AUSTIN — A North Texas legislator during House testimony on voter identification legislation said Asian-descent voters should adopt names that are “easier for Americans to deal with.”

The comments caused the Texas Democratic Party on Wednesday to demand an apology from state Rep. Betty Brown, R-Terrell. But a spokesman for Brown said her comments were only an attempt to overcome problems with identifying Asian names for voting purposes.

The exchange occurred late Tuesday as the House Elections Committee heard testimony from Ramey Ko, a representative of the Organization of Chinese Americans.

Ko told the committee that people of Chinese, Japanese and Korean descent often have problems voting and other forms of identification because they may have a legal transliterated name and then a common English name that is used on their driver’s license on school registrations.
Easier for voting?

Brown suggested that Asian-Americans should find a way to make their names more accessible.

“Rather than everyone here having to learn Chinese — I understand it’s a rather difficult language — do you think that it would behoove you and your citizens to adopt a name that we could deal with more readily here?” Brown said.

Brown later told Ko: “Can’t you see that this is something that would make it a lot easier for you and the people who are poll workers if you could adopt a name just for identification purposes that’s easier for Americans to deal with?”



A: Asian-descent voters are Americans too. What she really means, therefore, is "easier for generic white people to deal with."

B: Her lack of faith in the reading skills and problem-solving skills of generic white people is noted.

C: What we really need is clearly a return to the days when Immigration officials renamed people when they entered the country! Yes!

D: Life is going to change fairly dramatically when her generation is displaced in positions of power, and I can't wait to see it happen.

This is utterly ridiculous.

Just so we're clear on this: it's okay to serve and be Wiccan. It's okay to die in Iraq and be Wiccan. But it is somehow NOT okay to be Wiccan when it comes to engraving a symbol on your monument?

... frankly, folks, if we sent you overseas, you fought for us, and you died doing it? I don't care if your widow asks for a Star of David, a swastika, or an engraved Satan complete with pitchfork, flames, and tortured souls on your memorial, as long as she's not demanding it be neon, larger than the others, or some different material -- that is, no more noticeable than any of the many others until you really look at the symbol -- let her have it. Memorials are for the survivors. If all we can give back to her that brings her any comfort is a symbol, what symbol it is makes no difference in the long run. Somebody smack the DVA around until they Get this, please.

You'd make sure the family's breadwinner(s) got paid a living wage. Couples run into problems because of financial strain more than anything else.

You'd tackle the problem of domestic violence so that people felt safe with their partners, or prospective partners.

You'd make sure healthcare was available, because the stress of caring for a sick loved one -- and their medical bills -- can wreck a family.

You'd make sure quality childcare was available and affordable as the norm instead of the exception, so that people felt comfortable going out to work to earn that aforementioned living wage.

You'd make sure employers offered enough time off to accommodate their workers who have families to care for, so the issue of absentee parents and latchkey children wouldn't be so common. Latchkey children tend to become problem children, and differences on how to deal with them can tear their parents' relationship apart. The stress of wondering if (or, y'know, knowing that) you're going to lose your job because your kid's been too sick for daycare all week long and you didn't have any sick days doesn't make for family harmony, either.

You'd make sure health insurance would cover at least some family counseling as a rule.

There'd be a waiting period between when someone could get a marriage license and when they were allowed to use it. No getting married on a drunken night or "just for fun".

There'd be a full battery of drug- and STD- tests with the results revealed to both partners as a part of the process of getting the marriage license.

There'd probably be some lessons on handling basic household finances in there too.

Teenage girls who got pregnant would be advised to seek counseling and there'd be support available for them as a rule, instead of the push to marry the child's father that there often is now. Just because you had sex and proved fertile together doesn't mean you ought to be in a relationship for life.

Divorce would be harder to get.


... but hey, those things are hard, so instead of doing any of that, I suppose pushing a Constitutional amendment to make sure those horrible gays get excluded will suffice.

I have nothing more to say on this topic.

Every time I think that things really can't get any worse ... they do. This time, the affront is the concept of pre-pregnancy, the state in which, new federal guidelines would have us believe, every woman of childbearing age, regardless of whether she intends to have a child or not, exists.

It sounds on the surface like a good, well-meant theory. After all, the recommendations are common-sense, and intentional or not, pregnancies happen ... and it means that women's doctors pay a little more attention to their care. All perfectly unobjectionable -- until you realise, that is, that these new guidelines place the potential for a pregnancy above all other concerns, including such paltry things as the potential mother's wishes and well-being. There was already a faction that holds that the life of a fetus outweighs all other concerns, including the health, physical and emotional, of the woman harboring it. This goes a step beyond even that. It reduces the woman of childbearing age to the status of a potential incubator, and nothing more. It elevates one function of a woman above all other considerations, and worse, by implanting the idea in the heads of our physicians that we will have pregnancies whether we say we will or not, it removes our credibility in the eyes of the doctors treating us. It removes our ability to be our own advocates on this issue.

