Halffull.org

Well, Bush won the popular vote this time, and polls indicate that many of those who turned out to support him claimed the number one thing they look for in an election race is “moral issues.” My question is this: how long will the newly re-elected President wait before fulfilling some of his implicit promises to the right-wing conservatives who turned out to support him?

How long will it be before he selects a conservative justice to replace the ailing Rehnquist, or tries to pass further restrictions on stem-cell research? How soon will he start working on further restrictions to same-sex marriage?

When one depends so largely on a moral platform to get re-elected, the expectations for the accomplishments of the second term are high. When is it all going to start? I’m guessing about a month — until then we’ll be talking about unifying the country and all being Americans together regardless of party affiliation. Let’s all hold hands for a month before we start screaming “heathen!” “fundamentalist!” and gnashing our teeth, shall we?

So I went to see “The Stepford Wives” at the dollar theater, and until the last half hour, it was surprisingly good. It was well-paced, it was funny, the casting was perfect, and the writers had carefully updated the situation to work with the postfeminist America that we live in, rather than the 1970s world of the original. I was sitting there in the theater just glowing, thinking, “Wow, Hollywood has done something right!”

Then we got to the last half hour of the movie, and all hell broke loose. Continue Reading »

A Monroe County Family Court judge ruled a few weeks ago that a Rochester-area woman should not have any more children until her four existing children were out of foster care. Three of these children tested positive for cocaine at birth; the fourth was not tested. The ACLU is considering taking on the woman’s case, except that no one can find the woman — she doesn’t have a permanent address.

The court also ruled that the woman’s boyfriend should not have any more children either. The judge recommended birth control, although not specifying a method.

The woman has been picked up for drug trafficking and also for prostitution. She allegedly offered an undercover cop sex for $15. When he refused, she lowered the price to $10 and offered to have sex with the officer’s partner as well.

The woman is already pregnant again — conception took place sometime in March, before the “no pregnancy” order was put in place.

Does this court ruling violate individual rights to privacy? Discuss.

I know some of you out there enjoy and respect Bill O’Reilly and FOX News, and hey, that’s your prerogative. I try to leave that network alone, except for my weekly forays into trashy TV and The Simpsons.

However, last night an ad caught my attention. It was an ad for a later segment on FOX’s version of “Sixty Minutes.” The ad showed a list of names of soldiers recently killed in Iraq, presumably taken from some liberal network, and the announcer intoned “Lists of American soldiers killed in Iraq: newsworthy, or liberal propaganda? Find out at 10 pm.”

My question is this: How could a list of names be considered propaganda? Obviously one could present the names in a heart-wrenching fashion with lots of pictures of doves and crying widows and orphans, but the list itself, assuming that it is accurate, is not propaganda. It is a list of names of dead people who happened to be soldiers killed in Iraq.

I admit some forces in the media have a liberal bias: Newsweek and The NY Times, to name two. There is a difference, though, between putting a spin on the news and not reporting it at all. Look over there! Fags trying to get married! There is no war in Iraq! Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain! We are winning the war on terror! Not releasing the names of the dead, assuming that the families have already been notified and that the deaths are true, seems to me less like liberal propaganda than like refusing to report the facts.

In Texas and Florida, two fine conservative states, many juvenile criminals are sentenced and tried as adults. This leads to longer sentencing; a murder, such as the one mentioned in the Title IX case, could lead to life imprisonment if tried and sentenced under adult penalties rather than to 3-4 years in juvenile incerceration. In other states, like Maryland, for example, young criminals are tried and sentenced as juveniles, and they serve their time in facilities that are geared specifically toward rehabilitation.

So what’s the issue? I don’t understand why the disparity in sentencing is so great between states. (In the case of the young man who had a violent history and stabbed his girlfriend to death in school, I thought 3-4 years was not long enough in prison. This is probably gender bias on my part.) Interestingly enough, the young man in question committed his crime in Texas, but was tried as a juvenile. Usually Texan juvenile criminals are tried as adults. Why was that not the case in this situation?

So where a young person commits a crime can have a vast effect on the rest of their life. The moral of the story, I guess, is if you’re going to stab someone, do it in a liberal state.

