moriath

Obama camp says Detroit mayor may be unwelcome in Denver

I have to admit, I haven't paid super close attention to all of the trials and tribulations of Kwame Kilpatrick. But it seems like the man is constantly in trouble. He spent a night in jail for taking a business trip to Canada (and thus violating his bond agreement). This is just the latest misstep. Hopefully enough people will start shunning this man so he is forced out of office sooner rather than later.

Radio host angers parents of autistic children

And the executive vice president of Autism Speaks says we should just "ignore it."

With all due respect sir, this is not something we can ignore.

Summary of Michael Savage's assholery (this time around): children who are diagnosed as autistic are "brats" who haven't "been told to cut the act out."

I do think there's a time and a place for ignoring when idiots put their feet in their mouths, but I draw the line when an influential personality is spreading false and dangerous information. To me, this is no different than Tom Cruise telling women with post-partum depression that they should be exercising and taking vitamins rather than seeking psychiatric help for their problem.

See, as little as 20 years ago, there was still a persistent belief that autism was caused by the refrigerator mother. I know because people in my mother's own church accused her of being such when my brother was diagnosed.

Let me repeat that: people in her church accused her of being "emotionally frigid" and causing her son's impairment. Never mind that it was obvious by then that I was well on my way to being an above-average child (how would I have accomplished that without "maternal warmth"?).

The families of autistic people have every right to be livid that this guy is spewing hurtful misinformation to a national audience, just as families of depressed people were livid at Tom Cruise. We can not ignore speech that has a very real negative impact on families who are already fighting an uphill battle against misinformation. Ignoring it gets us nowhere.

Will Michael Savage be fired? Probably not. Look at what happened with Don Imus. Should he be held accountable for his actions? Hell yeah. I wish he would be fired (though I admit I'm terribly biased in this situation, so take that recommendation with a grain of salt), but that wouldn't solve the underlying problem, would it?

The best way to combat speech we don't like is with more speech.

"Ignoring it" doesn't put any more speech out there.

Bush lectures Arab world on political reform, women's rights

Because George W. Bush is really the world's foremost expert on political reform and women's rights.

The bottom line is, we still don't know how to advise patients in how to make boys.

WTF?! Maybe it's just because the headline (Mom's diet may play role in whether baby is a boy or girl) leads one to expect that there would be coverage of the diet that led to boy babies vs girls. But am I the only one seeing some tacit approval of the desire to have boys over girls?

Or so declares Yahoo! News. Something about the phrasing of that just
strikes me as being slightly off; as if they can pinpoint the exact date
and time the US hit recession territory, as opposed to just "slow
economic growth" territory as Bush has been trying to reframe it.

Current headlines on Yahoo! News:
Female bombers strike markets in Baghdad from the AP
Female bombers kill 72 at Baghdad pet markets from Reuters

The problem with these headlines? They completely change the connotation of what actually happened. Because both articles mention (eventually. The AP article states this in the first sentence but Reuters waits until halfway through the article to state) that the women were mentally retarded - most likely Downs syndrome.

These women weren't active, willing participants in this carnage. They were the victims just as much as anyone else in that market place. Someone strapped explosives to them and then used a remote control to detonate the explosives. The articles are just headlined this way in order to attract attention to that which is different - women - than to the true atrocities that obviously took place - abuse of the disabled.

Gah.