September 21, 2004 by s.z.

Blogging With Jenna and NotJenna For some substantive reporting on the issues, we go to the Bush Twins: September 19 -- Barbara and Jenna's Journal: On the Road in Michigan Hey, guys. We’ve had an incredible time traveling all around Michigan. In the morning, we had the chance to meet staff and volunteers at the Bush-Cheney Michigan Headquarters and thank them for working so hard to re-elect our Dad. These people were pretty incredible; they totally renovated an office space to create the headquarters. We sat with them and exchanged stories about the campaign trail, and they asked us a couple questions about what we are seeing on the road. What were those questions?  What were the girls' answers?  That's for them to know and you to find out.  But the key thing to remember is that the people were pretty incredible. On our second stop, we headed over to Brighton for a Bush-Cheney rally and to visit with volunteers at a phone bank. We had an incredible time meeting so many people of all ages (we meet a 90 year-old woman and a four-month old baby) who all support our Dad. What do four-month-old babies do to support Bush?  Presumably, the same thing as Jenna and NotJenna: pose for photo ops, and empty bottles.  The most moving part of our day was speaking with a soldier who had just returned from Iraq. He told us how proud his family is to have our Dad as their commander-in-chief. We both felt so awesome that a true hero — not a Hollywood actor — but a man who defines courage and puts his life on the line in the name of freedom respects our father. Well, I guess it would make the twins feel awed ... I mean, awesome, to find out that somebody respects their Dad.  Especially somebody who isn't an actor! We also met a soldier’s wife and their four-month old baby, Allison - she told us that they pray for our family. So, that's how the baby supports Bush: she prays for the Bush family. Finally, we finished out the day in Lansing at a Michigan State University Students for Bush rally. Walking on to the beautiful college campus, we were both overcome by a huge rush of nostalgia — maybe it is a twin thing — but, we both had to admit that we were a little jealous of these students who are still experiencing college. (We know we’ve only been out for four months, but it was a great four years.) Yes, it's a "twin thing"  to want to stay irresponsible college students forever.  Oh, and didn't you girls also get overcome by nostalgia for the carefree days of college while at each of the three universities you visited in Ohio?  Have you considered going for your doctorates -- that way you could stay in school for at least 4 more years? The rally really was incredible. MSU has the third largest Students for Bush organization in the nation. There were more than 300 energetic college students there, all waving Bush-Cheney ’04 signs (along with two guys us who made us laugh hysterically when they held up signs that read “CALL US” and their phone numbers)! Yeah, it was hilarious that they thought that the twins would ever call losers like them! We had a great time speaking to the students and meeting so many people who love our parents! It was a great day! Our time at MSU was awesome and we really challenge every college and university across the country to top the numbers of Students for Bush at MSU!! You never know where we will visit next!  And I too really challenge every college and university to build more Students for Bush, because then the Bush girls will visit, and that way we can keep J and NJ away from  the night clubs. Jenna and NotJenna practicing safe sex with a Trojan.  Now, wasn't that an awesome, incredible report?  So, how many think the twins really wrote it, and how many think that somebody pretending to be two airheaded teens wrote it?  (Personally, I can't decide.) 7:42:13 AM

Carnival of the Wingnuts 1.  Let's hear first from Selwyn Duke, international man of mystery and tennis.  He writes about "What we really have to fear from John Kerry."  And what we have to fear is his liberal cabinent, which will undoubtedly discriminate against white men.  It seems that white men are the new Jews, while liberals are the new Nazis. Now, please read what follows very carefully, because I'm going to illustrate the real reason why the prospect of a Kerry presidency should give you pause for thought. Most people don't remember the name Hazel O'Leary, but she was the secretary of the Department of Energy [DOE] during the first term of one of the Kerrys of the world, Bill Clinton. She didn't last long, however, and for good reason. She was a thoroughly corrupt individual who blended in seamlessly with a characteristically corrupt administration. She made a practice of awarding government contracts based on whether or not you were willing to play ball with the Clinton Administration. She would also try to punish those who strayed off Clinton's plantation by threatening to kick them off the gravy train. But while this garden-variety corruption was bad, worse still was the corruption that extended beyond that of a flawed moral compass and into that of ideology. You see, it also was revealed that O'Leary issued marching orders forbidding underlings to promote white males within the DOE.  