February 2008 – Page 16

Raising Awareness

This is an ad campaign intended to raise awareness about statutory rape by suggesting that just because a girl looks older, it doesn’t mean that she’s mature enough to make decisions about sex with an older man. That’s a fine idea. I’m all for recognizing the fact that just because a girl has a body that you perceive as sexual, it doesn’t mean that she is automatically interested in having sex with you. I’m all for recognizing that breasts are not indicative of adulthood or sexual activity or anything other than nice lumps of fatty tissue on one’s chest.

I’m all for raising awareness about statutory rape. But the execution here is… lacking.

As for “Just because she has the body doesn’t mean she has the brains,” well, she could very well have the brains (shockingly, not all minors are complete idiots) — it’s still breaking the law.

Ann Coulter says she’d vote Clinton over McCain

This kind of thing means less than nothing coming from a provocateur who earns her living ruffling as many feathers as possible and blasting obnoxious, shrill opinions on the “wrong” side of whatever issue she can find. I don’t know if her angle is to blast McCain for being too middle-of-the-road on terrorism and immigration, to damn Clinton with faint praise and a toxic endorsement, or just to cause as many rolling eyes as she can. But it’s still kind of hilarious, maybe because bits and pieces of it are disturbingly accurate. Those kernels of truth are… well, they’re election-year realities, I guess. Coke or Pepsi? Pepsi or Coke? Democrat or Republican?

Oh noes! Not pink underwear!

He likes to call himself “America’s Toughest Sheriff,” but he might as well be called “America’s Most Opportunistic Publicity Hound And Misogynist.” Yep, Joe Arpaio, Sheriff of Maricopa County in Arizona, has crawled out from under his rock to bask in the television lights because the Superbowl’s comin’ to town, and he wants to be sure to get some free publicity:

GLENDALE, Ariz. – If it comes to it, the oft-proclaimed “America’s Toughest Sheriff” says he has a pair of pink underwear, a bologna sandwich and a spot in a dirty old prison tent for Tom Brady, Eli Manning or, most certainly, Paris Hilton.

Maricopa County – which includes much of metropolitan Phoenix – is host to the Super Bowl, one of the nation’s most decadent party weekends where, sometimes, celebrities and even athletes find themselves on the wrong side of the law.

Around here the law means Joe Arpaio, the tough talking, tougher-ruling sheriff who would like nothing better than to make an example out of a high-profile criminal and give them the kind of treatment you might expect in what used to be the wild, wild West.

So for the football player who might get into a bar fight or the starlet who might drive drunk, consider yourself warned.

While it’s nice to see that any celebrity or athlete will be treated the same as anyone else, it’s useful to keep in mind what it’s like to be treated the same as anyone else in one of Joe Arpaio’s jails. The cornerstone of his strategy? Pink underwear.

Pink underwear: When he noticed that inmates kept stealing jail-issued underwear, he dyed them all pink in an effort to humiliate male prisoners and cut down on thefts. It worked and he even sells a line of pink underwear to raise money for the sheriff’s office.

That’s right: Arpaio’s strategy is to feminize the male prisoners, thereby humiliating them. Because there’s nothing worse than being a girl. But I loved the unquestioned assumption that the tactics work because feminization is so bad, and not, say, because it’s a lot harder to pass off pink underwear as your own rather than as the jail-issued stuff.

Other tactics include feeding his prisoners only bologna sandwiches, housing them in tent cities out in the Arizona desert, and making them work on chain gangs. I’m really surprised that nobody’s managed to file a successful civil rights claim challenging these practices, which seem to be put in place not for the benefit of public safety, but for the benefit of Joe Arpaio’s reputation.

Underhanded? Somebody is.

This is going to be a little inside-baseballish, but bear with me. I’ve been attacked and insulted quite nastily, and it takes a great deal of background to explain not only why the attacks were nasty, but why the attackers were simply dead wrong and need to issue a full retraction and apology.

