Category: Uncategorized

Life after killing OBL

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

It still astounds me how we eat our young –how poorly we take care of the troops after using them. CJR has an interview with the Seal team member who killed Osama bin Laden:

“No one who fights for this country overseas should ever have to fight for a job,” Barack Obama said last Veterans’ Day, “or a roof over their head, or the care that they have earned when they come home.”


But the Shooter will discover soon enough that when he leaves after sixteen years in the Navy, his body filled with scar tissue, arthritis, tendonitis, eye damage, and blown disks, here is what he gets from his employer and a grateful nation:


Nothing. No pension, no health care, and no protection for himself or his family.


Since Abbottabad, he has trained his children to hide in their bathtub at the first sign of a problem as the safest, most fortified place in their house. His wife is familiar enough with the shotgun on their armoire to use it. She knows to sit on the bed, the weapon’s butt braced against the wall, and precisely what angle to shoot out through the bedroom door, if necessary. A knife is also on the dresser should she need a backup.


Then there is the “bolt” bag of clothes, food, and other provisions for the family meant to last them two weeks in hiding.


“Personally,” his wife told me recently, “I feel more threatened by a potential retaliatory terror attack on our community than I did eight years ago,” when her husband joined ST6.

Bitter pill

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Sex-crazed Christians have gotten a capitulation from the Obama administration on birth control coverage. For heaven’s sake, don’t go to work for Christian Scientists, you won’t get any health insurance at all! Charlie Pierce:

In case you haven’t noticed, and as we’ll discuss at length later, the president’s approval rating has ticked upwards considerably since he was sworn in again. This, despite the fact the the entire Middle East seems to be up for grabs and the economy still has one wheel stuck in the ditch, and Republicans are jacking around with his nominees for practically everything. So, naturally, it is time for the administration to get magnanimous and reach out a compromising hand to people who eat phalanges on toast for breakfast. And the ladyparts of Presbyterian charpersons get sold down the river again.


Whatever you may thing of the compromises that were necessary to get the Affordable Care Act passed, the very nature of them, and the sheer number of them, has produced a mechanism uniquely vulnerable to political sabotage. This extended hissy fit is a very good example. The president made one compromise before he was re-elected, even though he didn’t have to, and then he got re-elected with a whopping gender gap because he stood up for the right of ladies to manage their own ladyparts free from Bible-banging interference. Now, with absolutely nothing to lose, we have another compromise, this one open to all sorts of new mischief no matter how often we are told that the new deal merely “simplifies” the problem and brings the act into more complete compliance with IRS guidelines. This, of course, presumes there was a “problem” to begin with, and not just an ensemble hissy fit among meddling clerics and theocratic pests.

The big change would be that “a house of worship would not be excluded from the exemption because, for example, it provides charitable social services to persons of different religious faiths or employs persons of different religious faiths,” according to the fact sheet. According to HHS, the change is meant to codify the intent of last year’s rules, and is not expected to “expand the universe of employer plans that would qualify for the exemption.” 

Except, of course, that it will expand that universe in practice rather dramatically. It certainly seems to expand the universe of “religiously affiliated organizations,” at least for the purposes of denying contraceptive coverage. More to the point, the individual consciences of the employees — our Presbyterian charpersons — are not accounted for at all. What we have here are regulations that codify the primacy of the employer’s conscience over the consciences of the people who work for him, especially when we consider the institutions under discussion here.

‘Why not something for white people?

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

White supremacists are so misunderstood!

A new report by Mother Jones reveals that James B. Taylor, a prominent conservative movement leader and board member for the Young America’s Foundation, once served as vice president of a white supremacist group.


Taylor’s bio notes that he is “chairman of World Youth Crusade [for Freedom] and former executive director and chief of staff of Young America’s Foundation.” It also includes that he was once public relations director for the anti-labor union National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation. It does not mention, however, that he also served as vice president of the National Policy Institute, a tax-exempt group than aims to be the lobby for “White Americans—our country’s historic majority and founding population—the people that bears the unique heritage of Europe, Christianity, cultural excellence, and the scientific awakening.” During Taylor’s time with the group, the white-nationalist foundation, founded in 2005 by right-wing publisher William Regnery, published a report arguing that “integration and the civil rights movement led directly to the destruction of great cities; and to millions of whites suffering terrible injustices, including assault, robbery, rape and murder, and losing everything they had through the ensuing destruction of their neighborhoods and their property values.”


Taylor did not respond to Mother Jones’ request for comment, but when asked about his connection to the National Policy Institute by a local newspaper last August, defended the mission of the group, saying: “You’ve got the NAACP and B’nai B’rith. Why not something for white people?”