My liberal heart bleeds

So former WorldCom head honcho and huckster par excellence Bernard Ebbers might have to spend the rest of his life in jail, huh? When I saw the images of a teary Ebbers being led out of court by his wife, I was almost tempted to feel sorry for him. And then I remembered:

• the Haymarket eight: wrongfully convicted, executed and posthumously pardoned;
• Dudley George, summarily executed by the OPP (the inquiry into his death only got started last year--eight years after the fact--and is still ongoing);
• Brandon Teena: dismissed by the authorities, murdered, then pillored by the same people who failed him the first time around;
• Nathan Tate, sentenced to life in prison at age twelve and released when he was seventeen--it's a good thing that time in prison doesn't have any significant impact on the psychology of developmentally-challenged adolescents, huh?;
• David Milgaard, who did 23 years for nothing. If you take away someone's life, it's murder--what happens when you take away a third of someone's life?;
• Maher Arar--'nuff said;

In the grand scheme of things, a rightfully-convicted multimillionaire doesn't fucking rank.

* * *

What's that? You need a feminist blog that's unrelentingly political, whip-smart and snort-coffee-through-your-nose funny? Twisty's got you covered. A taste of the good stuff:

Possibly there exist legitimate literary applications for gross sexism (although not, I’m afraid, for such a clunky expression of it), but if you are not Dashiell Hammett or Edward Albee, and you put it in your book anyway, you’re a fucktard. If you are Jim Butcher, and your hero is a wizard named “Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden, conjure by it at your own risk,” well, it’s just sad.

It is a blatant heresy and and a sin against patriarchy even to hint at the possibility that a woman might consider men irrelevant to her pursuit of fulfillment, and an even blatanter heresy and a sinnier sin against patriarchy to intimate that the patriarchal ethos is, perhaps, not fundamentally dissimilar to that part of the human body that excretes shit