Amy Siskind of the New Agenda: Safety for Women (unless they disagree with ME!)

Welcome to day eight, I believe it is, of Snarkopolitan's unexpected revival in the face of an insane little man's decision to urge his barking mad readers to play bloodhound and "out" me, doing their best to publish my real name and actual address on the web. This although I have never done anything to him, most especially never "outed" him, or anybody.

That being the case, I have decided, at great personal risk, to publish his picture, that his physiognomy be available for study to other innocent people.

Proprietor of Shillbuzz with Exhibit A
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It seems he is having a continual party over there at his place in the form of a witchhunt/blegathon (that's a blog begging for money, for those of you who are not aware of all internet--Hi Mom!--traditions).


What is the shortest day in the year? The day between Harvey Bilk's last fundraiser and his next one.
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I got my own graphic and gory tabloid front-page treatment full of fervid, ludicrous speculation that would have made Jonathan Swift pinch himself: was I funded directly by the DNC? Who ran me? How was I connected to an assortment of other hapless innocents? How were they connected to everything? Shillbuzz even ran a chart of the web of lack of connectedness that seemed to have been drawn by the Underpants Gnomes from South Park; at the heart, where the connectivity should go, it is just "?????????" It looks like it was drawn by somebody who had no idea that when you connect the dots, you're supposed to end up with a picture. Because it was:


A taste of crazy cocktail courtesy Shillbuzz's Moonbat Mixologist
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Since, in their eagerness to hunt me, these ninnies have posted names of people in my apartment complex (and married me to one of them, because there are only 6000 people in my complex, and they knew the names of two!),I am not comfortable linking to great rattling nutjob Harvey Bilk's Emporium of McCarthyism and Dubious Fashion Criticism, Shillbuzz. If you desire to see this lunacy for yourself, you can just put poor old neglected Snarkopolitan into a search engine. What comes up is entirely astonishing considering:

1. that this blog was moribund, stagnant, que pasa nada mas, in the weeds, bereft of life, inert, and, what really distinguished it from Shillbuzz, I wasn't posting on it. At all. Since MARCH of last year.



2. if this blog got fourteen hits back in the day, then it was a good day. My server would probably have gone down at twenty hits; it's Blogger's basic, and you may have noticed that even commenting is a heroic act merely because Blogger can't handle your request the first time, usually. You have to ask everything twice, while it stands there like a sulky teenager, blinking at you and wishing it were somewhere else.



3. it was really just for myself, trying out this and that; a comic strip, a painting, some commentary of an obvious, amateurish sort, because I was just a private person. Not that the content was private, but it wasn't meant to be scrutinized through a prism of no-holds-barred political machination and dirty tricks; I could have been writing about tomatoes or grandchildren, but I didn't have tomatoes or grandchildren.
   

In other words, this is not a DNC/ACORN/SOCIALIST tentacle reaching into the blogosphere, and I had no interest (and still don't) in the private life of one of the planet's most tiresome manufacturers of acid reflux-flavored "snark," Harvey Bilk, Lord of the Flies at Shillbuzz. In fact, the private life of which he complained he had been robbed when he was exposed by somebody unconnected with me, was about as private as a ticker-tape parade, in that he was on TV and in the paper in his capacity as a political operative, yammering away about defeating Obama, a position hardly likely to win many friends in Chicago.

The Shillbuzzers took to their assignment of routing out all the information they could regarding me like an ex-husband takes to the tree outside his ex-wife's window with his Loompanics manual. Some of them obviously were aching to exercise talents that had gone wanting since their spouses got that order of protection. They went through my blog, pausing to use my father's last illness to try to pinpoint my age, and sniffed at the drawings in my Flickr account. "Cartoonist," one said. "Couthless," said another.

Nevertheless, the Get Polly page ran out of steam, and was pushed, thankfully, off Shillbuzz's front page, almost by design it would seem; stories that had run before, like the very popular Class V Crass article (another gloriously idiotic pool of Buzzbile aimed, as usual, at Michelle Obama, where she is labeled an angry affirmative action Sasquatch and poor drunken fifties housewife Mamie Eisenhower is held up as the model of deportment).

In fact, there was a certain verticality to the flurry of posts thrown up by Shillbuzz; all that was missing was a picture of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. So with one last half-hearted swipe at advertising giant Saatchi and Saatchi, the entire screaming mimi about the conspiracy against Harvey Bilk was over faster than you can say "Cyber-stalking is a Fourth-Class Felony."

So the hysteria had died down, my good name had not lately been coupled with the affectionate designation "b***h," and I began going whole hours together without checking the Get Polly page to see whether they had done rifling through my father's last illness (scroll down)in their compassionate Shillbuzz way.

And then along came Amy. Siskind, that is, the erstwhile feminist Spokeswoman for the Voice of All Women whether they know it or like it or not, the New Fourth-Wave Woman's Group, the New Agenda. Their mission statement includes "Safety" for women, which is also part of their somewhat tortured acronym, S.O.U.L. Not that there is anything objectionable about a women's group focusing on Safety, Opportunity, Unity and Leadership, but a visit to the blog posts shoehorned into those four categories will often yield disappointing results: under "Unity," today, for instance, the subheading was, "It's very complicated." "You bet it is!" I said, and clicked, only to find that the article was a review in a rather querulous tone about a Meryl Streep movie called, "It's complicated." It had not the slightest thing to do with Unity.

Unity, is, in fact, the New Agenda's main platform. They are a "non-partisan" woman's group, with the express intention of getting women elected, no matter what their beliefs: just elect'em, and let constituents sort it out later, or what I call, "tissues before issues."

Toward a more perfect union: Shillbuzzers and TNA

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I have had plenty of tangles with Amy Siskind, the founder of the New Agenda, over her unwavering support of Sarah Palin, someone I consider no better than McCarthy in a beehive, although fortunately she turns out not to have his work ethic. That Siskind is a pawprintless PUMA with something of a national platform, doesn't help matters.

