In Putin's Russia, Games Play You

I'm not much for watching sports in general for whatever reason, but I am a known watcher of clusterfuckery, and of that, Sochi thus far promises to be chock-full. I get it, of course, that Russia basically had to create a humongous infrastructure to accommodate games of an Olympic scale, but the missing bits are pretty surprising--and things like missing manholes covers are outright hazardous (ditto "dangerous face water").

It makes you think--how sad would it be for an athlete to train and work hard to make it to the Olympic Games, and then wipe out on a bit of sidewalk that terminated abruptly or get dropped by a broken elevator?  Woof, what a mess.

Wow, Phyllis Schlafly is still around.

It's nice she has all that hate keeping her going. We all live for something.

I'm sure the idea that so many of us girls work these days and actually take care of ourselves and our families may have missed her attention while she was so busy working against our interests in being able to do just that. Perhaps she does, in her own peculiar way, recognize that many women don't need a man, but she may be surprised to learn that men sometimes up and leave without getting kicked out. Sometimes women find themselves widowed (as Phyllis Schlafly has). And sometimes men get kicked out because they were, you might say, "asking for it" by being abusive or just generally making a home unsafe for their wives and children.

But none of the realities of single womanhood, or especially single motherhood, seem to matter to Phyllis Schlafly, so long as these silly bitches don't vote Republican.

I must also quibble about her use of the word "illegitimate." The correct usage of the word would be something like, "Schlafly's views about the voting habits and lifestyles of thousands of single women are wholly illegitimate." But all newborn human beings, whether born of married or unmarried woman, are legitimately babies, and deserve to be loved and cared for. She might be thinking of the archaic term "bastard", because she is, herself, archaic. But the marital status of one's parents at birth just isn't the social handicap it used to be in the olden days.

We've also stopped burning witches--you'd think she could at least approve of some of our modern notions!

Oh, Sarah Palin, how do I refudiate thee?

The Wasilla Quitter quips on Twitter,
Her glistening wit not gold, but glitter;
The surface sparkles, the content--litter!
A candy shell on a center bitter,

A Tweet full of Sound and fury
text'd by an idiot,
signifying nothin'
(You can drop a 'g'--
in a living language--got to
celebrate it? To quote the Bard:
"Never, never, never, never, never.")

But naturally, my real problem isn't that she invented a word (which I admit I do, all the time--with the exceptions being that a) I know I'm doing it and b) I usually warn you I am, and c) I know what the words I'm using mean and generally whether they are real or not) but that she hopped up on the idea of being against the "mosque at Ground Zero" which isn't a) entirely a mosque, since it sounds kind of like it's a community center of sorts, nor b) entirely at Ground Zero, when it's really more like a few blocks away. And also the Muslims who are running seem to be the "peaceful ones" she somewhat bigotedly is referring to. And New York, which is where the 9/11 terrorists struck, is mostly okay with the whole thing, and the Heartland isn't so much being struck in the heart (which is a "say huh?" phrase if I ever read one--repetitious, graphic, overwrought) as people who want to flog the anti-Islamic sentiment have decided to make this an issue.

So what I'm saying is--there is so very much wrong there, why worry that she doesn't get basic rules of syntax or grammar right? She has basically Tweeted against the idea of religious freedom and the property rights of the people who purchased the site, which last I checked were decidedly American values, and she called upon Muslims to participate in their own discrimination--to satisfy the "real Americans" in the Heartland perhaps?

In other words, she got nothing right. In Palin-terms, that's a perfect score.

(Hat-tip to the whole entire Internet, basically.)

The past isn't even past--2010.

Just two quick stories I really have to blog about together because they are just peas and carrots. First off:

Miss. county schools ordered to comply with desegregation order

By Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 13, 2010; 2:58 PM

A federal judge Tuesday ordered a rural county in southwestern Mississippi to stop segregating its schools by grouping African American students into all-black classrooms and allowing white students to transfer to the county's only majority-white school, the U.S. Justice Department announced.

The order, issued by Senior Judge Tom S. Lee of the U.S. District Court of Southern Mississippi, came after Justice Department civil rights division lawyers moved to enforce a 1970 desegregation case against the state and Walthall County.

Known as Mississippi's cream pitcher for its dairy farms and bordering Louisiana 80 miles north of New Orleans, Walthall County has a population of about 15,000 people that includes about 54 percent white residents and 45 percent African American residents, according to the U.S. Census.

For years, the local school board has permitted hundreds of white students to transfer from its Tylertown schools, which are about 75 percent African American and serve about 1,700 students, to another school, the Salem Attendance Center, which is about 66 percent white and serves about 577 students in grades K-12. The schools are about 10 miles apart.

I included the byline so you could also view the date. This is 2010.

And the other story is this one:

McDonnell spokesman says voting rights letter sent to felons 'without approval'

RICHMOND -- Letters telling more than 200 felons in Virginia that they had to write a "personal letter to the Governor" to get their voting rights restored were sent in error, a spokesman for Gov. Robert F. McDonnell said Tuesday, adding that the potential requirement is merely a "draft policy proposal."

The letters sent to felons said that, "as a new requirement," nonviolent offenders must provide a "personal letter to the Governor explaining the circumstances of your arrest and conviction." They were also told to detail their efforts to get a job, seek education, and participate in church and community activities, and why they think their rights should be restored. The governor's letter went on to say that failure to do so would result in applications being closed "with prejudice."

"The letter was sent without approval by a well-meaning staffer attempting to continue to process requests even while new procedures were being considered," said McDonnell spokesman Tucker Martin.

McDonnell (R) is revamping the system for felons to have their rights restored as he works to process every application within 90 days. Other governors have taken six to 12 months to process applications.

Can I just say that the "with prejudice" in the highlighted paragraph goes without saying? That's a literacy test! And, near and dear to me as always, what is up with detailing efforts to "participate in church and community activities"?

These two stories don't just go together because they feature the states of governors Haley Barbour and Bob McDonnell, who have both been blogged about here because of the Confederate History month issue (even though I have a picture of both of them with this post.) They go together because they display the attitudes that haven't passed yet with respect to trying to exclude people, separate them, create social castes. That schools in Mississippi remained segregated in a given rural area to this day, and that the state of Virginia "mistakenly" sent out letters to a population that has historically been disproportionately African-American indicating an obstacle to voting rights seem "off" to many of us, but had to feel right to the people who were taking them as a matter of course.

Why? I don't know. Sometimes I blog about things to express my ignorance. I don't know why, except for discrimination, these things would happen, and I don't understand why, after so much progress in the area of civil rights in this country, we still have so much of it.