PunkAssBlog.com

In honor of congressional candidate Mike Erickson, I thought I’d recycle this oldie-but-goodie–always worth a read!

When the Anti-Choice Choose
By Joyce Arthur

My three favorites:

“I’ve had several cases over the years in which the anti-abortion patient had rationalized in one way or another that her case was the only exception, but the one that really made […]

Metallica’s first video ever!
I post this in recognition of the 900-plus soldiers who have had to have at least one major amputation in the last five years as a direct result of serving in Iraq and/or Afghanistan.

I think I may have mentioned in a few previous posts, in passing, that my childhood and adolescence were perhaps unfortunate from both a socioeconomic perspective and from a family dysfunctionality perspective. I tend to not go into much more detail than that and when I do, it is usually both very sparsely presented […]

The other day, one of my friends was looking through my bookmarks, and remarked that I had a lot of feminist blogs linked. I responded, somewhat off-handedly, that “Yeah, the feminist blogsphere is pretty much the only place on the internet where I can read the comment threads”. He responded to that “Oh, […]

I think it’s worthwhile to take a moment and look at the definition of partisan:
partisan[1,noun]
Main Entry:
1par·ti·san
Variant(s):
also par·ti·zan \ˈpär-tə-zən, -sən, -ˌzan, chiefly British ˌpär-tə-ˈzan\
Function:
noun
Etymology:
Middle French partisan, from north Italian dialect partiźan, from part part, party, from Latin part-, pars part
Date:
[…]

I am leery of the death penalty for two reasons, one philosophical, one brutally concrete.
The philosophical reason is that I object to the State, that amorphous and unaccountable collection of legislation, having the absolute power of life and death over any individual. The State already has a fair amount of control […]

Yet another set of relics from the post-satire age:

As the keychain says, truly “It don’t GITMO better than this.”
Welcome to “Taliban Towers” at Guantanamo Bay, the most ghoulishly distasteful tourist destination on the planet. As these astonishing mementoes show, the US authorities are promoting the world’s most notorious prison camp as a cheap hideaway for […]

Water ice and evidence of historic rainfall on Mars.
Smaller, rocky exoplanets near the habitable zone around their stars are being found. For a totally awesome exoplanet slideshow, click here.
(Because I need to think about something other than people right now. Ugh!)

A Massachusetts politician and defense attorney has touched off a firestorm with his shocking public vow to torment and “rip apart” child rape victims who take the witness stand if the state legislature passed stiff mandatory sentences for child sex offenders.
Rep. James Fagan, a Democrat, made the comments during debate last month on the state […]

Whatever side one falls on in the gun control debate, most people agree that handguns should not be in schools. It’s just a bad mix—volatile, trapped kids and deadly firearms. Any sane person ought to feel a bit uncomfortable at the thought of guns in a high school.
Unfortunately, sane people aren’t in charge in my […]

And I’m not a big fan of capital punishment in general.
But can I still wish he was dead?
Child rapists can’t be executed, Supreme Court rules
The ruling stemmed from the case of Patrick Kennedy, who has been on Louisiana’s death row since 2003, when he was sentenced to be executed for raping his 8-year-old stepdaughter.
Kennedy […]