The piece is all about homicides that have children as their victims.  It quotes a spokesperson for the Maine Department of Public Safety, Stephen McCausland, as saying that about two children per year are victims of homicide in Maine and that usually they're under the age of three when they die and that most of the perpetrators are parents.

Without knowing the Maine statistics in detail, none of that is surprising, because the same is true nationwide.  According to the Administration for Children and Families of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, about 80% of homicides with children as the victim are perpetrated by parents.  There are about 1,300 of those nationwide.

McCausland goes on to say that,

The vast majority are children who died at the hands of a young man, usually the father or the mother’s boyfriend.

That's a defensible statement.  The facts are these:

• From 2005-2009, 11 children under the age of 18 were the victims of a homicide in Maine;
• Three were killed by fathers, three were killed by mother's boyfriend; two were killed by mothers; two were killed by other children and one was killed by a step-father;
• One of the boyfriends was mentally incapable of criminal wrongdoing and was committed to a psychiatric institution.

So in Maine, over the years McCausland referred to, seven of the 11 children were killed by a father or boyfriend.  This is a very small sample size, easily subject to fluctuation, but it is 63%, and if that constitutes a "vast majority," so be it.

But where the article really goes wrong is with its next expert, Dr. Lawrence Ricci who tries to bootstrap the Maine statistics to the national level by saying,

That’s certainly the case in Maine, and it’s certainly the case nationally.

Actually, that's certainly not the case nationally.  The ACF tracks child maltreatment including homicide yearly.  And every year since at least 1997, women have killed significantly more children than have men, regardless of their relationship.

For example, in the ACF's report of state data for 2007, some 56.5% of child homicide was committed by women while 42% was committed by men, with the sex of the remainder of perpetrators being unknown.  Ten years before, the figures were about 63%/37%.

But Ricci doesn't stop there.  He goes on to claim that nationally,

the perpetrators of serious physical child abuse or homicide are most likely fathers, next are nonbiological father figures such as stepfathers or mothers’ boyfriends, and then sitters, Ricci said.

Mothers are the fourth-most-likely perpetrators and “well down on the list,” he said.

Again, that's just flat-out false.  The most likely perpetrator of child injury or death is the child's mother.  Referring to all injury to children, the 2007 ACF states,

Victim data were analyzed by relationship to their perpetrators. Nearly 39 percent (38.7%) of victims were maltreated by their mother acting alone (figure 3–6). Nearly 18 percent (17.9%) of victims were maltreated by their father acting alone. Nearly 17 percent (16.8%) were maltreated by both parents.

The same report found that 27.1% of child homicides nationwide were committed by a mother acting alone while 16.3% were committed by a father acting alone.

The figures for all child maltreatment over the years are these:

• 2006: Mother acting alone - 39.9%; Father acting alone - 17.6%
• 2005: MAA - 40.4%; FAA - 18.3%
• 2004: MAA - 38.8%; FAA - 18.3%
• 2003: MAA - 40.8%; FAA - 18.8%
• 2002: MAA - 40.3%; FAA - 19.1%
• 2001: MAA - 40.5%; FAA - 19.3%
• 2000; MAA - 40.0%; FAA - 16.6%

In other words, for none of those years was child abuse by a mother less than twice that of a father.

Prior to 2000, the AFC didn't break down abuse into categories like "mother only" or "father only," so here are the figures for male and female child abuse for the three years before 2000:

• 1999: Female - 61.8%; Male - 38.2%
• 1998: Female - 60.4%; Male - 39.6%
• 1997: Female - 62.3%; Male - 37.7%

I've emailed Ricci to find out his response to these data, but he hasn't responded.  How he figures that fathers commit more child abuse than do mothers is anyone's guess.

If you want to email the Bangor Daily News, the editor-in-chief is Michael J. Dowd and his email address is mdowd@bangordailynews.net.  If you want to email the article's author, Dawn Gagnon, go to the article and click on her name.

Thanks to Tatyana and Jeremy for the heads-up.

