The Story of Stan McGee: More Evidence that Children Are Expendable in America

Posted: May 6, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: child sexual abuse, children, Crime, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | 29 Comments

Stan McGee

Carl Stanley McGee (he goes by “Stan”), a top aide to Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, has been hired as interim director of the new Massachusetts Gambling Commission. Unfortunately for McGee and for the commission, McGee was charged with sexual assault on a 15-year-old boy in Florida four years ago. Although most people involved are claiming this no big deal, some–including the boy and his family–are raising objections.

BACKGROUND

McGee, who is originally from Alabama, was a Rhodes Scholar and holds a degree from Harvard Law School. Before being hired by Governor Patrick, McGee worked for the WilmerHale law firm.

In 2004 McGee was actively involved in the effort to keep gay marriage legal in Massachusetts.

In 2005, McGee and his partner John Finley IV married, and they even featured in the trendy and exclusive New York Times Vows column.
 An excerpt:

The affably preppy Mr. Finley, who is also the founder and the director of the Epiphany School, a private, tuition-free middle school in Boston for children of poor families, has a classic New England pedigree, which includes a degree from Harvard, where his grandfather was a master of Eliot House. His family, he said, was staunchly Republican “until the second Bush administration.”

The bespectacled Mr. McGee is a Harvard Law School graduate and a former Rhodes scholar who now works as a junior partner in the Boston offices of WilmerHale. He has a serious mien, a booming drawl and a shock of prematurely white hair. His passion for Democratic politics is rooted in the Deep South, and he has long been interested in the “pernicious connection” between church and state, he said.

“John had more of a sense of faith being a positive force,” Mr. McGee said. Yet, of the two, he says Mr. Finley “is more impetuous, more Gestalt, more big picture.” He added, “We’re more yin-yang, more complementary, than opposites. John’s all sugar and I’m all lemon zest.”

Apparently, McGee is quite the man about town. In 2007 he was named one of the Globe’s 25 most stylish Bostonians. In the accompanying interview, he described his style as

English traditional with an Alabama twist. I am not someone who is always chasing fads or trends. I spent a fair amount of time at Oxford on a Rhodes fellowship. My style wasn’t created there, but I think it was reinforced. Many would call it traditional, but it’s also subversive and ironic. You cannot wear pinstripe suits and have my hair color.

ALLEGED SEXUAL ASSAULT

From The Boston Globe, February 7, 2008:

A top official in the Patrick administration has been placed on unpaid leave because he was arrested in Florida and charged with sexually assaulting a 15-year-old male in a steam room at a $500-a-night Gulf Coast resort.

Carl Stanley McGee, 38, assistant secretary for policy and planning, is scheduled to be arraigned next week for sexual battery in Lee County, Fla. McGee helped draft Patrick’s casino bill, life sciences legislation, and his plan to bring broadband Internet service to the farthest reaches of the state.

According to police reports, McGee was arrested Dec. 28 and accused of performing oral sex on the 15-year-old, who was a guest at The Gasparilla Inn & Club, a 95-year-old hotel and championship golf course in Boca Grande. McGee was held overnight on a $300,000 bond.

The Globe reported that McGee’s co-workers were surprised to learn of the charges, because they had been told he was out sick during that time.

McGee’s mug shot

Here’s a little more detail about the alleged assault.

McGee…met the boy, who police said is between 12 and 16 years of age, in a bathroom at the resort a day earlier where they engaged in small talk, according to the police report.

The boy told police he ran into McGee again the next day in the resort’s steam room. McGee sat next to him, removed his towel, rubbed the boy’s back and shoulders and performed oral sex on him, according to the police report.

The boy’s father contacted police, who spotted McGee at the resort based on a description from the boy.

In March the Lee County prosecutor decided not to press charges even though the police investigator disagreed.

…[A] child abuse investigator asked by the Florida governor’s office to review the case told the Cape Cod Times Thursday he found the boy’s story credible. He urged prosecutors to reconsider criminal charges, he said.

“The child reported it immediately, he identified (McGee) from the backseat of a police car, and he gave a good statement to police,” Terry Thomas, a special agent with 27 years of experience investigating child abuse cases with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, said Thursday.

