The Bethie Bee

Who at CBS thought that this would be a good idea?

New video is out showing of a protest led by California College Republicans against MTV’s “nonpartisan” Rock The Vote before the ‘04 election. Speaking with the love that is liberalism, an MTV worker said to one of the protestors “I hope your wife gets raped and can’t get an abortion.”

Check out the video here.

Hat Tip: Michelle Malkin

Yikes–I hate to admit it, but that is so me. I’m not good at the monetary conversions…but even just the amount of time women spend on their hair is amazing. According to a Daily Mail article,

Talk about going back to your roots…

The average British woman spends an astonishing £36,903.75 on her hair in a lifetime, according to new research.

She will spend the equivalent of just under two YEARS of her life washing, styling, cutting, colouring, crimping and straightening her locks in salons or at home.

A whopping 650 days will be dedicated solely to creating a ’salon look’ in her own bathroom. The average woman splashes out a monthly average of £10.08 on shampoos and conditioners, £14.03 on home styling products and £301.14 a year on haircuts and colouring.

She spends the equivalent of 41 minutes at home every day washing, styling and restyling. A third of women say their hair is the most important part of their appearance, and they spend more time styling their hair than doing their make-up.

I hate to admit it, but I don’t even really know what my natural hair color is.

Ok…I know that title isn’t really news to anyone who lives in WNY, but an article in today’s Buffalo News shows that the problem may be even worse than we thought.

When a Rochester think tank asked thousands of New Yorkers this spring how they viewed state government, it found an overwhelming number are plain mad at the ways of Albany.
But in Western New York, respondents to the poll are more than angry. They’re downright seething.

On issues like taxes, the power of public employee unions, managing debt and combating corruption, the level of disgust in Western New York far surpasses the already notable concern elsewhere across the state.

“The volume in Western New York just seems to be turned up,” said Erika Rosenberg, research associate with the New York Matters Project sponsored by the Center for Government Research in Rochester. “It’s different from the rest of the state.”

Indeed, the poll of 2,492 residents statewide and 362 in Erie, Niagara, Chautauqua and Cattaraugus counties found the westerners in a far surlier mood than their already fed-up neighbors:

• While 27 percent of voters statewide rated state government as “poor,” that jumped to 45 percent in Western New York.

• When asked about quality of life, 27 percent statewide said it was worse over the past five years, but 42 percent thought so locally.

• Sixty-nine percent of Western New Yorkers say the economy has worsened over the past five years, compared to 40 percent of statewide residents who feel that way.

• A whopping 58 percent of Western New Yorkers rated the state poor on keeping taxes from hurting growth, compared to 36 percent across New York.

I couldn’t agree with my neighbors more on their disapproval of our state government…what I don’t get is how so many of these people think that Spitzer is the answer. Hunh? The article interviewed several area residents…this interview in particular really confused me:

Debby Swift, 51, who lives in Limestone, also says state government has failed to do enough to create and retain jobs in Western New York, while taxes are unbearably high. Both of her children have moved to other states, her son to Colorado and her daughter to Florida.

“The government doesn’t do right by everybody,” she said. “My taxes keep going up and up and up.”

At the same time, the value of her home keeps going down.

“I don’t think I could get out,” she said. “I want to move away from here . . . New York State, I want to say, stinks. That’s putting it mildly.”

Swift says she sees a ray of hope in the possibility of Eliot L. Spitzer becoming governor. As attorney general, he helped her family get money back from a propane price gouger.

“We got our money back,” she said. “I’m going to elect him. I think he’s good.”

I believe that this is more proof that the public is in dire need of some economics lessons. I think it also proves that Spitzer has done an excellent job of appealing to the emotions of New Yorkers without really telling them what the hell he wants to do.

Maybe it’s time for me to start looking into the Free State Project again.

I was stuck in the airport for several hours a few days ago, so I picked up a couple of books to pass the time. I finished the second of the books, “The Jane Austen Book Club” today.

I picked up the book because I’m a fan of Austen. However, I should note that I am by no means an expert…I enjoy reading and writing, but I wasn’t a literature major for good reason. At first, I wasn’t sure how I felt about the book–the world Austen lived in and wrote about was full of problems to be sure, but the ladies, gentlemen, and ballrooms of her books at first didn’t seem to fit with the modern world Karen Joy Fowler created in her book–the world of divorcee’s and lesbians and memories of molestation–not that there’s anything wrong with divorcee’s and lesbians, but it just didn’t seem to fit with Austen.

