(h/t ABL WARNING: Graphic images and language)

My mother died of breast cancer. I'm sure the vast majority of people reading this can point to an aunt, a cousin, a sister, a best friend who has had the disease. So far, the estimated new cases and deaths from breast cancer in the United States in 2012 (and this is just February) is 226,870 women and 2,190 men with new cases of cancer and 39,510 women and 410 men who have died from the disease. Many of these women, and possibly even men, are poor and have little access to proper health care or support in a country where health care is still only for few who can afford it, and many of them owe their lives to finding the disease early through breast screening provided by Planned Parenthood.

But it seems the anti-abortion faction of the right wing isn't just trying to impose their moral, political and religious values on women's wombs, they don't give a damn about the health of women's breasts, either. The Susan G. Komen Foundation has found itself under fire during this past week over its decision to withdraw funding from Planned Parenthood, thereby depriving thousands of women from life-saving breast screening. But one voice in the many opposed to the gutless capitulation of the Komen Foundation, and specifically Komen's CEO, Nancy Brinker, is that of Linda Burger, a 56-year-old breast cancer survivor in Las Vegas, who was so appalled she made a video. It is not for the faint hearted, for as Linda says in this video, cancer makes you frank, it makes you say what you feel. It give you the courage to face a camera and bare the scars from a mastectomy for the entire world to see. This brave, beautiful, kick-ass woman pulls no punches, she's a hero through and through.

Watch this wonderful video. Then send it to an aunt, a cousin, a sister, a best friend. Send it to your Congressman. Send the Komen Foundation the message that politics and religion have no place in providing health care for women who have nowhere else to turn. They can take their plastic pink ribbons and shove them up Ari Fleischer's nose. Then send a donation to Planned Parenthood - help keep them alive, so that they can help keep us alive.

By now, the story of Rebecca Hains's frosted cupcake confiscated by an overly zealous (or possibly just hungry) TSA Security Officer at a Los Vegas airport has gone viral, leading to a satirical song, and the sudden burst in popularity at the bakery of a "traditional style red velvet cake with Madagascar Bourbon vanilla cream cheese butter cream frosting" cupcake in a jar, now re-dubbed the National (Security) Velvet Cupcake (with the packaging redesigned to make it safe for air travel). Possibly the only dangerous thing about this cupcake is what it might do to your cholesterol levels.

The rationale - if one can use that word here without sniggering - behind the confiscation of a cupcake is the Transportation Security Administration's rule enforcing the 3-ounce limit for gels in carry-on luggage, ostensibly to prevent terrorists sneaking explosive aboard an airplane. But once we're finished with shaking our heads in disbelief and having a bit of a laugh... it might be advisable to look at this incident from a slightly more serious angle.

The Transport Security Administration was created as part of the Aviation and Transportation Security Act sponsored by Republican Congressman Don "Bridge to Nowhere" Young, signed into law barely a month after the 9/11 attacks, and transferred out of the US Department of Transportation and into the Department of Homeland Security itself in 2003. The stated mission of the Transport Security Administration is to protect 'the Nation's [sic] transportation systems to ensure freedom of movement for people and commerce.' Yet since its inception, the TSA has been the focus of one idiotic bungle after another, supposedly in the name of fighting terrorism, making freedom of movement for people and commerce far harder than it's ever been - for everyone, including politicians.

Rand Paul is hardly the first US politician to finally start objecting to the TSA's intrusive security searches, although he might be one of the most hypocritical, as he was on his way to Washington DC to speak at an anti-abortion March for Life rally. Don't anyone dare even think about touching his body, but he has no problem with government telling women what they can and cannot do with theirs. Rep Sharon Cissna (D-Alaska) endured far more than what Mr Paul suffered, after refusing an 'enhanced' full-body pat-down last year after the TSA in Seattle decided her mastectomy and gel-filled prosthetic breast insert required further investigation, the second time Ms Cissna was subjected to a pat-down. She took a ferry instead from Prince Rupert, BC to Juneau rather than fly, and had been a champion for the rights of travellers since. "The freedom of travel should never come at the price of basic human dignity and pride," she said.

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Tom Clancy’s fiction has never really been my cup of tea, and his rightwing ideology even less so. Clancy, a gun-toting NRA member who famously blamed 9/11 on left wing politicians, has made a vast fortune writing military thrillers. But like a lot of rightwing military fans, Clancy never served in the military, enrolling at Loyola College at the height of the Vietnam War to earn a bachelor’s in English Literature before becoming an insurance broker. His wife of nearly thirty years divorced him after she discovered his affair with Katherine Huang, an assistant district attorney in New York he’d met on-line. He then married Alexandra Llewellyn, twenty years his junior and a cousin to Colin Powell who introduced them while Clancy was still married to his first wife while having an affair with his mistress. Charming.

