BARBARA'S TCHATZKAHS

I'm with you Uppity my sistah - I'm with you! Okay, I’m probably going to get smacked here but, frankly, I am so sick of religious zealots, I could just spit. I have yet to meet ONE religious zealot who practiced what he or she preached at everyone else. Not one. Meet Sally Kern, Republican Theocratic Crackpot Religious Zealot. OKLAHOMA CITY — An Oklahoma lawmaker is once again drawing criticism from gay and lesbian groups from across the nation. State Representative Sally Kern, and a host of other lawmakers, civic and religious leaders, will gather at the State Capitol next month to sign the “Oklahoma Citizen’s Proclamation for Morality.” The proclamation urges Oklahoma residents to acknowledge the need for a national awakening of righteousness, but critics say Rep. Kern is again mixing politics and religion. Read the “Oklahoma Citizen’s Proclamation for Morality” These people don’t want to mind your business for you or anything do they? God, if I saw this wo...

by Jonny Paul The number of anti-Semitic hate crimes against the Jewish community in Britain reached an unprecedented high in the first half of 2009, according to figures released on Thursday by a Jewish community organization. The Community Security Trust (CST), a charity which monitors anti-Semitism and provides security for the Jewish community in Britain, recorded 609 anti-Semitic incidents across the UK from January to June this year, over double the 276 incidents recorded for the same period last year. The charity said that this is the worst year since 1984, when records began, and that the number of incidents in the first half of this year is higher than the 598 incidents recorded in all of 2006, during the Second Lebanon War, and the 544 in all of 2008. The charity records incidents reported by members of the Jewish community, organizations and witnesses of crimes and incidents. A further 236 incidents were reported to CST during this period but not included in the report, due ...

I concur. My late dog was wonderful with my kids when they were babies. They seemed to understand each other in a way I could not. It was beautiful to see. He'd even let me know when one of them was sick or in distress. Of course, exercise a lot of caution and supervise at all times when introducing your new baby to your dog. Always. He is very missed. Babies Can Comprehend 'Canine' Language By Randy Dotinga What's in a bark? A new study suggests that 6-month-old babies know the answer. Researchers found that most infants who were tested could figure out that an aggressive bark goes with an angry-looking dog. They also seemed to know that friendly-looking pooches voice their feelings in a different way. The babies managed to do this even though they weren't very familiar with dogs. It's not clear whether the babies actually know that a dog baring its teeth is a sign of trouble, but they're showing a level of sophistication regarding how dogs reveal thei...

Typical sociopath - no remorse, not his fault, playing victim... Tony Alamo, a one-time street preacher who built a multimillion-dollar ministry and became an outfitter of the stars, was convicted Friday of taking girls as young as 9 across state lines for sex. Alamo stood silently as the verdict was read, a contrast to his occasional mutterings during testimony. His five victims sat looking forward in the gallery. One, a woman he "married" at age 8, wiped away a tear. "I'm just another one of the prophets that went to jail for the Gospel," Alamo called to reporters afterward as he was escorted to a waiting U.S. marshal's vehicle. Shouts of "Bye, bye, Bernie" _ Alamo was born Bernie Lazar Hoffman _ came from a crowd gathered on the Arkansas side of the courthouse. Some came from Fouke, the nearby town where Alamo's 15-acre compound sits. Others were former followers of his ministries in Arkansas, California and New York. The jury of nine men an...

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 ...

by Jane Marcellus Has anybody else noticed that most news stories about politicians' affairs aren't really about women? There are women in them, of course. There's the Wronged Wife , who is often portrayed as a victim in stories that frame her in a domestic light, focusing on how she is " coping " and whether " she'll stand by her man ," the Cheating Husband . And then, of course, there's the Other Woman , without whom there would be no story. We know her type: a bimbo, a jezebel, a . . . you know. We hear even less from her than from Wronged Wife , since we all know she is (sotto voce here) " unstable ." We might see her photo -- preferably a semi-nude shot taken in better days--shared with the press by a former boyfriend, now a happily-married tax attorney. The dichotomy that Helen Benedict described over a decade ago in " Virgin or Vamp: How the Press Covers Sex Crimes " is never more true than in stories about extramarital...

I was 12 when the U.S.A. landed on the moon. Kennedy's dream realized. I remember it was a muggy July night. My whole family was gathered in our living room. My little brother had stayed up late. I sat on a chair next to my beloved Nana, who was in her usual spot in her rocking chair. (A chair I now proudly own.) The sliding door was open and the sound of the crickets under our six apple trees in our large back yard was all you could hear between the crackling of conversation between the astronauts and NASA. I remember clearly, after the "one small step" comment, taking my Nana's hand. I felt part of something so very big. And yet the pictures of Earth from space made me also feel so very small. I was too young to realize until years later, my Nana grew up riding in a horse and buggy. She'd lived to see the invention of the car, the airplane and now space travel. She was quiet, kept her thoughts to herself but watched intently. Nana would be very proud th...

