Author: blksista

Also at ThisBlackSistasPage.

Just what is it about this phenomenon of women killing women for their close-to-term fetuses? The shrinks had better be working on why something like this happens, and the sociologists had better start talking about how we stop it.  Not only do pregnant moms have to worry about abusive boyfriends or husbands, but they now have to wonder about friends, acquaintances as well as total strangers.
One thing I’ve noticed is that murders like these seems to happen among lower-middle class women and poor women.  I think it is a modern outgrowth of what I think is years of baby worship among Americans, with a by-product promulgated from those in the right-to-life movement.  They’ve been able to get to this subset of Americans.  

As a result, Americans fixate on babies, but they don’t necesarily appreciate what motherhood means.  They fixate on new life, sometimes without fully supporting and providing what the child will need to grow, to thrive, and be educated, clothed, and socialized.  They all seem to say, later for all that, which is one of my quarrels with the right-to-life movement–and with Nadya Suleman.

Don’t get me wrong.  I don’t want to get responses saying that I hate children or something.  I certainly do not hate infants, toddlers or older children.  That is not the point.  Neither am I putting down women and couples who know what it is to be mothers and parents.  I fully support women and couples having wanted children…within reason and with common sense and resources.  But it’s also true that many women do have babies as a means of self-expression and to create meaning for themselves by using their bodies.  

I think, though, some other women are watching this fecundity with more than a touch of jealousy and anger.  The fact is that the attention a mother-to-be gets is not like the attention a mom pushing a carriage with a three- or four-year-old or running around town with a ten- or a fifteen-year-old each day.  I think this is part of what triggers the jealousy.  Nobody pays attention to them.  Nobody appears to care about their lives as well.  And what is worse, they don’t care about themselves.

These women want a baby, or they can’t have a baby, or they want a biracial baby, or a girl or a boy.  They may already have two or three children themselves and suddenly, they want another.  And they are murdering in order to get these babies.  There is no color or culture which seems exempt from this behavior, but so far this crime is delineated by class.  You don’t hear about upper- or middle-class women pulling this kind of thing.  

These women plan these atrocities thinking that they can get away with it.  They don’t.  And each one thinks that they can.

Nine times out of ten, the infants die after being cut out of the womb, defeating the whole sordid purpose.  The expectant mothers die, butchered brutally and horribly.  I’m shaking my head as I write this, thinking how can a woman could visit this kind of thing on another woman or another human being–it’s something out of Nazi experimentation.  How can anyone not hear screams of someone being done away with?  Now it comes out that suspect Julie Corey lived in the same building as Darlene Haynes.  If it is true that the infant found with Corey is Darlene Haynes’ newborn daughter, then this is only the second child I have heard of to have survived such an ordeal.

According to the Boston Herald, Darlene Haynes had had a hard life.  An intellectual zero with an IQ of 70, Haynes was ready to bring a fourth daughter and child into the world:

[H]er family claimed she was born with fetal alcohol syndrome and suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and an attachment disorder. The report also states that the state Department of Mental Retardation was involved in her care.  

Her uncle, Karl Whitney, told Gordon that Haynes was raised by her paternal grandmother, Joanne Haynes, because her birth mother was abusive, the report said.

Haynes, who attended the Developmental Learning Center in West Boylston, had her first child, Jasmen, 5, when she was 18. Her daughter Lillian Rose, 3, was born in March 2006. The father of the children is unknown, and Joanne Haynes was granted custody, probate court records show. Haynes shared legal custody of the youngest, Kristine, with [ex-boyfriend Roberto] Rodriguez, but the dad had physical custody, according to a Nov. 17, 2008, judgment.

Darlene Haynes functioned at the level of a 12- or 13-year-old.  As with many developmentally disabled people, she was described as being very trusting and open.  Yet Haynes was not that insensible about herself and her surroundings.  She had shared with a relative a growing suspicion that her movements were being watched.

A restraining order against Roberto Rodriguez was issued recently, because he was accused of domestic violence during Darlene’s pregnancy.  He is the father of Haynes’ daughter Kristine, 1, and the as-yet-unnamed newborn.  In TV news reports, he was shown swearing vengeance against “the monster.”  Naturally one would suspect the boyfriend with the domestic violence paper trail, but this time, it wasn’t the case.

Like I said, I don’t get it all, and I had a minor in psychology, but I certainly get that this phenomenon among women seems to be growing, or perhaps the mainstream media is becoming more cognizant of it and milking it for ratings.  Like with drug addicts, the right people need to intervene, right now.

