Contributors

Friday, October 09, 2009

Republicans support...rape?

I just received this letter in my email box from Senator Al Franken.

Dear Mark,

I'm really excited to send you this message! Now, I know what you're thinking. Normally when I say that, I inevitably follow with something like, 'Please click here to donate today,' but not this time.

Today, I actually mean it.

It's not that we don't genuinely need the help of our phenomenal grassroots donors, we do. But after spending two years talking about what I planned to do if elected, it's an incredible feeling to finally get you up to speed on what we've gotten done.

Last Thursday, I offered an amendment to the 2010 Defense Appropriations Bill that would stop funding defense contractors who deny victims of sexual assault their day in court. My efforts were inspired by Jamie Leigh Jones, whose story is a chilling call-to-action, and whose actions to right this wrong a stunning profile in courage.

When Jamie was 19, she was working for then Halliburton subsidiary KBR in Iraq, where she was placed in a barracks with 400 men. She complained about sexual harassment, but KBR took no action and she was eventually drugged and gang-raped by co-workers. When she tried to report what had happened, KBR locked her in a shipping container under armed guard. One of her guards smuggled her a cell phone, which she used to call her dad. Her dad and her Congressman got her back to the States.

Once Jamie was back with her family, she discovered that the fine print in her contract with KBR prevented her from taking her case to court. Since then, she's been telling and retelling her story around the country, fighting on behalf of victims of sexual violence.

Yesterday, by a vote of 68-30, the United States Senate adopted the Jamie Leigh Jones Amendment, ensuring that employers cannot unfairly force victims of sexual assault into arbitration. While Jamie's fight is not over, from now on victims will have a better shot at seeking something that far too often eludes them: justice.

I was honored and humbled to play a small role in seeing this amendment passed, and am so pleased to let you all know today that while Minnesota, and the country, face serious challenges, we're making some progress on standing up for those who have previously been without a voice in Washington.

Thanks so much for your support, I'll be sending more updates soon.

All the best,

Al

Al



The first thing that struck me right off the bat was...who in the fuck were the 30 assholes who voted against this amendment? Let's find out, shall we? Here is the list.

NAYs ---30
Alexander (R-TN)
Barrasso (R-WY)
Bond (R-MO)
Brownback (R-KS)
Bunning (R-KY)
Burr (R-NC)
Chambliss (R-GA)
Coburn (R-OK)
Cochran (R-MS)
Corker (R-TN)
Cornyn (R-TX)
Crapo (R-ID)
DeMint (R-SC)
Ensign (R-NV)
Enzi (R-WY)
Graham (R-SC)
Gregg (R-NH)
Inhofe (R-OK)
Isakson (R-GA)
Johanns (R-NE)
Kyl (R-AZ)
McCain (R-AZ)
McConnell (R-KY)
Risch (R-ID)
Roberts (R-KS)
Sessions (R-AL)
Shelby (R-AL)
Thune (R-SD)
Vitter (R-LA)
Wicker (R-MS)

What a fucking shock...a bunch of white, male, rednecks all of whom are up their eyeballs in giving rim jobs to corporations like KBR and Haliburton.

I've heard a lot of shit from the right about how more government takes away people's rights. What about the rights of Jamie Leigh Jones? Here is a prime example of how a private company is doing EXACTLY what the right fears will happen if the government sets more regulation.

I also took a lot of shit from a poster (LabRat) on TSM about slavery. She screamed and howled at me for days about how I was a/n (insert various derogatory terms here) by saying that corporations enslave people and our country isn't as free as we might think. Well, Lab, here's an example of what the fuck I am talking about. They locked her in a container for 24 hours! Tell me exactly how this is "freedom."

People that support ANY of these men above ought to be ashamed of themselves. Look at one of the names above. He was your party's nominee for cripes' sake! Are you that ball cupping in love with THE CORPORATION that you don't know right from wrong anymore?

Apparently so.

13 comments:

dick nixon said...

I'm not shocked by this at all. A woman should know "her place" as the NRCC recently said.

Anonymous said...

And this is why I don't vote for or support Republicans (or politicians at all for that matter).

At some point, you're going to have to stop confusing "non-liberal" as "conservative Republican."

And where in the hell, Mark, do you get off calling this an example of legally sanctioned corporate slavery?

Unix-Jedi said...

Normally, I wouldn't reply here, for reasons amply explained. (And this has been cross-posted at my site, just in case.)

However, since you've done another drive-by-slander on LabRat, I'll lift that in order to call you the lying liar that you are. (See what I did there?)

She screamed and howled at me for days about how I was a/n (insert various derogatory terms here) by saying that corporations enslave people and our country isn't as free as we might think.

You lie.

