Monday Reads: Nice Bridge, it would be a shame if sumpin’ would happen to it
Posted: January 20, 2014 Filed under: morning reads | Tags: Chris Christie, George Washington Bridge, MSNBC 45 Comments
Good Morning!
Just when you think Governor CrankyPants of New Jersey couldn’t be that corrupt, more stuff starts leaking out about him.
Hey, that’s a nice bridge you have there. It would be a shame if anything happened to it.
Hoboken Mayor Dawn Zimmer confirmed Sunday that she spent several hours privately with federal investigators, a day after leveling stunning accusations that Gov. Chris Christie’s administration held out Hurricane Sandy relief funds until she would sign off on a private development project, according to media reports.
Zimmer gave the U.S. Attorney’s office her journal and other documents, she said to NBC.
“As they pursue this investigation, I will provide any requested information and testify under oath about the facts of what happened when the Lieutenant Governor [Kim Guadagno] came to Hoboken and told me that Sandy aid would be contingent on moving forward with a private development project,” she said.
Asked by Candy Crowley on CNN why she had waited until now, with the scandal swirling around the Christie administration’s purported payback move to close the George Washington Bridge after the mayor of Fort Lee refused an endorsement, Zimmer said “I really didn’t think anyone would believe me and quite frankly, if I came forward, no one believes me, then I’m going to put Hoboken in an even worse position and my number one priority as a mayor of Hoboken is to fight to make sure that we can get as many Sandy funds as possible.”
Then, some Dem who did endorse Christie fessed up.
Long Branch, N.J. Mayor Adam Schneider (D) on Saturday said he got “enhanced” access to state officials after he endorsed Gov.
Chris Christie (R) during his re-election campaign.
Schneider told the Washington Post that a few months after he endorsed the governor, he contacted his office about an issue he couldn’t get resolved by the state utility board
“I’m not talking to any more underlings, and I’m not being delegated to,” Schneider told Christie’s aides, a strategy that proved successful. “I got what I needed.”
The Long Branch mayor believes the help from Christie’s office can be attributed to the endorsement, even though the governor never promised him anything.
Governor CrankyPants has decided that it’s all MSNBC’s fault.
Here’s the full statement from Reed (emphasis added):
“MSNBC is a partisan network that has been openly hostile to Governor Christie and almost gleeful in their efforts attacking him, even taking the unprecedented step of producing and airing a nearly three-minute attack ad against him this week. Governor Christie and his entire administration have been helping Hoboken get the help they need after Sandy, with the city already having been approved for nearly $70 million dollars in federal aid and is targeted to get even more when the Obama Administration approves the next rounds of funding. The Governor and Mayor Zimmer have had a productive relationship, with Mayor Zimmer even recently saying she’s ‘very glad’ he’s been our Governor. It’s very clear partisan politics are at play here as Democratic mayors with a political axe to grind come out of the woodwork and try to get their faces on television.”
“Our journalism speaks for itself,” MSNBC spokesperson Lauren Skowronski told Business Insider in response to Christie’s office.
The billionaire Kenneth G. Langone, Mr. Christie’s most devoted fund-raiser and loudest cheerleader, got in touch with him in recent days. Mr. Langone said he told the governor that he must be smarter about those who surround him.
“I conveyed the importance of the decisions he makes about the people around him and their qualification and their competence, including common sense,” said Mr. Langone, who called the politically motivated closure of lanes onto the George Washington Bridge “beyond the pale.”
“It upset the hell out of me,” he said.
Mr. Christie has told friends and contributors that he can weather the slings and scrutiny, even as he complains about what he sees as “piling on” by his enemies and a once-admiring news media, according to people told of his thinking, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to be associated with comments that could upset the governor or his aides. Mr. Christie has leaned hard on his wife and brother for advice, in long, searching conversations. (The governor could not bring himself to watch the traffic jam-themed parody of “Born to Run” sung by his idol, Bruce Springsteen, on “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon,” though he was told by his college-age son, Andrew, that it was funny.)
Inside Mr. Christie’s inner circle, advisers are disputing public opinion polls, which show a noticeable drop in his popularity and job approval rating, saying that his previous sky-high numbers were inflated by election-year advertising.
Several Republican governors said they were heartened by Mr. Christie’s efforts to address the controversy head-on. So long as he is telling the truth and was not personally involved in the shutdown in Fort Lee, they said, Mr. Christie will remain a major force within the party.
You just gotta love the entire party and how it just continually strives to be out of touch with reality, doncha? Just so you know, Langone is basically the guy that founded Home Depot. It’s one of the stores on my boycott list.
