Linda Chavez Calls to End Apartheid of Women in Iran. Why that drips with irony.

From South Africa's Apratheid museum.

Funny story about Linda Chavez's concern of Iranian women,

Don't remember it?

Do you remember that Linda Chavez was George W Bush's first pick for Labor Secretar but she never took office?  Do you remember why?

Yes,  because she had allegedly  hired an  "illegal immigrant"  (she admitted making payments to one, but that's not exactly the same as proven hiring) which put her into the pits with the right so she had to go.

No this isn't about one woman possibly hiring one undocumented immigrant for up to ten years as news sources reported. It's about how the undocumented system is a form of apartheid and it appears that Ms. Chavez appears an active user of that system.

It's hard to imagine the pain behind hidden by that nonchalant excuse.  Not for Ms. Chavez, but for the friend, maybe a relative as I think she was described as a distant cousin.

Yeah, when an employee is not being treated well, they tend to quit.  They may return if they can't find a better offer, but repeated leavings means something is wrong.  And no one ever disputed that Ms Chavez knew she was illegal.  So the best thing to do would be to give her a permanent job and sponsor her for residency like an honest woman.

So what does hiring an undocumented immigrant and refusing to help her become legal have to do with an apartheid situation?  Apartheid treats one set of people like they aren't worthy of human rights.

Like Meg Whitman fired her maid/babysitter Nicandra Diaz-Santillan when the woman asked Whitman to sponsor her for legal status (documentation leading eventually citizenship).  It had also turned out that Whitman hadn't paid Ms Diaz for copious amounts of overtime the woman had done for the candidate's family.  Whitman paid up in 2010 so as to not add criminality to her obvious unconcern for her former maid's documentation problems, but only because the spotlight had been focused so harshly on her distasteful treatment of Nicky.

What is this ability to treat others as unworthy of respect,  just reward for work, and employer FICA payments (unless a person is self employed, the employer pays half of Social Security tax)?  What is the ability to neglect to pay overtime when an employee is asked to work over 8 hours a day or 40 hours a week, just because a person is undocumented?

That certainly smells like apartheid to me.  And in both cases the women came to know that these two women were undocumented.  In Linda Chavez case she ignored the plight of her "friend".  In Meg Whitman's case she fired a long time trusted maid, instead of getting into a politically messy
 situation that would have helped a woman who worked overtime apparently uncomplainingly for many years.

So Linda Chavez's worry about the women of Iran seems like she has cataracts obscuring her vision, but we do know that the neocons are desperate to get into another long protracted war.  Remember all the great things that were supposed to happen if we took a little "cake walk" in Iraq?

Turning Iraq over to the majority was supposed to free people, instead it forced women to don hi-jabs and spurred a civil war that drove millions out of the nation to seek safety across borders.   At least over 100,000 Iraq citizens were killed by the most circumspect number.  More than four thousand five hundred US soldiers died.  About ten times that were "wounded", but other analyses showed that up to a quarter million US soldiers have had their bodies, lives, or mental and emotional capacities harmed so greatly that normal lives will be impossible in the future.

I think America now understands we can't just march into a nation and fix it, but most Americans (70%) were against invading Iraq too.  With the wrong party in office, it doesn't matter what the people want.

That is why I keep trying to remind people about what happened when Republicans were in control before and to point out the hypocrisies of those who support neocon agendas when we haven't even fixed our own very apartheid approach to people who work in our nation.

Word stunts, though seem to be all some political people have to offer.  will we let them drag us back into war?

Picture at top used via Creative Commons license Attribution (CC by 2.0) thanks to flickr user Nagarjun/Nagarjun Kan-dukuru who has no connection to this blog or blogger.

Shorter URL for this post: http://bit.ly/PI4gCU

Has Issa Lost His Chance to Prosecute Former IRS Official Lois Lerner?

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Issa may have made a gaff that will prove to be fatal to his hopes to charge Ms Lerner with contempt according to Lawrence O' Donnell.

Video: Chris Christie Boasts He Can Make Stuff Up and Convince People It's True.

Do Tell So how much stuff have you made up so far in this little controversy?

So The Lady In AFP Ad Who Claims Her Insurance Will Be Unaffordable Turns Out Will Be Getting a Break from Obamacare

Above the opposite technique of Night for Day according to the photograper created by overexposing a nighttime vista, I assume.  (Attribution at bottom of post)

 It reminds me of the old "day for night" technique.  You film during the day and then just color everything with shades of dark gray. (Yes, yes,  as explained in FrancoisTruffaut's film of the same name).

I hope Ms Boostra got a lot of money from the brothers who are wealthier than the family of the Sultan of Brunei, because she has kinda trashed her husband's political career that she apparently relies on for money and contacts.  I don't think the Koch brothers will forget that anytime soon.

Excerpt Huffington  Post:

Americans for Prosperity, the conservative advocacy group backed by the Koch brothers, is running Obamacare attack ads featuring a cancer patient who claimed her treatments were "unaffordable" under the new health care law. On Monday, The Detroit News reported that the patient will actually save more than $1,000 a year.
Julie Boonstra says in the anti-Obamacare ad that she was diagnosed with leukemia five years ago, and her health care plan was canceled when Obamacare went into effect.
"Now, the out-of-pocket costs are so high, it's unaffordable," she said.
Before her plan was canceled, Boonstra was paying a $1,100 monthly premium. That's $13,200 a year, without adding out-of-pocket expenses like co-pays and prescription drugs. But under her new plan, the Blue Cross Premier Gold, Boonstra's premiums are down to $571 a month, and out-of-pocket costs are capped at $5,100. That's a maximum annual expense of $11,952 a year.

