287(g) Means Stealing Babies from Mothers

I just read this post from Ginger and I gasped out loud. She links to a post over at Tim Chavez’s about Juana Villegas DeLaPaz, who was coming from a prenatal clinic when she was pulled over by a Berry Hill police officer. It’s not clear from Chavez’s account why she was pulled over to begin with, but she didn’t have a driver’s license and so her brother-in-law was called to come and get them.

Then, the Berry Hill police officer decided to arrest her. While she was in the custody of our Davidson County Sheriff, Daron Hall, she was taken to the hospital, where she gave birth.

Her husband was then called to COME AND GET THE BABY AND SHE WAS TAKEN BACK TO JAIL.

I will pause a moment for Rachel from Women’s Health News to pick herself up off the floor. I don’t think the importance of a baby who can nurse nursing from it’s mother in those first few weeks can be overstated. You just do not separate a mother from her new infant.

But that’s what it’s come to in Nashville. We’re ripping babies out of the arms of mothers and for what?

To be cruel for the sake of cruelty.

Edited to Add: Hi, Shakers. Welcome. I was thinking that you might want to know that while almost all of Davidson County is the same as “Metro Nashville” that there are still little pockets of quasi-independent towns within our midst–like Al Gore lives in Belle Meade, which is right down the road a piece from me (and is the location of my favorite park in town), but he also clearly lives in Nashville. Same with Berry Hill. Berry Hill is surrounded on all sides by Nashville and they use many Nashville public services, but they have their own police force and city hall. But they also are under the jurisdiction of the Davidson County Sheriff’s department, which houses all of the prisoners of Davidson County, regardless of which police department made the arrest.

It is the Sheriff’s department which participates in 287(g), not the local police forces.

Also, see these posts here and here for links to more posts on this story. Oh, and read Tim Chavez.

Oh, Come On

Unbelievable.

Maynard also accused school board members of “a dereliction of duty” because—incredibly enough—they didn’t seek legal advice on whether their actions could expose Metro to a lawsuit.

I honestly do not mind if my tax dollars go towards education.  I’m not one of those folks who’s all “Well, I don’t have kids so I don’t want to have to pay for them to go to school.”  I’m a part of the community.  I’ll pitch in.

But Christ on a Cross!  You didn’t bother to seek legal advice about whether your rezoning efforts might waste my money on a lawsuit when any damn fool with two eyes could see there would be trouble?!

Damn.

Aren’t smarts a requirement for running for School Board?

Los Rosales

Oh my god.  Nashville blogosphere, you said that place was great and you didn’t lie.  I had this thing I saw on… oops, I just looked.  I did not have the thing I saw on Laura Creekmore’s blog.  I had that but not with spinach; I had beef instead; but I intended to order the thing I saw on her blog.  If everything I ever put in my mouth for the first time were that good, Steve from down the block would have had a much better junior year of high school, let me tell you.  And then we had some flaming mango extravagance for dessert.

AND I learned that I can take Big and Rich off my shit list because the rumor is that Big ≠ Rich and, in fact, that Big dislikes Rich so much he takes a separate tour bus to avoid him.  If this is at all true, Big and Rich as a group is off my shit list, Big is permanently off my shit list and Rich goes back on my shit list as a solo act.

All in all, a successful lunch.

Tiny Pasture Dips His Toe in the Feminist Theorizing

So, I’m reading along at Post Politics… school board… blah, blah, blah… resegregation… blah, blah, blah… when what should I see at the end of this post?

A fan of red lipstick and pearls? What the heck was that little aside about? Isn’t red lipstick like the default color for lipstick? Don’t a majority of women wear lipstick, especially for formal occassions (like, say, a school board meeting)?

Johnson was not available for comment in the story so how does the reporter know Johnson is a “fan” of pearls? How many times has she seen her wear them other than at a board meeting? I mean excuse her for dressing up.

Granted, it’s just some baby-sized feminist critique, but there it is–Carter dogging on Janell Ross for dogging on Johnson’s physical appearance, like that matters, in her story about the vote for school resegregation.

Every House Will Have Some Problem

So, we looked at a house yesterday that was amazing.  Big front porch, cute side porch, little back porch.  Tin roof.  Big living room, generous dining room, nice kitchen.  Three bedrooms (argh, they’re wearing me down!  Calling something with a door to the outside a bedroom!) and one bath, work shop, garage, cellar, about an acre of land, kind of but not quite in the country.  A beautiful rehab job, not by a flipper, but by the guy who is living there, so it doesn’t feel ostentatious, just comfy.

The drawbacks I think I could live with are that the lot is long and narrow, so you’re very close to your neighbors, especially on the one side (you share a driveway with them).  It would be a weird commute, to put it mildly, though you could do it either through surface roads or interstate.  I’m not sure where folks who live out there shop.  And the Butcher would have to get a car, end of discussion.

