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- G e n d e r G a p p e r s T M
DIFFERENT STROKES
Jill Leimkuehler has been a volunteer at Burlington, Vermont's Women Helping Battered Women, for 16 years. She is the recipient of the Hometown Hero Adult Volunteer Award, duly noted on page 4 of the second section of the daily newspaper."Sometimes I give the women emotional support. Sometimes I'll help them move, take them grocery shopping or on an outing, or sometimes I just sit there and hold their hand and listen to them cry. Sometimes they're barefoot in the snow. They come in with the clothes on their back and that's all." The front page has much more important information. It is all about men and power and war, with a centerpiece of very young children saluting the flag. The inference is clear, as is the article. War and patriotism are inseparable. Certainly, the paper is in sync with the rest of the media and it became very noticeable last year. So far, this year is right on track. By now anyone who has watched TV for at least 5 minutes a day has seen the mother "beating" her 4-year-old child at least 250 times. Although the video clip remained the same, the commentary escalated immensely."A study of ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News in the year 2001 shows that 92 percent of all U.S. sources interviewed were white, 85 percent were male and, where party affiliation was identifiable, 75 percent were Republican. Women made up only 15 percent of all sources (14 percent on ABC and CBS, and 18 percent on NBC), and were rarely featured as experts. Women were particularly poorly represented in the categories of professional and political sources, which were only 9 percent female. More than half of the women who appeared on the network news in 2001 were presented as ordinary Americans (as opposed to experts of some kind), versus 14 percent of male sources." http://www.fair.org/press-releases/power-sources-release.html Showing the clip could be excused when authorities were looking for the mother and child, but there is no excuse for it being repeatedly shown after they were located. What began as a "mother disciplining" soon became a "mother punching and pummeling." One commentator suggested that what could be seen clearly were the mother's back motions and these appeared to indicate slapping rather than punching. That commentator was furiously shouted down. When caught up with by the media, the mother readily admitted, "she lost it." This is the excuse that innumerable males have used claiming "they were over stressed or they were cuckolded or they were taunted beyond their limits." However, mothers are not allowed to "lose it." The TV media remains unmoved and unforgiving and it has poisoned any jury anywhere from giving this mother her constitutional right of a fair trial. Of course the scene was upsetting but although facts are scarce, it appears that the child is not and was not beaten to a bloody pulp as we were led to believe by the media.
Doris "GrannyD" Haddock walked from California to Washinton DC at the age of 90. She was arrested in the Capitol in April, 2001 reciting the Declaration of Independence. The charge was disturbing the peace. She gave a speech entitled, "Like a tree standing by the water" in August of 2002 to the Rolling Thunder Chautauqua of St. Paul and Seattle. It is well worth reading. http://www.grannyd.com/speech20020824.htm Maureen Dowd wrote of the vagaries of the imperial White House in terms of alpha girls: The colossal statue of a woman holding up a lamp in New York harbor is NOT a symbol of power, it is a symbol of LIBERTY. It must not be desecrated by greedy men."They rule their world ruthlessly and insolently, deciding who will get a cold shoulder, who will get locked out of the power clique and who will get withering glares until they grovel and obey the arbitrary dictates of the leaders. We could be talking about the middle-school alpha girls, smug cheerleaders with names like Darcy, Brittany and Whitney. But, no, we're talking about the ostensibly mature and seasoned leaders of the Western world, a slender former cheerleader named W. and his high-hatting clique Condi, Rummy and Cheney." http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/25/opinion/25DOWD.html
2002-040
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Constant
repetition and scary superlatives always distort the truth. These
are exactly the kind of tactics being employed today to make us abandon
judgment and reason, and incite us to rush headlong into a preventable
war. 