We have clashed on threads at Huffingtonpost, where she or someone very favorable to her is able to wipe some but not all negative comments, and we've clashed at the Daily Beast and More magazine, (sorry, can't link to specific comments, but the whole disaster is fun) where she has no power to delete, and where her coterie of regulars can't save her from general puzzlement if not downright scorn. About the only place outside of her own blog that's safe for Amy is the blog No Quarter, home of smear-peddler Larry Johnson, inventor, merchandiser, and non-producer of the infamous Whitey tape. There she cross-posts her articles to much more acclaim than they receive at any of her big media outlets.

Siskind is, or is trying to become, head of a nationally known womens' organisation. She is in print and on television, visible, nameable. She is a public figure. When she decided to seek this leadership role, she couldn't very well do it anonymously. A large amount of negative commentary has been aimed at her, sometimes by me. This is what comes with taking a public position: criticism.

I am not a public figure, and I blog anonymously. I do this because I'm not seeking public office, because I used to write about where I live, and I disguised the people I wrote about too. And because though the internet is full of good people in my experience mostly, even those whose politics I don't like, there are a few unhinged loons out there who don't know when to leave it onscreen. One such is the nasty piece of work who set his swarm of underoccupied $hillbuzzers on me and others of my friends and acquaintances,purely on the strength of that cluster of ???????'s on that truly wacked map of the tangles in Harvey's addled brain.

Although we have political differences, the one issue on which it ought to be possible to get women to come together is safety, which, as I have emphasized, is the first initial in the New Agenda (or NAG, as I like to call them) acronym of empowerment. Women's safety. Notice, I'm kind of hitting the word SAFETY fairly often here, you notice that?

Good. Because, just as the Get Polly post was sinking into the blessed second page of oblivion at Harvey's One Stop All You Can Hate Shack, a friend of mine went back to one of the first Shillbuzz spectaculars, and on that thread, he found this comment from New Agenda Founder Amy Siskind, which I have, as per custom, dressed up to relieve the ghastly expanse of stupidity and meanness:


That, in case it's hard to read, is the great womens' safety advocate offering to send data mined from her site and those for which she writes to a cyberstalker. She applies the term "gang of thugs" to women who don't support her point of view, and tell her about it in no uncertain terms, online. Using words. That appear before her on a flat screen. For this, she will send our IP addresses, I assume, to Harvey.

For to disagree with Amy Siskind fully merits being called a "b***h" by strangers, having people combing through the phone book looking for your real-life 3D address, and throwing nonsense terms like "defamatory" around, when Siskind has merely been confronted with the faultiness of her own reasoning.

My IP address couldn't possibly be more specific than what has been rooted up by the $hillbuzzers already, and IP addresses are easily changed. So Amy Siskind's attempt to be Quisling For A Day is for nought. But the underhandedness, the sense of entitlement (speaking against me is punishable by law!), the vengefulness, and the sheer foolishness (along with a goodly part of the right-O-sphere, she did not do even the slightest verifying before committing herself online to an unethical act) should be instructive for anyone who thinks Siskind could be a credible leader in the womens' movement.

Boy, You Try To Keep The Place Nice---

And then somebody goes and opens a window and the pests come in. In this case, two obedient Shillbuzzers, egged on by their Lord of the Flies, Harvey Bilk of Shillbuzz, believe they have pinpointed my exact address. Here they are, their twelve dirty little feet spotting up my study. This is the same comment as yesterday, btw, with "Michael F" referring to me, a complete stranger who has done nothing to anybody, as a "b***h." The new wrinkle is "High Energy Muscle Dude" (yes, really), who answered Michael F's call to find my "actual physical address".




Harvey Bilk, Lord of the Flies at Shillbuzz, is trying to out me, a private person who has never outed anybody on earth, as part of his continual fundraising efforts on behalf of himself. The Shillbuzzers have been crawling all over this blog, as they have crawled through other innocent people's, ostensibly to avenge his Lordship's "outing," an occurance with which I had nothing to do.

If the Shillbuzzers dig deep enough, they will find that I started this blog when my father was dying. I hadn't an idea what I was going to do with it; it was simply a refuge. Not that it meant to be private; I know the difference between a diary and a public blog, and I am not ashamed of anything I've ever written, or drawn, here or elsewhere. My father used to tell me "never say anything you wouldn't be proud to have on the front page of the New York Times." A tall order, to say the least, but I've tried.

So I knew my writing would be read by strangers, but I had every expectation that there wouldn't be many, and that the few that came would not be pitiless zombies on orders to exact some sort of punishment for something I had never done. Perhaps I was naive. Apparently, there is no way to protect anyone who blogs about something besides lolcats from being used as a political football.

But I'm not going to close my blog on account of the Lord Of The Flies (hobbit my rosy pink foot; he's an Orc trying to squeeze into a Hobbit suit). I've posted nothing on it since last March, if you'll check the archives; but I've had to revive it to deal with Mr. Harvey Bilk of Shillbuzz. If nothing more happens than that he becomes known by that moniker far and wide, it will be enough for me. And he will; before long, when you Shillbuzzers get hip to him, you'll be calling him that yourselves. But for now, you should see that this is a private citizen's blog. An innocent third-party being used to extract money from you. I don't go to your places and spot up the wallpaper. You don't belong here. Now get. Out. Shoo.

Shillbuzzers Aren't Misogynists, No Sirree!

The Shillbuzz dolts who have decided to try to "out" me are a whole new order of cretins.

That they cheerfully, brainlessly, perform what is considered, internet-wide, gross acts of malfeasance on complete strangers and innocent parties, has been established. *So it shouldn't be a surprise to anybody to read this (as always, draped in finery to compensate for the fiercely atrocious sentiments, for your viewing pleasure and comforting emotional distance):



Yes, this menacing goofball wants my actual physical address, and finds it perfectly appropriate to refer to a woman he has never laid eyes on, and who has done nothing either to him or to anyone he knows, a b***h. And I'm delighted to say that since he avows that he has sent a "pdf" of the blogroll to Harvey Bilk, and since Harvey Bilk shows up twice on the thread, then HB is obviously aware of the degree of cyber-stalking he is encouraging.

