help the assembly line workers put it together right the first time. Little tick marks, or fittings on the individual parts that at a glance told you, attach this part to this other part Here…This way. You didn’t have to even think about it. The pieces Told You how to put them together. That kind of thinking did not penetrate Detroit management for decades. I’m not sure it has even now.
You go to a Toyota or Honda showroom now, and you’ll see some of the finest cars American labor can build. Absolutely world class stuff. They’re just not Detroit designs. And that’s not the fault of American engineering either. I recall reading a few years ago, about a guy who’d been put in charge of GM’s Cadillac devision, who was proposing to build an American supercar, something to compete, not merely with the top of the line Lexus, Mercedes and BMWs, but with Rolls and Bentley. Right On, I thought. It doesn’t matter if the market for something like that is small…Build It dammit! Let’s produce one America sedan that’s made as well as a car can be made, not just at the state of the art, but defining it, and cost be dammed. Go ahead and make it for the fabulously rich…and maybe…hopefully…the techniques learned will trickle down to the rest of the GM line. You think what Toyota learns while making Lexus doesn’t find its way eventually to the Camry? That’s why they’re so damn good…they have a line where they just go for it. Every car maker should have one of those.
But no…it was never done. And I don’t think that guy’s with Cadillac anymore. The new styling in the line since the 1990s is his, and maybe some engineering improvements. But Cadillac still has the worst reliability record of any luxury model. That’s not the fault of the people who build them. American workers can build a great car, if they’re given a great car to build.
Now, this is the issue: Does a political party say to its most militant, committed, ideologically driven believers in purity that they have a veto over what the party does? And I say that procedurally because substantively I agree with them. I have spoken on this floor and in committee for including people of transgender. I have argued that with my colleagues in private. I have argued that with the Democratic Caucus. But I also believe that I have a broader set of responsibilities than to any one group and my job is to advance the moral values that I came here to advance as far and as fast as I can and not voluntarily to withhold an advance because it doesn’t meet somebody’s view of perfection. And the question is, how do we relate to those people? And it has become an increasing problem for both parties.
Frankly, until recently I have felt that one of the advantages we Democrats have had over our Republican colleagues is that we were more willing to be responsible, less susceptible to the most committed minority of our party having a veto. I think from the days of Terri Schiavo and before and since, the Republican Party has suffered from that. I don’t want the Democratic Party to suffer from it. Not because I want to protect the Democratic Party as an end in itself, but because the Democratic Party is the means by which these values I care about are most likely to be advanced.
And let me talk about this ideological faction that we have. There are some characteristics that they have that I think led them to this profoundly mistaken view that the greatest single advance we can make in civil rights in many, many years would somehow be a bad thing because it would only include millions of people and leave some hundreds of thousands out. And I want to include those hundreds of thousands. I have done more to try to include them than many of the people who say we should kill the whole thing, but I don’t understand how killing the whole thing advances that.
But here are some of the characteristics: first of all, they tend to talk excessively to each other. One of the things when you are in this body is you talk to people all over the country. You talk to Members of Congress from every State. And I have this with people who can’t understand why I am not introducing legislation to impeach the President and the Vice President, and I find that this is a characteristic that these are people who do not know what the majority thinks, who do not understand the depths of disagreement with their positions on some issues. And that doesn’t mean a majority that says George Bush is wonderful. That isn’t there anymore, but a majority who would be skeptical of impeachment.
But let me get back to this. There are people who talk excessively to each other. They don’t know people of other views.
There is another characteristic of these people who are so dedicated. They do not have allies. You can take an elected official who has been with one of these groups day after day for years, but let that individual once disagree, and it’s a betrayal. It’s a failure of moral will. And lest anyone think I am here being defensive about myself, let me be very clear: I will be running for reelection again. The likelihood that I will be defeated by someone who claims that I am insufficiently dedicated to protecting people from discrimination based on sexual orientation seems to me quite slender. I am not worried about my own situation, and let me also say that I have said that my colleagues suffer sometimes from the unwillingness to tell people bad news. It has been suggested that I may suffer from the opposite direction. It’s not that I like telling people bad news, but I do think that you should when you have to.