Published Friday, May 8 at ThisBlksistasPage.wordpress.com

 This morning I saw Leonard Nimoy on The View.  In fact, I’ve been seeing Nimoy almost all week on shows because of the promotion for the new Star Trek film in which we see Kirk, Spock and the rest of the bridge crew as young men and women.  Nimoy is in the flick as an older Ambassador Spock.  “Older” is right.  Leonard Nimoy is now 78, his Spock voice is thinner with age, and he’s on his third wife.  His latest foray into photography features very large women.  James Doohan, Majel Barrett, Gene Roddenberry, and DeForest Kelley have all passed.  It could be that this is Nimoy’s last Trek appearance, but as he said today, never say never.  

I think that there is more affection for Nimoy than there is for William Shatner; more affection for Spock than there is for Kirk.  I think it’s because the character of Spock revises the view of biracial people; he chooses to be Vulcan; he chooses to use his intellect before speaking.  Yet Spock cannot help but display his humanity: his geekiness, his irritation, the significant lifting of his eyebrows, and the way he would signal or mask his emotions by saying, “Fascinating,” or “Interesting.”  Not so noted was his quiet understanding of and affection for people like Christopher Pike, his mother Amanda, Flint, and women like Droxine and Liviana, the Romulan commander, and even for Tribbles and the Horta.  

And Spock is not destroyed because he is different, but he is enhanced and made more interesting and attractive by it.  That there is a portrait of Barack Obama going around wearing Star Trek gear and wearing pointed ears–Mr. Cerebral Cool–proves that Spock will continue to live on in the American cultural repository.  

However, because I am female and black, I identified, as well as fell in love with the character, too; though I wasn’t supposed to.  I was only supposed to relate to black characters or figures.  White girls who were in love with Spock wanted to seduce him on an “I could do it” basis.  And while he was alien, Spock was also part white, which meant that if he was going to make love to anybody not white, she had to be absolutely special.  And class-wise, equal or superior.  

And I was Spock, too; that is, as a tween, I was those things that made people misunderstand him, even to the point of equating him with the devil.  Because I was easily hurt, I wished that I could assume some of that armor of his.  Moreover, he as well I was deserving of love, and that is what I reacted to when I saw him on television 42 years ago.

Yet Nimoy himself is dismissive (and embarrassed) about the impact that he had on young girls and women when Star Trek was running on NBC.  As the Wikipedia entry relates:

Spock, in fact, became a sex symbol of sorts to many young girls–something no one connected with the show had expected. Leonard Nimoy notes that the question of Spock’s extraordinary sex appeal emerged “almost any time I talked to someone in the press…I never give it a thought….to try to deal with the question of Mr. Spock as a sex symbol is silly.“

Whatever.  It’s easier for him to deal with Kirk bedding women than Spock, I guess.  I’m sure this response (from his 1970s book, I am Not Spock) has to do with his separating the character from the real man, and the typecasting he underwent after Star Trek went off the air.  In my tweens and teens–and way into the reruns on Channel 2, I knew that it was a character I was enamored of, and not Leonard Nimoy.  

In the alternate Star Trek universe, which comprises of books, cartoons and video games, and which is not part of the official Trek TV and film canon, it is Saavik who, as Spock’s former ward, bears his child and later marries him.  But in my alternate Trek universe, Spock is the father of royal twins by their mother, the biracial queen of a black planet.  
No one has ever been able to keep Trek enthusiasts from creating their own fan fiction:  timelines, sexualities, worlds, religions, and new characters based on the original series and characters; in essence, extending Star Trek into subjects never seen or heard about on Sixties TV.  I’ve heard of these stories, plays, comics, videos and novels being passed around privately, presented, placed on websites, and even sold at Trek conventions, since the 1990s.  Until the rise of the Web, I thought I was the only one who’d written Trek fiction.

At 13, I had heard about Star Trek, but I was more into Batman and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. until one night, when I came upsairs to visit my childhood friends, Meemsy and his brother, and their mama, and they were watching the show.  Of course, I was hooked.  I think it was when NBC threatened to get rid of the show, that I began to write my universe.  And it wasn’t just because I was fascinated with Spock.  I was also ticked that Uhura wasn’t getting as much action or attention from the men on the Enterprise, and why not from Spock, who was not completely white.  When I saw Tuvok and his brown pointed ears on Star Trek:  Voyager decades later, I smiled. Now women are ticked off that the new Uhura and the new Spock are getting it on.

It was hard to write the story at first.  My mother tried to destroy every piece of juvenilia–junk, she called it–I wrote during that time.  Her stated excuse was that I needed to learn math, but I knew then as I do now, that there was more to this inclination of hers, because she kept doing it for years.  She made me to put the little hand-written manuscript in the garbage; but later, when it was part of my chores to put out the cans, I rescued it by putting it under my shirt.  I smoothed out the pages, rewrote the ones stained with salad dressing, and hid them.  I was so successful at hiding it that when I left home to go to college, the pages came with me.