If Menacing Michael F weren't unable to find his behind with a three-way mirror, he'd know how to find the Flickr drawings he complains of losing. They haven't gone anywhere. But let's just see how long it takes him to figure it out for himself.

And that's why I'm not especially afraid of Menacing Michael. Another reason I'm not afraid is in that link he posted; he apparently can't read very well, or he'd know that as far as threats go, he's very small potatoes. The smallest.

*Usually, I would link to the offending posts directly, but I'm trying to maintain the threadbare illusion that I still have some privacy.

Hellooooo, Hillbuzz!

Poor old neglected Snarkopolitan is playing reluctant Lazarus to a set of fiercely determined and resolutely idiotic would-be Sherlock Holmeses, who have breathlessly convinced themselves that everybody from George Soros to Maurice Sendak has participated in a conspiracy to silence the eternal drone of the stuck doorbell of intolerance that is Hillbuzz. They provide no links or proof, just dark assertions that are so overblown Dean Koontz would blush. Herewith, a screencap, which, as they are stultifying writers of flaccid, necrotic prose, I have kindly turned into a Blingee for my readers' relief:



We have no evidence but Hillbuzz's assertion of this fell conspiracy. But they, or perhaps, "he," had the cloak of anonymity pulled off by a blogger entirely unrelated to poor old neglected Snarkopolitan, or Mrs. Polly's friends and co-bloggers elsewhere. This caused the Buzzers, or Buzzer, as there seems to be only one, to pitch a mouth-foaming fit of epic proportions, and if saliva were subpoenas we'd have all been served.

The unfortunate innocents whose names and addresses have been published by the Hillbuzzing chuckleheads in their reckless search for revenge, have committed no crimes; some of them merely share last names with other strangers who run blog-registering sites.



This fellow in Rhode Island has perhaps done graphic design for a website owned by someone who shares a surname with the actual target of Hillbuzz's wrath. And Hillbuzzers have no compunction in doing exactly what they accuse others of doing-- making threats:


The abandon with which these hitherto anonymous and uninvolved parties' names are being smeared at Hillbuzz was enough to alarm a commenter who still had remnants of caution, if not decency:




Yes, for all that's holy, Hillbuzz, be careful As Jo Chgo says. You might want to remove that posting of the respected psychiatrist, but since you have the number, why don't you give him a call?

And should he or any of the people whose names and information you've published in your haste to divert attention from the acrid odor of bigotry on your own blog wish to sue you, as you can see, I've quite a lot of screen caps.

Meet Mike Doogan, another of Alaska's proud Public Servants. He used to be a journalist. Perhaps that is why Alaska's premier political blogger, AK Muckraker of Mudflats, infuriated him so much that he outed her.

After the Democratic representative was taken to task by Mudflats for sending rude emails to his constituents, he spent some state time digging, before using state resources to publish an article in his newsletter:

"Anonymous Blogger Anonymous No More
The identity of the person who writes the liberal Democratic Mudflats blog has been secret since the blog began, protected by the Anchorage Daily News, among others. My own theory about the public process is you can say what you want, as long as you are willing to stand behind it using your real name. So I was interested to learn that the woman who writes the blog is Anchorage resident ______.
Best wishes,
[signed]

I'm not linking to the newsletter, because it contains the blogger's name, and though almost all the toothpaste is out of the tube, there might still be enough in there for a couple of bicuspids.


Yes, actually, Mr. Doogan, a private citizen should be able to publish anything but actionable libel about a politician. You took on the burden of being a public figure when you ran for office. The woman who incurred your wrath has a right to her privacy, especially on the Internet, which can be a dangerous place. Moreover, she took you to the woodshed for your own stupidity and rudeness, but it's hardly reason to stalk and expose her.

Why are you even spending time on this narcissistic self-indulgence when your state is such a mess? You have remote villages with no sanitary facilities and makeshift schools, you have a volcano whoopsing on your oil tanks, and you waste your time on this?


That was part of an email I sent to this third-rate Jimmy Breslin, along with a promise that the minute he was primaried, I'd be sending a check to his opponent.

Should anybody wish to support Mudflats' creator, here you go:
Ph: (907) 465-4998 Or (800) 689-4998 Fax: (907) 465-4419
AK State Capitol Rm #112 Juneau, AK 99801
doogan@akdemocrats.org

Teh Crazy Goes Round And Round

And It Comes Out Here:
Defend Our Freedoms, the site of Orly Taitz, Esq.-in-the-state-of-California-only, D.D.S., is a full-featured site. Besides the usual incitements to rebellion, misspelled citations of antiquely inapplicable statutes, and pleas for money that are Orly's stock-in-trade, there's the Joke of the Day. Actually (if you don't include Orly's every blessed post), there are only two Jokes of the Day. They're neither hilarious nor terribly bad, not really worth the trip.

But one of the comments for the second Joke of the Day was thought provoking:

3/3/2009 6:14 PM Donna wrote:There is a very disturbing video on UTube and the title is Minnesota prepare for Martial Law. I first connected with it on Alex Jones. Now it is gone. I found it by typing in Minnesota prepares for Martial Law.Are there any viewers from Minnesota that can verify this"? This person gives a place called Farmington that is manufacturing the glass. He also states you can drive out of the city and find many of these roundabouts.

Roundabouts? Not the little traffic circles all over France, with the towns' names spelt out in marigolds in the middle? My mother and I were caught in one of them a few years back, and the worst danger was vertigo from constantly missing the turn-off to Perpignan. We did almost hit a sable-bearded gentleman in a tiny SmartCar; he beeped and shook his finger at us as if we were naughty children. (I should like to point out that my mother was driving, and had mistaken the gas for the brake. Again.)