Then he reiterated something he wrote in his report: “I have seen cases successfully prosecuted with less evidence than this case.”

There was just one more little bump in the road before McGee could breathe a sigh of relief and return to his glamorous life and brilliant career.

When the prosecutor declined to move forward with charges, Boston attorney Wendy Murphy filed suit in 2009 against McGee on behalf of the boy and his family and the case was settled in a confidential agreement in 2011, she said Thursday.

Hmmmm…sounds McGee had to pay a few bucks to get out of his little scrape, doesn’t it? I wonder how his husband reacted to all this? I checked and they were still married as of this year.

CURRENT CONTROVERSY

Fast forward to May 2012. After the hiring was reported in the Globe, some people started asking questions. But the gaming commission wasn’t worried.

Stephen Crosby, gaming commission chairman, said commissioners reviewed the incident and were convinced it should not be a factor in whether to hire him.

“Two of us had looked into it quite a bit and everyone we talked to from the state attorney in Florida, to his employer at the time Dan O’Connell, to Gov. Deval Patrick — everyone came to the same conclusion that there was zero substance to these charges,” Crosby said. “Given that there is zero substance to the allegations, to hold that against him would be inappropriate. He’s a superstar. He’s very intelligent and a first-rate public servant.”

A superstar who likes to take advantage of underage boys. But so what, “there is zero substance to the allegations” even though Stan settled a civil suit by the boy’s family.

Today, the Globe reported that the gaming commission didn’t actually investigate the incident or contact Florida law enforcement or prosecutors. In fact the chairman of the commission felt really sorry for poor Stan and probably couldn’t imagine him doing such a thing.

The chairman of the state’s new gambling commission last week called Carl Stanley McGee’s record pristine, saying he had reviewed the 2007 sexual assault charges against McGee in Florida and found them warrantless and meritless.

‘‘He went through this horrendous experience of being accused of a sexual harassment charge several years ago in Florida,’’ chairman Stephen Crosby told his colleagues Tuesday, according to a transcript of the meeting posted on the agency’s website, before they voted to name McGee interim executive director.

But today, Crosby admitted to the Globe that he didn’t really bother to order an investigation, he simply relied on what he read in “news reports.”

‘‘I did not do any independent analysis of the state attorney’s work, nor do I believe that would be appropriate,” he wrote in an e-mail to the Globe Friday. ‘‘Stan is presumed to be innocent of the allegations.’’

The Globe reported last week that law enforcement officials in Florida had believed the alleged victim, who was 15 but looked younger, and had urged the local prosecutor to bring charges against McGee soon after the alleged attack. They described a teenager who was scared but credible, providing consistent accounts of the incident.

Crosby claimed he had been assured by the Patrick administration that the charges were “meritless,” but according to the Globe that would have been impossible because the Patrick administration never investigated the charges either.

The alleged victim in the case, now a 20-year-old college student, reacted angrily Wednesday after reading that McGee’s former boss — Daniel O’Connell, formerly secretary of housing and economic development in the Patrick administration — had called the allegations false when interviewed by the Globe about McGee’s selection. The family then released the results of a 2008 investigation by Florida child welfare officials recommending that McGee be prosecuted.

The state investigation was conducted after the family complained to the Florida governor’s office about the local prosecutor’s decision not to press charges. An investigator for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement subsequently recommended that the prosecutor reconsider the charge of sexual battery on a child under 16 and add a second charge of lewd and lascivious acts upon a child under 16.

But the prosecutor still refused to press charges, and the family filed suit and won a settlement from McGee with the help of Massachusetts victim rights attorney Wendy Murphy.

And that’s the whole sordid story so far. I decided to tell it in detail, because I think this is probably typical of what happens when a successful, powerful person is accused of an offense against a child. Why do Americans place so little value on the lives of children?

And so another child predator goes free. Raise your hand if you think this was the only time Stan took advantage of a young boy. Perhaps another victim will come forward after all the publicity.

Brian Fischer Mocks Mitt Romney over Richard Grenell Resignation

Posted: May 5, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, open thread, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , , | 20 Comments

This is hilarious.