I am not worried about myself, but here is what I’m worried about: I am worried about people from more vulnerable districts because not only do people talk only to themselves and not understand the differences that exist and not accept anybody’s bona fides ever, that they will turn on anybody the first time there is an honest disagreement, but there is also the single-issue nature. That is, there are people who say, okay, you know what, I don’t care about your survival to fight for any other issue.
I’ll say this…you have to admire the chutzpah of a man who argues that he has "a broader set of responsibilities than to any one group" while defending a bill that protects only the group he belongs to, and not the broader set of sexual minority groups that it used to. You have to admire the chutzpah of a man who cites his minority rights credentials, while arguing that the people he’s culling out of a civil rights bill don’t matter as much, because they’re a smaller minority. But you Really have to admire the chutzpah of a man who is willing to state flatly that the job security of his fellow democratic congressmen is more important to him then then the job security of the people he’s culling out of his anti-discrimination bill.
This business about people with "no allies" who "talk excessively to each other" and bitch about being betrayed over an "honest disagreement" stinks like a cesspool. This is the language the gentleman bigots use to paint gay people as a militant pressure group for wanting equal rights, equal opportunity and access to marriage. They call us a threat to children and families, they call us disrupters of military cohesiveness, they call us disease spreading sexual deviants, they say we’re offensive to god almighty, and when we call them on their cheapshit bigotry they reply that they’re being viciously attacked for disagreeing with us. That’s called begging the question. What is the nature of the disagreement Barney?
You are betraying them Barney. And in doing that, you are betraying all of us. You’re selling them out, and in the process, cheapening our many many years of hard, bitter struggle. This wasn’t for fairness. It wasn’t for equality. It wasn’t for justice. It was just for Getting Ours. That’s what you’ve turned our struggle into. Jackass.
Yes you drooling moron, you have a broader responsibility. You have a responsibility to All Americans. Not just Some Americans. Not just Your Kind Of Americans. You have a responsibility to America. To what America stands for. Or…used to anyway. The American Dream? Liberty and Justice For All? That stuff? Remember it?
Members of the House of Representatives recently threatened to hold a vote on a bill that would cut from the Employment Non-Discrimination Act the people who most need its protections. There is no better example of the reason we need a transgender-inclusive ENDA than Diane Schroer, a highly-decorated veteran who transitioned from male to female after 25 years of distinguished service in the Army. Diane interviewed for a job as a terrorism research analyst at the Library of Congress, and accepted the position, but the job offer was rescinded when she told her future supervisor that she was in the process of gender transition.
The ACLU does not support an employment discrimination law that covers sexual orientation but not gender identity, for two reasons. First, the sexual orientation only bill may well not even do what its sponsors want. Because it currently defines sexual orientation as “homosexuality, heterosexuality and bisexuality,” there is still a serious risk that employers may get away with claiming they fired women because they are too masculine and men because they are too feminine. There is a serious risk courts will say the definition only covers who you have a relationship with, and not stereotypes that only apply to some gay people. If that sounds far fetched, we’ve been watching courts do just this in disability and marital status discrimination cases. And courts have already said that harassing someone over perceived masculinity or femininity is not sex discrimination if the prejudice stems from sexual orientation. We have been warning members of Congress about this problem for over four years.
But the more important reason to oppose excluding gender identity and expression is this: We truly do believe that discrimination based on sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity and expression are not mutually exclusive. They are all based on beliefs about what is or is not appropriate for men and women; what jobs are appropriate, what relationships are appropriate, what kind of personal and public identity is appropriate. It makes no sense to split them apart.
No one is more aware than the ACLU that compromise is a critical part of the legislative process, and that change in a large republic is almost always incremental. But a compromise that cuts out some of the community, as a group, as opposed to one that cuts out some employers or some situations, is wrong. It would create the belief that this is a less worthy group of LGBT people, something that doesn’t happen when you leave people who work for small employers uncovered (something most civil rights laws do). There has been plenty of compromise in ENDA. It allows employers to keep same-sex partners out of health plans. It doesn’t apply to the military. But some bargains are just not worth it. Cutting out people who have been on the front lines of the LGBT movement is not a concession we should make.