So, that was my first opinion as I started reading the book…but by the end, I’d fallen victim to its charms. It’s a great novel for any Austen fan, or anyone who loves to read…

Also Blogging:
Mark Bernstein

I wasn’t able to watch the Faso/Suozzi Gubernatorial Debate tonight, but BuffaloPundit liveblogged the debate.

I wonder what the name recognition of Faso and Suozzi is–around here, I’ve really only seen ads for Spitzer, and I doubt that your average Joe even knows that there are other people running, both in the democratic primary and in the general election. That being said, what a stupid move for Spitzer to choose not to participate in any upstate debates. This decision is a great way for Republicans to show Spitzer for the arrogant ass that he is and hopefully get some name recognition for Faso upstate.

Whoa…I though the public school system was bad…now look at what one private school is doing according to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle yesterday.

Park Day School is throwing out gender boundaries.

Teachers at the private Oakland elementary school have stopped asking the children to line up according to sex when walking to and from class. They now let boys play girls and girls play boys in skits. And there’s a unisex bathroom.

Admissions director Flo Hodes is even a little apologetic that she still balances classes by gender.

Park Day’s gender-neutral metamorphosis happened over the past few years, as applications trickled in for kindergartners who didn’t fit on either side of the gender line. One girl enrolled as a boy, and there were other children who didn’t dress or act in gender-typical ways. Last year the school hired a consultant to help the staff accommodate these new students.

“We had to ask ourselves, what is gender for young children?” Hodes said. “It’s coming up more and more.”

Park Day’s staff members are among a growing number of educators and parents who are acknowledging gender variance in very young children. Aurora School, another private elementary school in Oakland, also is seeing children who are “gender fluid” and hired a clinical psychologist to conduct staff training.

What?? In ELEMENTARY School?? I understand that some children may have problems with their gender identity, but is society ever going to stop to think that maybe we are CREATING these problems by programs like this? Hey if a boy wants to play with a doll, or a girl wants to act like a tomboy, fine…but this is kinda taking it to the creepy level. Do we really think Kindergarteners are able to decide which gender they want to be?

The article continues…

Children with gender variant behaviors feel intensely that they want to look and act like the other sex. They prefer toys and activities typical of the opposite gender. Signs usually start appearing between the ages of 2 and 4.

For some children, it’s a passing phase. Some grow up to be heterosexual, some gay. Some children insist they are the opposite sex although they might have a hard time explaining it. One nurse therapist said a boy once told her, “I think I swallowed a girl.”

“The point is we don’t know the outcome and don’t need to know,” said Catherine Tuerk, who runs the gender variance outreach program at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C., considered a leader in the field.

“What we need is a place where children can express what they want to,” said Tuerk, who has been working on gender variance for three decades.

Kids have always explored gender roles, but precisely how many exhibit gender variance has not been estimated, said Dr. Edgardo Menvielle, associate professor of psychiatry with the Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C.

“What is new is how parents and educators are addressing it and being open to it at earlier ages,” said Taneika Taylor of the Gender Public Advocacy Coalition, an organization in Washington, D.C., that is trying to end discrimination and violence caused by gender stereotypes.

This increased awareness, Taylor said, is fueled partly by the availability of information on the Internet and television. As the school year begins, new Web sites, e-mail support groups, educational materials and conferences offer support and education for parents and teachers of kids who defy gender stereotypes.

Their common message is not to try to change who these kids are, though mainstream mental health professionals are not unified. Some believe such feelings can and should be extinguished through therapy; others believe that can destroy children’s self-esteem.

“If you are forced to be something you don’t want to be as a kid, you are miserable,” said Carla Odiaga of Boston, the consultant hired at Park Day.

Odiaga speaks from a decade of experience counseling lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender teens who she says are scarred by early memories — a daughter forced to dress like a girl or a son whose dad hit him when he refused to play sports.

In the worst cases, children pushed by parents and picked on by peers grow depressed, suicidal or physically ill, said Caitlin Ryan, a clinical social worker at San Francisco State University who is conducting a long-term survey of gay youths and their families. She said many adolescents she talked to were picked on from kindergarten age — long before they knew their sexual identity — for looking or acting “too feminine” or “too butch.”

Gender variance is an especially touchy topic when young children are the subjects. The Traditional Values Coalition calls efforts to accommodate these kids “normalizing the abnormal.”

The group’s executive director, Andrea Lafferty, said gender variance is a Bay Area phenomenon.

