Blog Archives
Local Racism: District 8. National Racism: Colin Powell’s a moron.
Good anywhere you have an election you can’t win on merit, a debate you can’t win with facts, or school you don’t have the grades for.
The race card is pulled on an almost daily basis at this point, but one of the districts (not mine, thank god) in my city is undergoing a landslide of racism at the moment. District 8 has historically been a “black district” which apparently means a white person can’t run for office there without it being tantamount to “lynching” the black community politically, according to Jarrett Maupin.
“Post-racial society” my ass.
Hey, look, the pale skin running in district 8 is a democrat and I’m not here to defend her political views, but trying to stop her from running because she’s white is the exact opposite of not being a racist. How unbelievably blind can people like Reverend Jarrett Maupin, the author of this storm of accusations toward Kate Gallego, be?
If the people in the district don’t believe that she will represent them properly, either because they don’t agree with her political views and policies or because they judge her based on raced and they don’t want a white woman in office, they will not vote her into office. That’s how elections, generally, work.
There is a Reason Why No One in The Walking Dead Suggests a “Zombie Free Zone” to Protect the Group
I watched the first season of The Walking Dead and I have to tell you that there was a lot of gun use in that show, they all must have been a bunch of racists. For some reason not a single person came up with the revolutionary idea of taking their group inside a house and nailing a sign to the door that said “THIS IS A ZOMBIE FREE ZONE. NO ZOMBIES ALLOWED.” Surely that would have been a much simpler way to survive the zombie apocalypse.
“That’s crazy!” I hear you cry.
Why is it crazy?
“Because zombies don’t care about rules!” you shout.
Bingo.
Gun free zones just don’t work.
Why?
Criminals don’t care whether someplace is a “gun free zone”. In fact, that usually leads them to go TO those places to commit crime, because they are a “soft target”.
Ann Coulter makes that point brilliantly in one of her recent Townhall articles.
You will notice that most multiple-victim shootings occur in “gun-free zones” — even within states that have concealed-carry laws: public schools, churches, Sikh temples, post offices, the movie theater where James Holmes committed mass murder, and the Portland, Ore., mall where a nut starting gunning down shoppers a few weeks ago.
Guns were banned in all these places. Mass killers may be crazy, but they’re not stupid.
So gun free zones don’t work.
It’s time to try something new when it comes to protecting our children.
Or something old, apparently Rahm Emmanuel, David Gregory, and Barack Obama consider armed guards in schools are good enough to protect their kids. Even if they think the idea is “outrageous and unsettling” when the NRA suggests it for other other schools.
That’s right, the school Rahm’s kids go to has an armed guard, Obama and Gregory send their kids to school at Sidwell Friends, which has no fewer than 11 armed guards on campus.
So why shouldn’t other kids have the same protections? Either in the form of armed guards or armed teachers. Maybe Obama thinks his kids are somehow more important than the other children in the United States. Wouldn’t really surprise me.
Leaders in my state of Arizona are working toward better protection in schools at the moment, such as Tom Horne’s plan.
Arizona’s attorney general proposed arming one principal or employee at each school to defend against attacks such as the recent Connecticut school massacre.
“The ideal solution would be to have an armed police officer in each school,” Attorney General Tom Horne said in a news release Wednesday. But budget cuts have limited the number of Arizona schools with “school resource officers” on campus, he said.
The “next best solution,” Horne said, “is to have one person in the school trained to handle firearms, to handle emergency situations, and possessing a firearm in a secure location.”
Until some sort of option of this type can be worked out, there has been a plan put forward by Sheriff Joe Arpaio (who I have met!) who has decided to send some of his volunteer posse out to guard school’s in the area.
“I have the authority to mobilize private citizens and fight crime in this county,” Arpaio said. Arpaio first started using his posse to protect malls during the holiday shopping season in 1993 in response to violent incidents in prior years. Since then he said malls where his posse members are on patrol have had zero violent re-occurrences and patrols by his all-volunteer squad during the 2012 shopping season netted a record 31 arrests. Arpaio said since the program has worked so well in malls he believes it will work just as well protecting schools. “We’re not talking about placing the posse in the schools right now but in the outlying — the perimeters of the school — to detect any criminal activity.”
Sheriff Joe gets a lot of hell from liberals for any number of his positions here in Maricopa country, from his tent city jail (making criminals uncomfortable, how kooky) to his views on illegal immigration (where he actually views illegal immigrants as criminals, shocking right?) but he keeps getting re-elected.
Someday Sheriff Joe will need to stop running for re-election and back someone new for the position of Maricopa county Sheriff, but for now I cheer him on and hope that more locales take a harder stance on protecting our children.
Neither criminals or zombies are likely to follow the rules and laws you set out. Sometimes the best protection of innocent life, is an armed guard to blow their brains out…in the zombies case. I suppose you could just shoot to wound if at all possible in the case of the criminal.