His personal ethics are reflected in his fiction, not only by its literary content but by the questionable professional practices of its author. His novels gleefully espouse torture such as waterboarding and inducing heart attacks, where every liberal character is an idiot and a buffoon snorting cocaine, scarfing tofu, and determined to raise taxes on the wealthy (the b-stards!), and all the conservative characters are heroic patriots with impeccable principles. Then again, Clancy can’t actually be considered a real writer anymore, since he’s far too busy milking his various cash cows to ever sit down at a keyboard. It might be because since 2002 and the release of Red Rabbit the quality of his novels has greatly deteriorated. “If you haven’t read the new Jack Ryan novel yet, do yourself a favour. Don’t,” read one particularly acrid critic. The following year, his book, The Teeth of the Tiger (where the so-called “good-guys” are an FBI agent who murders a suspect in cold blood, and his cousin, Jack Ryan Junior, a lacklustre foul-mouthed frat-boy with the intellectual acuity of roadkill) was likewise savaged in reviews; the Washington Post calling it a “bloated, boring, silly novel” with “inane dialogue, gossamer characterizations, endless repetition and bumper-sticker politics.”

Ouch. On the other hand, Putnam paid him a cool $50 million for the two new books, which I’m sure did much to assuage any bruising to the ego.

Even so, Clancy didn’t come out with another Jack Ryan novel until 2010, which he didn’t even write – instead, it was written by Grant Blackwood, with his two follow-up novels, Against All Enemies and Locked On written by Peter Telep and Mark Greaney, respectively. That the true authors’ names appear on the cover in squintingly teeny-tiny print dwarfed under Tom Clancy’s name in huge typeface is actually quite remarkable, since Clancy didn’t even previously acknowledge his novels were being ghostwritten by other people past a brief mention in the acknowledgments to their “invaluable contribution to the manuscript.” Raymond Benson and David Michaels wrote the first two books in his Splinter Cell franchise, for which Clancy received millions from his publishers. No idea how much Benson and Michaels got for their work-for-hire hackery. The only thing Tom Clancy has to write these days to ensure a bestseller is two words: his name.

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(h/t David at VideoCafe)

Bill Johnson is a Republican Christian politician who was a former Birmingham City councilman and director of Alabama’s Department of Economic and Community Affairs until he resigned to run for governor. That wasn’t his first run – he ran for the U.S. Senate in Missouri as a Libertarian, campaigning to legalize marijuana and prostitution – views he’s since renounced since he became a Republican. Still, he’s got this odd streak of idealism that has made it difficult for him to fit into the GOP stable – after he fell out with Republican Gov. Bob Riley by asking the state attorney general and the Montgomery County DA to investigate his former boss for conflict of interest, he was banned by the GOP from appearing before the executive committee in Prattsville, his home county, or speaking at any other event the committee sponsors.

But it’s his latest brush with altruism, albeit somewhat peculiar, that’s landed him in hot water once again. Bill Johnson has spent most of the past year in Christchurch as a long-term recovery manager for Ceres NZ, helping the earthquake recovery, which is very nice of him. But his selflessness didn’t stop at helping New Zealanders rebuilt their ruined city. On his off-hours, he’s been surfing the net for women who want to get pregnant and donating his sperm, including to lesbian couples – despite his public campaign against gay marriage. At least nine women have been recipients of his genetic philanthropy, three of whom are now pregnant, and there’s a line of ladies on his waiting list. On the one hand, the mothers might be happy that the donor went through college on a full scholarship, has a Bachelor’s in chemistry, graduated cum laude and is a member of Mensa. On the other, for a smart guy, he’s been really stupid – while he was being so noble and gallant, he neglected to tell his wife, former Miss America finalist Kathy Johnson, what he was up to while he’s been "helping" New Zealanders.

Beyond the WTF factor making this just another incredibly bizarre activity by a Republican politician (at least he’s original!), there’s a more serious concern. New Zealand is a very small country, with around 4.5 million people, about half the number of people who live in New York City. It’s an idiom here that if you’re not related to someone in New Zealand, you're probably best mates with someone who is. With such a small population, Bill Johnson’s ad hoc mobile sperm bank has the NZ fertility medicine community concerned. Fertility clinic regulations recommend that no one man donates sperm to more than four families, to reduce the chance of accidental incest, as well as any adverse impact on donors and children if they seek each other out later in life, which New Zealand law allows.

This is a remarkable video, on so many levels. I crochet, always on the lookout for new ideas. These women are part of a community based organization called the Kibera Integrated Empowerment Group, seventy women, ninety percent of them HIV positive, who live in one of the sub-Sahara’s most crowded slums. This clip was shot by Charles Stuart Gay, a remarkable man who runs Humanity Unites Brilliance, dedicated to promote opportunities for some of the world’s most disadvantaged people – and you don’t get much more disadvantaged than being an HIV positive woman living in an African slum – through education, micro-loans, and small business schemes to “create self-sustainability.” That’s a fancy way of saying “make a living.” He also works with Craft Link Kenya, a fair trade market organization working with designers and retailers around the world to provide distribution for the Kenyan artisans creating a wealth of handmade goods, strongly focused on combating poverty while at the same time promoting environmentally friendly enterprises.