Is it a law of evolution that the fatter the wallet, the thinner the skin? The wallet of Ken Langone, the billionaire co-founder of Home Depot, is so fat he he must sit on it funny, yet there he was the other day, crabbing to CNBC about Pope Francis’ missive to the effect that the rich are indifferent to the poor.
Langone was careful to attribute his complaints to an unnamed fellow plutocrat, who being a rich person ostensibly took the Pope’s remarks as an insult. Langone claimed his friend was so upset by the Pope’s remarks that he was reconsidering a donation for the renovation of New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
If Langone sounds a little like the guy with an embarrassing condition opening his medical consultation with the words, “Doc, I’ve got this friend…,” so be it. Langone told CNBC he advised Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York that the pope should cool it with the finger-pointing at the rich. (“You get more with honey than with vinegar,” he said.) Dolan promised to explain to the reluctant donor that he was “misunderstanding” the pope’s words and suggested he would explicate the pope’s words in a more emollient way. “And then,” Dolan said hopefully, “he’s going to say, ‘OK, if that’s the case, count me in for St. Patrick’s Cathedral.'”
Remember, this is all about a $180-million project to renovate the big cathedral on Fifth Avenue, which suggests that the priorities of the New York diocese may not leave so much room for “misunderstanding” the pope’s message.
That message, in part, was that “while the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few…. A new tyranny is thus born, invisible and often virtual, which unilaterally and relentlessly imposes its own laws and rules.”
Langone hates Obama needless to say. He was active against the President as he sought reelection and was pandering to Christie prior to Romney’s nomination.
Langone is a prodigious donor, having given millions to New York University and New York City charities, including the Harlem Children’s Zone. He’s also given hundreds of thousands to conservative groups, like the Republican National Committee, Karl Rove’s American Crossroads super-PAC, and the American Action Network, the dark-money outfit run by former Minnesota Sen. Norm Coleman. Langone strongly backed his friend Ross Perot for president in 1992 and was a bundler for Giuliani in 2008.
Last summer, after the White House and Congress (whose members Langone compared to “sex fiends” when around money) clashed over lifting the federal government’s debt ceiling,Langone branded Obama “petulant” and “unpresidential” on CNBC. He even ripped the president for entering the Oval Office without a suit jacket on—something, Langone insisted, Ronald Reagan never would have done. (PolitiFact rated this claim “mostly false”; Reagan sometimes wore track jackets in the Oval Office on weekends.) Obama is “not bringing us together,” Langone said. “Divide us and we all lose. This has got to stop.”
He’s just another one of those billionaires that thinks he knows what’s best for the rest of us and that mostly means fattening his wallet.
Meanwhile, the news about the chemical leak from West Virginia is awful. The Ohio River is tainted and Cinncinatti closed its intake valves to prevent the chemical from entering the tri-state water supply.
The chemical leaked from a tank along the Elk River in West Virginia last week. The Elk feeds into the Ohio. Traces of the chemical were found at the Meldahl Dam around 9 p.m. Tuesday and were detected at a GCWW intake around 7 a.m.
“Right at the intakes,” Jerry Schulte, a manager with ORSANCO said. “The intakes have been shut down so that’s not a concern.”
GCWW stored water and alternate sources to supply customers until the chemical plume passed Wednesday night or Thursday.
The Northern Kentucky Water District said that it has also shut down its Ohio River intakes as a precautionary measure while the remnants of the spill passes.
Water treatment experts said the water could have been treated with activated charcoal and made safe for customers to use, but
Deborah Metz, a superintendent of water quality and treatment with GCWW, said, “We figure the least risky scenario is for us to just let it go on by.”
The environmental impact will be tracked by comparing fish counts and even bug populations from this spring to last spring.
“We won’t be able to detect the material it will be long gone from the system but if it had an impact on the systems we might be able to see it,” Schulte said.
Freedom Industries has filed for bankruptcy in order to avoid lawsuits and fines. This should not be possible under US Law but you know how this country is about the so-called job makers. What would be doing right now if this was Al Quaida that poisoned that many people?
Freedom Industries, the company that fouled thousands of West Virginians’ water with a chemical leak into the Elk River last week, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy Friday.
Freedom owes $3.6 million to its top 20 unsecured creditors, according to bankruptcy documents. The company also owes more than $2.4 million in unpaid taxes to the Internal Revenue Service, and the IRS has placed at least three liens on Freedom’s property, demanding payment.
The unpaid taxes date back to at least 2000, according to a lien filed in 2010.
Under the bankruptcy code, Chapter 11 permits a company to reorganize and continue operating.