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On October 7, 1966, President Lyndon Johnson, a man who had appointed a C.F.R. {Council on Foreign Relations} member to virtually every strategic position in his administration, stated:

"We intend to press for legislative authority to negotiate trade agreements which could extend most favored-nation tariff treatment to European Communist states. We will reduce export controls on East-West trade with respect to hundreds of on strategic items…"

The New York Times reported one week later on October 13, 1966:

"The United States put into effect today one of President Johnson's proposals for stimulating East-West trade by removing restrictions on the export of more than four hundred commodities to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe…Among the categories from which items have been selected for export relaxation are vegetables, cereals, fodder, hides, crude and manufactured rubber, pulp and waste paper, textiles and textile fibers, crude fertilizers, metal ores and scrap, petroleum, gas and derivatives, chemical compounds and products, dyes, medicines, fireworks, detergents, plastic materials, metal products and machinery, and scientific and professional instruments."

Virtually every one of these "non-strategic" items has a direct or indirect use in war.

Later, items such as rifle cleaning compounds, electronic equipment and radar were declared "non-strategic" and cleared for shipment to the Soviet Union. The trick simply is to declare almost everything "non-strategic." A machine gun is still considered strategic and therefore may not be shipped to the Communists, but the tools for making the machine guns and the chemicals to propel the bullets have been declared "non-strategic."

Meanwhile, nearly 50,000 Americans have died in Vietnam. The Viet Cong and North Vietnamese receive 85 percent of their war materials from Russia and the Soviet bloc nations. Since their economies are incapable of supporting a war, the Communist arm of the conspiracy needed help from the Finance Capitalist arm. The United States has been financing and equipping both sides of the terrible Vietnamese war, killing our own soldiers by proxy. Again, the landscape painters in the mass media have kept the American public from learning this provable fact.

Not surprisingly, the Rockefellers have been leaders in championing this bloody trade. On January 16, 1967, one of the most incredible articles ever to appear in a newspaper graced the front page of the Establishment's daily, the New York Times. Under the headline "Eaton Joins Rockefellers To Spur Trade With Reds" the article stated: "An alliance of family fortunes linking Wall Street and the Midwest is going to try to build economic bridges between the free world and Communist Europe. The International Basic Economy Corporation, controlled by the Rockefeller brothers, and Tower International, Inc., headed by Cyrus S. Eaton Jr., Cleveland financier, plan to cooperate in promoting trade between the Iron Curtain countries, including the Soviet Union…"

International Basic Economy Corporation (IBEC) is run by Richard Aldrich, grandson of Federal Reserve plotter Nelson Aldrich, and Rodman Rockefeller• (CFR), Rocky 5 son.

On October 20, 1969, IBEC announced that N M Rothschild & Sons of London had entered into partner ship with the firm.

Cyrus Eaton Jr. is the son of the notoriously pro Soviet Cyrus Eaton, who began his
career as secretary to John D. Rockefeller. It is believed that Eaton's rise to power in finance resulted from backing by his mentor. The agreement between Tower International and IBEC continues an old alliance. Although Eaton's name does not appear on the CFR's membership rolls, the Reece Committee which investigated foundations for Congress in 1953, found that Eaton was a secret member.

Among the "non-strategic" items which the Rockefeller Eaton axis is going to build for the Communists are ten rubber goods plants, including two synthetic rubber plants worth $200 million. Mr. Eaton explains in the Times article: "These people are setting up new automobile plants and know they have got to have tire factories." Under the Nixon Administration which, contrary to campaign promises, has multiplied trade with the Reds tenfold, American concerns are building the world's largest truck factory for the Communists. Trucks are necessary for a nation's war machine and truck factories can be converted to the production of tanks as was done during WWII.

The U. S. will provide the Soviets with both the facilities to build the trucks and the tires (or tank treads) for them to roll on.

In addition, the Rockefellers and Eatons are constructing a $50 million aluminum producing plant for the Reds Aluminum for jet planes is considered "non-strategic under Johnson-Nixon doctrine.

The Rockefeller and Eaton families have now joined forces to build war production plants behind the Iron Curtain so that the Communists can become a bigger threat to U. S. survival. America spends $70 billion a year ostensibly on defense and then the Rockefellers build aluminum mills for the Communists. Only the absence of a formal declaration of war in Vietnam keeps the Eatons and Rockefellers from being actionable for treason. They have the blood of nearly 50,000 American servicemen on their hands.

Passage of the bill plunged the upper house into what the article variously calls "chaos" and "pandemonium."  Factions opposed to the bill threatened to desert the ruling party, leaving it with a razor-thin majority.

