June 5, 2004 by s.z.

Your Family Circle Fortune for Today  The Cartoon (You can see it here): Daddy, wearing a sport jacket today, is holding Dolly in his arms.  He is standing by a chain link fence, on the outside perimeter of an airport.  A plane is overhead.  Dolly says: "I like ridin' in planes 'cept when they're taking you away from the people you love." Explanation: Mommy has left Daddy.  Daddy went to the airport to try to convince her not to go, like on the last ep of "Friends" (he left Billy home to baby-sit Jeffy and P. J. , but brought Dolly along to feed him romantic lines to melt her heart, a la Cyrano).  But Daddy was too cheap to pay for airport parking, so he missed her flight and was forced to watch his wife's departure from outside the facility.  His cheapness is one of the reasons Mommy left.  That and the fact that his manhood is missing (see yesterday's strip). Prediction: After saying a few private words to George Bush about how he'll roast in hell, the Pope whispered to Laura that while the church doesn't approve of divorce, since she isn't Catholic she should just leave the S.O.B.  Keane is predicting that as early as January 2005, Laura will be making a new life for herself as a small-town librarian and lesbian. Well, that was my interpretation of the latest offering from the Nostrodomus of our time.  Alison, Pete M., and Susie Dow have some other ideas (involving "No Child Left Behind," the rapture, and Dick Cheney's secret plan to rule the world).  See the comments from yesterday's Family Circle for the whole scoop, and take a look into the future  . . . if you DARE! 10:31:58 AM

Complimenting Chicks, Cursing Judges Renew America, one of our favorite wingnut sites, has some fun new columns up.  First, let's hear from Selwyn Duke, "tennis professional, internet entrepreneur, and writer whose works have appeared on various sites on the Internet, including Intellectual Conservative and Mensnet."  (Anybody whose work has appeared on the prestigious Internet undoubtedly knows what he's talking about.) It occurred to me a while back, as I thought about my chauvinistic teasing of a woman who is very close to my heart, that I had stumbled into genius. For if you're looking for a litmus test for a prospective wife there's none better then that of the tweaking of the modern female ego. All you need do is utter words such as "You do that very well . . . for a girl" with a twinkle in your eye and a boyish smirk on your face, and observe what ensues. Her reaction will tell you more about her than any computer dating service or impromtu little encounter session ever could. For as sure as night follows day, the degree to which her reaction is negative will be directly proportional to the degree to which she's been inculcated with feminism. So, what reaction to Selwyn's genius remark designates a girl as prospective wife material?  He never says.  My guess is that she smiles indulgently, says, "Oh, you!" and then gives him oral sex.  Or maybe she smiles gratefully, says, "Thank you, my lord," and makes him dinner. Anyway, the rest of the piece is just about how women have such big egos these days that they get mad when you imply that they can't do stuff as well as men can.  However, if Selwyn says he can beat his 95-year-old aunt at tennis any day of the week, it doesn't mean that he has a big ego, it's just a statement of fact.  So, women should just accept that men are the better athletes and go make bake some cookies or something.  Now, I'll conclude with a message for you young bucks out there. I remember the episode of the old show Leave it to Beaver in which Ward Cleaver comforts a crying paper-girl with the line, "I know this is a tough job for a girl." The girl took no offense at the remark and it was understood that it was meant to be compassionate. I'm telling you this because you've been raised in the age of the PMS, so you may not even know that the majority of women weren't always afflicted with her mental disorder. To you, this is probably just the way gals are. But I can assure you that in this instance the old show was truly a case of art imitating life — in the not too distant past virtually all women were like that paper-girl. But a few still exist and if you use the technique I outlined in the first paragraph and you're blessed, you just may find one. And then the two of you can live happily ever after in the year 1958. And one last word of advice: if the woman you're with fails the test, she's a PMS, and then your course of action should be clear. Run as fast as you can and don't look back — run like the wind, young man. And don't worry, she probably won't be able to catch you. Guys are faster, you know . . . "Failing the test" presumably means that she beats you to a pulp for your remark.  In which case, you probably should run, because speed is the only thing you have going for you. P.S.  For another view on feminism, check out Pete's coverage of another Internet Sage opining on the age-old question, Should Women Be Allowed to Vote?  While there (The Dark Window), you can also learn Pete's patented secret to winning a woman's heart, Shopping at Newsmax.  (And if you read the comments to that piece, you can read Mr. Frederick Beat Bush Blog's secret to winning a woman's heart: making fun of her spelling.) Now, here's our old friend Jen "Pinky" Shroder, who is trying to impeach a judge for unbiblical rulings.  