The filing also puts a hold on all of the lawsuits filed against Freedom Industries. Since the leak last week, about a mile and a half upriver from West Virginia Water American’s plant in Charleston, about 25 lawsuits have been filed against Freedom in Kanawha Circuit Court. The company also faces a federal lawsuit.
The company’s assets and liabilities are each listed as between $1 million and $10 million in the bankruptcy filing. Chemstream Holdings Inc. is the sole owner of Freedom Industries, according to the filing. Gary Southern, who is identified as Freedom’s president, signed all of the bankruptcy documents.
On Thursday, a source close to Freedom Industries, who asked to remain anonymous because of pending lawsuits, told The Charleston Gazette that Chemstream Holdings is owned by J. Clifford Forrest of Kittanning, Pa.
So, here’s the bottom line on that move.
A bankruptcy filing halts most litigation, forcing plaintiffs to vie with other creditors for a share of a company’s assets. More than two dozen lawsuits have been filed since the accident, which led President Barack Obama to declare a state of emergency for the affected counties. The state attorney general is investigating the spill.
Shorter bottom line: This pits bankers and investors against people damaged by the company. It protects the company’s assets.
I drove south to the point where I-79 South ends, and you pick up I-64 West to head into the interstate exchanges on the freeway that runs the length of downtown. And there, about a mile and a half out, I smelled it, smelled the odor of the MCHM coming in through the car vents.
I keep hearing the odor described as “licorice.” That’s not quite right, at least to me. But I can see how you’d make that association. The smell was both sweet and sharp, and strangely light, at least in comparison to the smells I associated with chemical leaks growing up. But it was there, suddenly, like someone had flipped a switch. It wasn’t there, and then the next second, there it was.
I-64 West into Charleston, coming from southbound, unrolls in a big left-hand curve just after you come into the city. I’ve driven this route hundreds, maybe thousands of times. I grew up here. I recognize every building from the freeway—the banks, the hospitals, the hotels and apartment complexes, all of it. In the deepest part of that big left-hand curve, down off the freeway and to my left, there was West Virginia-American Water Company, and the smell suddenly became very, very strong.
On my way in, the rain had let up. Now there was low-lying fog, white-and-gray tufts and tendrils of vapor rising up from the street level all around the small wood-frame houses and gas stations and grocery stores. The sky was dark, and the fog was in the streets, and the smell was everywhere. I looked at the water company, and I smelled the air, and suddenly I was filled—I mean filled—with a rage that was quite sudden, very unexpected, and utterly comprehensive.
We can never predict what moments are going to affect us this way. I’m no dewy-eyed innocent about chemical leaks. They were regular occurrences when I was a kid. On the merits, this doesn’t seem right now to be the worst industrial threat West Virginia has ever endured. Hell, it isn’t the most immediately threatening one my family has endured personally; that would be the bromine leak in my very own hometown of Malden in the 1980s, the one that forced a complete evacuation of the entire town until the leak could be contained.
But something about this confluence, the way I had to bring potable water to my family from two hours north, the strange look of the landscape wreathed in rain and mist, the stench of a chemical that was housed directly upstream from the water company—something about all of that made me absolutely buoyant in my rage. This was not the rational anger one encounters in response to a specific wrong, nor even the righteous anger that comes from an articulate reaction to years of systematic mistreatment. This was blind animal rage, and it filled my body to the limits of my skin.
And this is what I thought:
To hell with you.
Do go read the entire thing. It’s worth it.
So, at least today is a Holiday and we are celebrating the life of some one who fought for social justice. Today we celebrate the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
It took 32 years to get this holiday into law when it was signed by Ronald Reagan in 1983. It took until 2000 to get all 50 states to recognize the holiday.
The House took up the bill in 1983 and it passed by 53 votes. Democrats O’Neill and Jim Wright, along with Republicans Jack Kemp and Newt Gingrich, gave speeches supporting the King holiday.
But getting the bill passed in the Senate would be contentious. Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina openly opposed it. At first, Helms introduced a filibuster, and then he presented a 400-page file that accused Dr. King of being a communist.
Senator Ted Kennedy criticized Helms and Senator Daniel Moynihan called the document “filth” and threw it on the Senate floor.
Despite Helms, the bill passed the Senate by 12 votes–even South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond voted in favor of the King holiday.
President Ronald Reagan signed the bill in November 1983. The first federal King holiday was celebrated in 1986.
It took longer for the 50 states to adopt the holiday. By 1986, 17 states had already adopted it. But there was strong resistance in Arizona to passing a state holiday.
The fight between state legislators came to a head when the King holiday was put up for an Arizona voter referendum in November 1990.