The story is this:  The Enterprise was confronted with a planetary system embroiled in war. It wasn’t just Oshuniya and Uresiya that was at war, but the Kingdom of Oshuniya, an all-black planet, itself had a civil war between a younger, usurper king half-brother and his older, rightful queen half-sister.  

Queen Alixa was her name, and she too happened to be part-Vulcan; her father, Juozas, while a prince, had met and married an impressive Vulcan woman, Ke-Renn, of both warrior and noble blood. Unfortunately, the princess, pregnant with their second child, was slowly poisoned to death in a conspiracy.  Later, when Alixa’s father became king, he unwittingly married the woman who helped to murder his wife, the Duchess Geantine.  She in turn bore the king another heir, Prince Juozas, who appealed to those who distrusted Vulcans, wanted a male ruler, and upheld the purity of the royal blood.   Queen Geantine later rose in rebellion on behalf of her son, and but committed suicide in the failed attempt.

When the first Juozas died, Alixa ascended the throne.  In five years, however, her brother undermined the monarchy, playing on the queen’s refusal to use her powers on her own people.  Eventually, the queen fled, setting up her court and war council near the frontier, and the prince declared himself king, Juozas II.  In the process, however, he disappeared his uncle, poisoned his aunt until she was an invalid, forced his cousin to marry him, and imprisoned her twin brothers, all of whom were next in line to the throne.  At the time the Enterprise comes onto the scene, the queen’s and the usurper’s forces had fought to a draw.  The usurper’s wife, Seryona, had delivered a disappointment, a girl and princess, to the succession.  Uresiya was beginning to win the war against its neighbor, and taking the Enterprise would have expanded the war.  

Instead, the queen uses her powers to divert the forced beam over of the Enterprise command (Kirk, Sulu, Spock, Scotty, Uhura, Chekov, Bones) from the Uresiyans to her Oshuniya enclave, and hiding the Enterprise from view.  For it was the queen who had asked for the intervention of the Federation in the first place to help bring the interplanetary war between Uresiya and Oshuniya to an end.  When this is accomplished, even as the usurper king attacks the queen’s fortresses, she then challenges her half-brother to a fight to the death, and wins–all without using her powers.

Somewhere along the line, of course, the queen and Spock mate.  She’s just as lonely as he is; a kind of freak among her own people with pointy ears, and more powerful than any other Vulcan he’s known because of her Oshuniya ancestry, and with the reserved demeanor.  There’s no one else like her until Spock shows up. And perhaps, his presence is not an accident, as the Federation wants to put its best foot forward.  For the first time, Alixa has someone her equal to talk to.  By the time the civil war is concluded, and the queen is restored to her capital city and throne, she’s pregnant.  Naturally, Spock accompanies her through all this.  

Queen Alixa gives birth to twins, one of whom will marry his cousin and reconstitute the royal house.  Spock makes two or three visits to see the queen and the twins during their childhood, adolescence and early adulthood, and stays in contact with them.  He’s not exactly her husband or mate for life; he does not have a noble title; he is not one of her royal advisers, and they are not formally married according to the Oshuniya tradition, but the Federation recognizes that there is a tie.

I wrote this when I was 13, when I was feeling that I did not belong anywhere in my family, at school, in the black community, and wondered whether I would ever be attractive to a young man.  Writing it affirmed me; that I could have a happy ending, too.   Leonard Nimoy’s Spock represented Otherness as well as acceptance, a pride in ancestry as well as in being different, even for a black girl who wanted to be loved.

Also at ThisBlksistasPage

Photos by guydonges of Madison

It may look big, but it wasn’t.  I was there until just now (12:37 p.m); I am back in my room in Madison, just across the street from the Wisconsin Capitol Building.  I’d say that there were hundreds of people there.  Possibly a couple of thousand, if you include those coming out for lunch and watching for a bit.  And scary, if you ask me.  I wish you could have seen the sign carried by one protester: “OBAMA’S PLAN = WHITE SLAVERY.” I can only hope that the MSM gets it halfway right about how “successful” these “tea bag parties” actually were. The Faux Noise radio affiliate and the ABC TV station in Green Bay were representing…
Yes, I could see it from my building; I decided to go down and get a feel for what was happening.  Don’t ask me who spoke, I have no idea who they were, but I would guess that some of them who spoke were certainly Republican state senators and other officials and anti-tax advocates.  They also had a portable jumbotron.  And then there was a older brother who got to speak as well.  I shook my head.  Oh, no.  There is always a Steele type in everyone of these kinds of things saying, me, too! me, too!

