BARBARA'S TCHATZKAHS

From this great site: The not-so-bitter truth “You’re just bitter.” This is a phrase commonly used to silence women . Another variation says, “You are so unforgiving.” The bitterness accusation is used to bully a woman and tell her how she “should” feel instead of asking her how she does feel. Someone who uses this label expects her to pretend there has been no harm, no foul. She is expected to pretend the one who hurt her is a great person, even if she knows he is a terrible person. If she does not pretend, it is because she is “bitter and unforgiving.” Abusers nearly always sling this accusation at their victims. She may have accepted him back with open arms after a dozen violent episodes, but the first time she hesitates to “forgive and forget,” he will tell her she is a bitter and unforgiving person. If only it stopped there. The world does not want to hear the voice of the abused, either. Let her speak of abuse in the divorce hearing, and the judge may roll h...

When I do Domestic Violence counseling I concentrate on the non-physical aspects. The verbal, emotional, financial & spiritual abuse that's done. Majority of the time its covert and chips away at you little by little. I have had it done to me.8  years ago someone I thought was a friend and thought I could trust used it on me . It took a long time to completely untangle the mental pretzel I'd become, as well as professional help. I am still dealing with permanent PTSD and some of the aftermath problems have completely shut down parts of myself that I know are gone forever. Any psychology professional will tell you - you don't just "move on" or "get over it." No one is immune from this. No one. You are done in before you even know it. "Moral principles are a person’s sense of right and wrong. The women we spoke to had very high moral principles and an internal moral compass of right and wrong. Their moral sense and its relationship...

AN OPEN LETTER TO JON STEWART by Ron Rosenbaum Dear Jon Stewart, You probably don't recall, but I was one of your earliest, most enthusiastic media admirers. I wrote a column nearly a decade ago, shortly after you took over The Daily Show, when you were still struggling for recognition of your genius, before the massive media love-in that took a while to develop. My column then took the form of an open letter to David Letterman, about how his show was getting tired and how he ought to get Jon Stewart to replace him. (I like open letters.) I talked about how much I loved the perfect pitch of your TV "newsmagazine" parodies but most of all how I was blown away by your astonishing quickness of wit, most evident in the unscripted interviews. I called you "an idiot savant" of comedy. (That was a compliment—ignore the idiot part, focus on the savant.) So please know I'm writing as an admirer, someone who thinks you have the courage as well as comedic smarts to tak...

from the great Deadenders: Obama is a lying sack of crap! I hope no one is surprised that Mr. Present Vote is falling like a stone in the polls. His days of being able to say “hope and change”, and everyone just going along with whatever he says are coming to an end. Every bill that he’s rammed through congress because we “have to do it now or the world will explode”, have been a disaster. They look really bad if you read them too. With all that bad news and blaming Bush doesn’t quite have the cache it once did. It’s time to come up with a new plan, so here it is. Transparency be damned, that would be more funny if the oilsoc Administration was actually transparent. It’s time to start hiding things. oilsoc: I never said anything about closing Gitmo President Obama on Monday extended by six months a task force charged with determining how terrorism suspects should be interrogated, held in custody or handed over to other countries, putting in jeopardy his promise to close the military ...

FINDING G*D IN THE DETAILS Have you ever been excited about an idea, a project, or a goal, so excited that you felt like you could reach out and touch it - only to find that when you try to bring it into actuality the whole thing breaks down? It’s a common experience. In it’s pure ungrounded form, in your imagination, the vision can look vastly inspiring and easy to achieve. But when you try to bring it into reality, manifest it in all the myriad and fragmented details of your life, more often than not you find that there are lots of obstacles along the way. Shattered, shattered Love and hope and sex and dreams Are still surviving on the street Look at me, I'm in tatters! I'm a shattered Shattered This is the stage that, as the saying goes, separates the men from the boys. The easiest thing to do at this point is to give up, to stay with your old habitual ways of being that may not be ultimately fulfilling but are, at least, comfortably familiar. But, if you make up your min...