At that point, entertainers had started boycotting the state in protest, and the National Football League threatened to move the 1993 Super Bowl from Tempe if the holiday was defeated at the polls.
The King holiday lost in a two-part voter referendum and the NFL made good on its threat, taking the Super Bowl to Southern California and costing the state an estimated $500 million in revenue.
Arizona voters approved the King holiday two years later.
There was also a fight in South Carolina over the holiday. It was one of the last states to approve a paid King holiday for state employees in 2000.
The state’s governor had tried to link the holiday to a commitment to allow the state house to fly the Confederate battle flag. Instead, he signed a bill that approved the King holiday along with a Confederate Memorial Day celebrated in May.
Have a great day! What’s on your reading and blogging list?
Caturday Reads
Posted: January 18, 2014 Filed under: Barack Obama, Crime, morning reads, U.S. Politics | Tags: Bob Woodward, Chicago street shootings, children killed by guns, Chris Christie, cognitive development in children, Delaware Valley Charter High School, George W. Bush, Glenn Greenwald, Krystal Dikes, New Mexico school shooting, NRA, NSA reform, Philadelphia school shooting, Rahelle Godfread, Robert Gates, Shawn Bair, shootings in public places, signals intelligence 34 Comments
Good Morning!!
It’s another three day weekend, and it’s really quiet around here. I never thought about MLK Day being a big vacation weekend, but I was out in the car yesterday and the streets were dead. Where do these people go–the ones with enough money to get out of town? Florida? New Hampshire? I don’t know, but it’s nice when they aren’t clogging up the streets with their cars.
I expect it will be a slow news weekend too, except for the football games tomorrow. Let’s see what I can find out there in cyberspace.
Of course there’s the speech President Obama gave yesterday on NSA reforms. To be honest, I didn’t watch it. I’d rather just wait and see what happens. Here are a few reactions to Obama’s proposals.
Of course Glenn Greenwald hated it, as he wrote in an op-ed for the Guardian: Obama’s NSA ‘reforms’ are little more than a PR attempt to mollify the public. I tried to slog my way through it, but I couldn’t. He’s such a terrible writer–always nearly hysterical with rage and with absolutely no sense of humor to take the edge of his sarcasm and bile. He did end with a not-so-subtle threat to keep releasing U.S. intelligence secrets until America finally gives up spying altogether and accedes to Greenwald’s demands.
Today’s speech should be seen as the first step, not the last, on the road to restoring privacy. The causes that drove Obama to give this speech need to be, and will be, stoked and nurtured further until it becomes clear to official Washington that, this time around, cosmetic gestures are plainly inadequate.
After all, according to Glenn, there’s really no danger from terrorists or hostile countries like China and Russia. The entire goal of the national security apparatus and of signals intelligence is the instill fear in the populace.
A few more reasoned reactions:
Adam Martin at New York Magazine collects reactions from a number of people: So What Did People Think of Obama’s NSA Speech?
NPR’s Carrie Johnson offers: 5 Takeaways From The President’s NSA Speech.
Doyle McManus at the LA Times, who has been critical of both Snowden and NSA: A new day at the NSA — President Obama takes a step back from unfettered surveillance.
Individually, the concrete steps President Obama announced Friday toward reforming the National Security Agency‘s surveillance programs were modest. Taken together, though, they signal the end of an era of unfettered escalation in U.S. intelligence-gathering.
Since its establishment in 1952, the NSA’s history has been one of almost nonstop expansion. But for most of that time, the agency still faced limits on what kind of information it could gather and in the legal strictures that governed its programs.
That changed after the terrorist attacks of 2001, which prompted then-President George W. Bush to demand an all-out effort to collect every scrap of information available.
His order came at a time when the Internet, email, instant messaging and low-cost voice communications were pouring an unprecedented amount of private information into a global electronic network, available for sophisticated eavesdroppers to tap.
Bush brushed aside legal constraints and ordered the NSA to collect domestic telephone and email communications without court warrants. Later, Congress and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court legalized much of that program retroactively, including the NSA’s collection of domestic telephone call records, known as metadata. The principle driving intelligence-gathering had become collect first, ask questions later.
Obama’s proposals are step back from that rule.
Read the rest at the link. I have no idea what will happen, but at least Obama is open to talking about it, unlike Bush/Cheney.
I thought this article at Mediaite was pretty funny: Robert Gates Wanted to Recruit Bob Woodward for the CIA.
Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates shared an interesting detail during a conversation with POLITICO’s Mike Allen about his new book: he wanted to recruit iconic Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward for the Central Intelligence Agency. Yes, that’s right, Gates wanted one of the men who broke Watergate wide open to move to the government side because of his “extraordinary ability” to pry details out of people.