Two weeks ago, Mitt Romney former Bush administration official Richard Grenell as foreign policy spokesman for the Romney campaign. By the next day, anti-gay radio host Brian Fischer was attacking the move along with several other right wingers.

The day after Mr. Grenell was hired, Bryan Fischer, a Romney critic with the American Family Association, told nearly 1,400 followers on Twitter: “If personnel is policy, his message to the pro-family community: drop dead.” The next day, the conservative Daily Caller published an online column that summed up the anger of the Christian right, linking Mr. Grenell’s hiring to the appointment of gay judges to the New Jersey Supreme Court.

The Romney campaign was spooked. Campaign spokesperson Andrea Saul released a half-hearted defense:

Andrea Saul, a campaign spokeswoman, issued a statement of support for Mr. Grenell on April 24. But it made no mention of the attacks on his sexuality: “We hired Ric Grenell because he was the best qualified person for the job and has extensive experience representing the U.S. Mission to the U.N.”

But at the same time Grenell was repeatedly told not to say anything publicly for the campaign. Grenell finally read the writing on the wall after he organized a major media conference call on foreign policy.

It was the biggest moment yet for Mitt Romney’s foreign policy team: a conference call last Thursday, dialed into by dozens of news outlets from around the globe, to dissect and denounce President Obama’s record on national security.

But Richard Grenell, the political strategist who helped organize the call and was specifically hired to oversee such communications, was conspicuously absent, or so everyone thought.

It turned out he was at home in Los Angeles, listening in, but stone silent and seething. A few minutes earlier, a senior Romney aide had delivered an unexpected directive, according to several people involved in the call.

“Ric,” said Alex Wong, a policy aide, “the campaign has requested that you not speak on this call.” Mr. Wong added, “It’s best to lay low for now.”

That’s when Grenell decided to step down after only two weeks. Brian Fischer celebrated on his radio talk show, calling it a “huge win.”

Yesterday, Romney was running around telling people that he had wanted Grenell to stay with the campaign; yet Romney was stone cold silent for the entire two weeks of the controversy!

Then yesterday, Fischer made fun of Romney for caving to “a yokel like me.”

Fischer: Let me ask you this question, people have raised this question, if Mitt Romney can be pushed around, intimidated, coerced, coopted by a conservative radio talk show host in Middle America, then how is he going to stand up to the Chinese? How is he going to stand up to Putin? How is he going to stand up to North Korea if he can be pushed around by a yokel like me? I don’t think Romney is realizing the doubts that this begins to raise about his leadership. I don’t think for one minute that Mitt Romney did not want this guy gone; he wanted this guy gone because there was not one word of defense, not a peep, from the Romney camp to defend him. They just went absolutely stone cold silent, they put a bag over Grenell’s head, they even asked him to organize this phone conference and they didn’t even let him speak at the conference that he organized.

The quoted part begins around 4:00, but the whole thing is pretty entertaining, especially the part where Fischer talks about Romney’s “triple etch-a-sketch” and how Romney “went Saul Alinsky on me.”

New Orleans Jazz Fest Weekend Open Post

Posted: May 5, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: just because, New Orleans, open thread | Tags: | 3 Comments

Just because …

 

Creating False Equivalencies and other Nasty Campaign Tricks

Posted: May 5, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 elections, 2012 presidential campaign, 2012 primaries, Voter Ignorance | Tags: | 18 Comments

Politics has always been an ugly business in America.  All you have to do is follow the lives of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, or Andrew Jackson to get some idea of how the personal can be turned into the ugly political.  Rumor becomes fact.  Innuendo becomes headlines. Character assassination becomes de rigueur.  It’s hard to know exactly when modern politics went over the edge.  I would definitely have to point to folks like Karl Rove, Newt Gingrich, and Frank Luntz.  Although, Donald Segretti comes to mind too.  The age of social media and blogs has created a sleaze industry.  Andrew Breithbart was the sheistermeister of the internet and his site and sites like Red State continue the tradition of creating tropes, memes and canards to sucker an uninformed electorate.  AM radio and Fox News certainly don’t raise the standard either. Sleazy politics is on steroids these days.

