winding road in urban area

of murderers & misogynists

Scott Roeder, a "person of interest," in the murder of George Tiller, M.D. allegedly has a history of mental illness.  Friends of his reported said he was a good ol' boy but was an anti-abortion fanatic.  

The murder of Dr. Tiller, who provided women with late term abortions, comes close to a Washington Post article that asks if "extreme bias" or extreme attitudes about race, homophobia, and I suppose other notions that we would call, as Richard Hofstadter did, "the paranoid style" in American politics is a mental illness or more mildly a personality disorder.  Do we have to limit it to politics?  How about life issues? 

Those people that you run into in your day to day life may really be as disturbed as you think they are.

Abortion is a constitutionally protected right.  Equal rights for women means an equal ability to regulate reproduction.  Men cannot be forced to be biological fathers.  If women are going to be equal before the law then the government cannot force them to be biological mothers.  Or carry a fetus to term if the pregnancy will kill her.

So "pro-lifers" are for killing doctors who provide late term abortions.  They aren't pro-life.  They are anti-equality for women.  They fear that women will have an equal place in society, in employment, in reproduction.  They don't want women to make their own choices, their own lives.  Because these anti-equality types don't believe that there is enough pie to go around.  If God made woman from Adam's rib then what else will women want to make on their own?  It must come out of men, right?

How can a person dialogue with a person who will kill a man who is helping terminate a crisis pregnancy?  The Attorney General has now sent federal marshals to protect Dr. Tiller's colleagues.  Empty barn, meet the new lock on the door.  Of course President Bush wouldn't send marshals but neither would states' attorneys generals.  Because government officials court the lunatic fringe vote, too.  

There is no dialogue with deeply mentally disturbed persons.  There is protecting them from themselves and protecting others from them. How would that commencement speech at Notre Dame go down now? 

This isn't a free speech issue, either.  Anti-equality protesters like Bill O'Reilly and the professional, organized misogynists like Operation Rescue would like people to believe that they have a right to call doctors like George Tiller, "murderers" with "blood on their hands."  But speech means responsibility and does not mean the incitement of violence against another human being.  And when abortion providers are murdered, the surging God like power these murderers or misogynists feel must be enormous.

snapshot

When my husband and I are both dead, I wonder what will become of our things? Our personal items like our clothes, our photographs, our scribbled notes, phone books.  Our letters.

We have a will, we have an executor, provisions made, plans laid.  But when the estate sale is over, there will be some items that will be thrown into the trash.

I started thinking about this when I was looking on the Internets at found photographs.  People find discarded photos and post them on blogs.  No matter what the subject of the photo the first thing I react to is the fact that the photo was lost or discarded.

My 100 year old great aunt who I may have seen when I was a child, died last week.  She had children and grandchildren and great grand children but I am childless. The photos she saved will mean something to them and they will distribute them amongst themselves.

I am not so much estranged from my family, there was no blow up or confrontation, but I don't see my extended family.  I haven't seen some of them in 30 years, others in 20, others in 10, some five years ago.  The last time I saw my oldest living uncle, he asked me if I was trying to gain as much weight as my husband.  I turned to my mother and said, "I am ready to go back to your house, okay?"  He didn't say, "I am sorry."  He didn't say anything.  I mean after all it was my fault I got angry at him, right?  He died shortly after that, neither knowing or caring that he had hurt my feelings.

A friend's parent, the gender and the situation have been obscured to protect my friend, is back in their life after a lifetime of protective estrangement.  My friend is rather angry about the new role they have assumed.  Caretaker. My friend has raised their own family with perfect, textbook, model children.  Has the perfect spouse. There are these expectations that the wound will heal and the ending will work as perfectly as a high school senior play.  That isn't going to happen.  But what I really notice is the anger my friend harbors.  It has several different identities and ages.  Sometimes my friend sounds 15 years old and frustrated with the parent.  At times, my friend sounds 60 and aware that their life has been dominated by this unsatisfied desire to be that parent's child.  I of course suggested therapy, but that isn't going to happen.  