Matt Coles
Director, ACLU Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender & AIDS Project
Why I’m a card-carrying member. You think the ACLU is an extremist pressure group Barney? Well walk across the isle and shake John Boehner’s hand Barney, because without a doubt he believes that too.
Barney Frank wants to pass an EDNA and he doesn’t care if it leaves some members of our community (Yes John Aravosis, Our community…) in the dust. He doesn’t even really care if it really protects the people he claims it will. How does this make any sense? Because it’s got his name on it, that’s how. Frank wants his name in on the first ever federal law banning discrimination against gay people, and never mind whether or not it actually does that. It’s not for the community…it’s for posterity.
“This is a perverse distraction from the issue at hand,” said Jim Manley, a spokesman for Reid, D-Nev. “Instead of debating the merits of providing health care to children, some in GOP leadership and their right-wing friends would rather attack a 12-year-old boy and his sister who were in a horrific car accident.”
Manley cited an e-mail sent to reporters by a Senate Republican leadership aide, summing up recent blog traffic about the boy’s family. A spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., declined to comment on Manley’s charge that GOP aides were complicit in spreading disparaging information about Frosts. (emphasis mine)
In my experience, if you are not participating in something, you deny it outright to kill the story.
Mitch McConnell is the Republican Minority Leader in the Senate and sponsor of the Orwellian-named “Families First” legislation which would actually decrease the number of kids covered for benefits. Classy. Is someone in his office coordinating a dirty tricks PR advance against a 12 year old child? Have they been helping the story along, doing oppo on this child and his family and feeding it out through the wurlitzer to their corporate media buddies so their hands appear publicly clean while the wingnuts launder their slime tactics for them? As Digby asks, has the Senate Republican Minority leaders office frequently been used as a laundering point of contact for wayward freepers and random wingnuttery at large? Yes or no.
You often wonder sometimes, where the winger blogs are getting their information from.
Anyway, let’s see how the NYTimes does in fielding their latest gibberish.
when Democrats enlisted 12-year-old Graeme Frost, who along with a younger sister relied on the program for treatment of severe brain injuries suffered in a car crash, to give the response to Mr. Bush’s weekly radio address on Sept. 29, Republican opponents quickly accused them of exploiting the boy to score political points.
Then, they wasted little time in going after him to score their own.
In recent days, Graeme and his family have been attacked by conservative bloggers and other critics of the Democrats’ plan to expand the insurance program, known as S-chip. They scrutinized the family’s income and assets — even alleged the counters in their kitchen to be granite — and declared that the Frosts did not seem needy enough for government benefits.
OK. So they accused the kid’s family of fraud, essentially. How does the NYTimes do in fact-checking the asses of the right blogosphere?
The critics accused Graeme’s father, Halsey, a self-employed woodworker, of choosing not to provide insurance for his family of six, even though he owned his own business. They pointed out that Graeme attends an expensive private school. And they asserted that the family’s home had undergone extensive remodeling, and that its market value could exceed $400,000.
One critic, in an e-mail message to Graeme’s mother, Bonnie, warned: “Lie down with dogs, and expect to get fleas.” As it turns out, the Frosts say, Graeme attends the private school on scholarship. The business that the critics said Mr. Frost owned was dissolved in 1999. The family’s home, in the modest Butchers Hill neighborhood of Baltimore, was bought for $55,000 in 1990 and is now worth about $260,000, according to public records. And, for the record, the Frosts say, their kitchen counters are concrete.
Certainly the Frosts are not destitute. They also own a commercial property, valued at about $160,000, that provides rental income. Mr. Frost works intermittently in woodworking and as a welder, while Mrs. Frost has a part-time job at a firm that provides services to publishers of medical journals. Her job does not provide health coverage.
Under the Maryland child health program, a family of six must earn less than $55,220 a year for children to qualify. The program does not require applicants to list their assets, which do not affect eligibility.
In a telephone interview, the Frosts said they had recently been rejected by three private insurance companies because of pre-existing medical conditions. “We stood up in the first place because S-chip really helped our family and we wanted to help other families,” Mrs. Frost said.
That’s a pretty thorough refutation of every single accusation the wingnuts could come up with against the family. So, good. I myself would add that there never really was any reason to take their frenzied posts seriously in the first place: the crap about the private school, and their real estate assets supposedly affecting how much they could pay for health insurance, were obviously absurd from the start. There never was any need to "investigate" these claims: common sense should have said, "irrelevant."