Amazingly, the article makes no mention of the fact that such a provision is facially anti-democratic.  The very concept of democracy means that the people choose who governs them.  A law "reserving" 30% of parliament's seats to a certain group solely based on their sex plainly disenfranchises voters.  What if they don't want Ms. X to hold office?  Tough, she holds it anyway, not because she was voted in, but because of a pre-established quota.

Now, "reserving" seats may make sense if those who benefit are a minority.  The argument would be that they can never achieve what they need by voting because there aren't enough of them.  The same cannot be said of women who, not being a small minority, can vote themselves into office if they choose.

As in the United States, although women in India are roughly half the population, they make up nothing like half the elected MPs.  But the appropriate response to that is not to fix the game - or even 30% of it - in their favor.  The appropriate response is for women to work harder as candidates so they can appeal to more voters.

The other appropriate response is for Indian women to be perceived as the equals of men.  That is, they must be legally equal and must also be thought of that way.  That's a cultural change that must take place in order for true equality to reign.  Just to state the obvious, goading Indians to view women as the equals of men is ill served by granting them more and more special rights and privileges. 

I've often thought that, in the United States, one of the keys to greater female representation in local, state and federal offices is military service.  If women were required to register with the Selective Service System and serve in combat units, the perception of male/female equality would be much enhanced.  Like it or not, military service can provide a candidate for office a leg up on his/her opponent.  But beyond military service, I think there's a broad public perception, on the part of both men and women, that women are still a privileged class, shielded from many of the rigors of life that males have to deal with.  And until that perception no longer exists, women will remain a minority in elected offices.

Back to India, one of the comments to the article linked to pegs the legislation as a stalking horse for Brahmin caste elites edging lower caste MPs out of office.  One of the comments about the piece makes enough sense that I quote it in full.  It's by a gentleman named Ghulam Muhammed.

"Caste based" political parties in fact are protecting the majority of lower caste people of India, which are cleverly sidelined by the Brahmin caste comprising of mere 3% of the population together with the other upper castes of Kashtriya and Vaish, and have been ruling India in the name of a fake majority. The stranglehold of these highhanded upper castes is directly linked and strengthened by the new much publicized women's reservation bill.

The Bill in practice will make it that much impossible for lower caste political groupings to get even a proportion of their proportion of voting strength in Parliament and State Assemblies. So the propaganda of women's rights should not fool anybody.

The line up of 3 major political parties --- Congress, BJP and Communists --- to pass the bill is proof enough that all these Brahmin led political parties have ganged up to drive out the lower caste parties like Samajwadi Paty, RJD and BSP from the political arena. This is an open coup d’etat camouflaged as ‘Women’s Reservation Bill’.

The high-caste commentator with The Times of India, Dileep Padgaonkar translated his triumphalist comment to herald the 'last gasps of Mandalisation' --- Mandal reservations gave the lower caste the chance to enter the political arena.

It is shameful of Congress, the opposition Hindutva extremist BJP and the so-called secular Communist parties, to defraud the people as well as the world at large, by moving this retrograde anti-democratic legislation in the name of women. Only the high-caste women will end up further strengthening the upper caste stranglehold in India's power politics. The deprived cannot hope for any remedy from India’s skewed democracy and may resort to violent protests.
 

In other words, the 30% women's reserve is just a political ploy.  That many women are going along with it says a lot.  It says that they're having the wool pulled over their eyes; it says they value political expediency over democracy; it says that they don't see the obvious damage such a provision could do to their own cause; it says they're willing to kick their lower caste "sisters" to the curb (reminiscent of white suffragists doing the same to black suffragists in the early 20th century in the U.S.); it says that class makes more difference than sex, and it says that they still have some idea that privilege and equality can coexist.

Thanks to Mike for the heads-up.

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The presumption of innocence, as it is not specifically iterated anywhere in the Constitution, will not attach to sex crimes. Instead, all individuals will be presumed to exist in a state of non-consent . . . . As such, defendants accused of sex crimes will bear the burden of proof, and will have to prove their innocence. There is a danger inherent in such a system that a few innocent men will be punished, and this is quite unfortunate. It is not, however, more unfortunate than men raping with impunity in epidemic proportions simply because their victims are unable to prove to a room full of misogynists that, despite the ridiculous presumption of a default state of consent, they did not consent to a sex act. Victims will decide whether a crime has occurred, and defendants will not. This might frighten men, some of whom will claim that women will use the law to punish men out of vengeance. That might happen once in awhile, but our job is to protect the largest number of people possible, and false rape accusations are about a hundredth as common as rapes that go unpunished (by my calculation.) . . . . Any defendant convicted of rape will be assumed to have proven he is incapable of responsibly exercising his sexuality in society. As such, the penalty for rape will be immediate and irreversible castration.