The funny thing is that some things do speak of character and other things appear to be manufactured to create faux outrage.  I frankly believe that strapping your sick dog on the roof of your car for a long trip says something about your decision making and your humanity.  I don’t think a small child in a third world country eating dog meat because that’s what he’s been given to eat by his parents to be an equivalent morality play.

We are clearly in the swift boat age.  Right after the attack on 9-11 the politicizing of the event took off.  It was bound to happen.  I used to keep track of the number of times that Dubya used the term  “lessons of 9/11” to justify torture, invasion of a country that had nothing to do with the attack on 9/11, and signing into law severe restrictions on our civil liberties and personal privacy.  Every single SOTU address and re-election stump speech always contained the phrase “lessons of 9/11”.  I’m actually pretty outraged that the Romney and some elected officials think they’re innocent of trumping up the “lessons of 9/11” while accusing the President of Politicizing the Bin Laden killing.  Meanwhile, they’re politicizing the situation with a Chinese dissident while the Secretary of State is in active negotiations with the Chinese Government on the status of the dissident and his family.

All of this just drives me nuts.

The newest of these trumped up faux outrage moments is now called “Elizabeth Warren’s Birther Movement”.

If you are 1/32 Cherokee and your grandfather has high cheekbones, does that make you Native American? It depends. Last Friday, Republicans in Massachusetts questioned the racial ancestry of Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic Senate candidate. Her opponent, Senator Scott Brown, has accused her of using minority status as an American Indian to advance her career as a law professor at Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Texas. The Brown campaign calls her ties to the Cherokee and Delaware nations a “hypocritical sham.”

In a press conference on Wednesday, Warren defended herself, saying, “Native American has been a part of my story, I guess since the day I was born, I don’t know any other way to describe it.” Despite her personal belief in her origins, her opponents have seized this moment in an unnecessary fire drill that guarantees media attention and forestalls real debate.

This tactic is straight from the Republican cookbook of fake controversy. First, you need a rarefied elected office typically occupied by a certain breed of privileged men. Both the Presidency and the Senate fit this bill. Second, add a bit of interracial intrigue. It could be Kenyan economists eloping with Midwestern anthropologists, or white frontiersmen pairing with indigenous women. Third, throw in some suspicion about their qualifications and ambitions. Last but not least, demand documentation of ancestry and be dissatisfied upon its receipt. Voila! You have a genuine birther movement.

The Republican approach to race is to feign that it is irrelevant — until it becomes politically advantageous to bring it up. Birthers question Obama’s state of origin (and implicitly his multiracial heritage) in efforts to disqualify him from the presidency. They characterize him as “other.” For Warren, Massachusetts Republicans place doubts on her racial claims to portray her as an opportunistic academic seeking special treatment. In both birther camps, opponents look to ancestral origins as the smoking gun, and ride the ambiguity for the duration.

My children are 1/4 Japanese.  My youngest daughter has absolutely no physical traits that would lead you to believe she has a Japanese Grandmother.  My oldest daughter definitely has the mixed race look.  But that’s not the point.  Neither is the actual fraction or what’s historically been called the number of ‘drops of blood’.

Both of my children have a mixed identity because we fully embraced my husband’s mixed ancestry.  We eat Japanese food.  The kids went to Japan school for a period of time and can speak and write a bit of Japanese.  My mother-in-law lived with us and our home was filled with her cooking, her language, and her upbringing.  The girls also know about their family history from Japan and they’ve explored its culture.  We also talk about a lot of different things including  that my uncle was very responsible for the argument on the Japanese Internment policy to the Supreme Court for the Roosevelt Administration and that another uncle by marriage on my father’s side lost a cousin to the Baatan Death March.  His aunt was appalling rude to my husband every time we went to family reunions.  Both  heritages are a party of our family story and our family traditions. We discuss the anti-Japanese hysteria of the World War 2 period, the Japanese War atrocities, and the H Bombs that ended the war as well as my mother-in-law’s experience as a starving teenager in Kyoto who had to smuggle rice in her kimono.  All of this is a part of our heritage as melting pot Americans.  When I first walked to the counter of the Japanese Grocery store here in New Orleans with my items I was told “You shop like Japanese housewife.”  I am genetically as WASPY as they come. That’s what comes from being brought into a culture as a teen and surrounded by it for 20 years. There’s a very real part of me that IS Japanese now.  I am a New Orleanian after 16 years living in the inner city of New Orleans and being surrounded by all if its rich heritage and neighborhoods. These identities will stay with me no matter where I go.