In other words, if, as the NYT has it,
But what on the surface appears to be yet another partisan feud, all the nastier because a child is at the center of it, actually cuts to the most substantive debate around S-chip. Democrats say it is crucially needed to help the working poor — Medicaid already helps the impoverished — but many Republicans say it now helps too many people with the means to help themselves.
… It’s pretty clear that yes, the Frosts are a good example of the kind of people the program would help, and it’s also pretty clear that the reason the wingnuts went after them and their kitchen counters (!) was that their example is in fact a very persuasive one.
Most Americans know perfectly damn well just how messed up our heathcare system is, and they want relief from the constant stress this mess imposes upon them, and they’d really think it is kind of neat that you might not have to lose your home because your kids get in a serious car wreck. What are their "arguments," anyway? That it’s too costly? When money is shamelessly being flushed away by this administration on all sorts of harebrained schemes, most notably the wildly unpopular Iraq debacle, how’s that one going to fly? That it could lead to eeek socialism booga booga? When people might think to themselves, "is this constant worry over healthcare, which causes me to make constant sacrifices and affects even so basic a question as what do I want to do with my life and what kind of a family do I want to have, actually what American liberty is supposed to be all about? Constant fear?"
You can see why they decided to fling slime on the Frosts’ kitchen counters instead.
Reading the article, this all seems to me pretty clear, though naturally I’d like it spelled out more firmly.
But the real news in the article is this:
Republicans on Capitol Hill, who were gearing up to use Graeme as evidence that Democrats have overexpanded the health program to include families wealthy enough to afford private insurance, have backed off.
An aide to Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, expressed relief that his office had not issued a press release criticizing the Frosts.
And that is good news. If the GOP party leaders are backing off, then the media very likely won’t feel the need to plaster the Frosts all over the damn place over essentially nothing. And that is a Good Thing.
The progressive blogs started fighting back at once on this, and it looks like it made a difference. Now the noise from the right wing sewer isn’t going unchallenged by the time it percolates up to the corporate news rooms. This is good. This is very good. The radical right has spent decades building this noise machine. But it’s starting to look like other voices are finally, Finally, making themselves heard in the echo chamber.
But there’s more to this story then the simple fact that the right is lying about the Frosts. This little smear campaign illustrates perfectly how the radical right has been looking America in the eye and lying about itself, about its purpose, its values, its motives, for decades. Juan Cole (soon to be an ex-republican) sums it all up pretty well here…
I was talking to Tim via AOL IM, and I decided it was probably worthwhile to bring this up for everyone. One of the things that is so surprising (for me, at least) about the whole Graeme Frost episode is that rather than make their case against this program with their vicious assault against this family, they Malkin/Freeper/Limbaugh brigade are doing just the opposite. Rather than expose this family as a bunch of frauds and lazy slackers and welfare queens, they are making the family’s case.
If you look through this family’s dossier, it appears they are doing everything Republicans say they should be doing- hell, their story is almost what you would consider a checklist for good, red-blooded American Republican voters: they own their own business, they pay their taxes, they are still in a committed relationship and are raising their kids, they eschewed public education and are doing what they have to do to get them into Private schools, they are part of the American dream of home ownership that Republicans have been pointing to in the past two administrations as proof of the health of the economy, and so on.
In short, they are a white, lower-middle-class, committed family, who is doing EVERYTHING the GOP Kultur Kops would have you believe people should be doing. They aren’t gay. They aren’t divorced. They didn’t abort their children. They aren’t drug addicts or welfare queens. They are property owners, entrepeneurs, taxpayers, and hard-working Americans. I bet nine times out of ten in past elections, if you handed this resume to a pollster, they would think you were discussing the prototypical Republican voter. Hell, the only thing missing from this equation is membership to a church and an irrational fear of Muslims and you HAVE the prototypical Bush voter.