My friend has a difficult time keeping it all inside and in working order. I would describe my friend, as gender neutral as possible, as button-downed, zipped, belted and suspended, panty-hosed and panty-girdled, would always carry an umbrella, would be damnably early to lunch and dinner, keeps an organized tool shed and garden shed, which both look like a hardware store, the grass is perfect, the wine list completely understood.  The grocery list is written according to the layout of the grocery store.  Recycles, since the 1970s.  Still feels vague guilt about serving and eating table grapes and tuna.  Does own taxes, knows own family's social security numbers.  Did not vote for Nixon, but you would never know it.  Knows which one is Ehrlichman and which one is Haldeman and knows why it doesn't make any difference.  Knows the difference between opera length and princess length pearls.  No perfume, same toothpaste and soap since childhood.  Shoes, which are never worn two days in a row, never come untied.  Can make dinner out of saltines and tomato juice.  Says, "swell" without a hint of irony.  Hair never messes up, even after eight hours asleep or walking into a stiff headwind. Always pumped own gas, even before you had to.  Has read new car manual and keeps the service schedule.  Has all the pieces, even the shrimp cocktail forks, to the flatware and silver. No grape jelly jar glasses. Tightly wound and it would certainly be a frayed mess, my friend thinks, if it were examined.  All the king's psychologists won't be able to put my friend back together again.  Certainly not the same way and my friend is convinced that this personae was so difficult to create that it must be the best my friend can do.  How could my friend do any better?

The photographs I have should be scanned and cataloged so they don't stick together in some hot attic.  But why?  What value do they have after I am dead?  No one will want them.  They won't mean anything and they will of course take on that sadness I see in the found photography on the web. 

observe and report this

Dear Editor of TIME Magazine:

I will never touch another copy of your magazine. Richard Corliss' review of Observe and Report says that a rape scene in the motion picture is funny. 

"The scene achieves what few American movies even attempt: to pinpoint the grim compromise, the desperation, that can attend the sex act. Don't call it love; don't call it grand; but whatever it is, don't stop. That minute or so is the finest thing in Observe and Report, and if it doesn't strike you as funny-peculiar, you may as well stop reading now."

Does the image of a woman being raped in her own vomit turn you on? Can you actually see yourself laughing with your daughter or your wife sitting in a theater watching a young woman being raped?  Do you not know that one in four women are raped in their lifetimes? You are sitting in the dark laughing at a woman being raped when the woman sitting in front of you might be a rape victim.  Pass the popcorn.

Corliss and his editor should be fired. TIME/CNN magazine is a fascist, anti woman, pro date rape rag. People should cancel their subscriptions. High school libraries should refuse to shelve the magazine. TIME/CNN advertisers should be made aware of what they are buying.  The First Amendment does not protect the advocacy of violence.

It is difficult to pick up a newspaper or a magazine or even sit in a doctor's waiting room without being blindsided by violence against women.  The news has become porno-violence. Oprah started this and Jerry Springer has caused our evening newscast to fill our homes with porn we don't want or need.  The judge porn courtroom shows, the Nancy Graceless screaming for vengeance over dead wives and children is also porn. The Sunday morning "gotcha" porn that used to be public affairs broadcasting is now just so much shouting. Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich are public affairs programming?  When did we concede that there could no longer be quiet, thoughtful life?  

Date rape is comedy and we may very well allow college professors and students to carry guns; our desire for porno-violence has entered the classroom and must always be close so we can be excited by how near death might be. My husband was sitting in a doctor's waiting room a few days ago with the television blaring news of rape and kidnapping while children looked up at the ever present television.  How healthy is television in a medical setting?  Why not broadcast the ER every Friday night? No pesky storyline, just the blood and gunshots and the car accidents.  And the date rapes. 

another victory for free speech

LA MARQUE — Authorities have dropped a disorderly conduct charge filed against a woman who was handcuffed while being cited for using the F-word [Fuck] in a casual conversation at a Wal-Mart, the La Marque interim city manager said today.

City prosecutor Jay Brown dropped the charge recently after finding that there was insufficient evidence to prosecute Kathryn Fridge, 29, of La Marque, City Manager Eric Gage said. [Please call Jay Brown and ask him why he was absent during Constitutional Law when they covered the First Amendment 409-935-7564].