They employ over one thousand women in the Kitui district who weave sisal products. Eight hundred rural Maasi woman in Sambura, Magadi and Kajianda who produce beaded goods tailored for a Western market. One thousand men in Nairobi carve exquisite wooden products, and four thousand people in Mombasa working to orders coming in from Europe and North America. But by far, for me, the most impressive group of people are these women in Kibera, crafting amazing handbags out of recycled plastic carrier bags. Because not only are they creating a product that is helping them make a living, they’re consciously environmentally active, aware of and dedicated to whatever they can do to help save our planet.

Yet it’s even more than that – these woman have so little, and yet this video was made so that they could show you how to make your own bag, if you prefer. They have nothing but their intellectual property in designing these bags, and what they can make selling them in the world market – yet their generosity of spirit is so humbling I was close to tears. That’s all they have – and they’re willing to share it with you, and me. So as embattled as we are while we’re fighting for the future of the 99%, let’s take a moment to remember that the vast majority of the world’s 99% doesn’t even live in Europe or North America.

Let me begin with a personal anecdote, one my father told me. He grew up in the very poor South, dropped out of school by the time he’d reached fifth grade to help his father work their farm, and eventually went into the military. He was an intelligent man, but as a young sailor back in the 1950s, he was woefully ignorant and naïve. One evening, at a bar, one of his mates said, "Hey, Curt! Are you gay?" My father, who’d had a couple of beers, replied, "I’m feeling pretty happy right now, so yeah, I suppose I am." The resulting laughter puzzled him. He resolved thereafter to be more cautious if he wasn’t sure what a word meant. A week or so later, someone asked him, "Hey, Curt! Are you anti-Semitic?" Still stinging from the last faux pas he’d tripped over, he replied, "Well, I might be, if I knew what it meant…"

The resulting hoots of derision took his resolve a step further. He bought a dictionary, and started reading. Voraciously. He went to night school, got his high school diploma and eventually earned a college degree. And he taught his daughters the power of words. Today, I hold a Master’s degree in English – and yet I still struggle in the war of words. We all do. Particularly against those who use words as weapons. It’s no accident that the etymology of the word "dictator" comes from the Latin dictatus – to speak. Nor is it just a matter of dreary semantics - he who controls the word controls the world. And there are no dirtier, more malicious or ruthless opponents in this vital war of words than the American right wing.

Earlier this week, Karoli had an excellent post on one of these adversaries, Frank Luntz, a Republican strategist who excels in manipulating political messages. Don’t call it the "middle class," he told members of the Republican Governors Association in Florida. Call them "hardworking taxpayers." Don’t call it "compromise," say "cooperation." Sure, it means the same thing, he said, but "compromise" infers selling out your principles. Don’t call it "government spending," call it "waste." Waste makes people angry, and diverts them from the fact that government spending pays for such "wasteful" things as schools and roads and police and fire-fighters and medical care. And above all else, for heaven’s sake, don’t ever use the word "capitalism." Luntz isn’t sure yet what to substitute in its place, maybe "economic freedom" or "free market". But capitalism is being increasingly seen for what it is – an immoral economic system that supports the 1 percent Haves at the expense of the 99 percent Have Nots.

The right wing has spent decades refining definitions and controlling the language of politics, keeping the left constantly on the defensive. Conservative politicians ever since the 1950s have twisted the word "liberal" to give it sinister connotations it never had. John Lukas noted that "the history of politics – more, the history of human thinking – is the history of words", and examined what happened to the term "liberal", so leeched of its real meaning as the right increasingly used it as an insult to define their opponents. James G. Watt, Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior, said, "I never use the words Republican and Democrats. It’s liberals and Americans."

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A great dog and baby duet with the power to melt hearts and eardrums. And for those who worry, no, the dog isn’t in pain – howling is part of the canine reflex buried deep in the wolf genetic heritage to vocalize with other members of their 'pack', in this case, the baby, an act which helps in reinforcing the familial bonds between dog/baby/owner. Dog and baby really are singing together and having a great time. Hope you enjoy this as much as they obviously are.

