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RIP Angie Zapata

August 4th 2008 11:14
Trigger warning

Angie Zapata
There has been talk all weekend of the brutal murder of a woman in Colorado. The woman, Angie Zapata, was struck in the head repeatedly with a fire extinguisher by a man she had met online. The two had spent the day together and the man had stayed the night, though they did sleep in separate beds. Zapata's body was found by her sister, bloody and battered on her apartment floor.


What makes this case, beyond the horrific violence, is that Zapata is transgendered. She, and yes she is a she because that is how she choose to live and label herself, still had male genitalia. Upon discovering this her attacker decided to bash her in the head until she was dead. An act of rage, a momentary loss of sanity you say?

Andrade told investigators he covered Zapata with a blanket and started gathering evidence he thought might link him to the crime when he heard gurgling sounds and noticed Zapata was sitting up.

That's when he picked up the fire extinguisher and hit her again, police said. He left the scene in her car.


Once you start grabbing evidence you're no longer "acting on impulse". Not that reacting in such a horrific manner is justifiable either. People find out things about other people that they did not know every day and yet we are able to control ourselves and act like rational beings. No, the problem isn't that her attacker felt too angry or enraged, it's that in that moment he felt that Zapata was no longer a human being. His own words give way to that.


He grabbed Zapata's crotch area, felt male genitalia and became angry, the affidavit states. He took a fire extinguisher off a shelf and struck Zapata twice in the head, telling investigators he thought he "killed it."

"It" She was no longer a person, a human being, a living soul. She was brushed off as an it, a non-being. Something that could be destroyed and tossed out with no consequences. Like a newspaper or a tissue. Just an "it".

Absolutely disgusting.

R.I.P. Angie
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Is He The One?

August 3rd 2008 13:51
McCain confused
What was McCain thinking? No, seriously, I'm confused as to what could have been going through his mind when he OKed this ad. I mean, what in the world is he trying to say here?



Seriously McCain, there's a difference between "Ironic funny" and "Ironic, I've gone insane". I'm sure you were trying for the former, but you missed. And all the Biblical verses and phrases in there, it sounds more like you are making fun of Christians that you are making fun of Obama. Really, is this all you have left?

Hat tip to Queen of Spain for pointing this out on Twitter Friday night.

(Image source - sloomis08)
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scared woman
Let's play a game of Blame the Victim. I'll start: a woman goes out, has a few drinks, is feeling drunk, and suddenly a man comes along and rapes her. Who gets the blame? If you said the rapist you would be wrong.

More Rapes Linked To Young Women On Drinking Binges

That's the headline given to an article about the number of rapes in San Diego going up. It's not that more men are committing rape, or that rapists are getting away with repeat assaults, or even the more positive outlook that more rapes are being reported. Nope, it's those silly girls getting drunk and getting themselves raped.

From the story:

"The majority are young women who start out in bars or at a house party and end up drinking too much," Kendrick told the newspaper. "They can't consciously make a good decision, like say no and leave. Or maybe they've had too much to drink and can't leave."

Right, because having the audacity of being a woman, drinking, and in a place where there are rapists is really just a matter of making the wrong decision. Everyone knows that if you just tell your rapist no he'll let you get up and leave, it's just that the women are too drunk to do that.

beer
How about that more men are targeting women drinking in bars or parties. Which really isn't that surprising given the way rape cases are handled today. If a woman drinks too much she not only has to worry about being raped, but also that the judge will decide if she was too drunk to walk she was also too drunk to say no. Rather than ruling more harshly against the rapists who take advantage of woman who are intoxicated the women are punished for doing the drinking, sending the not-so-subtle message that "good girls" stay at home and wash their hair rather than leave the house and behave like everyone else is. And of course if you're not a good girl then it's not really rape/it's totally your fault.

One good thing is that from this San Diego's rape numbers should decrease. Not that the number of actual rapes will go down, just that more women will choose not to report them for fear of how they will be treated when it's discovered that their ankles were showing.

Image source - Brenna Lorenz, Martin Walls
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McCain
The newest McCain ad has been stirring up a lot of discussion lately. Mostly with it's interesting naming of Obama as a celebrity while photos of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton appear on the screen. The connection between Obama and these two particular celebs has been drawing a lot of discussion online. and none of it looks favorable for McCain.

