Who wants Hillary to stay away from the Secretary of State position.

Not that I think she would be bad as SOS. Quite the contrary, I think she would rock that position like no one else. She’d put Condi and Colin and Madeline to shame in under 3 minutes.

But to be SOS, she would lose the thing that makes her super awesome. She would no longer be an advocate for average, ordinary, American people. She would lose autonomy. She would no longer serve the will of the people, but the whims of the president. She would lose any influence she might have on those domestic issues like the HOLC and health care by being shunted off into foreign policy. I want her in the Senate, advocating for us, as a (wait for it, wait for it) maverick democrat unafraid of the Precious and his cronies. I want her to keep doing exactly what she has been doing, being a thorny ally in Obama’s side, reminding him about the rest of us and showing him up on economic policy.

So please HRC, remember us. Stay, fight, push us further down the road to the things we need. Don’t be a fool and think that Obama will hire you for your greatness, he is hiring you to get you to shut up on the things that we need most.

So I was reading about this horrible murder case at Jezebel (Sorry OD!).

Nixmary Brown, a seven year old girl, was beaten to death by her step father. Her mother, who is admittedly learning disabled and was also regularly beaten by her husband and DID not beat Nixmary to death, got a prison sentence 17 years longer than the actual murderer for her part in the crime.

17 years longer and she didn’t strike a blow.

Granted- she is a horrible mother. Horrible. And I know all about horrible mothers. And there are lots of things I would like to blame horrible mothers for, being the product of one myself. But…..

Let’s look at this in a different, more palatable and more common way (and a way guaranteed to stir up MRA’s into a furry).

If I, as a mother to my Kid, decided I wasn’t going to spend a dime on feeding my child, how long would it go on before I was thrown in jail for neglect? Certainly the Kid would get 2 meals a day from school Monday through Friday. He’d live on less than 1000 calories a day during the week and just water during the weekends. He’d live, but he’d be hungry and malnourished. And I’d be a horrible parent. At the most it would take a few months for someone to report me to children’s services and for the Kid to be taken away while I would be charged with criminal neglect. As I should be.

But let’s look at the Kid’s dad. Who owes $40,000 in back child support. That’s about 10 years of unpaid child support in the stunning amount of $328 per month (less than the total of 1/4 of the rent and half the cost of the Kid’s food). How long did it take for authorities to make that a criminal act, to threaten him with jail time for non-payment- 10 years. And then he didn’t get actual jail time, just the threat of it. 10 years of neglect. 10 years of not feeding or clothing or housing his own child.

His non-payment is the equivalent of my not feeding the kid, but the punishments are vastly different for the same essential crime, neglect of a child.

But I am the mommy. And society holds me to a much higher standard of care than they do his father, but I am given less resources, opportunity and excuses for failure than I would be if I was a father instead of a mother. I have a smaller paycheck, higher health care costs, and the physical, emotional, and economic burden of raising the Kid alone. As did Nixmary’s mother, until she married the man who murdered her daughter.

But we don’t look at that. I have not once heard anyone ask “where was the girl’s father?” in any of the stories I’ve read on this case. Where was he? Why wasn’t he protecting his child? Was he paying child support, seeing his daughter regularly so he would know if she was in a safe and loving home?

But it’s always the mother’s fault. Fathers are given the ability to walk away from parenthood with little consequence. Mothers are not.

Many of you are regular Shakesville readers. I am a junkie there. Melissa McKewan is one of the smartest writers I know, and why she doesn’t have a paying gig while dimwits like Arriana Huffington and Maureen Dowd do is beyond me.

Melissa is also a huge part of the reason I got enough donations to get the Kid and I into a safe house and out of couch surfing.

She does all this, full time, for free, with no income other than donations. And she is soooooo worth the donations. She has made me a better person and a better feminist with her clear writing on ideas that had just been hazy fog in my head.

So if you are a regular Shaker- now is the time to show some love with some cash. If you aren’t a regular, you should check it out. Shakesville is a harbor in the storm of assholery that is the internet for many of us.

For the less health care wonky out there- a pretty damn good explanation of why we need sinle payer universal healthCARE and not Obama’s half-assed, non-mandate, gimme gimme to the insurance companies.

We want health care, not health insurance.

Health care is a right.

It could increase the GDP of the US by 9%.

9 fricken percent.

That’s about a TRILLION dollars.

I guess that means our measly little 77 cents on the dollar really does hurt everyone, and not just our own pocket books.

or listen and cry.

The big reason why I am a feminist is that no matter what particular oppression affliction you suffer from, that oppression is ALWAYS worse for women. We can;t fix racism or classism or bigotry or abelism if we don’t address the ways we continue to hurt women, here and there and everywhere.

It cannot be an either/ or fix. It must be all or nothing will ever change.

Someone is giving me grief in comments for my aural abuse of metro bus passengers in defense of my kid.

And it’s got me thinking.

First, I’m a girl (you peeps might have noticed) and as a girl I am often given grief for my colorful language. So anyone who wants me to shut up and take a shit sandwich with a grin pisses me off. Cussing actually has sociological value. In the work place, cuss words are used to bond employees together over shared sentiments. Which is why it’s a double whammy when women are belittled for using the same kind of language as men.

But beyond that is this idea that politeness trumps humanity. Now I am a big one for manners. Manners are the little social rules that make society function. We wait our turn in lines, cover our mouths when we cough, don’t spit on the sidewalks. These are behaviors we have because it makes things work better. They differ from culture to culture (in Spain line-cutting is the only way to ever get through a line). But a majority of people in a place will understand what those unwritten rules are and follow them.

However, we have taken the rules for politeness into the extreme of apathy. Much like the asshole in comments, who thinks it is better to let doochebags get away with humiliating children than to offend bus riders with a 30 second take down of said doochebag, we have let inaction become the glue that holds society apart.

And in this case, it was just a dooche picking on a kid. But in other situations, like say the woman who was raped on a train platform while the guard sat in the guard booth and watched, that inaction has caused real damage. What if someone had thrown a public tantrum at the rapist dude before he actually got to the rape point. What if he had been publicly humiliated for groping or even just ogling the woman? Might we have stopped a worse abuse? Might we have stopped some of the watchers from thinking that kind of behavior is ok.

When you humiliate people for treating others badly, you make it harder for people to treat others badly. When you stand up for people, you make it easier for others to stand up. When you sit quietly on a bus and ignore assholes, you make it that much easier for them to be assholes.

In short, when you treat people like human beings, other people will treat them as human too. This is why it’s important for men to be vocal feminist allies and for whites to support people of color and for straights to push for gay marriage.

In WWII in a village in France, the local Huguenot minister treated Jews as humans. He and his congregation hid them, fed them, and kept them safe from the Nazis. The Nazis, seeing Jews treated as human beings instead of vermin, warned the minister before raids were about to take place.

When you treat people as human beings, it makes it easier for other people to treat them as human too. When you call out bullshit and hurtful behavior, you make it easier for other people to call it out too.

Inaction is not really politeness. We have to stop seeing apathy as good manners. We have to start treating people as human beings so we all can be treated as human beings. Stand up, yell at assholes, make a fuss and humiliate those who would do harm.

Who likes jazz.

I’ve posted some Maria Rita videos before, but she is awesome and so i will do it again.

So I’ve been thinking about healthcare.