And You Thought Your City Police Force Was Bad! And Your Governor...

(WARNING: this post could be upsetting to young children, especially girls. Hell, it upset me badly enough...)

Jeebus! Via Lindsay Beyerstein at In These Times, from the NYT:

...

And then the officer, Gilberto Valle, a six-year veteran of the New York Police Department, created a document on his computer, calling it a blueprint for “Abducting and Cooking.” In one of the most disturbing and unusual arrests involving a police officer, agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation took Officer Valle into custody on Wednesday after they uncovered several plots to kidnap, rape, cook and eat women.

“I was thinking of tying her body onto some kind of apparatus,” he wrote to a co-conspirator in one electronic communication recovered by law enforcement authorities. “Cook her over a low heat, keep her alive as long as possible.”

When the co-conspirator asked how big the officer’s oven was, Officer Valle replied, “Big enough to fit one of these girls if I folded their legs.”

Two law enforcement officials familiar with the inquiry said the officer’s estranged wife recently contacted the F.B.I. to report that Officer Valle, 28, viewed and kept disturbing items on his computer. The couple has a daughter, age 1.

The criminal complaint suggests that Officer Valle, who worked in the 26th Precinct in Manhattan and lives in Forest Hills, Queens, never followed through on any of the acts he is accused of discussing.

His lawyer, Julia L. Gatto, said the officer committed no crime. “At worst, this is someone who has sexual fantasies,” Ms. Gatto said at a hearing on Thursday in Federal District Court in Manhattan.

“There is no actual crossing the line from fantasy to reality,” she added.

...

Somehow, I am not comforted by that assertion...

Perhaps every large enough society has nut-jobs as genuinely evil as this. Or perhaps, as seems likely to me, our society has developed a widespread pathological misogyny, a context in which truly sick woman-hating wackos can emerge who contemplate their most disturbed and violent fantasies with an eye toward actually carrying them out. Valle certainly qualifies as disturbed and potentially violent toward women.

Good Hair, Bad Heart

So does Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who would cut off Planned Parenthood from the state's Texas Women's Health Program, an act on his part permitted yesterday by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, thereby endangering the lives of about half of the approximately 130,000 low-income Texas women served by clinics that have nothing to do with abortion at all:

Planned Parenthood's clinics served roughly half of the program's 130,000 low-income Texans, with the federal government picking up 90 percent of the bill. The clinics provided contraceptives, cancer screenings, and exactly zero abortions. Planned Parenthood's surgical centers, which do provide abortions, have never received WHP dollars or any other federal funding.

The case is somehow "still open in the lower court where it originated." And Planned Parenthood of Greater Texas is still fighting like hell, in court and out.

No word on whether Gov. Perry plans to cook and eat tens of thousands of poor women... maybe he's content with merely killing them slowly, just like Officer Valle. [/irony]