I was happy to see that a woman who falsely cried rape – sending her attacker victim to prison for nearly four years – has just been sentenced to 1 – 3 years for perjury.  She’ll be eligible for parole in a year.  Rape is a terrible crime.  It stays with the victim long after the actual attack is over.  Lying about it demeans actual rape victims, and further adds to their burden when they try to seek justice – to say nothing of the poor man whose life is destroyed by the accusation.

What’s been done to him is akin to rape.  He’s victimized, helpless, abused by his attacker – who, together with the state prosecuting him – hold his very life in their hands.  Even if it doesn’t go so far as to send him to prison, his reputation is forever harmed as potential employers and others Google his name and learn of the arrest.  And if he goes to prison, he may well be the victim of an actual rape.  False rape accusations are as much a life-destroying crime as committing an actual rape.  It’s unjust that she was only sentenced for a maximum of three years – even less time than the man she accused actually served.

Why did she do this terrible thing?  She got drunk, made her friends angry, and invented the rape to make them feel sorry for her.  I made some people angry when I suggested that women should be held more accountable for what they do when they’re drunk.   Sending this woman to prison is a good start.

I am so completely blown away by last night’s game, I’m having a hard time getting it together this morning to work or even to post. And nope, no hangover – just a good time and a late night. We had a few friends – diehard Saints fans – over to watch the game and had a great time, even sans alcohol. When the Saints won, my neighborhood went crazy – people just poured out of their houses, they were screaming “WHO DAT?!”, setting off fireworks and car alarms… just unbelievable.

Added:

Considering the frequent attacks in Israel – more or less daily from their Palestinian “neighbors” – as you’d expect, medical services in Israel have evolved. They’re much more accustomed to having to deal with victims trapped in rubble from bomb or rocket attacks, and rescuing, triaging, and treating victims in the worst possible conditions; more so, probably, than any other medical personnel in the world. So after the earthquake in Haiti, they immediately sent supplies and teams to do what they do best.

They have so impressed even Bill Clinton that he was moved to say (at Davos), “Shimon, I don’t know what we would have done without the Israeli hospital at Haiti. The Israeli hospital was the only operational facility which was able to perform surgery and advanced tests.”

Carl in Jerusalem has more on how the IDF learned to administer medical care in such challenging circumstances.

And in response to this? A weird convergence of Truther loons and Muslim antisemitic conspiracy loons accuse them of doing all this good to gain access to steal organs. (Yes, seriously. No link to those jackasses; if you really want to have a dip into that sewage you can google it.)  No good deed goes unpunished.

Ellie Light, Astroturfer Extraordinaire, managed to get her letter published in over forty credulous newspapers. Turns out, she’s Barbara Brooks, a nurse from California, and finally came clean to the Cleveland Plain Dealer about her motives for her repeated lies:

A proud Democrat, she said that “I want to deliberately talk to the enemy” and “people deep, deep in the red states.”

Except, even this much appears to be a lie, because apparently “Ellie Light” wasn’t Barbara Brooks, but her husband, Winston Steward.  Barbara Brooks told Gawker,

“I’m not Ellie Light,” she told us. “My husband is. I never told anybody that I was Ellie Light. Winston wrote every single letter. He’s been doing it since he saw that the Gulf War was being fought under false pretenses. I told him from the beginning that he shouldn’t write letters under phony names, but he wanted to get them out there.”

So why did she tell the Plain Dealer, in the clearest possible terms, that she was, in fact, responsible for the Ellie Light correspondence? “That wasn’t me,” she says. “I don’t know how they got that. Maybe my husband was impersonating me.”

Is there some reason it was impossible for Ellie Light Barbara Brooks Winston Steward to just write his own opinion under his own name?  Why pretend to be a woman?  Why lie like this?  Was “proud Democrat” Winston so ashamed of his views that he couldn’t bring himself to say them openly?

Added: The Cleveland Plain Dealer provides this update, wherein Winston lies about, well, pretty much everything else.  Of course, it’s all because he’s terrified of the “right wing crazies” which I find extremely amusing from a Californian, where “right wing crazies” who have the temerity to oppose same sex marriage have their names, addresses, and job information posted on the internet so they can be hounded and stalked from public life.  As always, more projection from the left.