For a while I felt rather nervous, so at first,  I scribbled what I saw on signs on a credit union envelope standing next to a couple of Capitol cops.  I didn’t see anyone from the Madison Police Department, but perhaps they were near what some of us call the outer ring of the Capitol Square.  I could see an area where the sponsoring group, “Americans for Prosperity,” had a few tables.  I’m sure there were pamphlets, leaflets and voter registration stuff there.  I didn’t want to get too close to this flag-draped, crowded area.  There were a lot of pot guts and gray hair under caps, although there were youth represented, hanging out and being social between getting bored and animated in turns.  People looked tense, and hardly anyone smiled; although they did cheer and roar at points in the speeches.  I didn’t want to meet anyone’s eyes, though I felt at times that I was being observed.  Some of the participants were dressed in the colors of the flag and were waving flags.  Others were wearing parts of what was hunting gear or Army fatigues.  And then there was the guerrilla theater stuff: people dressed as walking pork with a top hat and tails, or wearing white wigs with tricorn hats waving replicas of the “Don’t Tread on Me” flag that Benjamin Franklin made famous.  Check out the signs below.

There were signs attacking ACORN: “Silly liberals, acorns are for squirrels!”; “Obama, get your hands out of my piggy bank!”  “Obama Hood”  “Obama is the Antichrist; Oust Obama!” “Proud Americans Don’t Bow to Saudi Kings”  “Obama Nation is an Abomination,” and “Carry Your Own Weight, Leftist Parasites!”  There were also signs demanding the recall of Governor Jim Doyle, who was one of the first Democratic governors to support Barack Obama.  One spouted that Doyle couldn’t even run a lemonade stand, much less the state.  Doyle had been targeted here in Wisconsin like Spiegelman was in Alabama, but he survived GOP dirty tricks.  Governor Doyle is also the father of two adopted black sons, Gus and Gabe.

It ended at 1 p.m., but even when I left, it hadn’t yet begun to disperse.  I was listening a bit to Ed Schultz on the Air America affiliate here before I left; he was saying that this was essentially a white man’s rebellion against Barack Obama’s ascendancy to the presidency.  He had never been more right today.  Only thing is, where is all this “rebellion” going to go?  It could be no more than what Louis Farrakhan did with “The Million Man March;” he frittered away his chance at black unity on rhetoric.  Right now, there are just a bunch of leaders of this nutty right-wing movement, with no central figure.  And a bunch of Faux Noise talkers.  I would hate for all this frustration to crystallize under one or two leaders.  Then, look out.

Also at ThisBlksistasPage.wordpress.com

This is the only way we see her these days; long before Paris Hilton, she was famous for becoming infamous.  Earlier, she was trying to make a little money or a little noise making diet commercials, telling cruise ship audiences her story, or doing reality shows or walking the red carpet.  Now she just wants to be left alone, but now they’re going to make a movie about Bill Clinton and her.  It never ends.  They haven’t found someone yet to play her: oval faced, long, rich dark hair, heavy-hipped.  They may not; they may just use footage.  Monica Samille Lewinsky is now 35–middle-aged now, one might say–but she still doesn’t have much of a life or a career to show for it.
Barbara Walters of The View said something really touching a few weeks ago; that while Bill and Hill have patched up their marriage and moved on to new prestige (if you can call it that), Monica has not been allowed to move on and to excel–in her own way. She keeps wearing her own version of “the scarlet letter” over ten years after she came to public attention.  It’s her face.  

Even Linda Tripp, who earned the everlasting contempt of girlfriends all over the country for taping Monica’s confidences and exposing her, has her own business with a new husband.  However, she doesn’t look like Linda Tripp any more; she’s changed her face through plastic surgery.  A British reporter visited Tripp’s gift shop in Virginia, but wasn’t entirely convinced that the woman who called herself Karen wasn’t Tripp herself.  Yet Tripp has been able to blend back into the crowd, to disappear into the everyday.  Monica can’t.

During Hill’s ill-fated presidential run, the media made pointed references to the Lewinsky scandal, as it is still called, on its tenth anniversary.  Someone in the audience on two separate occasions asked Chelsea Clinton, who was campaigning on behalf of her mother, about the residual impact Monica Lewinsky had on her parents, or what she felt about Lewinsky.  I thought that this was a low blow, because those questions should have been forced on Bill Clinton himself, who some people feel had weaseled out of apologizing to Lewinsky.  True, at the time she was free, white and over 21, meaning she wasn’t stupid or ignorant.  Nonetheless, Bill Clinton was as much a willing and eager participant in this mess as she was an tempting initiator.  To misquote Steve Harvey, There’s always a man out there willing to cheat with a woman.