“If you talk to your typical person across America, they would be appalled,” she said. “God made us male and female, and God makes no mistakes. To teach a child at an early age self-hatred, and that’s what this gender variance is, is very sad.”

Even a prof from my Alma Mater weighed in…

Warren Throckmorton, an associate professor of psychology at Grove City College in Pennsylvania known for his work in the so-called ex-gay movement, agrees that some gender-variant children could be redirected to their birth sex.

“I’ve treated kids who were quite sure they were the opposite gender and are now are quite consistent in their behavior and their feelings with their biological sex,” said Throckmorton.

But he warned against dogma on either side of the debate. “It’s so individual. I don’t want to say there’s one answer.”

I’m sure that these problems exist, and they need to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis…but solutions like the one instituted at this school seem to only perpetuate and normalize behaviors that should not be mainstream.

H/T: Inkwell

David Boaz has some interesting comments on Turner Broadcasting’s recent decision to erase smoking from its classic cartoons:

Cartoon editors are painstakingly working through more than 1,500 episodes of classic Tom and Jerry, Flintstones, and Scooby Doo cartoons to erase scenes of characters - gasp - smoking. Turner Broadcasting says it’s a voluntary decision, but the move comes after a report from Ofcom, which has regulatory authority over broadcasters. So in this case “censorship” seems a reasonable term.

It’s not the first time. France’s national library airbrushed a cigarette out of a poster of Jean-Paul Sartre to avoid falling foul of an anti-tobacco law. The US postal service has removed the cigarettes from photographs on stamps featuring Jackson Pollock, Edward R Murrow, and Robert Johnson. And in the 20th-anniversary rerelease of ET, Steven Spielberg replaced the policemen’s guns with walkie-talkies.

On one level, this is just a joke: they are redrawing cartoons to make them more kid-friendly. And just to make the rules completely PC, Turner is allowed to leave cigarettes in the hands of cartoon villains.

But there’s something deeper here: an attempt to sanitise history, to rewrite it the way we wish it had happened. Smoking is a part of reality, and especially a part of history. Just look at any old movie. Everyone smokes: doctors, pregnant women, lovers. Real people smoked, too - people like Murrow and Pollock and Sartre. And some of them died of lung and throat cancer, which parents and teachers can point out. It’s Orwellian to airbrush historical photos in order to remove evidence of that of which you disapprove.

Political correctness takes on a whole new dimension in American textbooks. No cigarettes, you can be sure of that. But big states and cities, who are big textbook purchasers in America’s semi-decentralised school system, have forced “diversity” rules on the textbook publishers. Publishers say they are trying to avoid the old “white, suburban kids” textbook style. But they have instituted quotas that are just as far from reality.

McGraw-Hill’s guidelines for elementary and high school textbooks say 40% of people depicted should be white, 30% Hispanic, 20% African-American, 7% Asian-American, and 3% Native American. The US population is 67.4% non-Hispanic white. (And about 1% Native American.)

Harcourt demands somewhat fewer Hispanic faces but more African-Americans. The Wall Street Journal reports hilarious and depressing stories of publishers’ attempts to avoid depicting Asian-Americans as intellectuals or mathematics students, or redesigning the cover of a first-grade reader because the picture of a pig might offend Muslims or Jews. As you might suspect, it’s hard to find wheelchair-bound child models, so they have to depict able-bodied children as handicapped - all in the name of greater reality.

But the biggest problem is that the attempt to satisfy dozens of interest groups can sap the life out of literature and the history out of history, as Diane Ravitch discussed in her book The Language Police. Textbook editors are told to avoid words such as landlord, senior citizen, dogma, yacht or actress. One US history textbook included a profile and photo of Bessie Coleman, the first African-American woman pilot, but no mention of Orville and Wilbur Wright.

All this activism has resulted in at least one correction of the historical record: Franklin D Roosevelt spent decades trying to conceal the fact that he was confined to a wheelchair. Historians say that out of more than 10,000 photographs of FDR, only four show him using a wheelchair. Those are the ones that are now used in textbooks. One victory for historical accuracy. However, the FDR Memorial removed the ever-present cigarette from FDR’s hands. Orwell’s ministry of truth would be proud.

I hate smoking myself, but I agree with Boaz, re-writing history is not the answer…thoughts anyone?

