I’m a little late on this, but it’s nevertheless unfathomable. At Telegraph UK , ” Teenage girl throws puppies into a river in online video .” Click the image to watch. No doubt JBW thinks this is hilarious — no evil in the world, and all that , dontcha know? See the original post: Teenage Girl Throws Puppies in River
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Teenage Girl Throws Puppies in River
WASILLA, Alaska — The young lady at the desk of the Dorothy Page Museum and Visitor Center has blue hair — not the blue-silver of advanced age, but a punk-rock razor-cut style dyed cerulean blue. She is friendly and helpful to out-of-towners who stop by the Main Street museum to ask about the town’s most famous resident. Has Sarah Palin become a tourist attraction in Wasilla? “I don’t know,” says the blue-haired woman. “I guess a lot of people have added it to their itinerary.” Rumor is that the Palins are out of town and hope of an interview seems doomed to disappointment. Then my cell phone rings. “This is Todd Palin,” says the man on the phone. We chat briefly about the recent GOP primary victory of Joe Miller . I explain that I’ve driven 50 miles from Anchorage to Wasilla just to get a sense of the town where Sarah began her political career as a city council member and mayor. Todd then tells me that although his wife is out town, he’s still in Wasilla and … Half an hour later, I drive down an unpaved road past a large Miller-for-Senate campaign sign and turn into a driveway marked with multiple “No Trespassing” signs, past which no wise person would go uninvited. Here, nestled among birch trees on the shore of scenic Lake Lucille, is the home of the woman whom liberals love most to hate — and Todd, the man who got the nickname “First Dude” during his wife’s term as Alaska’s governor. Todd opens the front door and his youngest son, two-year-old Trig, scampers across the living room to greet the guest with a “high five.” Rambunctiously energetic, Trig is the focus of his father’s attention — Todd bounces the toddler on his knee, reads him a book, and fixes him a bottle — for the next several minutes until 16-year-old Willow comes downstairs, scoops him up and carries him upstairs for sisterly babysitting. Getting an interview with Sarah Palin is difficult. Getting an interview with Todd is next to impossible, and I would never have gotten this far if mutual friends — including Anchorage conservative talk-radio legend Eddie Burke — hadn’t vouched for my bona fides. So most of the conversation over the next two hours is off-the-record, or at least on background. To breach that agreement would be to put myself into that category of reporters whom Sarah Palin recently described to Sean Hannity as ” impotent, limp and gutless.” That was most specifically a reference to a profile in Vanity Fair by Michael Gross that was, in the words of Politico ‘s Ben Smith , ” so bad that even her harshest critics are leaping reluctantly to her defense.” Smith noted that Melissa McEwan , a hard-left feminist blogger and certainly no Palin fan, called the Vanity Fair article “the worst thing I’ve read all day” and accused Gross of employing “misogynist smears.” How bad was it? It was even denounced by Shannyn Moore, one of Alaska’s most relentless anti-Palin bloggers (which is a tough competition, by the way). So often have the Palins been the targets of such media abuse — thinly sourced hit jobs based on anonymous gossip from the disgruntled and deranged — that one hesitates to approach them with notebook and pen in hand. And right next door to the Palin home is a classic case of the raging two-year-long pandemic of journalistic psychosis that Michelle Malkin was the first to diagnose as Palin Derangment Syndrome. On the other side of a tall fence that Todd built to protect what remains of his family’s privacy is a rental home currently occupied by Joe McGinniss, a journalist with a contract for a book about Palin. When McGinniss moved in and the Palins complained about this bizarre intrusion, McGinniss went on NBC’s Today show to portray himself as the victim of ” the same kind of tactic that the Nazi troopers used in Germany in the ’30s.” As ironic as that claim may be, perhaps the greater irony is that anytime Sarah publicly mentions the media’s evident vendetta against her, her critics accuse her of “whining.” Todd Palin is no whiner — a former oil-rig worker who has proven his toughness by winning the 2,000-mile “Iron Dog” snowmobile race four times — and he seems mainly interested in pointing out how little credit his wife has gotten for her accomplishments during her truncated tenure as Alaska’s governor. He talks at length about her success in securing an agreement to build a natural gas pipeline from the North Slope down through Canada to the “lower 48,” to name just one notable achievement. In fact, Todd can talk Alaska politics and energy issues with such a thorough mastery of details that he