I know that some of my Orthodox friends are going to call or write me now and tell me I don't understand. Maybe I don't. But I do know what abuse is. So was the husband mentioned below abusing his wife because of her infertility? Abuse and marital problems are big issues when there's infertility. Infertility can cause severe depression, acting out and other serious problems in the woman. So because she wasn't breeding it was o.k. to treat her poorly? And not giving a woman a Get. Making an Agunah out of a woman. Talk about misogyny and control. These are things I don't think I want to understand. By ANDREA PEYSER AND you thought you had trouble committing. Thirty years after divorce became all the rage in America, the pastime is catching on like wildfire in the kid-rich, ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, where getting a "get" is the new black. So says psychologist Daniel Schonbuch, who thinks divorces (known in the community as "gets") are th...

by Anna Valerious Have you noticed that even when you do things right it can be crapped all over and made to be "wrong" by the narcissist? One of the ways they accomplish this is quite simple and can often trip us up without us seeing what got us. Even the most benevolent act can be turned into its opposite by the assignation of bad motives. The narcissist reserves to themselves the right to determine your own mind for you. They will tell you what was really motivating you in order to take away from you the truth, reality or rightness of whatever you have done . It can be an amazingly effective sleight-of-hand. When I think back on my relationship with my narcissistic mother this is one of the things that stands out. My mother takes extreme pride in her ability to "read" people. She has done this for as long as I've known her. Mostly, what that means is that she assumes the worst about someone's thoughts or motivations and proceeds on that as if it is the tr...

by David Rothkopf Throughout the political campaign Barack Obama argued that he was a staunch friend of Israel. In Cairo, in his ground-breaking speech to the Islamic world, he asserted America was committed to the security of Israel. Wherever he goes he says he is committed to upholding America's long history of supporting the Jewish state. So how come a Jerusalem Post poll conducted late last month says only six percent of Israelis think the Obama administration is pro-Israel, down from almost five times that in the early weeks of the administration? This is such a low number that it clearly cuts across all parties, demographic and social groups within Israel. It effectively says that something that Obama has done in his first six months in office has convinced virtually all the Israeli people (at least to the extent the poll is truly representative of the people of Israel) that he's not what he said he was. Could it be that they believe the Obama Administration is likely to ...

Gotta love those Global Warming deniers. Safe behind their keyboards. Since so far, this summer has been cool they're saying, "SEE - no Global WARMING! It's COOL out!" Get a clue. The fact that the predictable weather patterns are varying should tell you something. But most of them aren't gardeners like me, out tending flowers and growing a few veggies to serve to my family (tomatoes and my herbs are doing well so far this year, thanks!). No they'd rather bloviate from their computers and central air conditioned condos. Duh. And don't ask to debate them. Those bullies will just cut you off and scream louder. HOAX! I wonder if there's Global Warming in Hell? GLOBAL WARMING DENIERS ARE ON THIN ICE by Joel Connelly Chilling news on hot topics takes different forms, witness two e-mails that arrived cheek-by-jowl one afternoon last week. Sea ice in the Arctic thinned dramatically between the 2004 and 2008 winters, with thin seasonal ice supplanting thic...

Republican Sex Scandals a Sign It's Time to End the Family Values Wars Republicans and Democrats should keep private lives private and divorce politics from "family values" By Robert Schlesinger An Oklahoma state legislator recently divined the cause of our economic funk. We are paying the price, according to a resolution state Rep. Sally Kern is sponsoring, for becoming a "world leader" in pornography, same-sex marriage, divorce, and other "forms of debauchery." It will come as no surprise that Kern is a Republican (a "Kern-servative" at that, according to her website). If the states are indeed the national parties' farm teams, the Sally Kerns of the world will doom the GOP. Republicans can no longer afford to lustily fight the culture wars, and it's time for them to sue for peace on the marriage front. The phrase "family values" first entered the political lexicon in the 1976 Republican platform, according to William Safir...

