Louisiana or 1950s Mental Hospital? It's Your Call.

Yesterday, the Louisiana State Senate voted 32-3 to send a bill to the State House that would make castration an acceptable and sometimes mandatory punishment for sex offenders in the state. [Fox News] For second-time offenders, castration would be mandatory, provided that a "medical expert" decided castration would be effective. Chemical castration, via medroxyprogesterone acetate, would be the default method, but offenders would be able to choose physical castration instead.

Take a moment. I'll wait for you to catch up.

Let's roam into the hypothetical. Medrozyprogesterone acetate is a progestin that, when used as a treatment in males, reduces sex drive. Makes sense. Yes, introducing progesterones in a testosterone-filled environment will reduce sex drive. That seems like a common sense statement, and unfortunately I cannot veryify it because there are no studies on the effects of medrozyprogesterone acetate in healthy men. Every study I found was about sperm count in men having recently received vasectomies. Moving on. That's not the ridiculous part.

The ridiculous part is the assumption that too much sex drive is the underlying problem. Grown men do not rape children because they have overactive libidos. Rape, whether of grown women or of children, is an action driven by anger and rooted in violence.

Non-consentual sex is a physical manifestation of anger, violence is the coping mechanism, and mental illness is what we should be addressing. How often sex offenders feel the urge to get laid is not what we need to be talking about.

Religious Education Will Save DC!

So, in case you weren't aware, President Bush is a huge fan of school vouchers and created the first federally funded education voucher program. In DC, 1900 students were able to escape the torment of their every day lives and the horrible, terrifying DC public education system.....by way of $7500 vouchers to the private or religious school of their choice. [WaPo]

Not that I don't appreciate how terrible the state of DC's public education system is. I know I wouldn't want to have to rely on Michelle Rhee to provide me with a sound education. And I fully support providing students with access to a good education, but seriously, Spellings herself writes in the article that the problem is "institutionalized failure." So clearly, we should be paying kids to go to religious schools instead of using that money to, you know, fix the system.

Spellings even lays out the statistics: more than 7000 students have applied for the federal scholarships. The federal program costs $74mn; money that, according to Spellings, we might as well use to pull kids out of the DC public school system because, hey, if it weren't for the federal program, the District wouldn't receive it anyway! So what they hey! Let's drain the DC public school system of its impetus to reform.

Spellings even states that 86% of the students receiving federal vouchers would otherwise be in schools that "did not meet 'adequate yearly progress' goals in reading and math for 2006-07." This means that an atrociously high percentage of DC schools are undoubtedly sub-par and unable to provide their students with a comprehensive education.

So where does the $74mn come into the picture? Here's my hypothesis: sending a tiny percentage of DC public school students to private and religious schools costs a similarly tiny fraction of what it would cost to reform the school system that continues to fail the thousands of students who do not receive federal vouchers.

The silver lining, however, may come in the form of increased attention paid to the state of DC's public school system. Hopefully, while the parents of 1900 students are lauding the greatness of the federal voucher program, the parents of all of the other students in the system will take the opportunity to remind Mayor Fenty and Chancellor Rhee just who they're here to serve.

Money is the mother's milk of politics, and that, my friends, is the name of the game.

I Don't Understand Your Methodology, America.

So, after about 6 weeks, I finally started reading some of my subscriptions, and I happened upon this little gem from Ann Applebaum. I remember when I was a wee youngin, writing a reflection on one of her more mundane and rambling op-eds, and realizing sharply that her work often encourages America's disordered thinking. However, she may finally....finally have come around. [WaPo].

Sadly, we all remember how America twice elected George W. Bush, hailing him the candidate they most wanted to throw a few back with. 8 years later, we're somehow still talking about this, and even, horrifyingly, using this characteristic as a ruler for electability. Apparently, and I'm going to have to take Applebaum's word for it since I've spent the last month or so reading Women's Wear Daily and watching copious amounts of TLC, Bravo, and HSN, America is shitting itself over the fact that Sens. Obama and McCain aren't as "nice" as we once thought.

Well no shit. It takes a great deal of ego and arrogance to run for President of the United States. Seriously, to seek any elected office, you have to be pretty fucking convinced that you're the greatest and most intelligent person in the world. Now, that's not to say that the halls of legislatures and executives across the United States are filled with raging megalomaniacs, although I'm certainly not willing to wager my salary that they're not. But really, America, after 8 years of a country led by the guy everyone wanted to have a beer with, don't we think maybe, just maybe, it's time to be sober this time around?

Electing someone idealistic is certainly a good thing, but when we delude ourselves into thinking that that idealism is going to persist throughout a full term is completely absurd. Of course, an idealistic candidate is still going to be an idealist, but holding elected office, especially one as demanding as President of the United States, is going to provide a shock of realism that campaigning can't.

Having spent a longer-than-necessary amount of time on Capitol Hill, and now in my fashion industry refuge, I can tell you with some authority that the ones most able to maintain their idealism through the demands of performance are the ones who are less "the guy you want to have a beer with", and more "the guy you want running the country."