The choice of images is shocking on many levels. First there is the not-so-silent dog whistle to the racists out there of "Look at this black man mingling with these pretty, blonde white women!" I'm sure that McCain's camp will deny they meant that particular aspect, yet the images are hard to miss


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How the Pro-Choice Movement Saved America
With the news getting grimmer and grimmer for women I decided I needed a little friendly reading to lift my moral. Luckily I found just the thing I needed, wrapped in a pretty pink cover, shouting at me from the shelf at my local book store. How the Pro-Choice Movement Saved America: Freedom, Politics, and the War On Sex

Do I even need to say how much you should buy this book and read it? Already a couple years old I feel like I have a lot of catching up to do. Why I didn't read a copy as soon as it was out is fuzzy to me. But now that I've gotten my hands on it I'm absorbing every page. Last night I took it with me grocery shopping and poured through the pages while my partner put whatever he wanted in the cart. I was too busy to worry abut food


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Equality Now Calls For Help

July 29th 2008 11:30
Equality Now
Several sites have already mentioned this, but I thought it was important enough to deserve repeating for anyone who might have missed it. Equality Now has an Action Alert currently up asking for people to speak up and help an Iranian woman facing death by stoning from the actions forced on her by an abusive husband. It is the type of situation that should make those of us in more liberal areas stop and think, especially those who would rather us go back to being owned by our fathers/husbands.

Equality Now is urgently concerned about Kobra Najjar, an Iranian woman sentenced to death by stoning for adultery who lost her final appeal for amnesty. Iranian women’s rights activists working on her case report that Kobra has exhausted all domestic legal remedies and that her execution by stoning could happen any time.

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Condolences

July 29th 2008 00:19
I wanted to take a moment to say that my thoughts and prayers are with the members of the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church and their families today. Hatred can be a cancer that spreads until there is nothing left. May you find peace.
Unitarian Universalists


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Where Is The Liberal Bias?

July 28th 2008 10:50
news
I love to watch as reality comes in to bite conservatives in the ass.

There's been a long known whining about "Liberal bias!" that conservatives like to toss around. While they conveniently ignore the reality of media outlets being big businesses and therefore would be shooting themselves in the foot if they held a liberal biases, the constant whining often does a great job of boosting moral. What they are really do is binding together those who think that if they do not have the power to tell everyone else what to do and say then they are somehow being trampled on


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New York Times Meet The BlogHer

July 27th 2008 07:30
BlogHer

I have read many bloggers this weekend expressing anger and frustration over a certain article the New York Times decided to stick in Fashion & Style. The only rational seems to be that women = fashion, no matter what. That a large conference of female bloggers covering everything from gender to technology to marketing boils down to the sexy heels many were showing off. Because taking the time to dress nice automatically makes whatever a woman has to say pointless, right?

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McCain on Timetables For the War

July 26th 2008 02:36
confused McCain
McCain was CNN's Situation Room talking about the war in Iraq. And as predicted he went on to say 16 months is a pretty good time table to get out of Iraq.

Wait


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Oh Noes! Teh Gays In Military!

July 25th 2008 10:18
 Elaine Donnelly
Everyone has been talking about the hilarious video of Congressman Patrick Murphy questioning Elaine Donnelly on "Don't Ask, Don't Tell". You can see Murphy and others both fighting back laughter and anger at this woman trying to make her insane point.

To Donnelly every homosexual person is a sexual predator waiting to strike, an idea that is absurd to those of us living in the real world. However, I've come to conclude that most conservatives do not live in the real world so it shouldn't be a surprise that they are unfamiliar with how it works here


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More McCain Foolery

July 24th 2008 18:21
McCain
I love when McCain suporters get upset that the press is supposedly giving Obama more love than they are to him. Only in crazy land could that be true. Case in point, McCain says something stupid and CBS edits his own words to make him sound smarter. Straight talk? Watch the video and tell me.


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African American wedding
A good headline should pop out at you, and that is certainly what Black and single: Is marriage really for white people? did for me. Headline writers should jot this one down in their notebooks, this is the kind that makes people stop to read.

The story itself is part of the ongoing series on CNN called Black in America. Each show focuses on a different aspect of life, last night's show was about marriage. The first thing that stuck out, aside from the title, was the assumption that A) all black women are heterosexual, and B) all black women are looking to get married. Marriage is shown as the ideal, the answer to problems such as poverty and education


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News From Around The Web

July 22nd 2008 14:54
screaming
Why is it that reading the news sometimes makes me feel a little stabbity? I don't know what it is, but often I just have to put down the paper or turn off the computer and walk away. Luckily I know several deep breathing exercises. Today is one of those days when scrolling through my news updates I can feel my blood pressure going up. So rather than risk a heart attack trying to explain the painfully bad in the news, I'm just going to share a quick run down of the articles that are not helping to ease the headache in the back of my head. Warning, be sure to take a couple aspirin before attempting to read this.

Female soldiers raise alarm on sexual assaults - "It took Diane Pickel Plappert six months to tell a counselor that she had been raped while on duty in Iraq. While time passed, the former Navy nurse disconnected from her children and her life slowly unraveled


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