At the same time, I had to admire Monica.  She named her desire and went out for it, which was something to be praised and encouraged from feminists and womanists.  However, this was the wrong man and the wrong situation to be so bold.  The Right had been waiting to catch Bill Clinton at his weakest point.  Naturally, the women’s community was divided about her.  Some called Monica a homewrecker, not a sheroe.  I think she was neither at that time.  I think she was a little girl.

I used to call Monica Lewinsky, “Har-Monica,” meaning that I felt that we were all getting played (or blown) by this laughable non-scandal between two consenting, but flawed adults.  I’m not laughing now.  I don’t blame her for getting a gig out of Bill Clinton and his connections, and then, after she was exposed, for trying to make lemonade out of the lemons she was given.  She hasn’t been able to get a real job before and after she received a master’s degree abroad from the London School of Economics.  (She wouldn’t have been able to evade the paparazzi at an American university or college.)

Frankly, the companies don’t really know her.  It’s not like she’s going to turn a department into a bordello.  Sometimes I think these people choose her from the final three or five just to see who she is for themselves and to say that they had Monica Lewinsky in their office looking for a job.  This too is cruel.  Firms have feared that her presence might prove disruptive to the work environment and that clients might not wish to work with her.  This is overkill; they don’t need to protect Bill or Hillary Clinton.  My feeling is, how long would the initial awkwardness last if the management grew a length of spine and laid down the law about their confidence in her skills and knowledge?  Not long, in my humble opinion.

I don’t care if Monica is simply a privileged white Jewish girl.  And I don’t buy the canard that she was a spy for the Mossad, or that marriage is her only refuge.  Monica Lewinsky deserves to be left alone, and she deserves a career–like any other woman–as befits her competence, training and skills.  She needs to be important for the right reasons, to be a star in her own department, to be challenged and productive in doing the best job possible.  Isn’t that what women all over fought for and are still fighting for: to be of use, and to have agency over their own destinies?  I cannot believe that this blip in American history is all that Monica Lewinsky is really worth.

I don’t know how I managed not to see or hear about this atrocity.  It must have been all the ecstasies over Obama’s election to the Presidency that the news was drowned out.  In fact, the murders were discovered some two weeks before.  Someone over at Jack & Jill Politics linked the story update yesterday; of course, the Reichwing have been braying about this for all its been worth since November.   Under oath during the preliminary hearing of the four black Marines charged with the killings, a top investigator who surveyed the murder scene confirmed that  race was a factor in the murder of the Pietrzaks.  The Marines were jealous and enraged that Quiana Jenkins-Pietrzak had just married their sergeant and superior officer, Jan Pawel Pietrzak– and refused to give them the time of day.

“N—– Lover” was written on the wall near the master bedroom and on a bathroom mirror, Riverside County Homicide Investigator Benjamin Ramirez testified at a preliminary hearing, according to the News. But even more shocking, prosecutors say, is the fact that those responsible for the brutal homicide of the 24-year-old Marine and his 26-year-old wife are four Black fellow Marines.

Prosecutors allege that the Marines – Pvt. Emrys John, 18; Lance Cpl. Tyrone Miller, 20; Pvt. Kesuan (Psycho) Sykes, 21 and Pvt. Kevin Cox, 20 – burst into the Pietrzak’s home in Temecula, Calif., with shotguns, and tied up and tortured the couple. They also repeatedly raped Quiana, before John shot them both in the head, prosecutors say.

Why it took so long for the authorities to confirm that it was a hate crime is beyond comprehension. Were they under pressure by the Marines to limit the scope of the investigation?    The Wikipedia entry on the couple have links to several crime reporters’ stories intimating that the brutality of the murders could not have been motivated by simple robbery; that there had to be a much stronger reason why.  Furthermore, the bereaved mothers, Henryka Pietrzak-Varga and Glenda Faye Williams-Jenkins have steadfastly refused to believe the findings of Riverside D.A.’s Dan DeLimon’s office.

The victims’ mothers wept during the two-day hearing.

“We’re going to visit our children at the grave,” Henryka Pietrzak-Varga of Bensonhurst said later. “That’s all we have left after this.”