They are, however, not without fault. They are unable to afford insurance through normal means (and now that they have pre-existing conditions, probably couldn’t get traditional insurance anyway), and managed to get several of their family members injured in a traumatic accident. And, it appears, those are the big blind spots for compassionate conservatism. That, and the real big sin- allowing themselves to advocate for a policy that the Decider was going to veto. Here it is, so you can see their grievous sin that requires they be destroyed:
“Hi, my name is Graeme Frost. I’m 12 years old and I live in Baltimore, Maryland. Most kids my age probably haven’t heard of CHIP, the Children’s Health Insurance Program. But I know all about it, because if it weren’t for CHIP, I might not be here today.
“CHIP is a law the government made to help families like mine afford healthcare for their kids. Three years ago, my family was in a really bad car accident. My younger sister Gemma and I were both hurt. I was in a coma for a week and couldn’t eat or stand up or even talk at first. My sister was even worse. I was in the hospital for five-and-a-half months and I needed a big surgery. For a long time after that, I had to go to physical therapy after school to get stronger. But even though I was hurt badly, I was really lucky. My sister and I both were.
“My parents work really hard and always make sure my sister and I have everything we need, but the hospital bills were huge. We got the help we needed because we had health insurance for us through the CHIP program.
“But there are millions of kids out there who don’t have CHIP, and they wouldn’t get the care that my sister and I did if they got hurt. Their parents might have to sell their cars or their houses, or they might not be able to pay for hospital bills at all.
“Now I’m back to school. One of my vocal chords is paralyzed so I don’t talk the same way I used to. And I can’t walk or run as fast as I did. The doctors say I can’t play football any more, but I might still be able to be a coach. I’m just happy to be back with my friends.
“I don’t know why President Bush wants to stop kids who really need help from getting CHIP. All I know is I have some really good doctors. They took great care of me when I was sick, and I’m glad I could see them because of the Children’s Health Program.
“I just hope the President will listen to my story and help other kids to be as lucky as me. This is Graeme Frost, and this has been the Weekly Democratic Radio address. Thanks for listening.”
Pretty strong stuff. I can see why this rabid dog needs to be put down with the full force of the wingnutosphere. And it just goes downhill from there. We learn from our intrepid “reporters” on the right that $45,000 is now rich, which is news to me and everyone else who remember mocking Democrats when they tried to claim $100k combined income was considered rich. You righties do remember that, don’t you?
I think the property was valued at around $225,000. I dunno, I have no sympathy for them. Looks like they have more than enough money for luxuries they won’t sacrifice, yet they expect everyone else to sacrifice for them. My family had to sell our house because we couldn’t afford to keep it, have one used minivan and a clunker my husband uses to get back and forth to work, and until this past weekend we didn’t have a television because it was a luxury we couldn’t justify spending on. No private schools for my 3 kids- can’t even afford daycare. Yet we manage to afford health insurance, keep our rental home comfy, and have food on the table. I’m content with what I have and certainly don’t want anyone else paying for what I can afford, after cutting out the luxuries.
15 years ago, when my then-wife and I discovered we were going to have a child – I had a job with no health insurance.
I changed jobs – period. I was stupid and willing to go without insurance for myself – but with my child there was no way I was going to risk it.
These parents have the same opportunity.
They chose not to find jobs that offered health insurance – and they chose to spend their money elsewhere.
Then, when tragedy strikes, they’re held up as models of “what’s wrong with this country”.
Sorry – but they should be held up as models of “What’s wrong with many Americans”.
My bad- they don’t have any advice other than “SUCKS TO BE YOU” or “SELL YOUR HOUSE” or “GET ANOTHER JOB.” Because, as we all know, the hallmark of responsibility is making your children homeless so they can maybe get healthcare. Nobody even pointed to the numerous charities that we conservatives are supposed to expect to fill the gap so the government doesn’t have to pay for things. Instead, it was taunts, catcalls, contempt, and jealousy (because these folks are in SUCH an enviable situation).
I simply can not believe this is what the Republican party has become. I just can’t. It just makes me sick to think all those years of supporting this party, and this is what it has become. Even if you don’t like the S-Chip expansion, it is hard to deny what Republicans are- a bunch of bitter, nasty, petty, snarling, sneering, vicious thugs, peering through people’s windows so they can make fun of their misfortune.
I’m registering Independent tomorrow.