It all reads like an overheated John Grisham novel: A trusted football hero and director of a respected child refuge center is charged with sexually assaulting eight young boys for over a 14 year period. An assistant coach who was an eye-witness to the anal rape of a ten year old boy and rather than trying to stop the crime, or even report it to the police, instead told his boss, a legendary head coach, who along with a university president and his athletic director, covered it up. A district attorney who mysteriously disappeared six years ago, his body never found, before he could bring charges against the child rapist. A rapist who also – if rumors turn out to have any basis in truth – pimped out children to other pedophiles. And, rather than outrage at such evil finally coming to light, in a town so inculcated in a culture where football is king and so fearful it might lose its meal-ticket, the student body riot in protest when the head coach is fired. In a state where congressmen can still nominate said disgraced coach for the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, turning a blind eye to the corruption riddling his university team until they simply can’t.

Except it’s not a novel. This is Penn State.

When universities become so dependent on athletic departments for their very existence, to the point where nothing – nothing – seems vile or heinous or repugnant enough to shake that iron grip, then there is something desperately wrong with American universities. When any game becomes so powerful that football coaches can play God to entire towns, cover-ups this massive are blatant and where so many people knew and did nothing, when students riot after the filth lurking under rocks start to come out not in protest of the crime but in reaction to the loss of their beloved coach, then Penn State needs to be shut down.

Completely. Dismantled, not a brick left standing. Salt poured on the ground so nothing grows there again. This isn’t just a case of a single bad-apple, not just a small, isolated or one-off event. A man raped children while his friends deliberately covered up his crimes. For years. All in the name of protecting football. The extent of depravity metastasizing an entire town because of the power embedded in one university’s athletic department is on a scale hard to imagine, never mind stomach. The Penn State football program has lost the right to continue to exist.

By now, more than two and a half million people around the world have watched the video posted on YouTube of a sixteen-year-old disabled girl, Hillary Adams, being beaten by her father for nearly eight harrowing minutes. William Adams has admitted that he was indeed the person in the video who took a leather belt and savagely whipped his daughter for illegally downloading music off the internet, threatening to hit her in the face as well, screaming obscenities while beating her "into submission," incensed by her "disobedience," the sort of terminology rarely heard in everyday conversation. After several minutes of whipping the girl, the father leaves, but is heard to say, "I never got my licks in," and returns to beat her with an even bigger leather belt while his daughter screams and begs him to stop. Sickeningly, William Adams is the Aransas County Court-at-law Judge, presiding over Family Court, and has made 349 legal decisions regarding family cases in the last year alone, many of them child abuse cases.

Judge Adams, during an on-camera interview with KZTV Corpus Christi television station a few days ago, tried to downplay his behavior, saying the footage is years old, he’d already apologized for "losing his temper," but remains completely unrepentant, saying the beating "looks worse than it is" and he still could see nothing wrong in disciplining his daughter. He has apparently disciplined her over and over and over again, it seems, as Hillary Adams told an interviewer on NBC’s Today that father regularly beat her over a long period of time. She made the tape, she said, knowing the beating was coming – hiding a camera under a scarf on her dresser to make a record of the abuse. At one point, the girl’s mother chimes in, saying rather tellingly, "turn over like a sixteen-year-old and take it! Like a grown woman!" Like a grown woman? What grown woman thinks it’s normal to have the living snot beaten out of her by a violent, abusive man? It seems his daughter might not have been the only woman in his house on the receiving end of a leather strap.

So deeply ingrained was this family’s fear of this man that Hillary Adams waited seven years before releasing it. "Back then I was still a minor and living under his roof and releasing it then… I don’t know what would have happened to me or my mother or little sister… If this had blown up when I was a minor who knows where I would be. I wouldn’t be able to escape." Nor did the good judge’s abuse stop with his divorce, his wife leaving him four years ago. "I am praying for my daughters and me and my family to heal in all ways from emotional and physical abuse," Hallie Adams wrote on Facebook, "for the current and continuing abuse of my children and me that has been ongoing to end." Adams shares joint custody of his now 14-year-old younger daughter with his ex-wife.

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Four years ago, my novel, Redemption, marketed as a near future political thriller, was published by St. Martin’s Press in the United States. There’s a scene at the very end of the book, where protesters, in numbers "intensified past what even a castrated media could ignore" converged on Washington:

Placards demanding voting reform, civil rights, impeachment, and repealing the Patriot Act vied for space with signs protesting global warming, Internet restrictions, and record unemployment. Demonstrations resembled a war zone more every day with barbed wire and concrete blockades and thousands of scowling armed police. Several protesters had been killed in riots, which had only fueled the anger of the growing crowds, violent clashes escalating. The roar of a hundred thousand voices as they chanted, "Of the people, by the people, for the people, who the hell are you!" with a forest of accusing fingers thrust at both a barricaded White House and Capital Hill was breathtaking.

Writers like myself try to imagine the future by extrapolating from the present. Sometimes we get it woefully wrong. And sometimes we get it frighteningly right. What I imagined half a decade ago was a rebellion of the American people against a corrupt system, with protesters united, rather than behind any single cause, by a sense of general injustice and a multitude of grievances. Today, it’s a reality.

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