Three things jump out at me about these murders:

   
1. Sgt. Pietrzak was a Polish immigrant who became an American.  He was immediately drawn to Quiana Jenkins for herself.  I have heard about  young white men in the military who have been marrying African American women (as well as Asian Americans and Latina Americans).  As a new American, Pietrzak, in choosing his wife, seemed immune from racism predicating his actions on important decisions like marriage.   Most Americans from immigrant  backgrounds have tended to shy away from African Americans, because we were/are considered to be the bottom of the standard of what is an American.  There were the exceptions found among every European immigrant group that has come to the United States: Italians, Irish, Greeks, Germans and now Polish. When I have seen biracial couples on television, usually during a news program about military issues, the couples look well-spoken, if not well-dressed, and appear as if they are going places and doing things, except for this obstacle or problem.  Racism is not the issue.  As there are fewer black men who are not going to jail, black women sometimes can’t always be picky.  They have to find someone with mutual interests, who treats them well, and who will love them.  Sgt. Pietrzak loved his wife.  He loved Quiana, and she loved him. I am convinced of that from all I have read and from the wedding photographs.  She was “a good girl.”  The girl next door who had a master’s degree, and a responsible role in providing information and care for black infants.  And he was a good guy and a good friend who loved his country.  They were newlyweds who were going places until these creatures broke into their home and ended their lives.

   

2. Sgt. Pietrzak came from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, New York.  Yes, that Bensonhurst.  Bensonhurst was the scene of one of the most despicable race incidents in New York City during the Eighties:  the baseball-bat beating and shooting of 16-year-old Yusef Hawkins, which resulted, by the way, from race jealousy by the mostly young male Italian Americans.  Nowadays, Bensonhurst is more like a little United Nations than the predominantly Italian American community that it was at the time of Hawkins’ slaying.  Eastern Europeans, East Indians and Bangladeshi, Latinos and Asians now live there.  So things may have changed in Bensonhurst by the time Pietrzak grew up into manhood.  Enough for him to see Quiana as she was, not as a color or a threat.

   

3. There have been various articles in the blogosphere about the paucity of recruits to fight the illegal war in Iraq.  Blacks in particular have shied away from joining in record numbers after hearing the worst from friends and relatives and the news.   I’ve read of recruiting officials trying to get as many bodies as they can, using any possible inducement.  In desperation, they’ve also recruited pronounced neo-Nazi types, misfits, ex-cons and gang members affiliated with the Crips and Bloods into the armed forces. These kinds of guys kill with no recriminations whatsoever for their actions.  If they are the kinds of men we have loosed on the Iraqis, it’s a wonder that the insurgency and Al Sadr hasn’t done worse to us. Reading some of the comments to the articles about this killing, some former and current military men and Marines have piped up to say that these young men, who were still privates after a few years, were possibly a problem for the military before their rampage, and did not subscribe to the Marine motto of semper fi.

Such a waste.  Such a terrible waste.  My prayers go out to the mothers of these wonderful people.  People talk about giving their best; their children were their best.

Also at This Blksista’s Page

Eliot Spitzer’s downfall always had an air to me of being a political hit.  A few weeks before, the prickly governor of New York had announced that he was going to take dead aim at Wall Street excesses; his Rottweiler nose had already picked up the scent that something big was about to happen, and he wanted to get there before it did.

Unfortunately, the call girl scandale du jour caught up with him, and the former state attorney general that Wall Street loved to hate had to resign from a great height.   Since then, Spitzer has been writing occasional columns for liberal blogs and other mainstream media while attempting to get his personal life back on track.  Yesterday was one of those occasions on Slate, and Spitzer didn’t fail to deliver.    He was requesting that people not get suckered in by externals and outrage; that there is something deeper afoot:

Why are AIG’s counterparties (Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, UBS, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley,  etc.) getting paid back in full, to the tune of tens of billions of taxpayer dollars? […]

[Because t]he appearance that this was all an inside job is overwhelming. AIG was nothing more than a conduit for huge capital flows to the same old suspects, with no reason or explanation.

The day before yesterday, I had said just about the same thing: that these guys were getting paid once again when the Feds had already given them a bailout:

Plus, isn’t Merrill Lynch now owned by Bank of America, and Wachovia by Wells Fargo? Just what do we owe them now?

The MSM, the Congresscritters–they aren’t asking the right questions, Spitzer believes.  Anything else is mere posturing for the cameras, while the populace feeds on distrust of the Obama Administration.

   
• What was the precise conversation among Bernanke, Geithner, (then-Treasury Secretary Henry) Paulson, and (Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd) Blankfein that preceded the initial $80 billion grant?

   

• Was it already known who the counterparties were and what the exposure was for each of the counterparties?

   

• What did Goldman, and all the other counterparties, know about AIG’s financial condition at the time they executed the swaps or other contracts? Had they done adequate due diligence to see whether they were buying real protection? And why shouldn’t they bear a percentage of the risk of failure of their own counterparty?