“Of course, we would have hoped to prevail in the case, but not if there’s not significant evidence,” Gage said.  [In other words, they couldn't seat a jury because everyone in the jury pool admitted in voir dire that they too had said "fuck" in a Wal-Mart but they could not spell it on the jury questionnaire.]

Fridge was not immediately available for comment. [But had she been, I am positive her comment would have been something like, "Fuck, yeah!"]

She was cited on Aug. 4 for using the F-word [Fuck] in a [private] conversation with her mother while shopping for batteries at the Wal-Mart at FM 1764 and Interstate 45 as a tropical storm menaced the Gulf Coast. La Marque is in Galveston County.

The shelf where she expected to find batteries was bare and Fridge expressed her frustration to her mother.

Her remarks were overheard by Capt. Alfred Decker, La Marque assistant fire marshal, who handcuffed her after she protested his decision to cite her for disorderly conduct.

Decker released her after issuing the citation.

If you want to congratulate Decker for keeping the peace in Wal-Mart during a hurricane he can be reached at1109 Bayou Rd # A La Marque, TX 77568 (409) 938-9260. 

breaking news: houston, texas has a whore house in it

Houston police, not having anything really important to do and needing to look busy, busy, busy, busted a prostitution ring today.  No release yet of the client list but their are rumors that doctors, lawyers, and athletes are on the list.

Local media, never one to miss a chance to snicker, kick people when they are down, and generally not question authority, covered it like it was at least as important as a Supreme Court ruling.

Big surprise. 

Why is this story important?  Why are the police making the effort to bust women who answered ads on Craig's List and the like to sell their bodies for sex to Houston men?  Well, it is tax free income, but that seems to be an issue for the IRS, not the local police.

There are illegal immigrant girls and women who publicly work as taxi dancers in Houston but who are actually sold into "white slavery" to pay off the men who brought them to the United States.  Heroin is big in the area high schools.  Carjacking and murder are significant problems in Houston.  People who know each other kill each other more often than not.  How much white collar crime occurs here?  Women are beaten, abused, run over in the streets and left for dead.  Kids can't walk to and from school without someone trying to harm them.  The District Attorney and the Sheriff were abusing their offices by paying their former lover almost $100,000 a year and using inmate labor.  Neither were indicted.  A person usually has to go to a third world country or at least Illinois to find that kind of corruption.

Harris County sends more people to Death Row than any other county in Texas and there is a high probability that some of those convicted of capital murder were in fact not guilty.  But that isn't nearly as important an issue as getting well educated men locked up for paying for sex  

But prostitutes are a high priority.  Evidently the City of Houston will collapse in shame if women profit from sex with a consenting doctor, lawyer, or athlete for money. Evidently this is the most important issue facing the streets of Houston, Texas in these modern times.  Why all authority and government will simply dissolve and there will be chaos if this prostitution circle remains unbroken. It gives the news people--of which the female of the species looks remarkably like a streetwalker when delivering this "news" to viewers who are no doubt shocked, shocked! to learn that Houston has a whore problem--something "dirty" to talk about.  They can shake their heads, shame the bad boys, and look like they could spank the bad boys at the same time.

Yes, yes, prostitution is naughty and not nice.  People will be embarrassed.  Marriages will break up when the list comes to light.  Women who were not the natural object of their husbands' bounty got money that should have gone to wives and children.  Perhaps drugs were involved.  But there has got to be more serious crimes being committed than prostitution between well to do people.

Houston simply does not have the number of police it should for the population.  The size of this bust, if it grows beyond the arrest of the pimps--a husband and wife team--and the man hours worked to make the case might be huge.  The public will enjoy discussing who's who on the list but they won't be getting their tax dollar's worth.  Chances are, the "johns" will do no jail time, simply pay a fine and go on with their lives.  The women involved will be punished more severely.  The pimps should owe some taxes, answer local charges and then perhaps some federal ones if they don't have the money to pay their taxes but it isn't going to stop someone else from using the Internets to find companionship.