Putting "martial law," "Minnesota" and "Roundabouts" into Dogpile, my favorite search engine (starring Arfie), yielded the video, which was certainly eye-opening. Roundabouts are not safety enhancements after all! The U.N. is going to put huts on top of them. They are just perfect for little U.N. huts, so that blue-helmeted U.N. troops can run out of the huts and suppress the free movement of true Americans. Even though anyone in a hut in the center of a roundabout would be vulnerable from all sides, as exposed as the little figures on a wedding cake.

Dogpiling "roundabouts" and "U.N. Huts" turned up " UN threatens minnesota with global government, page 1", which took me to a thread by "mastermind 77" at a site (apparently overpopulated with masterminds) called "abovetopsecret.com".

The site's a sort of aggregator of "alternative" theories, enough to provide point-and-laugh, or shiver, material for a lifetime.Though convenient, unlike Dick Cheney, I don't enjoy canned hunts. But having fairly followed this quail from the wild back to the compound, I thought I might as well stay.

Mastermind77 began the fulminating:

"I just got word from a person who knows a local contractor that UN checkpoints are being planned to go up in the next few years. With round-about's being put in to stifle traffic so these usurpers of sovereignty and liberty can have their way with our country."

Daedalu snarled back, >"Im someone though. a man hardened by the fires of time and experience, emboldened against evil and tyranny and for continuance of family, gathering and liberty. And I challenge evil at the highest or lowest realms of existence itself by stating truth, whether its too crazy, too real, or not enough."

The black helicopter rotors were certainly revving up.

The usurpers of sovereignty had their own website for these traffic stiflers, and when I went to roundaboutsusa.com, I found terrifying pictures of round dirt impediments to continuance of family and liberty. Here's a scary one, and this one will trouble your sleep.

There is a bright spot, but it's the only bright spot for the Masterminds who are forced to yield before entering these circular oppressors of liberty: never again will they ever have to make left turns.
Crossposted at Rumproast, America's Meatiest Blog.

FLAMING SSEMPA

While Rick Warren, the divine inspiration-inflated Prop 8 pastor, mounted the national podium to spread his particular brand of limited goodwill over the land, his Ugandan colleague, Reverend Martin Ssempa, continued to spread his version of the will of God over Uganda. Though Reverend Ssempa's God embraces caring for the sick, He also apparently favors persecuting homosexuals and preventing Ugandans from obtaining condoms, thereby increasing the rate of HIV infection.

That at least seems to be the net effect of the erstwhile Bush administration's emphasis on abstinence-only HIV programs, and Ssempa's campaign to publish the names, pictures, and addresses of homosexual activists in the paper and on a now defunct Ugandan website. kobsrugby.com (the domaine is available for purchase for those who like combining sexual McCarthyism with fumbling around in a scrum of men in tight pants).

Ssempa, you may recall, is the evangelical preacher who marched into Makarere University and did battle with an AIDS prevention display which manifested itself as a scrap-metal dummy with a condom-covered drainpipe penis. Reverend Ssempa grabbed for and pulled the condom off that drainpipe penis, set the box of condoms next to it aflame, and burned them in the name of Jesus. Then he handed out bibles to the rubberneckers.

His antics may seem clownish, but Reverend Ssempa's cred as a Ugandan anti-HIV crusader is undeniable: he lost a brother, a sister and a niece to HIV. Another brother is ill now. It's a sad commonality he shares with many Ugandans, and gives him some emotional authority to speak about the effects of HIV on families. The history he tells of himself also makes it easy to identify with him: before becoming an evangelical Christian, he led a hedonistic, nightclubbing, existence (he was also a prize-winning breakdancer, he likes to note) that he now invokes when castigating sexual relations outside of marriage. Then he found the Lord, and settled into the kind of domesticity that he believes the Lord intended for everybody: heterosexual, and (to the best of anyone's knowledge) monogamous.

For Ugandans who do not fit into that model by dint of their sexual preference, Ssempa leads marches calling for their punishment; homosexuality is illegal in Uganda. Leaders of LGBT groups have been harassed and arrested; he also has demanded that homosexuals not be included in anti-AIDS programs. As someone who works closely with born-again Ugandan First Lady Janet Museveni, Ssempa, as the special representative of the First Lady's task force, went to Washington in April of 2005 to testify on HIV in Uganda.

In his testimony, he put forth the theory that a billion dollar AIDS/condom industry was foisting itself on an unwilling Ugandan culture:

"SO, WHAT IS THE PROBLEM? THE PROBLEM IS THAT MOST OF THE PEOPLE IN USAID AND CDC DO NOT LIKE THE ABC MESSAGE. THEY LIKE THE CONDOM SOCIAL MARKETING MESSAGE.WHY? WHY?I BEILEVE IT'S BECAUSE THE UGANDA ABC PROGRAM WAS ESTABLISHED BY AFRICANS FOR AFRICANS. THIS ANGERS MANY SO CALLED ''PROFESSIONALS'' IN THE AIDS COMMUNITY WHO HAVE PROMOTED CONDOM SOCIAL MARKETING.AIDS PREVENTION IS NOW A BILLION DOLLAR INDUSTRY BASED UPON SUPPLYING HIV PREVENTION PROGRAMS THAT CENTERS ON THE DISTRIBUTION OF CONDOMS" (hysterical all-caps his)

Representative Barbara McCollum of Minnesota questioned Ssempa, and the great condom conflagration of Makarere University made a reappearance:

"..... it is true. I burned condoms. But what critical piece of element is left out is the fact that those condoms had been banned by the government a few days earlier, that they would pose a significant risk to the population at large. So I was simply fulfilling what the government had ordered, a recall, a destruction of those condoms.

Ms. MCCOLLUM. The government requested you to go to that campus—I believe it was a campus—and the government personally asked you to burn the condoms?