could easily be mistaken for a think-tank analyst, except that he’s obviously not the sort of neurasthenic geek one usually finds in those policy-wonk jobs. He’s a red-blooded hands-on kind of guy, and is proud to point out that he acted as general contractor in building the latest addition to the Palin property, a two-story structure that includes a state-of-the-art TV studio that Sarah uses for her appearances as a Fox News contributor. He emphasizes that his wife began her political ascent with “in-your-face local politics,” where the interaction between Sarah and her Wasilla constituents was direct and personal. The same kind of “in-your-face” quality characterized the recent Republican primary in which Palin’s endorsement of Miller (who supported her in her 2006 gubernatorial campaign) was seen as the key to the Tea Party-backed insurgent’s upset of Sen. Lisa Murkowski. Many have portrayed that race as the byproduct of a personal feud between Palin and Murkowski, but Todd disavows any such animosity, noting that the two women were often allies in the past. Professionally, I’m obliged to mention speculation about Sarah’s plans for 2012, but Todd says his wife is currently focused on the upcoming mid-term congressional elections, now less than nine weeks away. And after November? I wasn’t taking notes and my memory is notoriously dodgy, so it’s possible that Todd’s answer was, “We’ll see.” Or maybe he didn’t say that. A good reporter never burns his sources.
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Meeting Mr. Palin
On the morning of July 17, 2010, the residents of the French commune of Saint-Aignan awoke to the sound of rioting, though few in the picturesque Loire Valley village could have guessed the reason for all the tumult. The previous night, a Traveler and robbery suspect by the name of Luigi Duquenet had barreled through a police checkpoint in his car, injuring a gendarme in the process, and was accelerating towards a second checkpoint before he was shot and killed. Within hours, dozens of incensed fellow gens du voyage , armed with hatchets and crowbars, were rampaging through the medieval streets of Saint-Aignan, chopping down trees, setting cars alight, pillaging stores, and storming the village police station. “It was,” as Mayor Jean-Michel Billon put it, “a settling of scores between the travelers and the gendarmerie .” The coming weeks would provide ample evidence that the clashes had in no wise settled any scores. By the next day three hundred soldiers were patrolling the streets of Saint-Aignan, and soon thereafter France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy was vowing that the rioters would be “severely punished,” and that the ” the problems created by the behavior of certain Travelers and Roma” would be addressed once and for all. The ensuing measures, Sarkozy continued, would be part of the “implacable struggle the government is leading against crime” and the “veritable war” being waged against those “delinquents” threatening France’s ordre publique . Pierre Lellouche, France’s Minister for Europe, concurred: ” we are faced with a real problem and the time has come to deal with it.” It was not long before French ministers were considering corrective measures ranging from the tightening of immigration controls to the systematic evacuation and dismantling of illegal encampments, the better to deal with the “sources of illegal trafficking, of profoundly shocking living standards, of exploitation of children for begging, of prostitution and of crime.” Such rhetoric in reaction to the events in Saint-Aignan was altogether predictable, given the emphasis placed on matters of law and order by France’s governing U nion pour un Mouvement Populaire (with Sarkozy himself having made international headlines with his 2005 comments about the need to “hose down” lawless estates and root out criminal “scum”), but in this case it cannot be said that the French government was engaging in mere posturing for popular consumption. Some three hundred Roma camps were quickly targeted for demolition, and on August 12, Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux announced that some 850 Roma would be systematically deported to Romania and Bulgaria (albeit each with 300 euros in hand). The first repatriations followed two weeks later, with more planned for the month of September. A lawyer for the Roma leadership, Henri Braun, cautioned that the government was “preparing to open a blighted page in the history of France,” but Sarkozy’s administration may in fact be setting a continental precedent. On August 21, t he Italian Interior Minister, Roberto Maroni, told the daily Corriere della Sera that ” if anything, it’s time to go a step further, ” calling for outright ” expulsions just like those for illegal immigrants, not assisted or voluntary repatriations.” For the various itinerant communities of France — the tsiganes , the manouches , the gitanes , the