Gates admitted he wasn’t exactly happy with Woodward’s assessment of his book, but beyond that he said he has great respect for Woodward, and admitted he would have liked to bring Woodward into the CIA because he has a gift that not everyone has.
“He has an extraordinary ability to get otherwise responsible adults to spill his guts to him, on background, nothing there for the historians, but his ability to get people to talk about stuff they shouldn’t be talked about is just extraordinary and maybe unique.”
Seriously, does Gates not know that Woodward began his career in naval intelligence “where he was a part of a group which briefed top intelligence officials; at one time he was close to Admiral Robert O. Welander, being communications officer on the USS Fox under Welander’s command.” Woodward even briefed Al Haig during the Nixon administration.
Woodward knew nothing about journalism until the Washington Post installed him at a small newspaper in the DC suburbs for a year so he could get some on-the-job experience before moving up to the big time? Before that, Woodward was involved in briefing Bernstein was the writer on the Watergate story and Woodward had the CIA/government connections.
Gates should know that once you’re in the “intelligence community,” you never really leave. Please forgive me for this, but I’m going to link to a post by Larry Johnson from 2005: Blowing the Whistle on Bob Woodward.
Woodward has been the consumate insider while cultivating the image of the hard charging investigative reporter. He is anything but, and it is time to blow the whistle on his incestuous relationship with certain government officials. The fact that the Washington Post is still covering for this joker says volumes about the decline of the Post.
When he appears on Larry King Live Tonight maybe he will answer a longstanding question, “When did he resign from Naval Intelligence?”
Johnson then reproduces a letter to the editor of the Tampa Tribune by Len Colodny. Colodny is coauthor of a book about Watergate called Silent Coup: The Removal of a President. Check it out.
This is interesting. Greg Sargent thinks President Obama might decide to encourage an increase in the minimum wage with an executive order.
Here’s some welcome news. At his meeting with Democratic Senators last night, President Obama indicated that he is giving serious consideration to executive action designed to raise the minimum wage for employees of federal contractors, according to one Senator who was present.
Proponents want to see this executive action happen on the merits — theybelieve it could impact as many as two million employees of federal contractors, and would help the economy. But they also believe such action could give a boost of momentum to the push for a minimum wage hike for all American workers, which obviously would require Congressional approval, but is currently facing Republican opposition.
Senator Bernie Sanders told me in an interview that the president took the idea very seriously when asked about it last night.
Surely some Democrats could applaud Obama if he did that. Of course the Greenwald cult followers will ignore it, because it would only improve the lives of working class people and do nothing for the “privacy” of upper middle class white males.
These days it seems we’re getting shootings in public places on an almost daily basis. I posted about a grocery store shooting in Elkhart, Indiana a couple of days ago. The victims and the shooter have now been identified.
What happened, police say, is 22-year-old Shawn Bair walked into the store Wednesday at about 9:30 p.m. Surveillance video shows him making phone calls and texting people….
Police say Bair pulled out a .44 caliber semi-automatic handgun, and shot and killed 20-year-old Krystal Dikes. Police say she had just started working at the store stocking the shelves. Friends say she was a caring, compassionate person.
“I don’t know what his goal was, I don’t know what his aim was, mad at the world. There’s definitely a family grieving for her. Definitely. And lots of friends,” said Dikes’ boyfriend Kyle Barnett.
Also murdered was 44-year-old Rachelle Godfread who was shopping. Bair then held the manager of the store at gunpoint until police arrived.
Police still aren’t sure why Bair, who police have been in contact with before, decided to go on this rampage but his Facebook page is filled with violent images and posts. In one post he says he knows he’s going hell. One from 2010 says he realized everybody should die, no matter what race or religion.
According to the Chicago Tribune,
Rachelle Godfread, 44, had recently moved from southern Indiana to Elkhart, where she was closer to her son who played basketball at the South Bend campus of Indiana University. Now that college student has lost his mom.
Yesterday there was a shooting in a school gymnasium in Philadelphia. CNN reports:
A warrant has been issued for the arrest of a juvenile suspect in a shooting that wounded two students at a Philadelphia school Friday, police said Saturday.
The shooting occurred at Delaware Valley Charter High School.
The suspect is not in custody, but police expect him, accompanied by an attorney, to turn himself in Saturday morning.
The shooter was in the school gym with seven other students, city police Commissioner Charles Ramsey said.
Some were playing basketball and others standing in a corner when he pulled a gun and fired.
The victims, a boy and a girl, both age 15, were hit in the arm. They were taken to a local hospital, police said, and their wounds are not life-threatening.