That’s the deal to me.  If Elizabeth Warren feels connections to her Native American Ancestry and if its part of her family story and tradition, do we really need to question if her ‘drops of blood’ justify her connection and her identity?

Discussing real issues and real moral character is difficult in this age of swift boating, contrived outrage, and false equivalencies.  It’s especially difficult because so many groups can get access to money and the media and push through some pretty outrageous tropes.   Unfortunately, most of these tropes are head line grabbers and the customer-hungry media will jump on it and ride it as long as possible.  It is really shameful that the noble pursuit of maintaining a healthy democracy seems to include such manufactured tit-for-tat.  US voters deserve better.

Caturday: ‘Spanish Harlem Mona Lisa’ edition

Posted: May 5, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: just because | 58 Comments

“I’m wearing the damn sombrero. Now, you be the piñata.”

Good morning, newsjunkies — and welcome to May 5th!

A little history blurb to start your morning off… via CNN, Cinco de Mayo a Mexican import? No, it’s as American as July 4, prof says:

In his interview with CNN, Hayes-Bautista stated: “Now it’s become this big commercial holiday and a wonderful opportunity to get services and products in front of the Latino market and it even got its own postage in 1996 and in 2005 President Bush even had a Cinco de Mayo celebration at the White House.

“But if you ask why is anyone celebrating, no one knows. And then you get some people who say it shouldn’t be celebrated at all because it’s a foreign holiday — and yet it’s as American a holiday as the Fourth of July,” he said.

“No one has seemed to link it to the Civil War,” he added about what he called groundbreaking research.

UCLA history professor Stephen Aron said Hayes-Bautista’s finding is significant.

“For the general public (and even for many historians), the California origins of the Cinco de Mayo holiday come as quite a surprise (since the holiday is so generally presumed to be a Mexican holiday that was only recently imported into the United States),” Aron said in an e-mail to CNN. “That Hayes-Bautista’s book ties these origins to the American Civil War is also of great significance.”

While conducting research as director of UCLA’s Center for the Study of Latino Health and Culture, David Hayes-Bautista — a UCLA professor of medicine — scoured Spanish-languish papers in California and Oregon during the 1800s, which led him to the connection between the Civil War and the Cinco de Mayo battle:

“I’m seeing how in the minds of the Spanish-reading public in California that they were basically looking at one war with two fronts, one against the Confederacy in the east and the other against the French in the south,” Hayes-Bautista said in an interview with CNN.

Very neat stuff, I must say! Check it out.

I plan to add Hayes-Bautista’s book, El Cinco de Mayo: An American Tradition, to my reading list. (You can read Chapter One at the link, which is on the UC Press website, or on your kindle via Amazon.)

Another fantastic read this morning, via Buzzfeed’s Amy Odell — Are Teenagers Better At Solving The Thin Model Problem Than “Vogue” Editors?:

Extremely thin girls have been the ideal in fashion for years — and this may be the most pushback against the super thin movement we’ve seen in a decade. So if you really are sick of it, Vogue editors, actually do something about it. Stop talking about it, stop drawing up toothless guidelines that fit into tidy press releases, and just change it. Don’t call in the tiny clothing samples for shoots. Don’t hire girls who are so thin you wonder if they have eating disorders. Don’t only shoot Adele from the neck up. And don’t talk about it. Don’t write it down. Just do it.

Like 14-year-old Julia Bluhm, from Maine, did yesterday, when she led a protest outside of Seventeen magazine’s New York office to try get the editors to feature one spread a month that features girls with a realistic appearance, who aren’t photoshopped. (She gained entré to the Seventeen editor’s office to discuss her concerns, but the magazine would not say if they would start meeting Bluhm’s painfully reasonable demands.) She did it. She up and went to New York one day, with her friends, with her 24,000 signature-strong petition in support of her cause, and just did what she needed to do.