The horror, the horror!  Yes, that was WAY worse than corruption! But is it even true?  Well, the only source for the claim seems to be David Schippers, who told Bill O'Reilly in 1999 that he'd heard the story from a client.  "As I understand it -- this is secondhand. As I understand it, when Hazel O'Leary got into the office, she asked for the promotion list and then asked them to strike the names of all white males," charged Schippers. Odd that nobody else reported it, or at least confirmed this story.  But I guess everybody else were part of the vast PC conspiracy -- or part of the 4th Reich. O'Leary's common-sense and sense of duty were trumped by her obsession with her brand of social-engineering. It reminds me of how the Nazis preferred to see Jewish scientists flee Germany or be killed rather than use them to further the war effort.  Yup, Kerry would rather see white men killed than use them to further the war effort.  However, the un-PC George Bush works to insure that young men and women of all races die to futher the war effort. Now, make no mistake about it, none of these inanities are merely aberrations unique to one politician or one administration. They are the fruits of a Kerry of the world mindset — one to which all imperatives, even national security, must be subordinated to their obsession with remaking society in their god's image. Expecting their judgement to not be colored by their curious little ingrained prejudice is a lot like expecting a Nazi's judgement to not be colored by his. Clearly, if President Clinton appointed a Secretary of Energy who, per one secondhand account, didn't promote white men, then it means that President Kerry would appoint al Qaeda members to cabinent positions (to futher diversity), and they would order all white men to concentration camps.  Can you take that risk??? 2.  And speaking of Bill O'Reilly, his latest column is about how the elite media won't call terrorists "terrorists."  You've heard it all before. But Bill has secret goverment info! What are we to make of the New York Times describing terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi as a "Jordanian militant?" I mean, this guy is one of the most vicious al Qaeda thugs in the world; right now he's behind much of the violence in Iraq and has been active in the worldwide terror network since at least 1990. On June 17th of this year, a U.S. intelligence official provided my researcher Nate Fredman with the following information [snip info] I demand that the FBI investigate the claim that a U.S. intelligence official provided U.S. intelligence info to Bill O'Reilly's researcher!  That sounds like it might be a leak, and we know how much George Bush hates leaks! The reason the Times and some other liberal media operations continue to downplay Zarqawi and, indeed, the entire worldwide terror threat is twofold: first, the liberal press does not want another pre-emptive strike against terrorists like the one the USA launched against Iraq. But everybody else wants another one of those pre-emptive strikes, because they are so effective, so sensible, and so cheap.  Next time it could be a pre-emptive strike against Denmark, to prevent terrorists from ever thinking about going on vacation there -- wouldn't that be cool! By denying Zarqawi was an al Qaeda guy, the liberal media can falsely claim Saddam had nothing to do with al Qaeda. O'Reilly logic: Zarqawi is an al Qaeda member.  Zarqawi is now fighting in Iraq.  Sadam used to be the head of Iraq.  Therefore, Sadam was allied with al Qaeda, and by implication, responsible for 9/11.  And secondly, the anti-Bush press believes that terrorism is the president's strongest issue. So keeping the very real danger of coordinated terror down is good political strategy for those who want to see President John Kerry. And because Bush's anti-terrorism plan in Iraq is going so well, the press doesn't doesn't you to think about it. And the press doesn't want you to know that terrorists are basically all members of the same club. The truth is that terrorists do seek each other out and cooperate. The IRA, for example, used PLO training facilities in North Africa and the Middle East. So our next pre-emptive strike should be against Ireland! 3.   