...
And more on Boonstra:

Boonstra told The Detroit News she had never been politically active before joining the anti-Obamacare campaign. The newspaper reported her ex-husband, Mark Boonstra, had served as chair of the Washtenaw County GOP, and was appointed by Gov. Rick Snyder (R) to the Michigan Court of Appeals in 2012.

Was that fair?  Should Ms Julie Boonstra be able to deny relationship to earning money pushing the lies of the right without be shown up by the truth?

I'm sure there's a Supreme Court case there somewhere.

Picture at top used via Creative Commons License Attribution (CC by 2.0) thanks to flickr user Mike Lewinski who has no connection to this blog or blogger.

Video: House votes on whether to condem Chairman Issa's action Shutting Down Oversight Committee Hearing Without Ranking Member's Comment

A Voice vote seems to go against Chairman Issa, but a Roll Call decides against sanctioning him.

Still it's a shame that this man represents our Marines.

Check out our stash on Darrell Issa by inserting his name in box in upper left side of this blog and hitting the "Search" button to the left and hitting the search button.

Video: Darrell Issa shamefully cuts off ranking House Oversight member's mike after Issa's umpteenth grilling of former IRS chief

Committee chair Issa represents our Marines at Camp Pendleton who are ready to risk their lives for us, as well as other loyal and good people of the Southern California region.  They deserve better than his dictatorial ways.

Help in South Texas For Women Who Self Induce Abortion Disappearing.

Apparently the women slavers in Texas have forced the last doctor helping women who induce their own abortions to quit.

The upstanding rights haters who have forced them into the desperate positions have apparently been able to shut down another helper, the last one for the Rio Grande Valley.

It is so hypocritical since the only possible use they could have to millions of unwanted babies is to build a massive military. So if they want to talk about killing, they should be looking in the mirror.  (And most likely they stood solidly behind George W. Bush's war on Iraq.

And if the GOP have control of the nation 20 years from now, they'll be selling those kids they forced to be born to the highest (campaign donation) bidders for more war.

But some people are still teaching the women of the Rio Grande to stick up for themselves in life and now in politics.

Oops maybe the TX legislative GOP kommandants will have to ban that too in their 2015 session.

(Like the Bible says.  "If you trouble your own house, you will inherit the wind."  The word wind was actually translatible as "whirlwind" not a nice breeze, and yes they have tornadoes in the Middle East.  See T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom)(Psst yeah read it anyway.  It is fantastic.)

Why Russia Doesn't Fear the West?

Caption on the above picture at flickr says Foros, Crimea. It is apparently a Russian Orthodox Church built in 1892.  Link to flickr location of original at bottom of this post. Link above also shows various residences of the Russian Czars in Crimea which they "owned" for 130 years and the Soviets controlled through links to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist State.

 I just read a long screed at Politico about Crimea and why Putin sent in the troops.  It took me back to college days and the times we sat writing reports with our foreheads filled with sweat and our stomachs churning until we learned that the old saw was true.

If you can't win the argument with facts, then baffle them with bullshit.

After the US started bombing Iraq in preparation for a ground invasion, I realized that war was a huge benefit the news media and it's pundits, especially when the "big" game is afoot.  But even more than that, there are signs the news media fear

The title at Politico was "Why Russia Doesn't Fear the West", but it seems to obscure the real reason: We and our Western European allies still are beholden to outdated fossil fuel industry.

  Yes, Europe is  directly involved in buying Russia's natural gas  because of their proximity to it's production fields and it's generally colder weather (though we should note they dumped overlarge vehicles many years ago), but it's actually the fault of our own (US) acquiescence to the stolen election of 2000.

By the end of the 20th century we were at the cusp of advances in solar, wind and other energy  that would have cost the government less and added more to alternative and natural energy advances than 8 years of invasive war helped anything.  Like Fat Albert on skates US could have grabbed the hand of Europe and built  momentum with solidarity and whipping actions that drove alternative energy development along like a speed skater.

Instead, thanks to GOP backers like Halliburton, Big Oil, and the Koch brothers' industries (yes they made millions off the Iraq War despite their protestations that they do not like armed conflict) we invaded a nation that posed no threat but had large stocks of oil.

The GOP also passed a bill while in control of the House, Senate, and White House that actually gave tax breaks for businesses to buy big gasoline and diesel powered vehicles. 

If all that money had been used to convert to solar, wind and other alternative energy industries, the US could have built a massive stockpile of natural energy producing resources and technology.  We could have supplied Europe with more and better natural energy technology so they could have avoided buying petroleum products from the Kremlin.

Instead the Bush administration opted for Global Climate Change boosting, and inducing war for more fossil fuels from the Middle East.

And now the news media needs to only cover the "facts" that please Big Money, Big Energy, and the backers of the American political right.

The Soviets would have been proud of Putin maybe, but definitely of the way that the West has learned to control people's minds by crafting garbage news and opinion to feed them and therefore how their teachings and tactics have continued to cripple the West.

In fact, Russia does have some historical claim going back to a time when white Europeans and their descendants were expanding in North America which we say gives us a valid claim to that territory we call The United States of America.

That may not be cool today, but it gets real sticky when we mention that though Truman did not start a war when China took over Tibet and East Turkmanistan, neither did Eisenhower when he came into the office two years later, and the venture into Vietnam that the great WW2 that the general did start as president to block "the Commies", didn't work out so well.

Picture of (presumed Russian Orthodox) Church in Crimea used via Creative Commons License Attribution (CC by 2.0) thanks to flickr user Lexus_2k who has no connection to this blog or blogger.

Map showing the expansion by Catherine the Great into the Crimea:

Entire map of Russian Imperial expansion, apparently in German, found at Old Map Blog.  To see this version more clearly save to disk, find, and open ( which in Windows 7 can then be enlarged)