   

• What is the deeper relationship between Goldman and AIG? Didn’t they almost merge a few years ago but did not because Goldman couldn’t get its arms around the black box that is AIG? If that is true, why should Goldman get bailed out? After all, they should have known as well as anybody that a big part of AIG’s business model was not to pay on insurance it had issued.

   

• Why weren’t the counterparties immediately and fully disclosed?

It doesn’t look as though any of these questions were answered yesterday etiher.  Liddy being called to Congress was cosmetic only–to smooth things over rather than answer these hard questions.  This was to keep the scheme going as long as possible until the principals get everything they want.

If Spitzer had gone in and done his worst, the whole thing would have crashed and burned before our eyes much, much earlier.  Bush, Paulson, and everyone else were trying to keep things together for McCain; or to have an exploding cigar ready for a Democratic president.  I know this sounds like a conspiracy theory, but not all of them are crackpot.

And it’s the same guys wanting the government to cushion them against their own bad decisions by foisting this whole thing off on the taxpayers.  Just how many times is Bank of America going to be bailed out, for instance?

The last time this happened was on Hoover’s and Roosevelt’s watch.  And Roosevelt and his people just let those empty, fake banks crash.  They had other things to do.

And where is Barack Obama on all this?  Beyond taking responsibility, it’s really hard to tell.  If he focuses just on the former Massas of the Universe instead of the people who really need help, he’ll be turning his back on them just like Clinton did with his social programs in the wake of the Republican “contract on America.”

Your thoughts?

Hat tip to Jack and Jill Politics:

This embedded video is all in Dutch, but it’s pretty obvious. Our new president is already in power at Madame Tussaud’s in Amsterdam, but where did they put ex-president Bush?

Other Madame Tussaud’s around the world, including the one I knew while in New York, should take heed.

Tinfoil hat time…?  

Mike Connell is dead.

From the Akron Beacon Journal:

[Mike] Connell was a prominent Republican political consultant. He founded New Media Communications in Richfield, [Ohio] which developed campaign Web sites for Republican presidential candidate John McCain and President George W. Bush.

But that’s not all he was.

Mike Connell was known as the “Republican IT guru” for Karl Rove.  Connell’s subsidiary, GovTech Solutions, set up the state of Ohio’s 2004 election results computer network for Kenneth Blackwell, the infamous former Secretary of State. Lately, though, according to Velvet Revolution, an investigative legal and reporting group, […]Mr. Connell told a close associate that he was afraid that George Bush and Dick Cheney would “throw [him] under the bus.”

Maybe they did.
Velvet Revolution goes on to say:

A tipster close to the McCain campaign disclosed to Velvet Revolution (VR) in July that Mr. Connell’s life was in jeopardy and that Karl Rove had threatened him and his wife, Heather. VR’s attorney, Cliff Arnebeck, notified the United States Attorney General , Ohio law enforcement and the federal court about these threats and insisted that Mr. Connell be placed in protective custody. VR also told a close associate of Mr. Connell’s not to fly his plane because of another tip that the plane could be sabotaged. Mr. Connell, a very experienced pilot, has had to abandon at least two flights in the past two months because of suspicious problems with his plane. On December 18, 2008, Mr. Connell flew to a small airport outside of Washington DC to meet some people. It was on his return flight the next day that he crashed.

I’ve been following the Ohio vote fraud controversy, which involves several court cases, including King Lincoln v. Blackwell,  on and off over the past three years, through Greg Palast, through BradBlog, RawStory, and other sources.  It’s only begun to blow open during the past year or so as the 2008 election neared.  We all feared that the same thing could happen again.

So why should we care now?  I mean, the good guys won and the bad guys lost on November 4, right?  There was such a tsunami of voters that they couldn’t cheat electronically, right?

Perhaps, but what about the next time?

These guys need to be nabbed.  Rove, Blackwell, all of them.

More to the point, we need comprehensive election reform.  We need to get rid of ancient voting machines that everyone’s known for decades that they don’t work, or machines that are electronically faulty and can be easily hacked.  We need to stop denying the vote to others so that the ‘right’ candidate wins.  We need to have our citizenry go in and out and about their business on Election Day instead of taking an entire day in order to vote.  We cannot continue to vote as if we were living in the ballot box-stuffing 19th century and not the egalitarian 21st, especially for our Americans of color.  If it means going back to the ordinary paper ballot, then so be it.  Up is up and down is down. Always.

Karl Rove said repeatedly, even on his blog, that John McCain was going to come out from behind and win over Barack Obama.  However, after October 31, when Connell was forced to answer a subpoena, Rove mysteriously shut up.  Judge Solomon Oliver of the Federal Court in Cleveland ordered Connell to give a formal deposition on November 3, the day before the election.  Two Bush/Cheney 2004 attorneys had been dispatched to ‘counsel’ Connell at this and at other appearances, but their stonewalling did not work.  For two hours, Connell was interrogated about “‘Man in the Middle’ attacks, the use of Trojan horses to control election results by remote, and the role of Triad in election manipulations.”  