Mr. SSEMPA. It issued a call to recall and destroy all condoms from public. And what happened, I work with college students. It was a season of freshmen. In fact, in that particular article, Helen Epstein says it is a fresh pack of condoms. It was not a fresh pack. It was a deteriorated, recalled pack of condoms that posed a significant, hazardous, life-threatening experience to anyone who would have used it, so that is what happened.

Ms. MCCOLLUM. I am glad you had time to look at the lot number and verify that, and that was not your property that you destroyed. And in your opinion, you thought you were doing something that was good."

The rubber firebug pastor did not mention to Ms. McCollum, and Congress, that the Ugandan government recall didn't happen until a month AFTER he cremated the condoms. *

Ssempa wasn't the only anti-condom, pro-abstinence-only witness to testify that day. Then-Global AIDS Coordinator Randall Tobias testified as well. Of his testimony, and trajectory, this probably says it all :










"I think it is somewhat ironic and hypocritical that he would patronize an escort service while he was denying funding to organizations who want to help prostitutes, and supporting a policy that obviously forbids fraternizing with prostitutes" -Jodi Jacobson, executive director for the Center for Health and Gender Equity, Washington, D.C

After the massage-loving (there was no sex! he insisted as he left DC to explain himself to his wife) former AIDS czar departed, President Bush appointed as his replacement Mark Dybul, M.D., a respected physician who happened to be both gay and uncloseted.

Although Dr. Dybul's orientation displeased some members of the faith-based organizations receiving PEPFAR funds, he accepted invitations to address them, speaking at Rick Warren's Saddleback Church and meeting privately with the Executive Director of Christian Connections for International Health

PEPFAR OFFICIAL WELCOMES CCIH FEEDBACK ON GOVERNMENT’S AIDS PROGRAMS
At a private meeting between Dr. Mark Dybul, Deputy Coordinator and Medical Director of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) in the State Department Office of the Global AIDS Coordinator, and CCIH Executive Director Ray Martin, Dybul expressed appreciation for CCIH’s efforts to educate the public about the evidence-based rationale for an ABC approach to HIV prevention.

Though funding increased, the same problems with faith-based organizations receiving funds for promoting abstinence-only and discouraging condom use continued. Undoubtedly Dr. Dybul would have had problems walking this tightrope between ideology and science, but he appears to have thrown himself into polishing Pepfar's, and the President's, image. Here he is at a press conference in Geneva in 2007, and note the return of a certain massage-loving bad penny:









"So people should not be under the impression that all this President has done, and this administration has done, is on HIV/AIDS. There is a person responsible for all of these activities. My former boss, the first Global AIDS Coordinator, Ambassador Tobias, is now the Director of Foreign Assistance - the first such position - to ensure that we have integrated and full programs that deal across the areas of development. He is also the Administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development at the same time."
http://geneva.usmission.gov/Press2007/0209Dybul.html

With the faithful unfaithful Tobias in charge of USAID and directing a new office for distributing foreign aid, the dangerous ideologically driven policies (this is not even getting into the anti-needle exchange and anti-prostitution pledge controversies that kept organizations from using their funds to help addicts and prostitutes, many of whom are children) continued.

LOOKING FOR CHANGE

In July of 2008, Congress reauthorized PEPFAR, but HIV experts continued to be unhappy with how the money was spent. David Wendt of the Center for Global Development, asked,

"For every one million people put on treatment, 2.5 million are getting infected. So why has Congress ensured that the $48 billion PEPFAR reauthorization legislation, passed by the Senate of July 16, privileges treatment and care over prevention?"

When Barack Obama assumed the presidency, the outcry over his selection of Rick Warren to deliver the invocation was swift, and when it was leaked that Obama was planning on asking Dr. Dybul to stay on as AIDS czar, at least temporarily, HIV and reproductive rights activists protested.

Dr. Dybul was given first the order to rescind his pro-forma resignation--he wrote a cheerful note to his staff telling them he'd see them after the weekend--and then, one day after Hillary Clinton was confirmed to be Secretary of State, told to un-rescind his resignation, which he did, amidst a swirl of rumors, cheers, recriminations, and rejoicings.

MOVING FORWARD?

There is nobody heading the Global Aids Coordinator office now, and no word on who is being vetted to replace Dr. Dybul. Obama has spoken of the importance of faith-based organizations, but as a community organizer he worked with them on non-ideological, non-controversial issues such as job banks. If his administration was willing to ask for Dr. Dybul's resignation, does it mean that a new emphasis will be placed on non-ideological programs for fighting HIV?

Homosexuals continue to suffer under harsher and harsher restrictions in many African countries: Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Uganda. They can be arrested and imprisoned for life. Religious leaders like Martin Ssempa continue to lead rallies calling for their prosecution
Keeping PEPFAR funds out of their hands will not be an easy task, if the Obama administration chooses to take on that task at all. But if they are committed to human rights, they have to.

"I once attended Sunday services at the church of Martin Ssempa, one of Warren's protégés in Uganda and a major force in that country's devastating move away from safe-sex campaigns. It is a heartbreaking thing to watch a tongue-speaking faith-healer promise a room full of sobbing people – many of them poor, many infected with HIV – that Jesus can cure them, if only they believe in him unconditionally (belief demonstrated, of course, in part by tithing generously)." --Michelle Goldberg, writing for the Guardian

Reverend Ssempa is "A PASSIONATE VOICE IN THE GLOBAL FIGHT AGAINST AIDS/HIV". So says the blurb on the front page of his website . The Reverend gazes at you over his thoughtfully folded hands, his brow furrowed. This is just one of the many passionate moods of Reverend Ssempa: as you click through his site, you meet others, one glowy soft-focus expression per subject, each calibrated for the relative seriousness: open, smiling Ssempa holds his hands out for his biography, modest Ssempa laughs, his head back, his eyes closed, embarrassed by the plaudits on his "reviews" page; his fingertips interlaced, gazing thoughtfully into the future of a world without rubbers as he envisions a global response to AIDS/HIV ; one eyebrow arched as he strokes his chin and considers awakening the warriors in the faith-based community.


