Homepage for the homeless...

I am all for outreach programs that work toward benfitting the underprivledged and underserved of our society. That's why I am a proud liberal Democrat. I think we as a society need to do more to encourage our government officials to support worthy programs that seek to lift others up. Too often we fail our citizens. Too often those with less are forgotten and left out on the street to fend for themselves. But sometimes, every now and then, a government agency will commit to making a difference in the lives of people who need it and wonderful productive results occur.

This is not one of those times.

The Department of Labor has created a job-resources website for... wait for it... the homeless! Finally all the people who have given up their homes in favor of their DSL connection have a website all their own.

I understand that many libraries have free access to computers in some areas, but it just seems to me that this idea of having a website to battle chronic homelessness shows a great deal of ignorance on what the homeless experience must be like. It is just another instance of the administration spinning its wheels, pretending to achieve something worthy, while nothing changes for the little guy.

And the kicker? If you follow links on the website to the job boards where you fill out personal information, you must enter your address to enter.

Paranoia is knowing only a little of what's going on...

Watching Newsnight with Aaron Brown on CNN, I saw Mr. Brown interview a woman named Annie Jacobsen. Ms. Jacobsen is a writer for WomensWallStreet.com, a dinky website providing financial content about the stock market to women. You may have heard about her, as she appears to have caused quite a stir with a recent story she wrote for the website. Her article Terror in the Skies, Again is about a recent flight she took from Detroit to Los Angeles that had a large group of Arab men on it. This group left her so shaken she was barely able to write an inflammatory and bigoted story about it.

It would seem that after seeing 14 Arab men board her plane wearing track suits with Arab writing on it and carrying valid passports, also with Arab lettering, Ms. Jacobsen bagan to feel uneasy and suspected the group of being cleverly disguised terrorists. Then their suspicious behavior began. The men began talking to one another, gesturing to each other, and even (GASP!) using the lavatory from time to time!

That's all. Nothing happened. Turns out the group were part of a Syrian musical ensemble hired to play at a hotel. The men talked to one another. They glanced around. They peed. Ms. Jacobsen overreacted to their behavior on the flight, but that's fine. I'm sure we all would have raised some eyebows at the group as tensions on airplanes are justifiablly higher these days. And perhaps she would have taken those jitters away with her and told a few people about the scary boogey men and their musical instruments of evil. The fears were unfounded and no incident occurred, however, and unlike what the average passenger might do after feeling on edge from a flight, Ms. Jacobsen dug around a little to find out if she should have been scared.

She contacted the TSA and the FBI and they assured her they were aware of the flight and they found nothing amiss after they looked into it. The men were indeed musicians and were doing nothing suspicious. But for some reason that I can only attribute to narrow-minded racism, she seems confounded that there were no arrests at LAX the day of her arrival.

I find the whole story a little implausible on face value but I chalk that up to Ms. Jacobsen's parnoid embellishments. For instance, one of the men apparently smiled at her before boarding, but once on board his face was "cold" and "steely." It could be that she was acting rather frightened and strange herself. Or it could be that he did not like her. I cetrainly don't and I haven't met her. But I am less interested in whether the story is true than in what it says about us as a society.

Suddenly, this non-incident is being picked up by the mainstream press and Ms. Jacobsen has been on-hand for a number of different news programs to discuss her racist tripe. Could you imagine NBC News picking up a story in some racist newsletter put out by the KKK and pretending by discussing the article with the author they are remaining fair and balanced? Because that is what this reactionary unintelligent garbage should be likened to.

Now it seems Ms. Jacobsen has written a follow-up to her story lambasting political correctness and how it will lead to more deaths. Excuse me, but nobody died. Nothing happened and no one was ever at risk. But people all across the blogosphere are lining up to pronounce P.C.-ness dead, as if her gross depiction of a women who jumps to conclusions and refuses to come back down is evidence. It's hard to take anything as hard fact when smack dab in the middle of an article an author uses Ann Coulter as a primary source.

Through all this coverage and discussion and facetime for a know-nothing, racist nutcase, not one news outlet has bothered to even try to contact a single member of this Syrian Band. That's the "liberal" media for you.

Becoming Sodom. Or Gomorrah. Whichever had all the hot gay sex...

Let me tell you a little something about the Town of Kearny, the little penisula in northern New Jersey where I grew up.  Kearny is smack dab between Jersey City and Newark, two of the dirtiest and most crime-ridden cities in the country. 
 
Kearny's residential area sits atop a hill that slopes down to the South to reveal a breath-taking view of New York City.  You just have to ignore all the rising smoke from the constant tire fires and the smoke stacks.  South Kearny houses plenty of industries that must constantly be breaking environmental laws, because the smells and pollution that often ride upwind to assault you should be illegal.  Although there are those lucky times when they try to unsuccessfully mask it with butterscotch.  I don't think I've been able to stomach a Werther's Original since we moved in, come to think of it.  Also in South Kearny, there sits a few large landfills, now closed, that for years was the home of New York City's rubbish.  These landfills were huge islands, surrounded by the depressingly polluted Kearny freshwater marshes, part of the Hackensack Meadowlands area. 
 
On the other slope of residential area, Kearny butts up against the Passaic River, fomerly the country's dirtiest river.  Now after a century of pollution, steps have been taken to lessen the verdict from "dirtiest" to "consistently at-risk."  But that doesn't stop the high school Crew teams from rowing and swimming in it from time to time.  
 
But not all of Kearny's attractions are environmental disasters.  We also have a state prison in South Kearny that houses New Jersey's sex offenders.  When everyone else was saying "not in my backyard," Kearny exclaimed "why not?"  Indeed!
 
If you think there is nothing redeeming about this Little Town That Didn't, you might be surprised to learn that we are the location of many scenes and location sites for HBO's hit series The Sopranos.  Yes, that's right.  Kearny will forever be synonymous Italian mobsters and ultra-violent tendencies.  
 
Despite the narrow-minded absurdity of the past, Kearny has now become the latest Den of Inequity to make Baby Jesus cry.  Last week Kearny had its first domestic partnership legitmized by the government.  In a tearful-eyed scene at Town Hall, a  lesbian couple signed a few documents and became the first same-sex couple to be almost married.   This is a very good sign to me. 
 
As someone who grew up in Kearny's sexually-stifling atmosphere and came out in high school, I always convinced myself that I'd have no real choice, that in just enough ways for it to matter, this town could never really be for me.  For gay partnerships to be recognized on the shoddy craftsmanship of the Town Hall's office building, it is an omen that maybe this place can change a little bit.  Maybe there's a chance that this country really can get a little better in the long run.   New Jersey is now the fifth in the nation to allow same-sex couples to file joint tax returns, make medical decisions for an incapacitated partner and visit each other in the hospital.  And the Gates of Hell didn't even open up to feast on our heathen souls.  If any place needed a Rapture, it's Kearny, New Jersey, but instead we got civil rights.  Some might say it's just one more item on a long list of mistakes or bad deeds that our town has committed.  I say it's a change in the wind.  Only 45 more states to go.