Not surprisingly, Connell intimates claimed that the White House was becoming increasingly jittery about the programmer giving evidence about his activities, which also included destroying White House and campaign e-mails and setting up an alternate e-mail universe. On November 1, Velvet Revolution stated:

[..] Connell must now know that the [j]ig is up–he can’t steal this election.  If he has set up the network for such a theft, he knows that he has to shut it down prior to Tuesday because he will get caught. People must now be held accountable and Connell has a unique opportunity to do that by cooperating in full and telling what he knows about election rigging, White House email destruction, front groups, and orders from Karl Rove and others to do illegal things.

The White House wasn’t the only organization becoming concerned about the Connell case.  The McCain campaign even kept track of developments by visiting RoveCybergate.com, Velvet Revolution’s dedicated website.

Larisa Alexandrovna of OpEd News, who regularly reports on RawStory about the case, commented yesterday afternoon about Connell’s death:

He [Connell] has flown his private plane for years without incident. I know he was going to DC last night, but I don’t know why. He apparently ran out of gas, something I find hard to believe. I am not saying that this was a hit nor am I resigned to this being simply an accident either. I am no expert on aviation and cannot provide an opinion on the matter. What I am saying, however, is that given the context, this event needs to be examined carefully.

I can’t publish this in the Orange Zone until tomorrow, but here it is:

From Hullaballoo via FireDogLake:

Larry Sinclair is one of the most outrageous anti-Obama smear merchants. So why is the National Press Club hosting him this coming Wednesday? Apparently Jeff Gannon wasn’t available.

Sinclair’s story about having used cocaine and having sex with Obama in 1999 is not credible. As Stoller says, it’s another “whitey” style rumor and we all know how quickly this stuff makes the leap from the right wing smear machine to Sean Hannity to Fox News and then alley-oops its way into the AP.

I kid you not, but sign the petition connected with this travesty at FireDogLake:

A video has been circulating the internet showing a man, Larry Sinclair, speaking to camera making slanderous claims about Senator Barack Obama. These claims are demonstratably false, and don’t bear repeating here, or in any venue. Which is why it is shocking that the National Press Club is offering a him a spot on the national stage on June 18.

Please take a moment to ask the National Press Club to check the facts before giving Larry Sinclair a bully pulpit. Also, if you have a moment please consider calling the National Press Club at 202-662-7500, and politely but firmly petition them verbally.

Petition Text:

We call upon you, before giving Larry Sinclair a stage from which to speak to the national press, to check the viability of his story. When the facts prove his story false, you deny him a place at your podium.

Again, call them:

National Press Club
529 14th Street NW
Washington, DC 20045

Front Desk
202-662-7500

What kind of people are they getting booked into the National Press Club?  First Wright, now Sinclair.  There is a method to this madness.

Also in l’orange…

Hat tip to Jack and Jill Politics:

The black women’s blog, What About Our Daughters? is about to inaugurate
the Michelle Obama Watch page to both list and refute attacks and smears on the character and aims of Michelle Obama, who may indeed become the first African American First Lady in history.
Said Gina M., proprietess of WAOD, in light of the purported ‘Whitey’ tape being promoted all over:

This whole infamous tape stuff is just a sliver of what Michelle Obama is going to face in the media. So because I predict getting a flurry of emails from now until November, I am going to be proactive and start a separate Michelle Obama blog to track every article, blog post, youtube clip that pops up and provide you an opportunity to respond. Because if the past is any indicator, the campaign has no problem with her being turned into a verbal punching bag, I DO! IF you want to volunteer and want to post updates on the blog, send an email to the gmail account in the right sidebar. Its going to be a LONG hot SUMMER!

Whether you support her husband or not. Let’s be clear, any and every Black woman that walks in her footsteps can expect the same treatment so we might as well pull a Gandolf, draw a line in the stand and yell “THOU SHALL NOT PASS!” This ain’t about Barack, its about every professional Black woman that has had to smile on the days she didn’t want to for fear of being labeled ANGRY.

So…black women aren’t feminists, per se?  If anything, black women understand feminism quite differently from white women, but it is still feminism.

In other words, black women are saying, we have this woman’s back, and those of her children, too.

Ms. Gina has had to step up construction of the Michelle Obama Watch blog, especially in light of the Malkin ‘baby mama’ controversy.  But it is up, in a small form, and I suggest people visit, and send links, comments and support in the coming election cycle.