I think the central point that the dudes ‘don’t get’ is that the majority of [advocates of this bizarre proposal] genuinely don’t care if [the] proposal is ‘not fair’ to the hypothetical falsely accused rapist of the post-revolution future.

'A 33-year-old Burbank middle school teacher accused of having sex with a teenage male student over a six-month period last year was charged on Tuesday with unlawful sex with a minor, MyFoxLA.com reported.

Amy Victoria Beck, a teacher at David Starr Jordan Middle School, appeared in Burbank Superior Court Wednesday. She did not enter a plea and her arraignment was scheduled for March 25.
...
She did not make bail and remains in the custody of the Burbank Police Department.

If convicted, Beck faces up to seven years in state prison, officials said.
...
Police interviewed the boy "and confirmed that the acts did occur" between March and September of last year, the sergeant said.

The boy was 14 at the time the alleged sexual activity began, and he is now 15, Quesada said. His name was not released.

Beck had taught English and Social Science at the school for ten years, according to The Burbank Leader. She resigned on Friday.

"She’s a well-respected and loved teacher," Principal Sharon Cuseo told the paper. "We’re all shocked."'

You may also notice a couple so called definitions there that don't exactly accurately represent what MRA means. Feel free to thumb them down.

Urban Dictionary is a popular website and so it is important for the true meaning of MRA to be accurately represented, and the false meanings to be dismantled.

And please feel free to create a new definition for "MRA" yourselves. It's fairly easy to do because you don't need to register an account.

When New York State Senator Hiram Monserrate was charged with assaulting his girlfriend, Pappas immediately proclaimed that he was unfit to hold the office to which he'd been elected.  That was long before anyone knew the facts of the case and longer still before Monserrate had been charged with or convicted of anything.  For Pappas, mere allegations were sufficient for her to flick aside the desires of the voters of his district and the concept that a person is innocent until proven guilty.

Well, she's back.  (Did she ever leave?)  This time she's demanding New York Governor David Paterson's immediate resignation (Legislative Gazette, 3/8/10).  This is an elected official who has announced his intention to not seek another term and so has only a few more months yet in office.  More importantly, this is an elected official who's been neither charged with nor convicted of any form of wrongdoing.  As the matter stands, an aide to Paterson may or may not have assaulted a woman last year.  Regarding whether the man did or did not do what the woman claims, there've been no charges filed and, obviously no adjudication of those allegations.  In fact, that's exactly what they are - allegations.

What's all that got to do with Paterson?  Well, it now seems that he may have intervened, through staff members, to get the woman to not pursue charges.  Apparently one staffer talked to the woman and another attempted to contact her but failed.  Clearly, if Paterson did intervene in an onging criminal investigation, he's violated his oath of office and very likely violated criminal laws on witness tampering.

Governor Paterson denies any wrongdoing.

So if there was a DV incident and if Paterson pressured the woman to refuse to testify or assist police, then he should face the appropriate consequences.  But right now, all we and Marcia Pappas have are those big ifs.  As in the past, allegations are all she needs to demand punishment.  For her to claim now that Paterson should resign, before a single finding has been made by anyone about any aspect of the case, in the face of his categorical denials, is outrageous.

It shows once again her arrogant disdain for due process of law and for the will of the people.  It's not the first time, and I'm confident that it won't be the last.

As a brief aside, the article linked to is a rather astonishing piece of agitprop masquerading as journalism.  It is in fact, nothing but a forum for Marcia Pappas.  Did the reporter bother to contact the office of the people's executive in Albany?  Did she ask anyone anything about the facts of the case?  Did she ask Marcia Pappas about the propriety of demanding that an official of state government resign his office based on nothing but allegations?  Did she wonder rhetorically about the impact on democracy of such a thing? 

All those look like pertinent questions to me, but none of them were asked.  In violation of Rule 1 of journalism - get the other side of the story - the Legislative Gazette chose to do nothing but channel Marcia Pappas and her invariable disdain for democracy and due process of law.

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