Roma, and the Sinti — the ongoing crackdown occurring in France, and now threatened elsewhere, is only the most recent chapter in a centuries-old story of tribulation and alienation. The zhalvini gilyi , or dirges, of the Roma folk tradition invariably stress the pitfalls of a peripatetic life on the lungo drom , the “long road.” “Oh Lord,” bemoaned Bronisława Wajs, the mid-twentieth century Polish-Romani poet, “Where can I go? What can I do?” now that “time of the wandering Gypsies has long passed.” A Transylvanian dirge laments: ” God, oh God! How you have thrashed me,/Perhaps nobody more than me,” before concluding “Oh, what can I do, all alone?” The dislocation and unfocused nostalgia that are part and parcel of the itinerant lifestyle, coupled with centuries of persecution, in turn led to widespread fatalism, with one Serbian Gypsy song resignedly foreseeing that “The crack of Doom/is coming soon./Let it come,/it doesn’t matter.” For the Roma and other Travelers, the “crack of Doom” has indeed sounded out with some frequency over the years, as European anti-ziganism is of considerable vintage. Anti-Gypsy sentiment, long a feature of the European social landscape, was first institutionalized in early modern Central Europe, with the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I outlawing the community in 1500, and with Ferdinand I expelling the scapegoated Roma from Prague after an unexplained 1541 fire. By 1548 the Diet of Augsburg had declared that “whosoever kills a Gypsy, shall be guilty of no murder,” and by 1710 the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph I would go a step further, demanding “that all adult [Roma] males were to be hanged without trial, whereas women and young males were to be flogged and banished forever.” Thirty-nine years later the Spanish monarch Philip V was still taking aim at “this multitude of infamous and noxious people” that needed to be “contained and corrected”; round-ups occurred in Spain and France up through the Napoleonic period. The situation for the Roma, Sinti, and Lalleri was even worse in the east, and it would not be until 1856 that the outright enslavement of Gypsies was abolished in Moldavia and Wallachia. The 20th century would bring no respite, with the coming of the Holocaust (known in Romani as the Samudaripen , “the murder of all,” or the Pharrajimos , “the devouring”). During those berša bibahtale , those “unhappy years,” in Hitler’s Germany, Pavelić’s Croatia, and King Michael I’s Romania, hundreds of thousands of Roma would lose their lives in concentration camps, in hastily dug ditches, and in the laboratories of Josef Mengele. As Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi official who organized the transport of Gypsies to the various death camps of the east, later testified: “i ntervention on behalf of the Gypsies was impossible from any side at all. Obviously, the prejudice against this group was the strongest.” That the grounds of the Lety concentration camp (in the modern Czech Republic), constructed seventy years ago for the Nazi internment of Romani men, women, and children, now hosts an industrial pig farm provides some evidence of the extent to which the Pharrajimos has yet to adequately penetrate the modern European psyche. Even the end of Nazi rule would bring no end to the suffering of the Roma, again particularly in the east, for, as Florinda Lucero and Jill Collum have observed, under Communist rule “a chilling ‘solution’ to the proliferation of the Roma came about: the uninformed and non-consenting sterilization of Roma women, often under the guise of caesarean sections and abortions, and under pressure from social workers who would get their uninformed consent with promises of cash and tangible goods.” (Instances of coercive sterilization of Romani women in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary have also occurred in the post-socialist era, indeed as recently as 2008.) Today, discrimination against this marginalized community is routine in central and southeastern Europe, with racially motivated assaults on the rise, Roma communities routinely denied access to sufficient electricity and water, and, in the Czech Republic, to take one example, fully two-thirds of Roma children placed into remedial programs for dysfunctional students. Anti-Roma violence has been on display in Italy, where in May of 2008 a Gypsy settlement outside of Naples was burned to the ground while crowds gathered to cheer, and i n Hungary, where anti-Roma demonstrations in 2009 prompted then-Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány to warn that ” we have to act while we can, not wait until the prejudices and the urge to vigilantism distill into unmanageable social phenomena.” Such outbreaks of overt anti-ziganism have led János Ladanyi of Budapest’s Center for Social, Regional and Ethnic Conflicts to further caution that ” this road is a dead end. It leads to the Balkans. ” YET