Jen curses the judge too, as the Bible demands. BlessedCause is currently investigating the process of IMPEACHING U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton. Hamilton has ruled in favor of partial birth abortion, an unforgiveably VIOLENT act of slaughtering God's precious children moments before their birth. Yup, it's now legal to rip a full-term baby from its mother's womb 15 minutes before it was going to make its way through the birth canal, and then slaughter it, just because the mother suddenly decided that she didn't want a child. These actions are outrageous and worthy of curse. Oh yes, Christians can curse, may all the saints curse those who would pervert the righteous ways of the Lord. Phyllis Hamilton andU.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, also nominated by Clinton, advocates lowering the age of consent to 12 years old! By the power of the Holy Spirit to cause these two women to be blinded, as Paul blinded Elymus in Acts 13, so do we curse all liberal judges who continue to pervert the right ways of the Lord. The rest of Jen's column is a rather incoherent mixture of Biblical verses and gibberish. but I was curious about Ruth Bader Ginsburg's plan to lower the age of consent to 12.  So, I followed Jen's link, which took me to an article by WorldNetDaily's Joseph Farrah which condemned Ginsburg for giving a speech to The American Constitution Society ("a highly partisan, political extremist organization with an agenda not to support the U.S. Constitution, but to undermine its most basic precepts").  Nothing there about 12-year-olds and sex. So, where did Jen get this idea?  Well, a little googling revealed that it's been floating around wingnut circles for about a year or so now.  I finally found the following citation, which is also floating around out there without any attribution, but which everybody accepts as evidence of Ginsburg's plan to corrupt kids): Knight and York's footnoted documentation on this is as follows: "Sex Bias in the U.S. Code," Report for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, April 1977, p. 102, quoted in "Ruth Bader Ginsburg's Feminist World View," The Phyllis Schlafly Report, Vol. 26, No. 12, Section 1, p. 3. The paragraph (from the Ginsburg report) reads as follows: "'Eliminate the phrase "carnal knowledge of any female, not his wife, who has not attained the age of 16 years" and substitute a federal, sex-neutral definition of the offense. ... A person is guilty of an offense if he engages in a sexual act with another person. ... [and] the other person is, in fact, less than 12 years old.'" But I couldn't find a copy of "Sex Bias in the U.S. Code" to verify this for myself, nor could I find a copy of The Phyllis Schlafly Report, Vol. 26, No. 12.  I did find Phyllis claiming that Ginsburg wrote "Sex Bias in the U.S. Code," and that this publication advocated lots of horrible stuff, like letting women into serve in combat zones, and no longer requiring a husband to "support his wife and provide her with a home."  I even found a piece where Phyllis claimed that Ginsburg opposed the Mann Act, "because it 'was meant to protect weak women from bad men,' which she believed was demeaning to women"  But I couldn't find anything where Phyllis claimed that Ginsburg advocated letting adults have sex with 12-year-olds. I found another anti-ERA article which indicated that: In 1977 the US Commission on Civil Rights published a 230-page book written by the leading pro-ERA women lawyers, Ruth Bader Ginsburg (then a professor at Columbia Law School and now a judge on the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia) and Brenda Feigen-Fasteau (then a director of the Women's Rights Project for the American Civil Liberties Union and a frequent pro-ERA debater). This book, called Sex Bias in the U.S. Code, systematically identified the 800 federal laws that must be changed in order to eliminate all sex bias and conform to "the equality principle" of ERA. The list is very revealing; it ranges from the massively radical to the trivial. But this article also failed to mention the women's insidiuous plan lower the age of jailbait to 11. I finally found the "Knight and York" mentioned above -- they are Frank V. York and Robert H. Knight, and they wrote a reasoned and scientific piece about gay pedophiles and their designs for your son called "Homosexual Activists Work To Normalize Sex With Boys" (it's included in this handy pamphlet Homosexual Behavior & Pedophilia).  The above ellipsed citation is in their footnotes.  But it doesn't indicate which law it is that Ginsburg meant to ammend with her suggestion.  So, I searched for the phrase "carnal knowledge of any female, not his wife, who has not attained the age of 16 years."  I found a law -- it's part of the statutes regulating Indian affairs (Section 1153), and it indicates that an Indian who commits various crimes, to include carnal knowledge of a female under 16, within "Indian country" shall be subject to the same laws and penalties as anybody else committing the offenses within the jurisdiction of the United States.   It's the ONLY federal law I could find that uses this phrase. Would Ginsburg and Feigen-Fasteau really have claimed that, in order to eliminate sex bias in federal law, Indians should be allowed to have sex with 12-year-olds in Indian Country? Maybe, but I find it hard to believe.  I suspect that this is another case of a couple of anti-gay wingnuts making creative use of a Phyllis Schlafly screed in order to claim that pedophiles were on the verge of winning a legal battle to seduce your kids into homosexuality.  And that the rest of the wingnuts found this citation a year or two ago and ran with it. So, what is the lesson of all of this?  That Jen Shroder is pretty gullible, and that Selwyn Duke is awfully annoying ... for a girl. 9:22:05 AM