The Friday afternoon incident was at least the second shooting at or near a school this week in the Olney neighborhood.
And then there are the plain old street shootings. Again from the Chicago Tribune: Shootings leave 2 dead, 7 injured since Friday afternoon.
Two men have been killed and seven people injured in shootings on the South and West sides since Friday afternoon, according to police.
The violent start to the weekend, which came as downtown temperatures hovered in the teens, included a shooting that injured three people on a Dan Ryan Expressway ramp and another that left a 15-year-old girl hospitalized.
Police were called to the first of Friday’s homicides about 5:20 p.m., after gunfire rang out in 4900 block of West Huron Street in the Austin neighborhood.
Officers found 21-year-old Timothy Travis on the ground, bleeding from a gunshot wound to the head, authorities said.
Travis, who lived in the 4900 block of West Quincy Street, was pronounced dead on the scene at 5:34 p.m., according to the Cook County medical examiner’s office.
Of course the “experts” are “weighing in”: Experts: N. Mexico suspect, other young shooters show preteens’ impulse actions.
(CNN) — The New Mexico middle school shooting allegedly by a 12-year-old boy highlights how such gunfire is now occurring in America’s earlier grades, raising disturbing issues on whether such youngsters know the devastating consequences of such violence and on how they should then be adjudicated, experts say.
“It’s becoming more and more common, especially in the middle-school age, for these kids to be committing these violent acts,” said Sheela Raja, clinical psychologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago….
That tally includes last October’s shooting in Sparks, Nevada, by a 12-year-old boy who killed himself after fatally shooting a teacher; a 2010 shooting in a Madison, Alabama, by a ninth-grader who fatally shot a boy, 14, in the head; a 2000 shooting in Mount Morris Township, Michigan, in which a 6-year-old boy killed another 6-year-old; and the 1999 shooting in Deming, New Mexico, in which a 12-year-old boy killed a classmate, 13.
Raja explains that children at these ages do not have the cognitive development to restrain strong impulses or to understand the full implications of their actions.
“People should remember that a 12-year-old is barely past the age of believing in Santa Claus,” said Wendy Walsh, a behavior expert and psychologist.
“While there is great variance in cognitive development, plenty of kids this age are unable to fully comprehend that death is permanent,” Walsh said. “Add to that the impact of violent video games where ‘downed’ characters get up again, and there is good reason to assume this child does not think like an adult.”
Wouldn’t it make sense to keep guns out the hands of young kids then? I know, stupid question.
From the NYT: In Age of School Shootings, Lockdown Is the New Fire Drill.
For students across the country, lockdowns have become a fixture of the school day, the duck-and-cover drills for a generation growing up in the shadow of Columbine High School in Colorado and Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. Kindergartners learn to hide quietly behind bookshelves. Teachers warn high school students that the glow of their cellphones could make them targets. And parents get regular text messages from school officials alerting them to lockdowns.
School administrators across the country have worked with police departments in recent years to create detailed plans to secure their schools, an effort that was redoubled after the December 2012 shootings in Newtown, Conn. At the whiff of a threat, teachers are now instructed to snap off the lights, lock their doors and usher their students into corners and closets. School officials call the police. Students huddle in their classrooms for minutes or hours, texting one another, playing cards and board games, or just waiting until they get the all clear.
Why should kids have to go through this at school–a place where they are supposed to be safe and protected? I guess because the NRA wants more and more guns everywhere and Congress doesn’t have the guts to do anything about it.
Another “expert” told Jake Tapper that mass shootings are on the rise. Isn’t it great that we have “experts” to explain that to us? /snark
OK, enough depressing news about death and destruction. What’s the latest on Chris Christie? Steve Kornaki has dug up some good stuff: Christie camp held Sandy relief money hostage, mayor alleges.
Two senior members of Gov. Chris Christie’s administration warned a New Jersey mayor earlier this year that her town would be starved of hurricane relief money unless she approved a lucrative redevelopment plan favored by the governor, according to the mayor and emails and personal notes she shared with msnbc.
The mayor, Dawn Zimmer, hasn’t approved the project, but she did request $127 million in hurricane relief for her city of Hoboken – 80% of which was underwater after Sandy hit in October 2012. What she got was $142,000 to defray the cost of a single back-up generator plus an additional $200,000 in recovery grants.
In an exclusive interview, Zimmer broke her silence and named Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno and Richard Constable, Christie’s community affairs commissioner, as the two officials who delivered messages on behalf of a governor she had long supported.
Something tells me we have a lot more Christie corruption news to look forward to.
Now what stories are you following today? Please post your links in the comments and have a great long weekend!