That's beyond dangerous.

Until now, only children and those judged incompetent of making their own decisions required someone else present to make sure their doctors paid attention to and followed their requests and preferences about their own health care. With this new guideline, in effect, telling our doctors that we don't know what we want and can't be trusted to follow through on our decisions about pregnancy, women stand in danger of being reduced to that status, too. "Pre-pregnancy" is a pernicious idea which needs to be stamped out now, or we can expect to lose our autonomy in health care decisions somewhere not too far down the line.

Think I'm exaggerating the issue? Consider that this guideline has gone out at the federal level. Even if your personal doctor disregards it, how many medications will now have approval for use on "pre-pregnant" women withheld because they might impact a potential fetus? How many of those "pre-pregnant" women will be forced to make do with a possibly less-effective medication because of the worry over the health of a fetus which does not exist and may well never exist? How many of those cases would it take before you found the situation unacceptable? If your answer is "one", here you go.

I have been unable to obtain adequate medical care for my epilepsy
because I am what they'd call pre-pregnant. As my neurologist puts it,
I am a woman of child-bearing age. As such, they flat-out refuse to try
me on any medicines other than the ones proven least likely to affect a
fetus (read: the ones that are paying off my neurologist). Despite the
fact that I have declared my belly a no-fetus zone.
-- shadesong

This isn't new. Any childless woman under the age of about twenty-five who's asked for a tubal ligation can probably tell you that our doctors have always tended to value the potential for reproduction over the wishes of the women sitting in front of them. What's new -- and what's unacceptable -- is that now, instead of viewing that tendency as a shortcoming that needs to be changed, the word from our government is that it's a value to be embraced. That, quite simply, needs to go, and the sooner the better.

Via aris_tgd:

Although few studies have been made of this phenomenon, a study done in 1981[1] found that 24% of women who had abortions considered the procedure morally wrong, and 7% of women who'd had abortions disagreed with the statement, "Any woman who wants an abortion should be permitted to obtain it legally." A 1994/95 survey[2,3] of nearly 10,000 abortion patients showed 18% of women having abortions are born-again or Evangelical Christians. Many of these women are likely anti-choice. The survey also showed that Catholic women have an abortion rate 29% higher than Protestant women. A Planned Parenthood handbook on abortion notes that nearly half of all abortions are for women who describe themselves as born-again Christian, Evangelical Christian, or Catholic.[4]

Maj. Mark Bieger cradles a dying Iraqi girl
photo by Michael Yon

I'm awake far too late, as usual, trying to enjoy the online time while I have it, since tomorrow I leave for New York to retrieve some court documents pertaining to the kids' case. I won't be back online for any real time until Tuesday evening or Wednesday, most likely.

In the course of my wanderings, though, I came across this photograph, and this site. I'm not sure why it's made so big an impression: you're not likely to win my heart with gung-ho rahrah, and the phrase "support our troops" has been coopted to mean "keep your mouth shut and sit down, no matter what." It gets an instantaneous reaction of distaste from me anymore.

But maybe that's the difference.

Yon makes the distinction between "Iraqi" and "terrorist" -- not just in lipservice, but in the way he portrays them -- and that gains my grudging respect.

The Iraqi children who trail our convoys and make many of the patrols into parades are the best barometer we have about the future here. I’ve written about how carefully Iraqi parents watch their children, and how the military has come to read the total absence of children on a street as a bad omen. The portentous power of these kids works both ways. Their smiles are a measure of how the people here are mostly embracing a brighter future.

If he used the phrase "support the troops", I didn't see it. What I saw were people, some better than others, coping with tough situations as best they could. I can trust that, and even admire it. More, his work lets me separate the men from the administration in my head in just the way, I think, that this administration would most like to prevent. From one officer's insistence that a prisoner be turned over for interrogation (against the rules, and the requests are all denied) to the one soldier asking if the account could be toned down so his Mom doesn't freak when she reads it, Yon brings a note of authenticity to the table.

I'm cynic enough to wonder what's still going untold, but that's my own problem and not his: what he tells, I believe, is told as straight as an ex-Green Beret can tell it, when he's talking about military men. And in doing that, he does as much as anyone can do, to remind both sides of the very real human beings currently dealing with this mess that was none of their making.

"I don't see how you can be a partner in peace if you advocate the destruction of a country as part of your platform," declares our President.

... Truer words he never spoke. But have another rock, Mr President? I think there's a wall over there still standing...

in other news, Democratic Senator Tim Johnson of South Dakota joins Ben Nelson of Nebraska to support Alito's appointment to the Supreme Court. Ben Nelson, if he's running, is up for re-election this year, having come in in 2000. I hope y'all out there in his state don't let this go unremembered. Johnson, sadly enough, isn't up this year, but his time, too, will come.