By Timothy Collins Not surprisingly Benjamin Netanyahu's heavily qualified endorsement of the two-state solution prompted scorn and ridicule from Palestinian and Arab quarters. In Israel, many considered the prime minister's offer of a future Palestinian state a generous one. But to characterise Netanyahu's endorsement of Palestinian statehood in his address last Sunday at Bar-Ilan University as either farcical or magnanimous is to miss the historic significance of the moment. Granted, Netanyahu vetoed both a Palestinian military and Palestinian sovereignty over its airspace, staked Israel's claim to an 'undivided'Jerusalem as its capital, and demanded that Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state. But seen in the context of Likud's ideological evolution over the past several decades - and notwithstanding Netanyahu's unwarranted reiteration of his belief that the West Bank and Gaza are part the Jewish peoples ancestral homeland - the PM's de f...

from the Black Agenda Report: "Since the first days of his administration, Obama has methodically erased single-payer advocates from the picture.” The president feigns amazement at popular demands for a change in the industrial world’s most expensive and dysfunctional health care system. "We're doing some stuff on health care because I think the country is geared up, businesses are geared up, families are geared up to go ahead and start solving some our extraordinary health care system problems," Obama fairly gushed, as if his own corporate-friendly proposals accurately reflect the public will. In reality, the Administration is engaged in an elaborate charade designed to sidetrack, possibly for decades, the most broadly supported idea in American politics, today: single-payer health care. Obama has gone to extraordinary lengths to suppress advocates of a single-payer or “Medicare for all” system, which polls have consistently shown to be favored by at least six in te...

It's scary how close to truth The Onion gets sometimes: In a devastating blow to millions of unsuspecting Americans, newly elected president and international con man Barack Obama fled the country Wednesday with nearly $85 million in campaign funds. According to FBI investigators, Obama's sudden disappearance was discovered at 6:15 p.m. when the former Illinois senator failed to arrive at a gala event in Lincoln Square, prompting several aides to rush back to his campaign headquarters. At 6:23 p.m., flight logs at O'Hare International Airport confirmed that two passengers, a male carrying two silver briefcases and dressed in a perfectly tailored Brioni tuxedo, and an African-American female wearing a fur coat and speaking in a thick Russian accent, were seen boarding a private plane. Enlarge Image Letter A note was left behind by Obama, in which he claims the American public "never stood a chance." Obama's campaign office, sources said, was completely vacant ...

(REPOST FROM JULY 2008) My least favorite musical was always THE MUSIC MAN. Oh, the music itself was masterfully scored, lovely and the play itself is well-written. But it's Meredith Wilson's love story about a con man reformed by real love. It presents the same false hopes that Disney's been selling to females for years now. Love cures all. And the musical is a complete con in itself. In my ongoing education about the interpersonal exploitation and abuse of trust in emotionally/ psychologically damaging relationships, and the personality disorders that cause this endless trauma, I (and many others) see Harold Hill for what he is. A Destructive Narcissist. .. that's on the 'low end' of the Cluster B Personality Disorder Spectrum. Even that 'Think Method' of the mythical Hill is pure narcissistic lure. Don't get me wrong though -- Destructive Narcissists (if you have been reading this blog) are just that: DESTRUCTIVE. They leave a wake of rap...

From GOTHAMIST: Here's a cute, bright-eyed kid in Borough Park who probably has no idea that his Purim black face costume might be considered just a tad offensive. Of course, in a post-Drunken Negro Face Cookie world, this kind of tone-deaf Obama homage is no longer so surprising. The reader who emailed us the photo explained that the boy is donning black face to raise money for an unspecified charity, as part of Purim custom. Hence the "DOLLAR'S [sic] not CHANGE!!" sign. ( The reader added that he admired the "poetic" nature of the sign and gave the lad an extra dollar.) We once spent a Clinton-era Purim night driving around costumed tweens collecting money door-to-door, and were always under the impression the kids got to keep the loot, because every time they'd receive a sub par check they'd slam the car door and call the donor a "pig." SOURCE

from: STALKING THE SOUL Perverse abusiveness fascinates, seduces, and terrifies. We sometimes envy abusive individuals because we imagine them to be endowed with a superior strength that will always make them winners. They do, in fact, know how to naturally manipulate, and this appears to give them the upper hand, whether in business or in politics. Fear makes us instinctively gravitate toward them rather than away from them: survival of the fittest. The most admired individuals are those who enjoy themselves the most and suffer the least. In any case, we don't take their victims, who seem weak and dense, seriously, and under the guise of respecting another's freedom, we become blind to destructive situations. In fact, this "tolerance" prevents us from interfering in the actions and opinions of others, even when these actions and opinions are out of line or morally reprehensible. We also weirdly indulge the lies and "spin" of those in power. The end justifie...