And the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals says today that it is constitutionally kosher for Texas school children to have a moment of silence to do whatever they wish--pray, not pray, think of Zen koans, make an inventory of the desks, their souls, of the people they have wronged, make a mental note to meet their heroin connection, hope the police caught the rapist who attacked them on campus while the police failed to see it with the expensive surveillance equipment--because it doesn't, according to a three judge panel, advance religion.  Well, if it doesn't, then why all the wrangling to get a law passed to allow for a moment of silence?  It has got to be unconstitutional but as long as we are wondering about something as silly as prostitution on the news, there isn't time to consider the really important issues like how the rest of us live with government and the worship of authority.

everyone has an uninformed opinion about shelling until they have been shelled.

Israel is the only country I can think of that is expected to take shelling with a smile and not return fire with equal or superior force.  

I have broken my blood oath and read some ridiculous liberal bloggers who think that it is just inexplicable that Israel is using phosphorous based weapons against the poor, oppressed Palestinians in Gaza.  

Can we have a moment of sanity?

If Gaza had not been shelling Israel, perhaps Israel wouldn't feel the need to shell Gaza?  If Gaza didn't import every weapon it can get its hands on from other Israeli enemies across its border perhaps Israel wouldn't feel the need to control traffic across the border in much the same way that international borders are controlled everywhere.

If Mexico started shelling Houston, it is a safe bet that the United States would shell Mexico in return.  And if it didn't, quite a few Texans would get the weapons to shell Mexico on its own.  And the U.S. would use superior weapons to those possessed by Mexico.

Palestinians reported to Human Rights Watch, a group funded interestingly enough by money from the estates of Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammet and yet supported by self loathing Jew Noam Chomsky that Israel was using the phosphorus based weapons which are not considered chemical weapons by international law.  The Palestinians have no reason to lie about Israel, do they?  According to spokesmen for the Israelis,  the IDF or Israeli Defense Forces do not use weapons that are banned by international law. 

If Palestinians are shelling Israel out of UN facilities, the Israeli forces have every right to shell the UN facilities which stopped being neutral when Palestinians fired rockets out of them.

A two state solution is the only solution.  But Israel has been out of Gaza for years and Gaza is supplied weapons across its borders that they fire at will across Israel's borders.  This must stop.  And children are always the innocent victims of war be they children in Gaza, children in Israel, children in Japan or Germany or Vietnam or Iraq.  Is Hamas using its own as shields and targets for Israeli defense forces and then crying foul when Israel kills them?  Is this the moral equivalent of human suicide bombers?

Many of you are too young to remember the days of dinner parties with Black Panthers and the radical chic of partying with bomb building anarchist and Weathermen (may be not that young since we have been revisiting the Weathermen of late) but this liberal support of Palestinians is beyond me.  I don't get it just as I don't understand the desire to party with terrorist, homegrown or foreign.  They cheered when the World Trade Center came down.   Academics love the anti-Semites. I do not love walking into the faculty lounge and seeing Al Jazeera on every computer screen.   

If the IDF has committed war crimes, they should be punished just as Americans who committed war crimes in Vietnam and most recently Iraq should be punished.  These things happen on every side in every conflict.  Will Hamas be punished?  Is it really acceptable to the American left who can't get George Bush and Dick Cheney punished by a Democratic Congress for their war crimes that Hamas get a a free pass too.We let George Bush take us to war on a lie and then let him return to Texas with our blessings.  We impeached a man for a sexual indiscretion but not for war crimes? And we feel comfortable in our own homes to criticize countries half way around the world that our own students cannot find with a map.  Will Hamas come to an international court of law and act like civilized countries act?  Or will they denounce international law, the rule of law, the community of nations as some "jewish trick?"  

really cranky

After three weeks of leave, I could seriously use three more weeks of leave.  How about three more years of leave.  I go back to work next week and I am not ready.  Today it took me four hours on the computer to futz around with things that should not have taken more than mere minutes.  Am I too old for this?