For the record, I was raised in a family of Rockefeller republicans. I registered republican at age 18, as soon as 18 year olds were given the vote back in the early 70s. I switched to democrat in the 1990s, because I got tired of gay folks like myself being used as baseball bats against democrats. I figured if the party regarded me as the ultimate weapon against democrats, I might as well be one. Mr. Cole…your gay and lesbian neighbors have known what a bunch of bitter, nasty, petty, snarling, vicious thugs, peering through people’s windows, the republican grassroots are for a long, long time now. Reagan delivered them into power. Bush taught them that to the victor belong the spoils.
Nonetheless, progressive types persist in deluding themselves that there are vast masses of the "needy" out there that only the government can rescue. An editorial in Canada’s biggest-selling newspaper today states:
A total of 905,000 people visited food banks across the Greater Toronto Area in the past year.
The population of Toronto is about two-and-a-half million. Is the Star suggesting one in three citizens of one of the wealthiest municipalities on earth depends on "food banks"? Or is it the same one thousand people getting three square meals a day there? Or ten thousand people swinging by a couple of times a week? And, in that case, how many of them actually "depend" on food banks? Only the Star knows. But the idea that 905,000 Torontonians need food aid is innumerate bunk.
(emphasis added)
Now, I don’t know anything about the Star article in question, but anyone who’s not a wingnut engaged in "fact-checking" can plainly see that the "Greater Toronto Area" would have a larger population than "Toronto." Since wingnut research is done entirely with The Google, let’s consult the oracle:
The Greater Toronto Area (widely abbreviated as the GTA) is the most populous metropolitan area in Canada. The GTA is a provincial planning area with a population of 5,555,912 at the 2006 Canadian Census.[1]
5.6 million vs 2.5 million. OK, the actual figure is only 220% higher than Steyn’s.
These little slights-of-hand aren’t clumsy or accidental.
Sorry, no sale. The Democrats chose to outsource their airtime to a Seventh Grader. If a political party is desperate enough to send a boy to do a man’s job, then the boy is fair game.
So says Mark Steyn of the National Review. Firedoglake has more…
Why are all these high traffic wingnut blogs (and far right Fox News) attacking this 12 year old boy and his family? This may well be the lamest excuse I have ever heard in my life for attacking two children who were severely injured in a car accident and their parents who couldn’t afford health insurance for them. I mean honestly, this propaganda fishing expedition disguised as “questions” doesn’t pass the smell test, and Malkin and her cronies know it:
Asking questions and subjecting political anecdotes to scrutiny are what journalists should be doing.
First of all, you weren’t scrutinizing, you were harassing the family at their place of business and their home, and then you kept on harassing them and egged your readers to do the same. Your gin up a phony distraction from your bad press because ”the GOP doesn’t care about poor children“ conservative bloggers and pundits decided that the ends justifies the means in cleaning up after George Bush’s latest mess — even if it meant sacrificing the daily lives of a couple of injured children in the fray. Secondly, you weren’t even close to following the code of ethics that professional journalists require in this situation to “minimize harm,” so you can call yourself the ethically-challenged political hacks that you are and be done with it.
None of you political hatchet cronies give a rat’s ass about minimizing harm for these children, one of whom suffered a severe brain injury in the car accident and can’t possibly fight back against this crass, thoughtless tactic. And on top of that, you are liars.
Which really says it all about how much they believe themselves in their own ideology. A political movement that claims to have access to certain truths about morality and governance that so-called "leftists" and "socialists" are trying to suppress has to resort to lies to get it’s point across? So where’s all this Truth you guys claim you have over progressives? No. No. They lie, starting with their declared moral and political values, because if they told the truth, that all they really believe in is Might Makes Right, and the absolute rule of the rich and powerful, they’d never get anywhere. They’re scum. Or as Digby says…
This is so loathesome I am literally sick to my stomach. These kids were hurt in a car accident. Their parents could not afford health insurance — and sure as hell couldn’t get it now with a severely handicapped daughter. And these shrieking wingnut jackasses are harassing their family for publicly supporting the program that allowed the kids to get health care. A program, by the way, which a large number of these Republicans support as well.
They went after Michael J. Fox. They went after a wounded Iraq war veteran. Now they are going after handicapped kids. There is obviously no limit to how low these people will go.
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