A little self-disclosure here: I battled anorexia up close and personal during my entire adolescence through my twenties. I am a survivor of that battle. It’s a mental and emotional war that has to be refought in different ways, even after one is fortunate enough to regain physical health. I have been hesitant to share this part of my life with the Sky Dancing community up until now, even though I consider y’all my family of sorts. However, I think you can gather from my blogging on gender politics et al. that the cause of supporting women and girls so that they can lift themselves up is one that is very near and dear to me and comes from the bottom of my heart.

I see a huge void in the media–an entire audience spanning multiple generations that is not being spoken to in any comprehensive, consistent, cohesive way–at least not by any major magazine. My (very very pipe)dream job after getting a postgrad degree (either in psych or nutrition, or possibly both! yes I hope to be in school forever, that is the goal –heh!) is to become founder and editor of my own magazine for girls and women–Mona Mag, as it is tentatively titled. (Emphasis on PIPE dream.)

And with that–a baby step from my pseudonym! You can call me ‘Spanish Harlem Mona Lisa‘…or Mona the Wonk for short 😉

It’s been a long road full of baby steps. At age 14, I was too busy–starving my body, mind, and spirit to near-death–to organize a protest. The media diet I was fed as a child can be summed up by saying… during those days, Monica (my namesake) and Rachel on Friends got thinner and thinner as the actresses who portrayed them broke a glass ceiling in women’s pay.

All this to say… I salute the young Julia Bluhm for muckraking it up right outside Seventeen‘s door. What a bright young shero star she sounds like!

And before I wrap this up… one final link for you to check out this morning, from earlier in the week, about the DC couple who recently launched the website ‘A Might Girl‘:

(Cliff Chiang – DC Comics)

A better approach for those of us concerned about the messages all things princess send our girls may be the one taken by D.C. residents Carolyn Danckaert and Aaron Smith.

The couple has just launched a new Web site called “A Mighty Girl.” It’s a repository of books and movies with girl empowerment themes.

“A major impetus for us in creating the site was the frustration we’ve experienced when seeking out presents for our four nieces over the past 12 years,” Danckaert said.

For Princess Week, they created a special page for “independent princesses.” It highlights classic and new works “with a non-traditional interpretation of what it means to be a princess,” Danckaert said.

Some of the books on the site include “The Apple-Pip Princess,” by Jane Ray (Candlewick, 2008) about a budding environmentalist, “The Invisible Princess,” by Faith Ringgold (Knopf, 1998) about an African American girl during slavery and “Princess Pigsty,” by Cornelia Funke (The Chicken House, 2007 ) about a princess who is banished from castle life to live with pigs and finds herself much happier.

Now, I don’t hate the concept of a Princess Week entirely–but I do LOVE  and much prefer A Mighty Girl’s version of it 🙂

The Wapo link continues:

It’s true that women are reaching new educational and professional heights, and are also embracing more equality-minded attitudes. Still, the traditional gender messages are often strictly enforced when it comes to children.

Disney’s “Princess Week” is one example. There is ample evidence during the rest of the year, too.

Remember the introduction of girl-themed Legos with which girls are encouraged to build not a rocket ship, but a beauty salon? Remember the viral video [sic dead link; youtube removed] from this past holiday season of a little girl ranting that boys had superheroes but she had only pink frou-frou toys to choose from?

Ok, let me interject here real quick to say–if you missed that video during the holidays, you must watch it RIGHT NOW.

Back to the blog piece:

“We’ve always been dismayed by the extreme gender segregation that you see in mainstream toy stores and by the content of the toys designated as ‘girls’ toys,’” Danckaert said.

“We searched online for sites with girl empowerment product recommendations and didn’t find anything very comprehensive, although there did seem to be a lot of other people looking for these types of toys and book.”

So she and Smith, both of whom have backgrounds in advocacy work and technology, decided to create their own online store.

Ah, two advocates after my own heart.

Alright, well that’s it for me… your turn in the comments, Sky Dancers. Let’s hear what’s on your Cinco de Mayo read+rant list!

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