The past two weeks have been busy, but, I’ve been following the headlines as much as I can. This month, in the category of “fact is stranger than fiction,” so far there have been a heap of stories.
1) For instance, on Annanova, a story about, “Man, 29, has 21 children,” has me at a loss for words. Turns out the Tennessee man, Desmond Hatchett, has had relationships with 11 Tennessee women and has children from newborns to 11 years old.
He works a minimum wage job and the newspapers only found out about it because the authorities tried to nail him for child support. Knoxville says it is going to levy half of his salary which they admit will amount to a little over a $1 per week per child.
I don’t consider this abuse. After all they note that one mother who has two children with him, “said she should get $44 a month but rarely receives any child support. “It’s frustrating, but usually, when I ask he gives it to me,” she said. Mr. Hatchett said he knows the names and ages of all his offspring. I hope they all remember him on Father’s Day.
2) In Honolulu, Sen. Inouye announced on Jun 2, 2009, that the city is getting a $1 million dollar grant to help underprivileged young parents obtain education and job-skills training. Sounds like good news.
The grant is to help mothers, expectant mothers, and fathers; age 16 to 24, with job training, child-care, transportation, and healthcare. I don’t know what their selection criteria are for the few people they will be able to help. I hope they plan on tracking how the money is used. I would be surprised to see more than a 10th of the money used to help fathers. It is easier to kick them out of the kids’ life permanently and much more profitable to garnish his wages over the next 20 years.
3) On June 3, 2009, Lisa Belkin writes for the NY Times, ““How to Teach Kids About Money”. So, after her two parent family dialogue, in which her son is close enough to a golf course to caddy, she says not a word about children of divorce.
One important lesson about money the best financial courses cannot teach is how fast it can disappear after a divorce, especially for Dads who get kicked out of their childrens’ lives, pay enormous fees for lawyers, and still end up with child support payments that break the bank every week till their children are grown.
Too often, men enter what should be their retirement years with an alienated family and no cash in the bank. The poverty that consumes these families cannot be measured by the men who have, in spite of their best efforts, no savings. It must be measured by the actions of the children who will do it to their children all over again. The cost to society is far beyond what you can imagine.
4) Follow me on this one… (no link, sorry) Jessie Doss used her common-law husband’s name and personal identifying information to obtain a license for a gas station-convenience store business in Alabama. Patrick Doss worked full-time at a machine shop 10 miles away. He dropped in on her every now and then. Jessie didn’t file tax returns for a couple of years. The tax man came knockin, Patrick was there and told him that Jessie would call them. Jessie didn’t call so they brought Patrick into court to extract the money from him.
Well, he just told them revenuers that his wife ran the business and he had nothing to do with the money owed. And, he didn’t know that his wife (now ex) had the tax license and hid the DOR notices until after she borrowed money in his name and then ran off with another man. Even the oil company sued Patrick for the gas she bought but dismissed the claim based on the evidence. Patrick lost his job, his wife, and is being hounded from bills she ran up with corporations and authorities.
A special thanks to Chief Administrative Law Judge, Bill Thompson, for his insight into this abuse.
5) Back here in Honolulu, the Star Bulletin published this article, “Mother ordered to hospital on June 6, 2009. Elly Rivera was found not guilty by reason of insanity of choking her 4-year-old daughter into unconsciousness. “Rivera had said voices told her they were going to burn her family, and she needed to kill her children painlessly to preserve their souls.”
And after the B.S. meter hits the bell the deputy city prosecutor, Jeen Kwak, says “I’m just glad, seriously, that it was the mental illness, because I can’t imagine a biological mother doing this knowingly. That would be so spooky.”
What is spooky is that they let this woman off “because of the threats from voices” and they nailed Ernie Gomez on domestic violence charges after he found out his wife was cheating on him. The only consistent thing about mental illness excuses in attempted murder cases in Hawaii is that women have it easy. Click here for my story on Ernie.
Way to go Circuit Judge Patrick Border. You really have instilled confidence that the system works… for psychopathic women.
6) Dr. Perri Klass of the NY Times has a bit more to say on bullies and their enablers in a June 8, 2009 article, ““At Last, Facing Down Bullies (and Their Enablers).” See my article on ““Women hurting women.”
It seems as though, now in 2009, bullying in school is being recognized as a gender neutral topic. In fact, the evidence seems to suggest that, when you include verbal abuse in the definition of bullying, women and girls seem to have the edge avoiding any consequences to their actions.
7) Why Reuters takes a light-hearted view of “Fewer divorces during financial gloom” I’ll never know. Reuters quotes a study by Grant Thornton accountants that appears to point to divorce trends that are linked to a sharp drop in property prices making it hard for couples to sell a joint home, and the credit crunch that dampens a desire to fund two separate households.
Where 80% of divorces are being initiated by women after their “honeymoon” stage of marriage has ended, it seems that these accountants have quickly summed up what women are all after; money. It doesn’t buy happiness but the lack of money sure does hurt one’s chances of being a happily married mum.
It makes you wonder what would happen if men all over the world suddenly decided to quit their jobs.
And-8) Not to belabor that point, “Stern murder trial combines sex and wealth,” one has to wonder why money and murder stories end up in the “Oddly Enough” category when the woman does the murdering.
Murder, when committed by a man against a woman, gets front page billing as a heinous and horrible deed. When committed by a woman against a man, well, it always seems justified. But is it?
To find out more about the inequity of the justice system against fathers and families visit my web site at http://www.mywiferanoffwithourkids.com/.