I started to say "Link to it. Or I will." You won't. Your narrative won't stand up to the facts. So I will:
http://www.haloscan.com/comments/khbaker/919047467833848063/#582536

http://www.haloscan.com/comments/khbaker/919047467833848063/#582569
You mendacious little slime mold. There aren't "forms" or "levels" of slavery, there's just slavery, THE PRACTICE OF OWNING HUMAN BEINGS. Anything else is NOT FUCKING SLAVERY. It may suck, it may be bad, it may be wrong, or it (like your refusal to consider any heating option that requires high degrees of work or cash investment to be a choice) may only be inconvenient, but it's NOT SLAVERY.

Using the word for anything other than slavery- pure, unadulterated, buying and selling and putting to labor- is moral vampirism. Every time you use that word for something that IS NOT SLAVERY, you rob some of the horror, some of the pain, some of the visceral wrongness from real slavery, the kind where people were sold at auction and worked until they died and never saw their families again. They didn't work for "The Man", they worked for A MAN, or men, with names and addresses and rational or irrational expectations who would send other men with guns and chains if they tried to do anything else.


You have lied, and the truth is easily seen.

You owe LabRat an apology. Actually, two, since you made a comment that was pointed out to me the other day.

Calling LabRat! Hmm....I wonder if Kevin's posters will heap Jake with vitriol like they did with me when I said something similar.

Different Rules...


Again, you lie. What Jake said wasn't what you said on TSM. (Nor are you held to different rules - which you claim is discrimination.)

He said: Forcing someone to provide another with a service against the provider's will is not a "right" of the recipient, it is slavery.

That is.

A W-2 job isn't.
A mortgage isn't.

So you owe LabRat an apology for that. You owe her another for this post, where you lied about what you said.

She did not scream. She did not howl.
She said you had no moral sense. She was correct.

She did, when you insinuated 2 years later that you had "hit close to home" address your lack of morals. If it's in dispute, I'll repost the relevent comments. Again, your history: imagined.
It goes back to your fundamental dishonesty and rampant narrative, where you cannot process facts.

(And I'm being nice and not linking to your support of the apparent ACORN actual slavery.)

The rest of your pathetic screed is as factually-deficient as is your norm, missing the point, missing the entire forest for the tree of Wishful Thinking. I do not concede anything you say by failing to address it now. (To explain in smaller words: I might come back later and demonstrate that you're wrong, but that's not as important now.)

But your unmitigated slander, lying about the situation and the facts, shall not go unnoticed, and shall not go unremarked upon.

It doesn't minimize Labrat for you to slander and lie about her. But then you've been missing that point for a long time.

You've smeared Labrat, you've associated her with something she's never supported (nor many others), and you've lied about the relevant history.

You will do anything to avoid admitting you were wrong, won't you?

dick nixon said...

"She did not scream. She did not howl."

"You mendacious little slime mold."

What planet do you live on, dickwad? And all the cap letters in WASN'T SCREAMING?

I read all that bullshit you assholes heaped on Mark and it doesn't take a genius to figure out that he was using allegory and metaphor to illustrate a larger point. LabRat, on the other hand, was being an indignant self righteous zombie. And, as Mark correctly pointed out, was just a little too insecure about what he said. In fact, I think Mark was too nice in all of his rebuttals against her (a fault of his that I have lamented about in the past) and any suggestion of an apology is laughable.

This case of Jamie proves how right he is about corporate slavery and your anger filled screed must mean he is correct.

sara said...

"And I'm being nice and not linking to your support of the apparent ACORN actual slavery"

You mean the journalistic hit job that James O'Keefe carried out? Show me where ACORN actually assisted in slavery. Yes or no-did the trafficking of human beings actually occur with the help of ACORN? Show me.

Mark just showed you a private corporation who covered up the ACTUAL rape of a woman as opposed to a paranoid filled fake rage and clearly political attack. My question for you, Unix Jedi, is how would YOU have voted if you were in the Senate?

juris imprudent said...

a genius to figure out that he was using allegory and metaphor to illustrate a larger point

And obviously you are no genius (whereas your namesake was something of a genius, a twisted evil one at that).

M was given ample opportunity to clarify that it was allegory or metaphor and he simply refused to concede that. Probably because unlike you and I, he doesn't understand them; rather like he doesn't understand "verbatim".

Unix-Jedi said...

dick:

it doesn't take a genius to figure out that he was using allegory and metaphor to illustrate a larger point

Apparently it does. For Mark has on several occasions (other than in that thread, where he first did) denied the allegory and metaphor. He meant it literally. (It's possible he doesn't know what "literal" means. He used Verbatim for over a week insisting it meant "roughly the same as".)