Interesting…maybe the left’s anti-family values are finally catching up with them. According to a Syracuse professor,

Simply put, liberals have a big baby problem: They’re not having enough of them, they haven’t for a long time, and their pool of potential new voters is suffering as a result. According to the 2004 General Social Survey, if you picked 100 unrelated politically liberal adults at random, you would find that they had, between them, 147 children. If you picked 100 conservatives, you would find 208 kids. That’s a “fertility gap” of 41%. Given that about 80% of people with an identifiable party preference grow up to vote the same way as their parents, this gap translates into lots more little Republicans than little Democrats to vote in future elections. Over the past 30 years this gap has not been below 20%–explaining, to a large extent, the current ineffectiveness of liberal youth voter campaigns today.

Alarmingly for the Democrats, the gap is widening at a bit more than half a percentage point per year, meaning that today’s problem is nothing compared to what the future will most likely hold. Consider future presidential elections in a swing state (like Ohio), and assume that the current patterns in fertility continue. A state that was split 50-50 between left and right in 2004 will tilt right by 2012, 54% to 46%. By 2020, it will be certifiably right-wing, 59% to 41%. A state that is currently 55-45 in favor of liberals (like California) will be 54-46 in favor of conservatives by 2020–and all for no other reason than babies.
The fertility gap doesn’t budge when we correct for factors like age, income, education, sex, race–or even religion. Indeed, if a conservative and a liberal are identical in all these ways, the liberal will still be 19 percentage points more likely to be childless than the conservative. Some believe the gap reflects an authentic cultural difference between left and right in America today. As one liberal columnist in a major paper graphically put it, “Maybe the scales are tipping to the neoconservative, homogenous right in our culture simply because they tend not to give much of a damn for the ramifications of wanton breeding and environmental destruction and pious sanctimony, whereas those on the left actually seem to give a whit for the health of the planet and the dire effects of overpopulation.” It would appear liberals have been quite successful controlling overpopulation–in the Democratic Party.

Of course, politics depends on a lot more than underlying ideology. People vote for politicians, not parties. Lots of people are neither liberal nor conservative, but rather vote on the basis of personalities and specific issues. But all things considered, if the Democrats continue to appeal to liberals and the Republicans to conservatives, getting out the youth vote may be increasingly an exercise in futility for the American left.

Democratic politicians may have no more babies left to kiss.

Matt at GOP Bloggers thinks that maybe there’s more at play here than just a fertility gap, and wonders if some of this decrease could be due to the “Abortion Factor”. Matt’s point is a great one…but I think there are other things at play here too…like the feminist movement.

The feminist movement has has changed women’s reproductive habits in many ways besides just abortion. It seems quite likely to me that many changes in marriage and family values could lead to this phenomenon. One factor that strikes me as especially interesting is women who are putting off getting married and having children until later in life because society has led them to believe that this has no consequences. When, in reality, “A healthy thirty-year-old woman has a 20 percent chance of getting pregnant in a given month. Ten years later, that forty-year-old has just a 5 percent chance” (according to The Politically Incorrect Guide to Women, Sex, and Feminism by Carrie L. Lukas). I would be interested to see whether liberals or conservatives tend to begin trying to have children later, and whether age-related infertility could contribute to the “fertility gap”.

Who cares about Monet or Van Gogh, our generation has a naked woman hugging and slow dancing with a dead pig. What exactly has happened to art lately? According to a Daily Mail Article,

After pickled sheep, unmade beds and painting with elephant dung, some questioned where modern art could go next.

Kira O’Reilly will provide her own answer today by spending four hours naked, hugging a dead pig - at the taxpayer’s expense.

The controversial Irish performance artist will invite one person at a time to watch her sit in a specially-constructed set and perform a ‘crushing slow dance’ with the carcass in her arms.

She claims the bizarre exhibition is an attempt to ‘identify’ with the pig, which she cuts with a knife during the show.

I’m sure it will be lovely. I’m just glad I don’t live in Britain, where taxpayer money is funding this swill (pun intended). That being said, we all know tax money here in America has gone to fund similar “art”.

I almost hate to admit it, but PETA got it right on this one…

Anita Singh, spokesman for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, said: ‘This seems to be a desperate cry for help that merits visits from mental health counsellors, not voyeurs.

‘As Miss O’Reilly seems to depend on the shock value of using a murdered pig as a prop, perhaps lacking the talent to make it as a proper artist, may we suggest she take up a day job instead to pay the bills. This is not entertainment - this is sick.’

Look, if this was privately funded, I would still find the whole thing a little disturbing (and yes, a little funny), but I would understand that this falls under one’s innate freedom of expression. That being said, this “art” should definitely not be taxpayer funded–nor should any art for that matter.

A photo is available on the Daily Mail website. I won’t subject my readers to it by posting it here.