THE ROAD THE GYPSIES of Europe are on is not itself at a dead end, as is appropriate for a people historically accustomed to looking at the lungo drom . There have been occasional victories in European courts, including a 2003 ruling in the United Kingdom’s House of Lords ( Wrexham County Borough Council v. Berr ), which held that zoning regulations should not ” impose an excessive burden on the individual whose private interests — here the gypsy’s private life and the retention of his ethnic identity — are at stake,” as well as a 2010 European Court of Human Rights decision finding that Croatia had erred in placing Roma students in Roma-only classrooms. A 2005 photographic exhibit entitled ” Lety Detention Camp: History of Unmentioned Genocide” was prominently featured in the European Parliament, and later was displayed in foyer of the Czech Senate in Prague, prompting President Václav Klaus to acknowledge that “o f course it is necessary to appropriately commemorate this place.” Meanwhile, in Romania, a Comisia pentru Studierea Robiei Romilor , or “Commission for the Study of Roma Slavery,” was established in 2007, and consists of Roma and Romanian historians and social scientists investigating the deep history of southeastern European anti-ziganism. EU Roma summits have taken place in 2008 and 2010, and b y August 2, 2010, the Council of Europe had declared a day of remembrance of the genocide against the Roma, and pledged support for the promotion of Samudaripen education, given that the Roma genocide “is nowhere to be found in European educational materials but should in fact be an integral part of national education curricula.” It seemed a distinct possibility that attitudes towards the Roma might be changing, and that the “Gypsy question” might some day be answered. Yet the expulsions from France, which by the end of August had resulted in 151 obligatory (” de manière contrainte “) and 828 voluntary (” de manière volontaire “) repatriations to Bulgaria and Romania, have overshadowed such progress. Concerns voiced by Roma groups, certain Bulgarian and Romanian politicians, the United Nations, and the European Union have only prompted France to double down on its method of controlling the gens du voyage and their perceived ” menace à l’ordre public .” France’s Immigration Minister, Eric Bresson, has hinted at further measures to crack down on the clandestine immigration of Roma, particular at the French border, while Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux continues to insist that “the objective announced by the president of the republic, that half our country’s illegal camps will be dismantled in three months, will be met.” The French government has roundly rejected any suggestion that these expulsions in any way resemble the infamous rafles , or round-ups, of the Second World War. Deputy Jean-Pierre Grand responded to critics (including Catholic archbishops and opposition politicians) thusly: “Persons are arrested, their identities are verified, and they are offered money to return to their homeland; I would like for someone to explain the connection to the roundups of the Second World War [ Les personnes sont interpellées, leur identité est vérifiée, on leur propose de l'argent pour retourner dans leur pays d'origine: j'aimerais bien qu'on m'explique quel est le lien avec les rafles de la seconde guerre mondiale ].” Pier re Lellouche has proven more defiant still, insisting that the expulsions were designed to guarantee the “first of human rights, which is the right to safety.” While a French court in Lille recently rejected the notion that illegal Roma camps are by their very nature threats to public order, the government has pressed on, planning amendments to French national law that will make “repeated theft or aggressive begging” grounds for expulsion. With crimes committed by Romanians (many of whom are Roma) reported to have increased by 259 percent in Paris over the last eighteen months, with some one in five Parisian thefts perpetrated by a Romanian, and with constant strains on the welfare system exacerbated by the presence of illegal aliens, it was inevitable that the French government would step up measures against unlawfully-present Roma and their camps, brooking no opposition in the process. And it is no coincidence that the crackdown has occurred alongside an overall government-led “debate on national identity” that has been taking place in France over recent months. (That the Roma are paying something of a price for Gallic resentment of other immigrant communities that have likewise yet to fully assimilate cannot be discounted either.) The French government has even raised the possibility of contesting Romanian and Bulgarian entry into the Schengen (border-free) European zone in March of 2011 due to the regular egress of Roma from those countries. Thus the Roma controversy in France figures to have more than merely domestic political ramifications.