The drawbacks I’m just not sure about.  It’s at the very, very top of my price range and, even with the Butcher’s help, I would feel like I was signing up for yet another five years of having to be very, very frugal with my money.  And I’m not sure I want to go back to that.  I kind of like where we are right now where I’m not thinking “Oh, the Professor wants to have lunch, can I afford it?” or “Hey, Mack wants me to come up and look at this cool thing he saw in Springfield, but can I afford it?”

I don’t want to be burning hundreds just ’cause I can, but I’ve spent much of my adult life watching every penny and I just don’t want to go back to living that way. I don’t want to have to be turning down invitations to do things because I don’t have the money.

The second major thing kind of goes hand in hand with the first.  The house has no closets in the bedrooms.  You could, I guess, put closets in.  But when?  In five years when I get a little free money?  I have to be almost forty before I can hang a dress in my house?  Sure, I could buy wardrobes, but again, when?  In five years?

Or, I guess what you do is buy it and then sell off the back part of the lot and use that money to remodel.  But then you don’t have that awesome yard.

I don’t know.  I’m vexed, folks.

This is, by far, the most “me” house we’ve seen… and frankly, it would be like me to live in a house with no closets… but I don’t know.

To me, it seems like the trade off either has to be “needs some renovation–cheap price” or “more money than you wanted to spend–won’t need anything for a while”.

So, there’s that.  I wish the folks I’ve come to depend on to put on their tool belts and their wrinkled- browed faces of scrutiny were in town and could drive by and say “Oh, hey, B., yeah, we could totally make that work” or “Oh, no, just no.”

But alas.

Oh well.

Sometimes, I Think the Goal is to Wear You Down and Keep You Stupid

Tom over at Functional Ambivalent has a post about the thing that annoys me most about the South–that strain of folks who take pride in being willfully ignorant (not that there aren’t a whole lot of people all over the nation who aren’t willfully ignorant–there are–I’m just not familiar with any other part of the country where the folks who are willfully ignorant are so proud of it, like it’s an accomplishment to refuse to learn) and, because they are willfully ignorant, who are so damn easily to manipulate.

I bring that up in relationship to Bill Hobbs (and can I take a moment to give a terrorist fist jab to Jim over at Progressive Nashville, who cracked me up this morning?) because today he’s all gloating at the TNGOP’s ability to cut off funds to a private source of healthcare for women by funding governmental sources.  Yes, America, the Republicans, who you may recall position themselves as the party of small government and reliance on private entities, are all for bigger government when it means they get to tell you what to do.  And what the TNGOP really wants you to do is not have an abortion.

Okay, fine.

I give up.  Really.  I don’t know what to say.  I mean, how many times can you ask “Bill Hobbs, how many children have you adopted?” or “If every woman who gets pregnant carries that pregnancy to term, are you going to pitch in your tax dollars without complaint to provide services to that baby?”

I mean, my god, this is the party whose members DON’T EVEN WANT TO ISSUE BIRTH CERTIFICATES to the wrong kinds of Tennessee babies.

And yet, they get to feel like superheros to themselves for opposing abortions.  It boggles my mind.

I quote Bill Hobbs:

The organization served 3.14 million clients in calendar year 2006, killed 289,750 babies, and referred only 2,410 clients to adoption agencies – that’s 0.07 percent of clients referred to adoption agencies, 9.2 percent given abortions.

And I repeat the part salient to my point: 3.14 million clients, 289,750 abortions*.

So, to Hobbs, it’s fine to deny affordable (often free) healthcare to 2.85 million women because you don’t like what three hundred thousand of them have done.  That somehow makes you good.

I don’t know how many times a woman can say, this is my body, not yours and I have the last say in what happens to it.  If you don’t like the choice I’m making, give me better options.  But then butt the fuck out.

I think they just figure if they keep saying it long enough–that they have the right to decide for you what kind of healthcare you need–they can wear you down into no longer fighting it.  And yet, mark my words, folks, we will see Bill Hobbs screaming holy hell against national healthcare.  He and the TNGOP want to dictate who provides you what services and who pays for them, but that’s okay, because you’re just a woman and you need the goverment’s guiding hand.

It’s somehow different.

How, I’m not sure, but it is.

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*According to the TN Right to Life, there are 1.3 million abortions a year.  According to Bill Hobbs, Planned Parenthood provided about three hundred thousand of them.  And yet Planned Parenthood is supposedly “America’s largest abortion factory.”  And yet, according to the numbers provided by the anti-abortion folks, they account for only about a quarter of the abortions provided in this country.  This can only mean one of two things–either the TN Right to Life is lying about how many abortions women are having every year or Hobbs is misleading voters into believing that defunding Planned Parenthood would come close to ending abortions.