I seriously put some thought into an intercom system for the front porch and side gate.  We have been building our own gates since Hurricane Ike took our fences and the new gates have no handles.  They are smooth and modern and I don't want to put big honking handles on the gates.  The electric company has to get in the backyard to read the meter, but I often notice him or her in the neighborhood before he or she gets to the side yard.  Our doorbell has always been difficult to hear from the back of the house so an intercom at the front door and the side gate would be really better.  But I had second thoughts as I read my email friend's column at Slackjaw.  We have never been formally introduced.  I haven't taken the man's hand in friendship, but he is a terrific writer with an admirable sense of humor.  He was writing about apartment buzzers in his latest column and I hadn't checked it before I went on line to look for intercoms. 

I too would rather be left alone.  But packages come to our house almost daily.  Books from Amazon or small out of print stores or another attempt at a handbag that works for me comes via UPS.  Our meter must be read.  We have a glass "screen" door which keeps the dogs from darting into the yard over the delivery person but an intercom that I could hear would keep me from actually answering the door when I am not really expecting someone.  I don't like to wake from a nap and hear the gardener in the backyard.  I would rather he announce himself and asked to be allowed into the backyard.  In our part of town, kick in burglaries are getting more common although driveway robberies are more common still.  We simply don't answer the door if we aren't expecting someone.  If I don't know the person on the other side of the peep hole, I don't unlock the door.

Caller ID for the door. 

Speaking of being old enough to be left alone:  I have a friend or I should say had a friend.  I can't say that we will be speaking again.  I did the childish thing and hung up the phone before I could say something else insulting to her.  This person is very well educated.  A writer.  But she insists on telling me about how "incompetent" her household help is. She hires women who are seriously mentally ill to work for her because "they need the money."  Yet she criticizes them to the point that I want to cry listening to her tell me how terrible they are. She then says things about their ethnicity and "hard-headedness."  Her doctors and lawyers must be of a particular ethnicity or religion. If someone has an Irish name, they are drunks.  She actually gives a damn about someone's country of origin.  I mean, after a generation or two, aren't we just Americans? She refuses to learn any language that might facilitate her demands or make errands easier.  She was shocked when another writer friend of hers told her she was a bigot.  I told her she was a bigot.  She said she wasn't because she wished no ill toward these groups.  I told her she should think of people as individuals not stereotypical groups.  She complains about poor people in emergency rooms using "our" resources.  That the "Mexicans" are "taking over".  She cares deeply about where people are born, what color their skin is.  I told her that there were simply three expressions of racial types--Caucasians, Africans, and Asian-Pacific people and she went ballistic.  It is simply beyond her that Native American Indians can be Siberians.

Every time I talk to her she gets on this topic.  How poor her housekeepers are, how minorities are running the world, and how things used to be so much better.

If you are one of the tens of tens that actually read this blog then you know that my work concerns government, politics, and media.  I have been paid to do all three.  My friend started our last conversation with her usual nonsense and then got on the media.  She said media used to be better than today's television reporters and how journalism departments require students to take philosophy.  I said, no they don't and the pressure on today's journalist to make a paper or a news broadcast profitable was just as intense when Edward R. Murrow was on the air.  She was horrified when I insisted that Dan Rather was a good guy from East Texas and no intellectual or scholarly training, that Peter Jennings didn't graduate from high school and his tour of the Middle East and his father's connections at the BBC were more helpful to him than a graduate degree in journalism.  Which really teaches where a comma is placed, not what to ponder when reporting a news story.  She kept telling me I was wrong.

I am not wrong.  I don't have to listen to a bigot tell me I am wrong.  I hung up the phone.  She called back.  I didn't answer the call.  I just can't.  I can't go through it anymore.  I wasn't right about anything when I lived with my father.  I don't need this nonsense on my own telephone.  She can't accept that things were not any better in her day than they are now.  Politicians were not great men then, they were human beings.  Reporters made mistakes, networks were idiots then, too.  Romantic notions of the past are for fascists.  The world is more complicated than it appears to be and dumbing it down to bite sized chunks of digestible falsehoods doesn't make it any better. 

It isn't as if I hadn't told her that I don't want to be corrected in law, government, and media.  I have a terrific set of degrees from fine schools.  I read a lot now.  I don't tell her where to put the comma in her poetry.  I have asked her not to ask me about politics and history if she doesn't want to hear complicated stories.  She wants to make school children salute the flag every morning, I don't see how the Republic is going to collapse if they don't. I don't believe in compulsory patriotism, she doesn't see the harm in it because that is what they did every morning in Missouri.