No, I don’t want Republican Son in Laws
Posted: January 17, 2014 Filed under: religious extremists, right wing hate grouups, War on Women, worker rights 66 Comments
I so badly want to write on your blog, Bob, or at NOLA.com about your op ed because it sounds so, well, reasonable. However, I’m going to do it here where I am totally surrounded by my friends. Yup, you’re reasonable, my friend, like most democrats I know. Y’all will compromise on just about anything because y’all so reasonable. I’ve got the President in mind when I say that one, actually, let alone most of the senators and congressmen in the democratic caucus. I’m a political independent, Because y’all tend to be so reasonable,
I don’t really mind that my oldest daughter grew up to be a democrat and that she married one. However, I would completely totally freak if either daughter registered republican or brought one home to me. I say this with the caveat that up until the Clinton years, I was a republican and I ran for office in Nebraska as a republican. You may be reasonable, but today’s republicans are not. There is no compromise with them. There is no one reasonable left in the party unless you count the people that don’t believe the dogma but enable it any way to either get re-elected or to have their businesses get preferential tax treatment and subsidies. I don’t want these folks in my home or near my daughters.
So you ask “Would you be troubled if your son married a Republican? What if your daughter married a Democrat?” and I’m answering you here because I don’t want to sully up the nola.com site or your blog site. My answer will be trolled beyond anything reasonable people can imagine and it won’t be by my fellow independents or your democrats. You can read my response here where I am surrounded by loving friends who will agree with me and will give you their own stories as Latinas, feminists, GLBTs, atheists or religious and racial minorities, and people that are not only reasonable but will stand up for what’s right.
According to a 2010 national survey, 40 percent of us would be “upset” with such a marriage. That’s worrisome, but almost as interesting as the historical trend. In 1960, when a pollster asked a similar question, only 5 percent said they would be “displeased” if a child married into the opposite party.
Doesn’t it feel some days that the entire, polarized country is obsessed with politics, down to the political affiliation of our children’s spouses?
I may have agreed that you were oh, so reasonable if I haven’t witnessed so much disrespect coming from the Republican Party towards women, gays, racial minorities and non-christians. I have the perspective of having been republican, having ran for office as a republican, and 
being basically drummed out of the republican party for being pro-choice and having “marched in the streets with lesbians” in support of an anniversary of women’s voting rights like it was some kind of immoral act.
As a matter of fact, I just had this conversation at a friend’s house last month. I met a woman who had a son undergoing gender reassignment surgery. I was telling her that one of my best friend’s nephews was having the same surgery and was a doctoral candidate at UC Berkley in the AI robotics program. We both laughed and said it could be worse, they could’ve become born again and republicans. I thought about it and decided that’s about the only thing that would cause me never to speak to either of my children. The idea of having a Michelle Bachmann as a daughter or a Ted Cruz, or a David Vitter or a Steve Scalise any where near my daughters let alone married to them would cause me to worry about their safety and their sanity.
Let’s check legislation proposed by today’s Republicans.
Here’s a new proposed law in Arizona.
A veteran state lawmaker is pushing legislation that would allow businesses to discriminate against gays — and maybe even women and Jews — as long as they were acting on sincerely held religious beliefs.
SB 1062 would allow those sued in civil cases to claim that they have a legal right to decide not to provide their services to any individual or group because it would “substantially burden” their freedom of religion. That specifically means doing something that the person feels is contrary to their religious teachings.
Sen. Steve Yarbrough, R-Chandler, said the measure is aimed specifically at preventing what happened in New Mexico where courts there said a gay couple could sue a wedding photographer who turned away their request to take pictures at their nuptials. He said that should not be allowed to happen here.But Yarbrough said his legislation could also be interpreted broader than that, allowing motel operators with vacant rooms to refuse to rent to gays.
Potentially more significant, Yarbrough acknowledged there may be individuals who have religious beliefs about unmarried women, or even employing people who do not share their same beliefs.
On the morning of December 11th, Gretchen Whitmer, the charismatic 42-year-old minority leader of the Michigan Senate, stood before her colleagues in the Statehouse in Lansing, and told them something she’d told almost no one before. “Over 20 years ago, I was a victim of rape,” she said. “And thank God it didn’t result in a pregnancy, because I can’t imagine going through what I went through and then having to consider what to do about an unwanted pregnancy from an attacker.”