Excuse me, but how did you think they calculated gestational age?
So there has been this thing, where, for some reason, the legislature here in my state has tried to pass several laws recently that have to do with procreation and abortion.
I will admit that I have a tendency to jump to conclusions about these sorts of laws and, partially because the topic isn’t a really big deal for me, I have a tendency to just listen to what the media is saying about a law. I generally assume that 50% of what they claim the law does is complete and utter bullshit, since that’s my default setting for news, but this time I actually started doing a little research because someone actually bothered to bring up a discrepancy in the facts when talking about the law and posted a link to the bill itself.*
The issue at hand seems to be this part of the bill.
On page eight of the proposed amendment to H.B. 2036, lawmakers lay out the “gestational age” of the child to be “calculated from the first day of the last menstrual period of the pregnant woman,” and from there, outlaws abortion “if the probable gestational age of [the] unborn child has been determined to be at least twenty weeks.”
- RT.com
(Don’t bother looking in the bill summary I linked to, the first “quote” doesn’t exist in the summary.)
Because of this, apparently, the state of Arizona is trying to be tricky and prevent abortion from week 18 not week 20, as the law suggests. Because two weeks makes it so much better *eye roll*
The only problem is, this isn’t some tricky language from legislators who are trying to sneak in a shorter amount of time for abortions to take place. This is how gestational age has always been calculated this way.
Gestational age, or the age of the baby, is calculated from the first day of the mother’s last menstrual period. Since the exact date of conception is almost never known, the first day of the last menstrual period is used to measure how old the baby is.
Here’s what an OB/GYN had to say on why this is how the age of the fetus is calculated.
No, it doesn’t mean that the law prohibits abortion at 18 weeks. It means 20 weeks. Pregnancy has ALWAYS been calculated from the 1rst day of the last menstrual period. Always, always, always. When we do an ultrasound, we still use that convention. Perhaps it seems odd to non-obstetrical folks, however, since the last day of the period can be inaccurate (do you use flow? spotting? one spot of blood?), as can date of ejaculation (what if you have sex 3 days in a row?), and date of ovulation (how would you know that?), and the fact that fertilization takes 24-48 hours, the 1rst date of the last menstrual period is the only accurate date. Every other state law uses the last menstrual period (as does every obstetrical textbook) because that is the way we calculate gestational age.
So, technically, when things like this are said:
“Considering that it’s anti-choice nuts we’re talking about, it’s safe to assume that they’d simply prefer a situation where all women of reproductive age are considered to be pregnant, on the grounds that they could be two weeks from now,” RH Reality Check’s Amanda Marcotte adds in a recently-penned editorial. “Better safe than sorry, especially if that mentality means you get to exert maximum control over the bodies of women of reproductive age.”
- RT.Com
The people that Amanda Marcotte should be going after are actually the doctor’s who staff the American Pregnancy Associate or the other medical organizations that have decided that gestational age is the most fool-proof way to calculate the age of the fetus.
This isn’t “anti-choice” nuts deciding that I might as well be considered pregnant now, just because I could be 2 weeks from now. This is sound medical reasoning.
*****
Now, do I have problems with the law? Perhaps.
Mostly I just don’t see the point. Our current state law(to my knowledge) prohibits abortions after viability, except in case of danger to the mother’s life. I don’t have a problem with that, as I’ve written about before.
So while I don’t take issue with the actual time constraints as far as the 20/18 week “conspiracy” goes…can’t our legislature find something more important to worry about?
*****
*I’m usually quite lazy, the best way to get me interested in something is to give me to relevant links first. Other wise I just forget about it and never bother to google to topic.
Meeting Sheriff Joe
My day could not possibly get any better.
(okay, I’m a crazy political fangirl. Getting my picture taken with a political figure is cooler than meeting an actor in my book.)
I had the good fortune to be able to attend a meeting of the ASU College Republicans this afternoon and Maricopa county Sheriff, Joe Arpaio, was the guest speaker.
He is nothing like the papers describe him, and he had more than a few comments on journalistic bias and the press in general.
He is a very funny, personable man, with an extremely “no non-sense” point of view and an awesome tie pin.
He joked a lot, took some (extremely polite) jabs at democrats, and refused to comment on “operation fast and furious” because he doesn’t like to talk badly about other law enforcement agencies.
He cares a lot about his deputies and their families and about his duty as Sheriff, to the people if his county and to the laws of our country and state.
I was amazed to hear how many years he has worked in law enforcement and how diverse his background is. He’s worked in numerous countries and spent many years protecting the Texas/Mexico border.
If I hadn’t been planning to vote for him already, I would be now.
It was a great honor to meet him and I hope that I will get to hear him speak again.
Laws for the GOP to pass: Sane Teacher Certification (via The Conservative New Ager)
This all sounds pretty accurate. Especially considering it was written by one of the best teachers I’ve ever known…just sayin’.