I am disappointed because "educated people" means that we have open minds, not a dependency on the past, especially when that past was about conformity, uniformity, comfortable bigotry, and mindlessness.  I can feel sorry for her, but I suppose I am as guilty as she is for not calling her back.  But can I compromise my values to tolerate hers?

enough already

Finally the media, the criminal justice system, and popular culture have acknowledged that children are not "making it up," when they tell an adult that another adult sexually assaulted them. People are paying attention.  Although registering sex offenders usually focuses attention on a certain group of offenders and takes attention away from the more common offender.  Children are assaulted by someone they know and sometimes some one in their family.  It isn't the convicted felon down the street with the ugly yard, the drawn curtains, the huge sign in the yard.

This year, why not recognize that sexual assault and abuse happens when a person is forced into sexual activity?  And sexual assault happens to someone in this nation every 2 minutes.  Every two minutes, a person is sexually assaulted.  

Look at the math:

 

That means inappropriate touching, penetration or the labia, vagina, anus, or mouth by the perpetrator's fingers, penis, tongue or with an object.  So that means when a young woman walks down the hall at school and she is purposefully touched on her breast, between her legs, on her rear-end, she has been sexually assaulted.  It might mean that a couple is engaged in sexual activity, she says "stop" and he doesn't stop.  Sexual assault can be verbal, visual, or anything that forces a person to join in unwanted sexual contract or attention.  And it can happen in different situations and settings in a crowded hallway, a classroom, an isolated place, on a date, in the home, with a stranger or more likely with someone a person knows. 

For many, even those who gather statistics, rape is the focus.  But it isn't the only type of sexual assault.  But consider these statistics: 

1 out of every 6 American women have been the victims of an attempted or completed rape in their lifetime (14.8% completed rape; 2.8% attempted rape).

17.7 million American women have been victims of attempted or completed rape.

15% of sexual assault and rape victims are under age 12.

• 29% are age 12-17.
• 44% are under age 18.
• 80% are under age 30.
• 12-34 are the highest risk years.
• Girls ages 16-19 are 4 times more likely than the general population to be victims of rape, attempted rape, or sexual assault.

7% of girls in grades 5-8 and 12% of girls in grades 9-12 said they had been sexually abused.

• 3% of boys grades 5-8 and 5% of boys in grades 9-12 said they had been sexually abused.

In 1995, local child protection service agencies identified 126,000 children who were victims of either substantiated or indicated sexual abuse.

• Of these, 75% were girls.
• Nearly 30% of child victims were between the age of 4 and 7.

93% of juvenile sexual assault victims know their attacker.

• 34.2% of attackers were family members.
• 58.7% were acquaintances.
• Only 7% of the perpetrators were strangers to the victim.

Those persons who are convicted of sexual assault in a court of law have to register with a sex offender data base.  But what about those who don't get to court.  What would happen if a woman was touched in that school hallway, dropped her books on the floor and screamed, "Don't touch me!"  What if she slapped him?  Would that be assault and battery?  Perhaps but she acted in self-defense.  What if women learned to use self defense and not live like victims?

Child molesters get the public loathing they deserve.  But those who commit sexual assault who are classmates or peers are dismissed as "just being kids."  Women who are victimized by sexual violence are dismissed as being hysterical, over-reactors, some how seeking sexual contact--a.k.a. "asking for it."  

In comedy films, sexual assault is depicted as felonious frat boys being regular guys when in fact they are voyeurs and child molesters.  Count the sexual assaults in Animal House.  Looking in windows, at women under bleachers, sexual intercourse with a 13 year old.  How is this entertainment?

In the workplace, when comments are made, women must have the courage to say, "that is verbal sexual assault," or "that is harassment," or "please, don't subject me to those comments."  Write it down in front of the perp.  Tell their supervisor.  Go above them if they don't care.  And warn other women who must deal with this dangerous person.  Unfortunately the situation may be such that you must continue to work there, work around them, but you don't have to absorb the violence alone.