Paula Devlin longs for the good, old days, when everybody believed in God, so we didn't need laws. Every aspect of our lives is increasingly controlled by so many laws it is humanly impossible to know all of them. The one true God got his laws across to mankind in ten sentences. Apparently Paula has never read the Old Testament, or she would be aware of the pages and pages of laws contained therein -- for instance, the book of Leviticus is basically nothing but laws, and it runs about 45 pages.  And actually, the Ten Commandments (as recorded in the KJV of Exodus 20) are composed of 11 sentences, since "keep the sabbath day holy" gets two. When the majority believed in a final judgment and man was expected to regulate his behavior accordingly, there was no necessity for laws defining everything. Yeah, those were the good old days, back before the Code of Hammurabi. Civilizations that become so enmeshed in regulations have collapsed because they no longer produced anything. We have become dominated by the chattering class: people without souls, ethics or productive abilities yet with enough unearned capital to control those who produce it.  I'm not sure who exactly Paula is describing here: it sounds like she's railing against rich Republican legislators, but that seems kind of out of charactor for her. 4.  Ron Paul, a regular writer for "TruthNews," has a column entitled "Forcing Kids Into a Mental Health Ghetto."  A presidential initiative called The "New Freedom Commission on Mental Health" has issued a report recommending forced mental health screening for every child in America, including preschool children. The goal is to promote the patently false idea that we have a nation of children with undiagnosed mental disorders crying out for treatment.   When, of course, the truth is that our nation has no children whatsoever with undiagnosed mental disorders.   Anyway, from an initiative recommending "universal" mental health screenings of children, Paul infers that there is a government plan to have goverment officials do the screenings.  What's worse is that these officials will prescribe unneeded drugs to your kids (because we frequently let GS-8 clerks diagnose kids and prescribe dispense medication) -- maybe as part of a sinister plot to benefit the drugs companies and the ritalin industry.  Oh, and children who believe in God and conservatism could be labled "crazy" and put in mental hospitals!   All because the government thinks it owns your kids! The real issue is whether the state owns your kids. [...] Forced mental health screening is just the latest of many state usurpations of parental authority: compulsory education laws, politically-correct school curricula, mandatory vaccines, and interference with discipline through phony "social services" agencies all represent assaults on families. The political right has now joined the political left in seeking the de facto nationalization of children, and only informed resistance by parents can stop it. Yeah, first the state makes your kids go to school.  Then it makes you get them vaccinated against deadly diseases.  And then it makes you stop beating them!  When will this interference with parental rights end?!?  So, who is this wingnutty new columnist? Congressman Ron Paul, a Republican, represents the 14th Congressional District of Texas, which encompasses the Gulf Coast region south and west of Houston.   5.   John Kyl also writes regularly for TruthNews.  He's here to tell us about how poor people LIKE paying unfair taxes! Ever since President Bush’s second round of tax cuts was enacted last year, Democratic partisans have dramatically stepped up their rhetorical attacks on upper-income taxpayers. Such "class warfare" is a common political strategy, although its effectiveness has been inconsistent because Americans are typically less interested in stoking resentment than in joining the ranks of the wealthy themselves. See, if you vote for lower taxes for the rich, they will be grateful, and will invite you to join their privileged number. Aimed initially at "millionaires," then broadened to include those in the top tax bracket, Congressional Democrats’ tax hike proposals now target individuals with taxable income above $200,000 a year. Who are these people? In many cases, small business owners - the engine of growth and job creation in our economy and a group that virtually all politicians claim to want to help.   And if small business owners are made to give up more of their income to help run the country, then they will sulk and refuse to create more jobs. The Democrats’ tax hike proposal is based on the rather simplistic belief that upper-income taxpayers have more disposable income and, therefore, can easily afford to pay higher taxes. Besides the fact that more than half of these individuals are small business owners generally operating on razor-thin margins, it’s also worth noting that they already account for more than 37 percent of all income taxes collected in the United States, despite filing fewer than 2 percent of all individual tax returns. In plain English, they’re already paying their fair share, and then some. Yes, the top 2% of taxpayers account for 37% of the collected income tax (something that poverty-stricken Rush Limbaugh mentions on every possible occasion).  