Might want to take that up with him.

LabRat, on the other hand, was being an indignant self righteous zombie.

She had the added benefit of being correct. Mark did not correctly point that out, he made that up, again, using the terms literally.
Using "slavery" to attack employment or mortgages - demeans the real horror that was slavery.

Labrat laid out the horrors of slavery, and Mark said "Blah blah, I had to work WITHOUT COFFEE LAST WEEK." (No, not really. That's allegory.) Go back. Read the thread. If you really want, I'll find the other ones where he denies that. I'll not expect an apology from you as well. (That thread is enough there. It proves you wrong.)

That's not screaming and howling in my book. Fine, we differ there. I show outrage when people are morally deficient, when they minimize horrors, when they support evils such as slavery. My apologies to you if you disagree with me there. (See, Mark? It's not hard.)

and any suggestion of an apology is laughable.

Oh, I know. I've been dealing with him for the past two years. He's lied to me, about me, about my affiliations, grouped me in with the most reprehensible people in order to try and score rhetorical points, redefined words, (and then refused to clarify), made up his own words... He's never apologized for any of it.

Oh, I know an apology is laughable from Mark.

That, however, isn't LabRat's fault.

sara:
You mean the journalistic hit job that James O'Keefe carried out?

No.

My question for you, Unix Jedi, is how would YOU have voted if you were in the Senate?

Honestly.

juris imprudent said...

Mark just showed you a private corporation who covered up the ACTUAL rape of a woman

I hate to say this, but it is an entirely uncorroborated allegation. IF, as the story goes a US Army physician turned over a rape kit to Halliburton corporate goons, that officer should be court-martialed for gross dereliction of duty. But instead we get third-hand, a story that the doctor didn't remember this particular incident because there were so many.

It is a horrid story if true, and equally horrid if it is not.

Somehow I suspect that too many people would only be angry at one aspect and not the other.

GrumpyOldFart said...

Okay, let me make sure I understand this....

The very same people who have spent months howling about how paranoid it was to talk about "death panels", a phrase which was a quite obviously intentional exaggeration to make a point, deliberately put in "scare quotes" for that very purpose, and which referred to something that was ACTUALLY IN THE BILL, are now howling about 30 people who voted against something, NOT BECAUSE OF WHAT THEY VOTED AGAINST, but because of the scenario it has been tied to. Have ANY of you actually READ the bill, or have a link to it? If not, then you have NO FUCKING CLUE what they voted against, right?

Why is that suddenly so unimportant now, but was vital to be 100% accurate to the nth decimal place with healthcare? So much so that equating incentivized end-of-life counseling with "death panels", in scare quotes, qualified as "paranoid rage"?

You see, this is the real difference between the Republican base and the Democrat base. When Republicans find one of their own doing something he really should be stood against a wall and shot for, they're more likely than not to at least vote them out of office. The rank-and-filers, you understand, the guys at the top tend to be pretty corrupt regardless of their party. What floors me is that when a Democrat does something he should be shot for, like say, the negligent homicide of a woman he abandoned to drown in his car while he tried to cover his own ass for drunk driving, or years worth of fraud to the tune of millions.... when party leadership covers for Democrat scumbags, the Democrat rank-and-file celebrates it.

I never did understand that one.

By all means, if they've done something horrible by voting as they have, let's throw them out. Yes, even I, conservative libertarian that I am, will help you throw them out.

How about if we actually find out, rather than treat the mere accusation as equivalent to proof?

And while we're at it, when are you going to allow anyone to help take out your trash? You've got PLENTY.

Kevin said...

Am I missing something? The girl was gang raped and wants to sue? How about jailing the fuckers who did it? No contract signed can protect them from that. They need to do some hard time, not cough up a few bucks.

Mark Ward said...

Well, obviously all but one has come forward. She has been trying to sue KBR because apparently they know who did it. She would like them to be put behind bars as well.

juris imprudent said...

M you aren't fucking getting it. If a US Army officer, a physician, treated her, took a rape kit, and then turned it over to KBR "security", I want to start with a court-martial. Then we can proceed with obstruction of justice of those "security" goons. Then the rape case, and then civil damages right up there in the Ford Pinto fireball range.

The trouble is that there appears to be ZERO corroboration for her allegation. Oh, and she's claimed that she was sexually harassed by her PREVIOUS boss at KBR. Now, maybe every horn-dog frat boy that ever lived went to work for KBR, or perhaps, just POSSIBLY, this woman has a minor credibility issue.

If her story is true, then there is a MUCH bigger problem than a naughty corporation.

Kevin said...

She's certainly going to a whole lot of trouble if it's all bs. I think she deserves her day in court, if only to find out one way or the other.