To By Those Who Have, Much Shall be Given.Taken

The sick furore created by the self-crowned Bitch-Queen Of All Wingnuttia Michelle Malkin and her legion of flying buttmonkeys over the Frost family’s appearance in a Democrat healthcare policy ad, as ordered by the Republican party, has already coming back to bite her – in the form of her own words. Seems her views were quite different until very recently. Sweet.

Not that this will at all impede her metamorphosis from sloppy dishonest journalist to the La Pasionara of the Fox Brownshirts.

Malkin’s been a good little GOP shocktrooper lately, but in the process of debunking her all sorts of people have been shown to be sucking off the public teat, and guess what, it’s not the poor so much as the comfortably off and those who don’t have to worry about affording things like healthcare because theirs is covered, thanks, and usually by your tax dollars. And that’s without even mentioning corporate welfare. The wingnuts may have opened a can of worms they’d rather have kept closed.

Here’s a couple of cases in point, though there’s no shortage of more. First, via Cliff Schecter’s blog there’s the NY millionaire who has persuaded the courts that the taxpayers should pay for his son’s private school:

Supreme Court: NYC schools must pay private special education for multimillionaire’s son

WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court on Wednesday affirmed a ruling that requires New York City schools to reimburse a wealthy businessman for private special education for his son.

The justices split 4-4 on the case, which means a lower court ruling siding with former Viacom executive Tom Freston remains in place.

Lower courts had sided with Freston against New York City’s board of education, saying the city must pay for educating the learning-disabled student, even though he had been enrolled in private school.

The student’s parents had insisted that public schools were unable to meet the child’s needs. His learning disabilities were diagnosed after he was enrolled in private school.

In case you don’t know what I’m talking about, here is the link to where this twaddle actually ended up, at the NYT.

I’m not going to link to Malkin, you can find her easily. But here are her words about a family of 6 living on approx 45-55k per year.

The bottom line here is that this family has considerable assets. Maryland’ s S-CHIP program does not means-test (correction: I meant to say assets-test>. The refusal to do assets tests on federal health insurance programs is why federal entitlements are exploding and government keeps expanding. If Republicans don’t have the guts to hold the line, they deserve to lose their seats.

I expect the vilification, stalking and slandering of Viacom Exec Tom Freston to begin immediately.

Don’t hold your breath.

On a less blatant but no less hypocritical note it seems it’s not enough that police on the job have all of their medical expenses covered and workmens’ comp and paid recuperation leave, though no-one begrudges them that becauise many put their lives on the line every day.

But it’s not enough for this greedy Orkando police officer:

Cop who fell on the job sues family of baby who almost drowned
An officer who went to help when a baby fell in a pool says she slipped in a puddle.

CASSELBERRY – In January, 1-year-old Joey Cosmillo wandered into the backyard and fell into the family pool. When his mother hauled him out, he wasn’t breathing. Rescuers were able to bring him back to life, but he suffered severe brain damage and cannot walk, talk or even swallow.

Now, his family faces another burden: One of the rescuers, Casselberry police Sgt. Andrea Eichhorn, is suing, alleging the family left a puddle of water on the floor that afternoon, causing her to slip and fall.

The boy’s grandparents, named in the suit, are mystified and angry.

A family friend today set up an account, hoping to raise funds for the boy’s long-term care. It’s the Joseph “Joey” Cosmillo Assistance Fund. Donors can make contributions at any Wachovia bank branch.

Without the insurance programme that Malkin and her ilk are so vehemently opposing, children like this would have no care at all. This family would have had to sell everything to provide medicine and round-the-clock nursing – and when that money that ran out, what then?

The flying buttmonkeys don’t care. Like the Spartans that they so homoerotically venerate, they think sick children should be considered a societal encumbrance who deserve to be left to die as the obvious defectives they are.

“Eichhorn last week sued Richard Cosmillo; his wife, Maggie Cosmillo; and the boy’s mother, Angela Cosmillo, accusing them of negligence. They were careless, according to the suit, and allowed the home they shared to become unsafe.

As a consequence, Eichhorn broke her knee, something that kept her off the job for two months, according to police Chief John Pavlis.

Joey now lives in a nursing home five miles away, where he gets 24-hour care. He breathes through one tube. He’s fed through another.

“He doesn’t have any abilities — any,” his grandmother said. “He can’t sit. He can’t swallow. He can’t eat. We’re not even sure he can see.”

She and Richard Cosmillo are the boy’s legal guardians. For the first two months after the accident, she remained at his bedside, never once going home.

She has now gone back to work at a furniture store, and her husband keeps watch on the boy. He visits every day.

“This thing,” Maggie Cosmillo said, “has destroyed our lives forever.”

The baby’s mother was the only one home Jan. 9, when the boy slipped out of the house and wound up in the pool, according to a police report.

She plunged in and dragged him out, carrying him inside, down a hallway and into a bedroom. She also called 911.

Eichhorn arrived a few minutes later. As she stepped into the room where rescuers were working on the boy, she slipped and went down on one knee, then stood back up, according to Richard Cosmillo.

