Badtux the Snarky Penguin

In a time of chimpanzees, I was a penguin.

Religious fundamentalists are motivated by the sneaking suspicion that someone, somewhere, is having fun -- and that this must be stopped.

Tuesday, February 06, 2007

California: Millions for jail, not a dime for the disabled

When I was a child, the first wave of de-institutionalization of the mentally insane and developmentally disabled occurred as part of a conspiracy by idiot lefty do-gooders who thought that all those disabled people were actually just being put-upon by The Man, and tighty righties who saw an immediate way to reduce spending on social services and fuck the retards and nutballs, I got mine and fuck you, yeah baby! The old lady who ran a boarding house on the other side of my grandfather's back fence saw an immediate opportunity. She kicked out all her low-rent tenants, filled out the licensing paperwork to become a "community group home" for the disabled, and filled up the rooms in her shabby boarding house with retarded and mentally disabled adults for a much higher per-week rate. She didn't actually *do* anything for these people, mind you, except cook them a couple of cheap meals of beans and cornbread every day and occasionally run one of them to the doctor when he seemed ill. She didn't really bother too much with cleanliness, for example, or with meds for the ones that had medical problems. When the state inspectors finally shut the "group home" down after one of the residents died of neglect, they found a scene of indescribable squalor, as un-potty-trained mentally retarded adults were found literally sleeping in their own accumulated urine and feces.

For those with severe cognitive disorders, a "community group home" is a sick joke. The State of California, for example, has eight inspectors for the entire state to make sure that patients are receiving proper care. Group homes go for years with no inspection because there are no inspectors to do the inspecting. For patients who still have living relatives complaints can get an inspection more swiftly, but old lady Woodson was quite careful to select only residents with no listed next-of-kin.

The State of California once ran an extensive chain of nursing homes for the severely disabled. In those nursing homes, the severely disabled could receive the care they needed and had access to the resources they needed in order to survive and have a reasonable quality of life. Now the State is closing them down, to be replaced by prisons. Because, remember, it's more important to lock up a man for selling whacky weed to willing customers, whacky weed that has never killed anybody in the history of the planet, than to care for the least amongst us. After all, it's those retards and crazy people's own damned fault for not pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. They should have chosen to be born intelligent sane white Christian fellers like you and me, gosh darn it! Remember, the 11th Commandment of the Republican Bible is "I got mine, and fuck everybody else." Hallaleujah, AMEN!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Cross-posted over at the Mockingbird's place

Posted by: BadTux / 2/06/2007 04:06:00 PM

Comments:

"whacky weed that has never killed anybody in the history of the planet"

Ah, so you are on it and therefore don't believe it hasn't?

As for jail, it is big business you know. America is five percent of the population of this planet and it houses about twenty-five percent of it s prisoners.

Don't you just the American business empire?
# posted by BBC : 6/2/07 7:49 PM

Nah, I've been offered weed before, but never had any desire for it. From what I can tell, it makes folks, like, real mellow, mon. Haven't noticed that it ever harmed them in any way, unless a sudden desire to munch brownies is harm. Not like hard drugs. Frankly, no more dangerous than unfiltered cigarettes and/or alcohol, and treating it as such would result in an immediate end to California prison overcrowding as well as an enormous increase in state revenues (assuming that the state tobacco tax was extended to weed).

But, as you say, jail is big business. Housing 25% of the world's prisoners in the world's biggest gulag makes Stalin look like a piker (though at least our gulag doesn't kill people... well, not usually, anyhow).

-BT
# posted by BadTux : 6/2/07 9:41 PM

That whacky weed killed plenty of people... Back when executions meant hanging with a hemp rope. But we don't do that anymore, so bring back the whacky weed, says I.
# posted by Anonymous : 7/2/07 5:03 PM

Did you see this? It's ony a 26 minute show. PBS NOW.
# posted by Anonymous : 7/2/07 5:05 PM

Honor Roll

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"Keep fighting for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don't forget to have fun doin' it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce." -- Molly Ivins, 1944-2007

"The penalty good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men."

-- Plato

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