This year, we should say, enough. Sexual assault should get the public attention that child molestation has recently received.   

forgive me, it has been nearly a month since my last post

Exhausting, ennui, angst, blowout, burnout, fatigue, call it whatever you will, I haven't been the same since the funeral of my dear friend.  Another friend called a few nights ago to complain about her job search and I commented that our friends were dying and the new people in our world hardly knew the dead or cared.  We can drop names with the best of them but our list of living friends who can help us get a job when we need one is shorter and not as well connected as it used to be.

It hardly matters to me if Caroline Kennedy gets the appointment to represent New York in the U.S. Senate. We are going to have our own hell of a Senate race in Texas in a few months.  Everyone including those whose platform includes synchronizing the street lights on Houston streets and either flat-heads or Phillip's head screwdrivers but not both are going to run.  

I don't know if Ms. Kennedy is any more or less qualified to be a Senator than Hillary Clinton was when she earned voters' confidence and won the seat.  If her brother were alive, the buzz would be for him.  If her mother were alive the buzz would be for her.  Ms. Kennedy isn't any more or less qualified to serve than President Obama was when he became Senator from Illinois.  Or President of the these United States after a mere two years in the U.S. Senate.  Gore Vidal famously wrote in his seminal play, The Best Man, that a criticism of a candidate is usually something like, "never met a payroll," or some such nonsense.  Vidal's in-law, John Kennedy, who had the benefit of becoming a war hero when the Japanese sank his PT boat under him, said, if you are in the race, you are qualified to be there.  Winning is what mattered.

John Kennedy seemed older then at 43 than his daughter seems now at 50.  He had been elected more than a few times to the House and Senate.  And he had a fine mind and a love of learning and books.  Ms. Kennedy does, too.  She has done considerable fund-raising and yet like her Uncle Teddy really doesn't have an answer to questions on the issues.  Ted Kennedy couldn't tell Roger Mudd why he wanted to be president.  Kerry Kennedy tried to say that her cousin Caroline, author of two books on the Constitution, hadn't divulged her stance on abortion in one of the more high profile Catholic family gatherings.  I don't believe her.  I believe Ms. Kennedy has a stance on abortion and either it isn't the party line or they haven't gaged the reaction of the Church to her stance on abortion.  How do we expect voters to react to a pro choice Catholic Kennedy?  The Kennedys have visited more popes than most members of the Senate have.

How about thinking about voters like complicated adults.  Many Catholics support abortion and the Church dares voters not to support them.  Does she really have to prove her worth as a pro-choice Catholic?  Her father just had to prove his worth as a Catholic.  

What a tiresome, pseudo-problem.  Look the camera in its unblinking eye and answer the question.  Don't be shy.  Be smart.  She is a grown woman who has seen considerable death in her 50 years and has three teenage children.  She is concerned about contraception and the alleged contradiction.  

Andrew Cuomo, Caroline's ex-in law, would like to go to the U.S. Senate.  He has been elected attorney general of the state of New York.  He is divorced from Kerry Kennedy and they have three daughters.  He was in the Clinton Cabinet.  Cuomo's father was governor of New York, could have been president or on the Supreme Court or both.  

The plot is now thick.  And Governor Patterson is really not going to make anyone happy.  His best solution is to select either a New York City police officer or transit worker to be the next Senator from New York. An out of work auto worker would be an excellent choice.  May be he will pick himself.   Perhaps an immigrant cab driver from India since they are happy to tell you what is wrong with politics and have an opinion or two about the intersection of politics and religion and of course nuclear weapons..

Jim Mattox, 1943-2008

Jim Mattox died last week in his sleep of a massive heart attack.  He was 65 years old.  We will join his wife, son and daughter, and sister and brother and literally hundreds of friends to bury him in the Texas State Cemetery tomorrow. My husband knew him for at least 30 years, I knew him for 20 years.  He was my mentor, my boss, my friend.  He was larger than life and yet he knew how difficult life is for many, many people. 