In Texas, a woman is suing the local school district over the stabbing death of her daughter at school. The woman’s daughter had broken up with her boyfriend the night before. The ex-boyfriend had a history of violent assaults against others, particularly against young women who had rejected him. The victim allegedly told several teachers that she was afraid that her ex-boyfriend might hurt her, but no one seems to have filed an official complaint or report. The boyfriend tracked the girl down in school and stabbed her to death. He will serve between 3 and 4 years in juvenile prison.

The girl’s mother is suing the school district under Title IX, which provides equal opportunity for students in sports. The mother alleges that teachers and other school officials knew of the threat against her daughter’s life and did nothing to prevent the murder, and that this is negligence under Title IX, which also protects students from sexual harassment. However, to win the case, the mother will have to prove the school was aware of the harassment and took no action, which may be difficult.

I’m not sure what’s going on here. This kid had a serious violent history and no one listened to this girl when she said she was afraid? On the other hand, is it fair to sue the school district for several million dollars?

“Filed at 8:40 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) — Congress is set to ban a specific abortion procedure, a legislative landmark that could lead to a fierce legal fight affecting a woman’s right to end a pregnancy. The ban on what opponents call partial birth abortion is likely to pass by a wide margin when it comes up for a vote scheduled in the Senate on Tuesday. Three weeks ago, the House passed the bill with a 281-142 vote, and Senate action would send it to President Bush, who strongly supports the ban.” Continue Reading »

I abhor Blockbuster. I can’t be any clearer on the subject. I loathe it. It is like kryptonite if I were Superman, or lemon Pledge if I were a stubborn built-up spot on a wooden coffee table.

Why, you ask, why would a nice normal person hate a nice big business that provides so many movies at all hours of the day? Why indeed? Continue Reading »

Bush is once again demonstrating his fervent desire to serve the people of this nation with his selection of the head of the FDA Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee. By “the people of his nation,” I mean the White Christian heterosexual males that Bush recognizes as people. Continue Reading »

From crimelibrary.com, your major categories of rapists are these:

Power-reassurance: That’s what law enforcement calls the “gentleman rapist.” He has a complex fantasy of a consensual relationship with a woman.

Power-assertive: That’s the individual who believes that he is entitled to do whatever he wants to women. They’re to be used for his gratification. His fantasies are minimal.

Anger-retaliatory: This person assaults because he’s motivated by anger and he’s getting even with women for real or imagined wrongs. He has almost no fantasy. He simply strikes.

Anger-excitation: He’s a sexual sadist. He’s punishing women because he believes them to be evil and powerful, so he’s trying to take away that power. He has deep and complex fantasies.

Opportunistic: He’s there to commit another crime like robbery or burglary. The victim is there and he simply seizes the opportunity. He’s frequently under the influence of alcohol or drugs. If he starts robbing and raping repeatedly, he gets classified into one of the major categories.

Gang rape: This involves three or more offenders and you always have a leader and a reluctant participant. Those are extremely violent, and what you find is that they’re playing for each other’s approval. It gets into a pack mentality and can be horrendous.

Opinion: Having read a little bit about a few serial rapists/killers, it’s obvious to me that they have severe psychological problems. This does not in any way exonerate them from responsibility in any crime they commit, but it is clear nonetheless that many of them are more or less mentally ill. A person who feels compelled to wash his hand ten times an hour and lock all the doors six times before bed is termed a person with compulsions, and if these compulsions are severe enough, he may be diagnosed with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. Shouldn’t there also be a disorder for people who feel compelled to force sex on others?

My questions: Should someone be doing psychological testing on these criminals? Should there be diagnostic categories for them in psychology and psychiatry (currently there are not)?

If there were such categories, would that minimize the criminality of such behavior and allow rapists to say “oh, but I have paraphilic rape disorder, I can’t help it,” and would they then get off on an insanity defense or be treated less harshly in terms of incarceration time? Where should the line be drawn between a common ordinary rapist (say it happened on a date and he just kept going after she said no) and a mentally ill rapist?