Cronkite Through A Child's Eyes By David Kurtz As a two-year-old, so the family story goes, I would ask my mother to hang a map on the wall behind me while I shuffled papers in my small hands at a desk, pretending to be Walter Cronkite. Around that same time, maybe a little later, when I was visiting my grandfather's farm implement store in the Bible Belt, one of the mechanics in the shop was left dumbfounded when he asked me what my favorite TV show was, and I said, apparently without hesitation, "Walter Cronkite." I'll stipulate that those anecdotes, which I have no direct memory of, probably say more about what a hopelessly geeky kid I was than they do about Cronkite or his influence. But it does give you a sense of his place in the American home in the 1970s. My own memories of Cronkite, who went off the air when I was 11 years old, are tangled up with memories of my dad: the excitement of him coming home from work, the smell of his pipe (Cronkite smoked one, ...

by Holly Sanders Ware For such a sophisticated and secretive company, Twitter is proving to be an awfully easy target for computer hackers. A hacker swiped hundreds of confidential documents about Twitter and its employees after breaking into the e-mail and Internet accounts of several Twitter workers, including co-founder Evan Williams. Among the stolen documents are floor plans for the firm's new San Francisco office, a pitch for a possible Twitter-themed reality TV show and growth projections for the micro-blogging site. The hacker also lifted private information from employee accounts, including resumes, credit-card numbers and phone logs. The hacker, who uses the identity "Hacker Croll," leaked the documents yesterday to TechCrunch, an industry site run by Michael Arrington, and a French blog called Korben. In May, the same hacker infiltrated a Twitter employee's account and from there gained access to the Twitter accounts of several high-profile users, including...

Did G-d Create Evil? By Aron Moss -------------------- Question: Did G-d create evil? Surely G-d made everything. So although it is people who actually do evil, it was G-d who must have created the idea of evil. But if G-d is good, how could He create evil? Answer: Here's the paradox: Goodness exists because G-d desired it; evil exists because G-d doesn't want it. If a human wants something, but doesn't actually do anything about it, nothing happens. You may want a piece of cake, but a cake will not materialize unless someone bakes it. But when you're a Divine Being, your desires create reality. With G-d, just wanting something makes it exist. After all, He is all-powerful; if He wants it, what can possibly stop it from being? He wanted a world, so it was. He wanted goodness, so it was. Now the same applies to G-d not wanting something: it too becomes reality. If G-d decides He doesn't want something, then that decision itself makes that thing exist. G-d's all-...

(Written by Maria De Santis of the Women’s Justice Center, Santa Rosa, CA) There’s a seemingly simple little exercise we’ve done dozens of times at workshops on violence against women. The usual responses, however, are anything but simple. They’re confounding and cause for concern. Recently we repeated the exercise with a conference room full of 70 social workers, advocates, therapists, and mental health workers. “Why don’t some domestic violence victims leave the relationship,” we ask? “Call out the reasons!” The answers, as always, come fast and freely. “Because she doesn’t think she can make it on her own.” “Not enough money to feed the children.” “She feels obligated to her marital vows.” “It’s learned helplessness.” “She doesn’t believe she deserves better.” “She doesn’t know where to go.” “She wants the children to have a father.” etc. I jot down the familiar list until the group exhausts their thoughts. And there, again, is the enigma. How, at this date, with this group, - with...

Every day that I read or watch the news - more of the devastating effects of Destructive Narcissists and their decisions & behavior are all around us. Lisa & I mention this to each other frequently. Sometimes I wonder, are we the only ones who see this? I have always believed that Britney Spears was the victim of a Destructive Narcissist (Kevin Federline). Federline is all about himself, comes off as the better parent, does all he can to keep his all-important 'image' pallatable - but I watched Britney's acting out after their split with horror and compassion. Shaving off her hair, drinking, possibly drugging, hobnobbing with paparazzi... Britney didn't know if she was coming or going it seemed. Her race from one personal train-wreck to another appeared to be a desperate attempt to run away from pain. Acting out is a hallmark of PTSD, can go on for months are years, and in my opinion - she had it. That desperate attempt to avoid the devastating hurt one feels wh...

Tim Horton's has finally come to New York. Krispy Kreme didn't do so well here despite all the hype, and I wonder how ole' Timmy will do in the Big Apple. My ex is Canadian and I am still close to a lot of his family north of the border. When I visit, I always stop at Tim's for my coffee and at least once have a Maple Glazed Donut. Heaven! (I am on a medical food plan and have been for a number of years so one a year is about all I allow myself. ) Tim's is good. VERY good, in my opinion. So give it a chance. Obviously a warm bowl of oatmeal and dried cranberries, an apple or scrambled egg whites are my usual choices... and when I am in the neighborhood, an onion bagel with cream cheese and chives from Ess-A-Bagel is the quintessential NYC experience. (When I could eat regular food after my recent surgery - this was the first thing I asked for!) So take the poll at the article's source, linked below... and let us all know. Can we give Timbits a chance?...