He saved an innocent man from execution.  Death row inmate Henry Lee Lucas was not guilty of capital murder and Mattox investigated the situation. His report on the Lucas matter was merciless.  Mattox and investigators revealed that the so called serial killer did not kill the victim for which he was scheduled to die.  He went to the Board of Pardons and Paroles and asked that Lucas' sentence be commuted to life. Governor George W. Bush took the Board's recommendation and did not execute Lucas. 

Lucas died in his sleep in general population in Huntsville, Texas.  He was 64.  My husband and I attended his funeral there on the prison grounds. 

Lucas came to our attention because my husband's employer, McLennan County District Attorney Vic Feazell, discovered that Lucas' confession spree was nothing more than a fraud.   Mattox noted that the "Lucas Task Force" headed by the Texas Rangers had participated in a "hoax." Lucas could not have killed between 350 and 600 people without leaving any physical evidence.  His confession in his death row case claimed that he raped and murdered the unknown woman and left her in a drainage ditch.  The rape kit performed in her autopsy showed no signs of rape or sexual abuse.

When we told 60 Minutes the truth about the Lucas matter, Jim Mattox was on camera supporting us.  When the FBI and the Texas Rangers wiretapped our phones, Jim Mattox called me and told me we were being "trapped and traced."  He was almost gleeful that his phone number would be included. 

Jim Mattox gave me my first job in state government.  He gave me my first job on a statewide political campaign.  He ate at my dining table in my home, played with our dog, regularly bought my lunch at a cafeteria in Austin and ate off my plate.  He had me research speeches, rewrite speeches, and listen to him complain.  We talked about politics, life, hard childhoods, law school, his beloved children and his wife. 

He fought for Texas consumers, Texas children, and he worked tirelessly to make Texas better.  He was never harder on anyone than he was on himself.  His grasp of public policy and the political system was phenomenal.  He didn't go a long to get a long and he wasn't interested in making friends but he was loved across the state of Texas by every person who was in need of Jim Mattox in their corner.  I could count on him for anything.  And I watched him give his everything to his employees, his constituents, his family, friends, and his state.  My life is better for knowing him and your life is better because of his devotion to the underdog, the unloved.  He comforted the afflicted and afflicted the comfortable.  And even if it was a lost cause, he never backed away from a fight.  He took on the fight sometimes simply because no one else would.

When the Texas Legislature gave his office the responsibility of pursuing child support collections, they did it with the hope that he would fail.  His abrasive nature, his inability to court the Establishment, the fact that his home phone number was in the Austin phone book and he believed it was an honor to serve the people and not serve corporations made him a lone figure in the legislature.  But he was not really alone.

Even some of the so called liberal journalist--the two or three in the entire state--did not like Mattox because he didn't drink with them, didn't have their birthright, didn't think he was entitled.  He was no elitist.  He had callouses on his hands and knew what it was to go without limousine liberals generosity.  His charity did not come with tuxedos and taffeta.  Poverty was not an abstract concept to him.  It wasn't something to fight at charity balls.

He listened to people.  He didn't listen to critics.  He was nearly Rooseveltian in his philosophy about measuring himself by the enemies he made. He believed in a Great Society. Texas certainly did not.  The Democratic Party changed.  The conservative Democrats became conservative Republicans and the poor, the middle class found a meaner colder Texas.  Jim Mattox's liberalism died with the death of the Texas Democratic Party after George W. Bush and Karl Rove reinvented Texas politics.  But the people they used and abused were the same ones that conservative Democrats had used, too.  Democrats couldn't compete with Republicans in the polarized "liberal" verses "conservative" depiction of Texas. 

Most Democrats in Texas were conservative and didn't really care so much about the people Jim Mattox served.  After all those people suffered under Democratic administrations for years and Jim Mattox suffered at the hands of a press that championed the Democratic Establishment.  Hell, the press was the Democratic Establishment.  The Houston Post was owned by Lt. Governor William Hobby.  The Dallas Morning News was a reactionary paper that long endorsed Democratic candidates when their was no real Republican Party in Texas until the election of Republican Senator John Tower.   For eight years in the mid 1980s every statewide official was a Democrat--but what kind of Democrat?  None were liberal Democrats like Jim Mattox.