It's all just a little bit--forgive me, but just a wee little bit--

queeny.

*Human Rights Watch letter to US Global Aids Coordinator 10/11/07

A FIELD GUIDE TO FRAIDY CATSwe can handle anything except criticism. or scrutiny. or questions. or dissent. or disappointment. or logic. or rationality. or independence. or information. or research. or reality. or the time/space continuum. or
When I tell friends that I've been PUMAwatching, they say, "Cats? Shoes? What are you talking about?" and I have to remind them about PUMA, or Party Unity My Ass, that noble organization founded on resentment of Hillary Clinton's supposed maltreatment by the Dems and encouraged delightedly by McCain operatives pinching themselves that so many of Hillary's followers could be so easily manipulated.

Since PUMA managed to convince itself and the McCain campaign that it ROARED with eighteen million voices, it led McCain to pick the Alaskan Albatross that ultimately sank him, so I am grateful to PUMA on that score. In fact, PUMA roars with just about enough voices to keep the comment sections of a few dozen blogs populated, assuming each commenter posts multiple times and visits more than one blog a night.

The election proved that PUMApower in fact ROARED with enough hot air to blow up the forty or so orange PUMAballoons at any of PUMA's underpopulated rallies, but not much more than that. Hillary Clinton's debt was not retired with the help of PUMAdollars, or even affected, and Hillary went on to blow PUMA's minds by getting over her disappointment and moving on with her life, worst of all by working with HIM.

Born out of frustration, inability to accept opposition, and sheer will to destruction, having failed to obtain the nomination or to throw the election, now PUMA exists to promote hatred of HIM. That one. A veneer of faux feminism encrusts PUMA, many of whose members seem to be reinventing the feminist wheel, circa 1972: "I thought the ERA had passed!" said one.

But PUMA blithely exchanged Hillary's feminist values for those of John McCain, who opposed equal pay for equal work, voted to impeach Hillary's husband, happily told rape jokes, verbally abused his wife ("at least I don't slather on the makeup like a trollop, you c**t") and disparaged young Chelsea's looks. They went as well for anti-intellectual mannequin and Republican frozen cheesecake Sarah Palin as if the indifferent scholar and neo-con pinup were a reasonable substitute for detail-oriented Ivy-League magna-cum-laude policy wonk Hillary, thereby endorsing the idea that genitalia trumps everything, from ideology to policy.

Irony is lost on PUMA.

PUMAs are currently congratulating themselves for the dubious distinction of being chosen as Time's eighth-hottest buzzword of the year, right in between "tweet" and "rick-rolled"*. The eighth-hottest buzzword of last year, BACN, has of course gone on to dominate conversation at watercoolers nationwide ever since, so the fly-about-to-be-encased-in-resin elegaic quality of the eighth-hottest buzzword designation shouldn't worry PUMA at all.

Why even pay attention to this group if the country no longer does? Why bother if it is so laughably ineffective? Why bother with PUMA instead of leaving them to their own devices in their insular PUMASPHERE?

Because PUMA seems to have the beginnings of a classic hate-group, and needs to be watched.

The FBI classifies hate-group formation as happening in 7 stages:

Stage 1: The Haters Gather

"Irrational haters seldom hate alone. They feel compelled, almost driven, to
entreat others to hate as they do. Peer validation bolsters a sense of
self-worth and, at the same time, prevents introspection, which reveals personal
insecurities. Further, individuals otherwise ineffective become empowered when
they join groups, which also provide anonymity and diminished accountability.

Evident on PUMA threads is the constant one-upwomanship of trying to come up with newer better stronger insults for Obama and anyone who supports him.. PUMA pets and indulges the most extreme of its Obama-haters, Jenniforhillary, admiring her for her "spirit". Only once has any PUMA ever challenged her, and that was on whether her attack on Al Franken was merited, not on the legitimacy of wishing slow painful castration on him per se. And, as per usual, nobody else protested.

Stage 2: The Hate Group Defines Itself

Hate groups form identities through symbols, rituals, and mythologies, which
enhance the members' status and at the same time, degrade the object of their
hate."

PUMA adopted the hapless big cat as their superkewl icon, and from there followed a flood of neat images of pawprints, demonstrations and spamming parties known as "prowls", and the PUMA war-cry, PUMA HAKA! (a HAKA is a Maori war chant) And RRRoarrrrsss. There is much of the junior college sorority in this, and would not be alarming if PUMA left it there. Even if there are slightly psychotic overtones in their belief that Hillary was wearing an orange pantsuit at her convention speech as a secret message of PUMAdarity with them.

PUMA mythologies are so extensive and evolve so much that it's impossible to follow them, much less refute them systematically, starting immediately with PUMA's creation myth: that Hillary was cheated out of the nomination because she was a woman.

PUMAs embrace anyone who offers anti-Obama mythology; the most notorious may be noted anti-Semite Andy Martin, originator of the Obama-is-a-Muslim myth. Martin attended the PUMA convention in Washington and is seen in PUMA's pictures shooting the breeze with assorted Pumas. Andy Martin, Lyndon LaRouche follower Webster Tarpley, and Andy Berg, all have the PUMA welcome mat put out for their theories about Obama's nationality (he's a Kenyan/British/American/unAmerican Usurper. "Did you know that if Obama reads a national security document it's treason?" asked a PUMA on PUMAPAC.

Stage 3: The Hate Group Disparages the Target

"Hate is the glue that binds haters to one another and to a common cause. By
verbally debasing the object of their hate, haters enhance their self-image, as
well as their group status."