It was inevitable. The moment former Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman announced his homosexuality publicly, a flurry of journalists eagerly penned the obituary of the Republican Party’s stance on traditional marriage. Again. It’s happened multiple times since social conservatives responded to activist judges in Massachusetts six years ago by propelling George W. Bush to a second term. Democrats’ electoral rampage in 2006 was a repudiation of the GOP’s anti-homosexual marriage agenda, they said. Ditto 2008, when Barack Obama — who could be called the first gay president, like Bill Clinton was the first black president — coasted to victory. But liberals’ celebration was tinged with angst. In 2006, many of the candidates who gave Democrats the majority trended conservative on the marriage issue. And in 2008, California might have voted for Obama over John McCain by a landslide, but 52 percent of voters backed a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between one man and one woman. That wasn’t supposed to happen. Now, in 2010, the frustration continues. Obama’s goal of reversing the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on gays serving openly has fallen on hard times. Complainers in the netroots notwithstanding, Obama hasn’t changed his mind on gay nuptials, either. He supports civil unions but not marriage redefinition. So, when your own guys aren’t helping much, what else to do than falsely portray a seismic shift on the issue in your opponent’s party? The Washington Post informs us that older Americans and social conservatives are evolving to support homosexual marriage. Read between the lines: the issue is an albatross around the neck of a GOP trying to refocus on economic issues. Judging by the tenor of media coverage, you’d think traditional marriage was a failing issue for the GOP. But it’s not. To date, 30 states have adopted marriage amendments, including several deep blue states. Those campaigns often have aided moderate Republicans by turning out a base that otherwise would have stayed home. Can the GOP point to comparable victories on immigration, tax policy, or gun rights? No. Yet marriage is fast becoming the pariah to top party bosses. Blue-blooded country club Republicans aren’t comfortable talking about God, morality, and tradition. Can we get back to railing against illegal immigrants, please? That’s not to say political shifts aren’t happening. During the past decade, public acceptance of same-sex marriage has tilted slightly to the left, and polls show that young voters tend to favor it. But neither development is significant or shocking. Polling shows a leftward tilt on several of the GOP’s pet issues. It’s unfair to portray marriage as an outlier. And the fact that young people are liberal, a systemic trait of young people, is hardly a news flash. Politics aside, the reasons for conservatives and Republicans to continue standing for traditional marriage are legion. Glenn Beck doesn’t get it when he claims freedom-loving Americans have “bigger fish to fry” than traditional marriage and abortion. “You can argue about abortion or gay marriage or whatever all you want, the country is burning down,” Beck said in early August. That sentiment fails to recognize the inseparable connection between America’s social and economic ills — as if the fiscal sphere were solely responsible for the decline of America. It’s not. The fall of the traditional family has long been linked to economic instability, the rise of the welfare state, and an electorate that doesn’t understand, nor want to defend, freedom, liberty, and tradition. There’s also a marked distinction between the public issue of same-sex marriage and the private issue of protecting the rights of homosexuals as citizens. Americans should be protected under the law regardless of sexual orientation. But that’s a far cry from re-defining civil marriage to include relationships that nature defines as untenable and God as immoral. Economic concerns are, understandably, at the forefront of voters’ minds this fall. But marriage continues to be a winning issue with voters. If GOP bosses continue down the road that leads to total abandonment of this principle, they’ll fast discover unintended consequences at the ballot box.