"A hard female voice rings warningly across the playground" TBOGG's monitor died, thus delaying his report on  America's Worst Mother™ (a trademark of TbogganymicsCo).  We don't have any proof that Meghan is behind the monitor business, but you have to admit that it's odd that this would happen on the very day her column is scheduled to be mocked. Anyway, because we're beneath the scope of Meghan's vast conspiracy, we'll provide a brief summary of "Boys Will Be...Reprimanded" to hold you until Tbogg can give the story the treatment it desevers (which is whatever he feels like giving it). *** This week Meghan takes her four cherubs (Bathsheba, Pekahiah, Colonoscopy, and Dubyetta) to the playground for some biffing.  While there, Meghan encounter A WORSE MOTHER THAN HER!  Or so she claims.  Here's Meghan's description: I wheel around, hardly able to contain my amazement at this scolding, harrying, beastly fellow mother. Why doesn't she leave her child alone, give him a second of peace? The crime he has committed now is so slight that in most families it would be resolved with a friendly, "Let's find out who this belongs to." MacKenzie is holding another child's lunch box. MacKenzie's mother doesn't want her kid to steal lunches from other kids.  What a harridan!  This proves that she is a horrible mother, and probably competent!  Why can't she be more like Meghan, who beams indulgently at Pekahiah while he teases some toddlers?  I notice a pair of mothers watching him, and see that they want to stop the game, but can't think of a good reason. The usual method is to talk past the "negligent" mother in order to shame her into enforcing community standards of absolute pacifism, as in, "Riley, put that stick down. Someone could get hurt."   But Meghan, who hates pacifism almost as much as she detests other women, refuses to enforce community standards -- because they are unfair to boys.  See, Meghan believes that boys are unfairly picked on in our society, and never allowed to be the hyperactive, violent, messy, brats that nature intended them to be.  (Meghan seems to share this philosophy with her friend Danielle Crittenden, who writes in her novelAmanda Bright in Hell about how none of the stupid liberal mothers whom Amanda hung out with would invite her little Meneleus for play dates.  But they didn't understand that boys are supposed to hit other kids, and their attitude was just a manifestation of our feminized society -- and not a sign that Meneleus is a rotten kid destined for the gallows.) Anyway, MacKenzie's father shows up (unlike Pekahiah's father), and tries to make his kid give back the lunch box.  However, Meghan's accusations of bad parenting are still directed at his mother.  As the father reaches for the lunch box, and MacKenzie for the first time begins to object out loud, I turn away. You have to intervene if you see someone beating a child, but rotten, unkind parenting? You just can't. What can you say? "Be careful, M'am, or you'll turn a sweet boy into a sly, resentful one?" As Meghan is forced to observe further instances of MacKenzie's "persecution" (his mother warns him that if somebody wants to use the slide, he'll have to move), she is reminded that she read Sister Carrie in college.  While Meghan presumably couldn't care less about Carrie, she undoubtedly blames Hurtswood's mother for everything that befalls him. So, is MacKenzie's mother worse than Meghan?  While she does seem (from Meghan's account) to be overly restrictive, she is at least attentive and concerned about her child.  And maybe she's aware of a recent study which shows that bratty boys are more likely to grow up to be physically aggressive men. Investigators found that kindergarten-age boys who did not share, blamed others and were irritable, disobedient, inconsiderate and fidgety were more likely to become physically aggressive as teens. Which I would imagine that Meghan would just attribute to teens being teens, and then men being men. Anyway, I will concede that there probably are worse mothers than Meghan.  Like Ma Barker.  However, contrary to the popular picture of her, Ma Barker really didn't lead a gang of super criminals and plan their capers -- reportedly J. Edgar Hoover just started that story to explain why the Bureau killed a short, dumpy old woman.  But Ma wasn't a good mother.  She did raise four sons who grew up to be criminals.  As Biography.com explains: Though her boys went on to be violent criminals, making the FBI's most wanted list - there was never any evidence that Ma committed any crimes herself, or planned the crimes that her sons went to prison for. Many historians believe it was Hoover who launched the legend of Ma Barker, after, they say, the elderly woman was mistakenly killed by FBI agents in a bloody gun battle. What is known about Ma Barker is that her whole world revolved around her four sons - and that she would have done anything to protect them. She condoned their criminal lifestyle - traveled with them around the Midwest as they robbed and killed - all the while, she made sure they ate well and were taken care of. Ma was so controlling of her sons that she didn't want them to date other women because she wanted to be the most important person in their lives. Sound like any other mothers we've read about?  But so far, Meghan's children haven't made the FBI's Most Wanted list (as far as we know), so she's probably just  America's Worst Living Mother®. 4:43:02 AM