PUMA shows its stress lines when the subject veers off Obama. Even Hillary-worship doesn't hold up reliably any more since Hillary consented to campaign for Obama, much less work for him as Secretary of State. The gulfs between atheist/lesbian/pro-choice PUMAs, Catholic pro-life PUMAs, Conservative PUMAs and lifelong Democratic PUMAs become noticeable, and though PUMAs have never reproved each other for the bleak and gorey scenarios they like to envision being visited on their enemies (Obama, Obots, and nonPUMA men), they do have hissing contests over whether a PUMA has disrespected other PUMAs' beliefs. This frequently results in a theatrical, and sometimes permanent, exit.

Puma blog postings frequently begin with a "feminist" subject. Sometimes they will start out highlighting a figure from women's history, which seems a valuable enough effort. But the veneer of feminism inevitably melts away where all roads lead to the One, or rather, disparagement of the One. The "feminist" post is often simply an incitement to outrage over yet another example of the very real misogyny and ill-treatment of women the world over. The trouble here is the focus of the outrage: it isn't focussed on the perpetrators, it's spread to whomever the PUMAs wish to be angry at (More on this further down, with the John Favreau debacle). And more than anything else, PUMAs wish to be angry at Obama.

A visit to PUMA sites will net many new terms of abuse for Barack Obama that you may never have heard applied to any presidential candidate before, even though terms of abuse for presidential candidates are a cherished American art form. At main Puma site Pumapac.org , you'd encounter the following:

NOBAMA
Obie
Obambi
teh precious’
Obamatrons
The Cheetos
Obots
Barry
backtrack
Barky Barry Von Cash
the O-Borg
No
count Fraud Ojambo
Ofart
ohonewhothinksheisking
Baruk the Crook, the
fraud President elect,
Baruk the Cruk
Barock the Crock
NewOrleansPuma 11.30.08 at 3:14 pm
Baseek the Sheik
Pres
Omigodicantbelieveitsnotbutter’
Oslime-o
Ojingo
emptysuited
hypocritical lying thievin’ flim flam gutter rat
Nobie
Oblobit
baracobambi
oblah blah
Obummee

This is a short list. Notice that some of the names are frankly racist and xenophobic: "Ojingo", "Ojambo", "Baseek the Shiek". That's a dirty little PUMA non-secret: assorted flavors of racism, from the vague racist overtones of comments such as:

Nijma 01.03.09 at 2:41 am

mountainsong, yeah, chicago; if the bots get rambunctious, there’ll be plenty of
prowling to do, but if they behave, things can stay quiet.
If Teh One
enacts our agenda and stops dissing women, our reason for living will be
gone and we can go to the dance club all week long. On the other hand,
if it’s all bit*hes and ho*s and Ludicris, and no jobs for
women, we’ll have a
lot of free time to blog, and no money for cover charges

to frank, overt racism such as this picture of Obama as a lawn jockey in front of the White House, excused by the caption,"Why is this not okay?" The supposed reason for photoshopping Obama around as a shoeshine boy is that Jon Favreau, a young speechwriter of his was photographed with his hand cupping the non-existent breast of a cardboard Hillary. Incensed, PUMA immediately struck back by demanding Favreau be summarily fired, gustily predicting he was on the road to real sexual criminality, and posting demeaning pictures of innocent women photoshopped onto Hillary's cardboard body, so that the speechwriter was then molesting Donna Brazile and Michelle Obama. That's the kind of thinking that got PUMA where it is today.

Where PUMA is today is a splenetic organization that tolerates, indulges, even encourages hatefulness as long as it's directed toward Obama and Obama supporters, whom PUMA pictures as glassy-eyed kids and wild-eyed socialists referred to as "Obots". They do not admit the possibility that adult people not very much different from them could rationally decide not to hate Obama as they do, so they turn Obama's followers into non-human "bots".

Stage 4: The Hate Group Taunts the Target

"Hate, by its nature, changes incrementally. Time cools the fire of hate, thus
forcing the hater to look inward. To avoid introspection, haters use
ever-increasing degrees of rhetoric and violence to maintain high levels of
agitation. Taunts and offensive gestures serve this purpose."

This stage must necessarily have changed since this paper was published in 2003 because of the increased prevalence of the Internet. Whereas hate groups who used to long for contact with "the other" to express their hatred had to go out looking for them, now it is possible to find all the enemies they could ever want online.

PUMAs see themselves as wounded, martyred, woman warriors, but they are not likely to follow this model beyond step 4 into physicality, although some observers at the notorious Rules and Bylaws Committee meeting had their doubts.

They do constantly increase the rhetoric and outrage: Murphy of PUMAPAC posts ever more terrible news items about attacks on female victims, which keeps her blog followers in a permanent state of foam-flecked spitting fury. She frequently uses these posts to drive the PUMAs into donating to PUMAPAC, although PUMAPAC's accounting practices are a little hazy.

Here is one of PUMAPAC's most active members, Jenniforhillary, on her hope for the country under Obama:

jenniforhillary 11.08.08 at 8:49 am
I am in a economy proof business, my
parents have money, and I will NOT SUFFER. We have one year of food PLUS, we
have our gardens, we have our weapons, our bullets, our network. We are
prepared.
That being said, I CANNOT WAIT for the suffering to begin. I
hope there is starvation, I hope there is rioting, and i hope that there
is massive death…

Heartwarming. Jennifer is indeed in a recession-proof business: her mother's estate-clearance company. Massive death certainly wouldn't hurt Mom's balance sheet. Of course, after Jennifer dropped that one in the PUMA punch-bowl, did that spoil it for the rest of the PUMAs? Anyone care to challenge Jennifer on her cheery PUMIHILISM? No? Of course not. One PUMA responded,

GBPuma 11.08.08 at 10:03 am
jenniforhillary 11.08.08 at 8:49 am
I agree 150%…….they have no concept of
the suffering they have created and they
deserve everything they are about to
get

Jenniforhillary (or Jennifer X, as she sometimes calls herself now that Hillary has lost the way to the Light) is not a fringe member, but actually hosted one of the most unintentionally hilarious radio hours ever to go out to bewildered listeners of public radio station KPFT. On the phone for the entire hour with Jennifer X was PUMAPAC founder Darragh Murphy, who listened calmly and approvingly as Jennifer shouted over and dumped callers who tried to challenge any of her PUMAganda. The two PUMAs thought the show had gone swimmingly and Jennifer was much praised on PUMAPAC for her facility in Obot-wrassling. They were surprised to learn that KPFT did not feel quite as enthusiastic about a regular PUMA hour as they did.