Later that day, she went to an emergency care center and eventually to an orthopedist, according to her attorney, David Heil.

While she was on medical leave, Pavlis said, the city’s insurer paid her medical bills and provided disability checks.

Eichhorn, a 12-year department veteran, would not discuss the suit. Her attorney said those benefits, paid by the city’s workers’ compensation carrier, were not enough. The suit seeks an unspecified amount of money.

Eichhorn, he said, is a victim. Her knee aches, and she will likely develop arthritis.

If the Cosmillos had made their pool baby-proof, police would not have been called to the scene, there would have been no water on the floor, and Eichhorn would not have hurt herself, he said.

“It’s a situation where the Cosmillos have caused these problems, brought them on themselves, then tried to play the victim,” he said.

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Doesn’t that just about sum up the wingnut attitude?

Anything bad that happens to you must must be your fault, because otherwise that would mean that bad things happen to good people and life is just random – that would never do. After all, weren’t they gifted their own comfortable lifestyles as a reward for being good people? Of course they’re good, mothing bad’s happened to them, QED.

The alternative, that really it’s all just blind chance, not a matter of just deserts and that they’re no better or worse than the rest of us and not exceptional at all is unthinkable.

To admit otherwise is to accept that their God, be it supernatural or the invisble hand of the free market, doesn’t exist. There they stand, they can do no other: the thought that they are not special and beloved, but just ordinary schmucks who got lucky, is just too much for their little heads to cope with.

Oh No, Not My Baby

Could the culture of entitlement and helicopter parenting put an end to war?

From the Guardian’s Jerusalem blogger Seth Freedman:

A bus stop in Ashkelon became the stage for an extraordinary pantomime over the weekend as a stand-off erupted between a group of female soldiers, their parents, and their IDF commanders. Citing the army’s apparent lack of concern for their safety, the rookie soldiers refused to return to their base in Zikim, near Gaza, which was targeted in a recent Kassam attack by Palestinian militants.

The soldiers, who have only been in the army for two weeks, decided that their superiors had not done enough in terms of fortifying the base after the carnage last month. With the backing of their parents they decided to defy orders and stage a mini-demonstration protesting their plight. Appeals by army top brass to return to base and air their grievances through the proper channels were met with outright refusal by the soldiers, forcing their commanders to threaten to jail them all unless they complied with their instructions.

[…]

For the average 18-year-old enlistee into the IDF’s ranks, there is an almost seamless transition from the final year of senior school to the first day spent in the confines of an army barracks. After a childhood spent in the (relatively) warm bosom of parents and teachers in their local community, the shock to the system of life in the army is understandably often met with resistance by the soldiers.

Throw into the mix one plutzing Jewish mother for every fresh-faced young rookie, and it is easy to see how the whole commander-soldier system can break down when parents are so willing to get involved to defend their offspring to the hilt. In a country where almost every parent sends their child off to war to defend their homeland, familial intervention in army affairs is often treated with almost reverential restraint by commanders – but only up to a point, as the Zikim soldiers found out.

Read whole post

If every mother in countries that’re prosecuting wars of aggression did this there’d be a sudden outbreak of peace – although of course in many countries it would merit an armed response. It is after all, strictly speaking, a mutiny.

But would conscripts shoot their own mothers? Some might, probably more than we mothers would like to think, but imagine the worldwide furore. Matrcide is a universal no no.

Because so well developed is the American sense of entitlement, scenes like this one in Israel, where all able-bodied young are conscripted, might be a foretaste of what could happen if a US draft were instituted.

So let’s call one now. Can you imagine the reaction if these parents’ precious darlings were drafted?

Even their children level the charge at the baby boomers: that members of history’s most indulged generation are setting new records when it comes to indulging their kids. The indictment gathered force during the roaring ’90s. A Time/CNN poll finds that 80% of people think kids today are more spoiled than kids of 10 or 15 years ago, and two-thirds of parents admit that their kids are spoiled. In New York City it’s the Bat Mitzvah where ‘N Sync was the band; in Houston it’s a catered $20,000 pink-themed party for 50 seven-year-old girls who all wore mink coats, like their moms. In Morton Grove, Ill., it’s grade school teachers handing out candy and yo-yos on Fridays to kids who actually managed to obey the rules that week. Go to the mall or a concert or a restaurant and you can find them in the wild, the kids who have never been told no, whose sense of power and entitlement leaves onlookers breathless, the sand-kicking, foot-stomping, arm-twisting, wheedling, whining despots whose parents presumably deserve the company of the monsters they, after all, created.

A whole army of Private Benjamins. I love it when a plan comes together.

With a universal draft of overindulged teens I could indulge my schadenfreude at the little horrors getting their comeuppance in boot camp whilst at the same time relishing the total unpreparedness of the military machine for a confrontation with a shrieking horde of lawyered-up, indulgent boomer parents.

Perhaps raising children to be self-centered and mollycoddled, and then drafting them, has the potential to end war as we know it. Neato.

Training The Suburban Stasi


From Mother Jones (via Jesus General) comes news that US Homeland Security is taking over high schools so that they can train their droids directly, with no pesky outside liberal influences like the Constitution interfering.