But it's probably fair to mention a few more statistics, such as: One percent of the U.S. population owns sixty percent of the stock and forty percent of the total wealth.   So, are they really paying "their fair share, and then some"? Since 1973, every group in society except the top 20 percent has seen its share of the national income decline, with the bottom 20 percent losing the most. They have just 3.6 percent of national income, down from 4.4 percent a quarter century ago.  [Note: the above facts are from a few years ago, and since the rich have continued to get richer in recent days, the disparity between rich and poor is even greater now.] Oh, and this Rush Limbaughesque pundit is "Senator Jon Kyl, a Republican, [who] represents Arizona in the U.S. Senate. 6.  Joel Mowbray writes about how counterintelligence investigations which involve Israel are anti-Semitic. Beyond mishandling of classified documents—not an inconsequential offense, to be sure—every other accusation leveled by unnamed State Department and intelligence officials appears part of a carefully calculated campaign to question the loyalty of several Pentagon civilian employees by name, as well as a much larger group by implication. Joel, passing a classified document to agents of a foreign power goes beyond "mishandling of classified information" -- you can look up the federal codes yourself.  Mishandling classified documents would be like if, say, Sandy Berger, accidentally carried home classified documents and then distroyed them without ever letting unauthorized people see them.  And he was hanged, wasn't he? According to someone with intimate knowledge of the draft presidential directive that low-level Pentagon Iran analyst Larry Franklin allegedly leaked to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the document contained no sources and no methods.  [...] Why was it marked “secret?”  Nearly every document emerging out of that Pentagon office was stamped secret—the lowest grade of secrecy. No, Joel, the lowest grade of secrecy is "Confidential." A memo about an office Christmas party would probably be classified secret too. Only if the classifier could cite one or more reasons (from the official classification guidelines) why it should be so classified.  Ask that "someone with intimate knowledge of the draft presidential directive" what the classification citation for the paper was, and I'll bet you'll find out that there were reasons that we didn't want it being passed out to foreign nationals. Bandying about words like “espionage” and “spying,” as many news outlets have, serves the goals of the State Department and the CIA, the mortal policy enemies of the hawks at the Pentagon.  But unlike previous leak campaigns, State and CIA’s latest effort may have crossed into dangerous territory. Most politically appointed administration officials on the foreign policy team who support President Bush’s agenda seem to have at least an uneasy feeling that the anonymous smear campaign flirts dangerously close to classic anti-Semitic libels. Others are of decidedly less mixed opinion.  Says one official, “It is not a witch hunt; it is a pogrom.” Because passing a classified document to agents of a foreign power ISN'T "espionage" or "spying" if it involves Isreal, and only an anti-Semite would say that it is. Though Franklin is Catholic, few articles mention that he is not Jewish, and none from the Post do so.  Obviously, part of the anti-Semitism in action. The reported track record of the FBI agent in charge of the investigation, FBI assistant director of counterintelligence David Szady, is also troubling.  Szady has for years “led investigations into Jewish American CIA employees believed to be spying for Israel that have also failed to persuade the Justice Department even to investigate the cases,” reports Eli Lake of the New York Sun. Dave isn't the sharpest knife in the counterintelligence drawer, and MANY of his cases fail to persude DOJ to prosecute anybody.  But most of those cases don't involve Jews, Israel, or neocons.  So, sorry, Joel -- I think this is about the espionage, not the anti-Semitism.  Oh, and the fact that the press noted that your neocon friends in the Pentagon screwed up the Iraqi war isn't about anti-Semitism either -- it's about incompetence on Feith's (and the rest's) part. 5:50:29 AM

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