The inability to tolerate dissent demonstrated by the PUMAGANDA flaming dirigible of a radio show is completely in keeping with the PUMAs' policies on their blogs: absolute censorship of opposing views. On both the Confluence and PUMAPAC, only pro-PUMA comments are allowed. "Riverdaughter", the founder of the Confluence, offered the explanation that it isn't censorship when she does it because only governments can censor, although that isn't what the American Heritage Dictionary says (any person "vested with authority" can be a censor as, say, the administrator of a blog).


This is what makes the Confluence's Weblog nomination as Best Liberal Blog something of a farce; as a big L blog, exhorting followers to vote for the Republican ticket is just plain not Liberal, and as a small l blog, what is more illiberal than the closemindedness of censoring comments? Riverdaughter's The Confluence is more egregious in this than even PUMAPAC; one of their bloggers, the not awfully gracious myiq2xu, loves to "edit" comments he doesn't like and republish them:

Mountainaires, on January 1st, 2009 at 2:28
pm Said:
To Riverdaughter and myiq2xu who responded to my comment
previously.
myiq2xu: if you are the "moderator" who went in and edited the
quotes from Richard Falk, then you deserve to be insulted for doing it. Before
you start changing quotes, you ought to know what you’re talking about, which
you clearly did not. There were no food or medical supplies being transported
into Gaza at the point of my comment, and your insertions were inaccurate. You
could have posted your own comment responding to mine, and posted your
inaccuracies under your own name. Instead, you hid like a coward behind a power
title of "moderator" and altered my comments. Shame on you.
Next time please
post your own comment in reply to mine if you don’t like my opinion. Stop going
in and altering a comment which has my name on it."

One of the rare PUMen, myiq2 has an agenda of his own: Here he is talking about PUMAs on the blog Balloon Juice:

myiq2xu March 14th, 2008 at 10:10 pm
...
What is Hillary’s core
constituency? Women.
Older, yet “liberated” women.
At 47 years old, I am a
“boy toy.”
Since they are post-menopausal, that means they don’t swell, they
don’t tell, and they’re grateful as
hell.--------------------------------------
--------------------------------------
myiq2xu March 14th, 2008 at 10:24 pm
...
Go to a rally where you are
one of the few guys (and the only single guy under 50) and there are about 100
unattached women. Okay, lots of them are widows, but it’s still good for a
person’s self-esteem.
Honestly, I’ve never had women fight over me
before.--------------------------------------
--------------------------------------
myiq2xu March 15th, 2008 at 12:01
...
I was trying to help you get a
“coming out” present.
No STFU before you mess things up. I think the redhead
puts out.
--------------------------------------
--------------------------------------
myiq2xu March 15th, 2008 at 1:11 am
Rodney Carrington Live at the
Majestic is on the Comedy Channel.
“I went home with a fat girl once a bunch
of times.”http://www.balloon-juice.com/?p=9901

(Hat tip: Yes To Democracy)

PUMA laughs off Myiq2's jokey misogyny, but sexism is fine as long as it emanates from PUMA. http://pumapac.org/2008/12/10/does-estrogen-poisoning-make-us-more-ethical-and-less-violent/ So are violent fantasies, as long as they are about violence against men (you may want to skip the next few paragraphs; they're quite ugly):

"murphy 12.11.08 at 12:54 am "One in nine men will be arrested for a violent
crime. Half of those violent crimes will be assault with a weapon, rape, or
robbery. Numbers dont lie. The answer is Decimation."

And, from the immortal Jennifer X:

"AL FRANKEN should have his pencil penis removed sans pain medicine and left to
bleed to death (does that say enough)…."

Yes, that does just about say enough, Jennifer.


Stage 5: The Hate Group Attacks the Target Without Weapons

" This stage is critical because it differentiates vocally abusive haters from
physically abusive ones. In this stage, hate groups become more aggressive,
prowling their turf seeking vulnerable targets..."

It is at this stage that the FBI separates the sheep from the goats: hate groups who do not progress to violence are assessed as "immature" hate groups. This model was drawn up primarily to assess skinhead groups, and I should make clear that I certainly do not regard PUMA as akin to skinhead groups, focussed as PUMA is on hating one distant and well-protected man, and satisfied as PUMAs are with blogging their hatred.

But PUMA still has disturbing similarities to groups going through the stages described by the FBI, including the psychological underpinnings.


Stages Six and Seven, respectively, are attacking the Target with weapons, and destroying the Target.

Although PUMAs don't back away from expressing violent fantasies about those whom they view as their oppressors, they assume it is understood that these are just fantasies. What is alarming is the tolerance for some PUMAs, like JenniforHillary, who seem to be spinning out of control without any kind of check. Rather than talking her down, PUMAPAC consistently feeds her hysteria, paranoia and despair and sits back applauding the show. While PUMAs are hardly likely to resort to skinhead-style battles on the street, there are individuals in the PUMAsphere who are clearly psychologically disturbed, such as Jenniforhillary. While PUMA is applauding itself for its womanly lack of physical brutality, they might do well to remember there have been female Presidential would-be assassins in recent memory, such as Squeaky Fromme.


Murphy and Riverdaughter are playing a dangerous game; playing on the fears and wounded psyches of women scattered across the country, trolling in fringe right-wing websites for bad news to keep the glue of Obama-hate bonding their followers to them. They may themselves be convinced that it is feminism and empowerment that they're spreading, but what they are actually doing is imitating the negative stereotype of feminists as overprivileged, humorless, castrating loons.

*Tired of Rick Astley. My Rick doesn't roll that way.