"It is necessary to investigate before legislating, but the line between investigating and persecuting is a very fine one and the junior Senator from Wisconsin has stepped over it repeatedly. His primary achievement has been in confusing the public mind, as between internal and the external threats of Communism.

We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men -- not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.

This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy's methods to keep silent, or for those who approve. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities. As a nation we have come into our full inheritance at a tender age. We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.

The actions of the junior Senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad, and given considerable comfort to our enemies. And whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn't create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it -- and rather successfully. Cassius was right. 'The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.' "

-- Edward R Murrow.

I wish I could make this one movie required viewing for every single American. Judging from the comments of the rather vacuous pair of girls behind us, at least one teacher has offered extra credit for it, and that, if not their reactions, gives me hope -- but the unspoken parallels between the climate of fear then and the "post 9/11" America of today are hard to miss, and even harder to answer. (Incidentally, let me thank my friends at the Nuke Free Zone -- usually the first place I turn when I'm trying to find links quickly on matters like this.) If you can, please see this movie. Alternately, read the text of the original broadcast upon which the movie's based. I've seen several attacks, unsurprisingly, on the movie, but Murrow's original words still stand, strong and unsullied.

NEW YORK (CNN) -- A Republican congressman from North Carolina told CNN on Wednesday that the "evidence is clear" that Iraq was involved in the terrorist attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001.

Let's recap this slowly for you, Robin -- it's obvious that you've been sitting in the back of the classroom staring out the window all this time.

• The attacks were plotted and carried out by al Qaeda. Remember them? Remember, the guy we're looking for is Osama bin Laden? I know they may all seem alike to you, Robin, but really and truly, Osama isn't Saddam. Two different people entirely. I promise you.



• We had the 9/11 commission look into this. They reported back in August of last year, saying that there was no evidence that Saddam was connected to 9/11. He did not help al Qaeda carry out or plan the attacks.



• Even President Bush has acknowledged that there is no evidence Saddam was involved in the 9/11 attacks. Let me point out the dates on those for you: they came way back in 2003.

Now, I can see where you might think you have better insight and information than the 9/11 committee, but better insight and intelligence than the President himself, Robin? They didn't go to him with proof, but they came to lay it on your desk? How nice for you. I hope they brought you a nice dose of Risperdal along with it, and some tea and cakes, too.

Even worse,  Robin, you're Vice Chairman of the House Subcommittee on terrorism. You should know better. You have to know better. And if you don't, then you haven't been paying any attention whatsoever. So, either A) you're somehow privy to information the President doesn't have, in which case, you ought to hand it over;  B) you're so incompetent that you haven't yet caught up with conclusions reached more than a year ago; or C) you're misusing your position and deliberately lying. Do tell me if there's a fourth option I've missed in there, won't you? And in the meantime? Sit down and stay away from the media, 'cause you're making us all look bad.

Edit: fixed link.

AFA mail generally makes me cringe -- it's usually just this side of pure intolerance and bile. Occasionally, however, they get it right.

Dear C,

Allstate has fired a manager because he expressed his Christian beliefs concerning homosexuality.  Matt Barber was a manager in Allstate's Corporate Security Division.  On his own time, and without identifying himself as an employee of Allstate, he wrote a column posted on several websites which was critical of same-sex marriage.

An outside homosexual group complained to Allstate about the column.  Because of their support for the homosexual agenda, Barber was immediately fired and ushered off company property.

The message is clear: To work for Allstate one must not publicly express their Christian belief in the Bible's teaching on homosexuality.  Barber was fired because he did.  Homosexuals can criticize and condemn the Bible's teaching and they are welcomed, but Christians must remain silent. 

After following the link to the article, I find I have to agree: Allstate appears to be in the wrong on this one.

I'm setting aside the allegation of retaliation at the heart of the firing, although I think that's probably more accurate than that Allstate's out to persecute every Christian in their ranks who dares to speak up, because whether it's accurate or not, that's not the reason they gave.  The trouble is that the reason they gave should not ever be viewed as a valid reason, and then it couldn't be used as a screen for other things.

Expressing your opinion on your own time, using your own resources, shouldn't be grounds for termination. I don't care if you're employing members of the Ku Klux Klan, if they're breaking no laws in or out of work, and behaving appropriately at work, you don't have cause for termination. Reverse the situation and make it someone writing about pro-GLBT issues and being fired by their company for it, and there'd be outrage, and rightly so. We can't promote respect for personal rights by violating the personal rights of others. When we advocate tolerance, we then agree to act out of that same tolerance ourselves.

And that's exactly what my email is going to say.

Hey Kristof,

Why should the U.S. 'care' for the rest of the world? The U.S. should take care of its own.

People have been in Africa for thousands of years -- & look at their progress during those years. Tribal still!

It's way past time for Liberal twits to stop pushing the U.S. into nonsense or try to make every wrong in the world our responsibility.

The last line makes the letter.