One of the commenters quotes Joseph Stalin – “Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.”

Black Ops Jungle: The Academy of Military-Industrial-Complex Studies

News: Spy High
By Chris Colin

September/October 2007 Issue

Dedicated to everything from architecture to sports medicine, “career academies” claim to offer high school kids focus, relevancy, and solid job prospects. Now add a new kind of program to the list: homeland security high. In late August, Maryland’s Joppatowne High School became the first school in the country dedicated to churning out would-be Jack Bauers. The 75 students in the Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness magnet program will study cybersecurity and geospatial intelligence, respond to mock terror attacks, and receive limited security clearances at the nearby Army chemical warfare lab.

The new school is funded and guided by a slew of federal, state, and local agencies, not to mention several defense firms. Officials say it will teach kids to understand the “new reality,” though they hasten to add that the school isn’t focused just on terrorism. School administrators, channeling Cheneyesque secrecy, refused to be interviewed for this story. But it’s no secret that the program is seen as a model for the rest of the country, with the Pentagon and other agencies watching closely.

Students will choose one of three specialized tracks: information and communication technology, criminal justice and law enforcement, or “homeland security science.” David Volrath, executive director of secondary education for Harford County Public Schools, says the school also hopes to offer “Arabic or some other nontraditional, Third World-type language.”

The school’s main goal is to get its grads jobs in the booming $24-billion-a-year homeland security industry. It’s certainly in the right location: Northeast Maryland has become a mecca for the military-industrial complex. The Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground is the county’s biggest employer, and all manner of defense contractors have set up shop nearby, including weapons maker Northrop Grumman.

However, it’s not clear how many Joppatowne grads will be on track to join the upper echelons of the intelligence community and how many will wind up as airport screeners. “We do want to encourage higher education,” Volrath says. “We also want to be realistic. Some of these defense contractors will have huge security needs, and the jobs won’t require four years of college.”

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Why bother with a high school at all? Why not just recruit members of the new GOPJugend straight from elementary schools? Shit, why even bother with that – how much education does actually it take to be a Bush loyalist asshole who spies on everyone they know and stripsearches and tasers people for fun?

I expect Michelle Malkins’ kids’ names are down for the first intake already.

Future Shock

That dystopian, authoritarian future we’re so fond of reading about in science fiction? It’s here already.

From Mother Jones comes this sickening expose of the use of electroshock equipment to torture disturbed American teens into compliance:

Rob Santana awoke terrified. He’d had that dream again, the one where silver wires ran under his shirt and into his pants, connecting to electrodes attached to his limbs and torso. Adults armed with surveillance cameras and remote-control activators watched his every move. One press of a button, and there was no telling where the shock would hit—his arm or leg or, worse, his stomach. All Rob knew was that the pain would be intense.

Every time he woke from this dream, it took him a few moments to remember that he was in his own bed, that there weren’t electrodes locked to his skin, that he wasn’t about to be shocked. It was no mystery where this recurring nightmare came from—not A Clockwork Orange or 1984, but the years he spent confined in America’s most controversial “behavior modification” facility.

[…]

The Rotenberg Center is the only facility in the country that disciplines students by shocking them, a form of punishment not inflicted on serial killers or child molesters or any of the 2.2 million inmates now incarcerated in U.S. jails and prisons. Over its 36-year history, six children have died in its care, prompting numerous lawsuits and government investigations. Last year, New York state investigators filed a blistering report that made the place sound like a high school version of Abu Ghraib. Yet the program continues to thrive—in large part because no one except desperate parents, and a few state legislators, seems to care about what happens to the hundreds of kids who pass through its gates.

[…]

Despite spending more than three years at this behavior-modification facility, Rob still has problems controlling his behavior. In 2005, he was arrested for attempted assault and sent to jail. (This year he was arrested again, for drugs and assault.) Being locked up has given him plenty of time to reflect on his childhood, and he has gained a new perspective on the Rotenberg Center. “It’s worse than jail,” he told me. “That place is the worst place on earth.”

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Comedy Double: There’s No-One Quite Like Grandma

Wahahaha. Grandma to the rescue!

You’ve been told – don’t mess with Grandma…

Oh dear. This is what happens when Nan plays Doom too much. An XBox viral:

Age can often bring an entirely new lease of life, not to mention a loosening of inhibitions. Here’s Grandma on the PS3, stuck at a big boss level on Resistance, Fall of Man:

Not all Grandmas are old, though. They’ve still got plenty of va-va-voom, as this banned Hyundai ad demonstrates:

So do Granddads too, it seems.

Hang on – aren’t Grandmas supoosed to set an example to the rest of us? Not this one:

Some grandmas are just bad-tempered old bats who can’t turn down a good scrap.

One of the bad things about being old is the creaking:

But one of the good things about being old is that you can speak your mind. Just ask the Fruitcake Lady.

And age is no barrier to having a good laugh.

Bonus clip:

It’s not about Grandmas as such, but rather it’s for any Grandmas reading this: a little reminder of the reason why being a Grandma is just so cool.