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Unintended Consequences
Hearing the song “Lillie Shull” the other day made me wonder whatever became of murder ballads. A century ago there was scarcely a small town murder that wasn’t memorialized in song. This was especially true of the non-literate musically inclined mountain folk of the Border States. It was a trait they carried with them from Scotland, but one that has not survived modernization, which is too bad. Murder ballads seem to have died out around the time of the Great Depression. The genre underwent a brief resurgence during the ’60s folk revival — who hasn’t heard the Kingston Trio’s maudlin version of “Tom Dooley”? — though few new ballads were written. From time to time, murder ballads are dusted off by contemporary singer-songwriters, which is how I learned about “Lillie Shull.” Murder ballads were cautionary tales, usually taking the point of view of the condemned man on the gallows as he expressed remorse for his awful deed. “Lillie Shull” is typical of the genre with its dire warnings against greed, lust, drink and infidelity. The titular character was a young woman whose name was actually Lillie Shaw and who lived in Johnson County, Tennessee, at the turn of the 20th century. Lillie’s marriage was an unhappy one, as evidence by her affair with a local man. At some point, Lillie’s husband left her and resettled in Ohio. Lillie, for some reason, moved in with her neighbors, the Prestons. During her stay at the Prestons’ house, she was reportedly visited several times by her lover. After filing for divorce, this man’s wife allegedly approached Finley Preston with a proposition: she would give him $100 and two acres of land if he would murder Lillie Shaw. Preston was torn. It was a lot of money, but then he had nothing against Mrs. Shaw. The wronged wife kept pestering him, however. Here things get about as foggy as a Tennessee mountain morning. It could be that Lillie decided to break off her dalliance with her lover and return to her husband. She told Mrs. Preston she hoped to sell one of her guns and a rocking chair to a neighbor and use the cash to buy a ticket to Ohio. Days passed and there was no sign of Lillie. Search parties were organized and a few personal items were found in the woods next to what appeared to be signs of a struggle. Eventually, on the other side of the mountain, the searchers found the burned remains of a young woman. Because he lived nearby, suspicion fell on Preston and he was arrested. It wasn’t long before he confessed, to most of the crime anyway. The way Preston told it, he was in the woods tracking a wayward cow when he bumped into Lillie who said she was on her way to the neighbor’s house to sell a gun. The two talked. Preston said he’d like to take a look at the gun. Rather than return it to her he aimed it at her chest and fired. Later Preston and his father went back and carried the body to the far side of the mountain and burned it. CHARGES WERE NEVER brought against the cuckolded wife, and Preston was quickly found guilty and sentenced to death. He was the last man hanged in Johnson County, Tennessee. “The Ballad of Lillie Shaw” skimps on the true crime details and focuses instead on the killer’s remorse: A great crowd now gathered all around the jail, to see my execution and to hear what I’ve to say. I am to hang for the murder of Lillie Shaw You’ll learn who I so cruelly murdered and her body so shamefully burned. I was taken to prison for the murder I did own, and by the court was sentenced to hang for the murder done. The cries of poor Lillie again was in my sight. Her loving form consuming in the fire that burnt so bright. I bowed down to Jesus in painful grief and prayed. I prayed that he might save me as he did the dying thief. God bless my dear parents who now my fate to mourn, likewise my wife and baby who will be left alone. God care for my baby I’ll never see again. I pray thee ever keep it from danger, harm and sin. Murder ballads were written for highly superstitious folk who believed dancing a sin. Not as great a sin as murder, or cheating or drinking, but dancing could