Recently, over at Lawyers, Guns & Money, there have been a number of rather vitriolic discussions concerning the Florida Democratic primary and the alleged attempts by Hillary Clinton to “cheat” or to “break the rules” by spinning her win there as a victory and announcing that she wants to have the Michigan and Florida delegates seated at the convention. The DNC last summer decided to punish Michigan and Florida for moving their primaries up the calendar, before Super Tuesday, by stripping them of delegates at the convention. The primaries could continue, but there would be no delegates at the convention. The candidates all agreed not to campaign in Florida or Michigan, though they could fund-raise. A number of candidates withdrew from the Michigan ballot. Others, including Hillary Clinton and Chris Dodd, remained on the ballot, but by the time the primary rolled around, Clinton was the only one left in the race.

Why the vitriol over a primary? Seems that Rob Farley and Scott Lemieux have decided that Clinton is not to be trusted, and become rather unhinged when anyone disagrees with them on this point. How unhinged? Well, today, Scott likened me to John Yoo. That’s the guy who is behind the unitary executive theory and argues in favor of torture, in case you haven’t been keeping score. And when I objected, Rob piled on and became rather invested in the comparison even as Scott backed off a little (but not very effectively).

Mississippi legislators seek to bar restaurants from serving fat people

I’m still reeling from the insanity of Clinton wanting to yank due process out of deportation. But wait… there’s more insanity before bedtime!!

Mississippi House Bill 282 would make it illegal for restaurants to serve food to anyone who is considered obese by the State Department of Health. And apparently the legislator who introduced this bill is completely serious about it, even though he’s aware it’s unlikely to get passed.

Any food establishment to which this section applies shall not be allowed to serve food to any person who is obese, based on criteria prescribed by the State Department of Health after consultation with the Mississippi Council on Obesity Prevention and Management established under Section 41-101-1 or its successor. The State Department of Health shall prepare written materials that describe and explain the criteria for determining whether a person is obese, and shall provide those materials to all food establishments to which this section applies.

This kind of thing cannot be ignored when talking about the “War on Obesity” and how distorted it is by people’s ingrained cultural attitudes and paranoias about fat. Fat is so bad and evil that you need laws against it; you need to legally restrain restaurants, sources of food, from potentially propagating fat. You need to hang signs saying “We Don’t Serve Fat People.” Sometimes bills like this are introduced without expectation of passing, to raise awareness about an issue. But is it really awareness-raising to suggest something so blatantly discriminatory? Especially when fat people already get discriminated against — even refused service, in some cases — for being fat? It’s so absurd that it would make a good joke about how out of control the obesity scare has become, if it weren’t being done with some serious anti-fat intentions.

Hillary Clinton wants to eliminate due process for immigrants? What is this, bizzaro liberalism?

Although some are claiming her stance on immigration is preceded by years of anti-immigrant policy in the previous Clinton White House, I’m still totally flabbergasted by Hillary Clinton’s recent spate of comments calling for swift deportation of immigrants, with no due process. Until today, I was still not completely decided on who I wanted to vote for in the primary next Tuesday. There are a lot of things I actually like about Clinton: I’m more impressed with her take on universal health care, and I strongly believe in the need for a woman in the White House someday soon. But unless this is a hoax, or there’s some explanation that convinces me it’s all wildly misconstrued, there is now a 0% chance I will vote for Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The New York Sun is known for having a somewhat neocon bent, but they’re far from being Fox News or the Post. Unless they’re flat-out lying, this is not a single slip of the tongue or ill-considered comment we’re talking about here. Keep in mind this is Hillary Clinton we’re talking about here. She’s not only a very savvy political operative who’s not known for making absurd slip-ups, she’s also been a lawyer for the last 35 years, and started her law career interning at a civil rights firm. But nevertheless, she said these things on three different occasions to three different audiences:

“Anybody who committed a crime in this country or in the country they came from has to be deported immediately, with no legal process. They are immediately gone…”

“[Aliens with criminal records] should be deported, no questions asked.”

[About illegal aliens who have committed crimes] “No legal process. You put them on a plane to wherever they came from.”

She apparently wants to put immigration lawyers out of business, not to mention public defenders who represent non-citizens. I can’t believe she’d toss due process out the window, even to earn points with certain audiences for being “tough on immigration.” Pandering is no excuse for taking a torch to the Fifth Amendment! Isn’t due process part of what’s supposed to set Democrats apart from the Constitution-burning Bush administration? Aren’t liberals supposed to be concerned about the abuses at Guantanamo, about prisoners being locked up or tortured with no fair trial, just because they’re not citizens or suspected of a crime? This is serious facepalm territory we’re in at this point.