No one in the gallery said a word. Instead, with just hours to go before it broke for Christmas recess, Michigan’s overwhelmingly male, Republican-dominated Legislature, having held no hearings nor even a substantive debate, voted to pass one of the most punishing pieces of anti-abortion legislation anywhere in the country: the Abortion Insurance Opt-Out Act, which would ban abortion coverage, even in cases of rape or incest, from virtually every health-insurance policy issued in the state. Women and their employers wanting this coverage will instead have to purchase a separate rider – often described as “rape insurance.” Whitmer, a Democrat known as a fierce advocate for women’s issues, described the new law as “by far one of the most misogynistic proposals I’ve seen in the Michigan Legislature.”
And it’s not just Michigan. Eight other states now have laws preventing abortion coverage under comprehensive private insurance plans – only one of them, Utah, makes an exception for rape. And 24 states, including such traditionally blue states as Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, ban some forms of abortion coverage from policies purchased through the new health exchanges. While cutting insurance coverage of abortion in disparate states might seem to be a separate issue from the larger assault on reproductive rights, it is in fact part of a highly coordinated and so far chillingly successful nationwide campaign, often funded by the same people who fund the Tea Party, to make it harder and harder for women to terminate unwanted pregnancies, and also to limit their access to many forms of contraception.
Here’s a great list of what right wing, christianist republicans say about women and their bodies. They believe it’s perfectly acceptable to deem women property of the state and endanger their lives.
1. Texas State Senator Wendy Davis is a “terrorist” because she filibustered an anti-choice bill.
2. “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”
3. Who needs abortion when victims of sexual assault can just get “cleaned out” by a rape kit?
4. Women shouldn’t terminate pregnancies resulting from rape because it’s what God intended.
5. Women shouldn’t complain about forced transvaginal ultrasounds, because they’ve already had sex.
6. “If babies had guns, they wouldn’t be aborted.”
7. “Abortion is much more serious than the rape of children by priests.”
8. Abortion rights caused the Sandy Hook massacre.
9. Ban abortions because of masturbating fetuses.
10. Abortion is just like the Holocaust.
I would worry about the safety of my daughters because of this: Virginia GOP candidate: Spousal rape isn’t a crime if she is ‘wearing a nightie’.
“I do not know how you could validly get a conviction of a husband-wife rape, when they’re living together, sleeping in the same bed, she’s in a nightie and so forth,” Black says. “There’s not injuries, there’s no separation or anything.”
or this: Medical Records Confirm The Pregnant Texas Woman On Life Support Is Actually Dead
Did I mention that my oldest is actually an ob/gyn and she went to practice some place where these folks aren’t second guessing her medical expertise? You’ll excuse me if I say that with their guns, their onward christian soldiers zealotry, and their anger/meanness that I believe that the only thing safe around these people might be a clump of cells called a zygote.
Then, there’s the laws they want enacted to teach specific creation mythology as science. Oh, and we taxpayers get to foot the bills for christianist madrassas.
When public-school students enrolled in Texas’ largest charter program open their biology workbooks, they will read that the fossil record is “sketchy.” That evolution is “dogma” and an “unproved theory” with no experimental basis. They will be told that leading scientists dispute the mechanisms of evolution and the age of the Earth. These are all lies.
The more than 17,000 students in the Responsive Education Solutions charter system will learn in their history classes that some residents of the Philippines were “pagans in various levels of civilization.” They’ll read in a history textbook that feminism forced women to turn to the government as a “surrogate husband.”
Responsive Ed has a secular veneer and is funded by public money, but it has been connected from its inception to the creationist movement and to far-right fundamentalists who seek to undermine the separation of church and state.
The opening line of the workbook section declares, “In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth.”
Infiltrating and subverting the charter-school movement has allowed Responsive Ed to carry out its religious agenda—and it is succeeding. Operating more than 65 campuses in Texas, Arkansas, and Indiana, Responsive Ed receives more than $82 million in taxpayer money annually, and it is expanding, with 20 more Texas campuses opening in 2014.
Charter schools may be run independently, but they are still public schools, and through an open records request, I was able to obtain a set of Responsive Ed’s biology “Knowledge Units,” workbooks that Responsive Ed students must complete to pass biology. These workbooks both overtly and underhandedly discredit evidence-based science and allow creationism into public-school classrooms.
I’m a political independent but frankly, if my daughters came home spouting this stuff or with some man in tow that thought it was okay, I frankly would see if they need to be institutionalized and thoroughly checked by a psychiatrist. Fortunately, my son-in-law is a nice registered Democrat and Hindu. My other potential son-in-law is also a democrat and is as agnostic as they get. My son in law is a doctor and my youngest’s SO has degrees in biological engineering so both of them are reality based.
However, I could go on and on and on about the climate change denial, the treatment of the poor in this country, the unemployed, and just about any one else who isn’t a big political donor to the Republican party and ask you to rethink your treatise. The leader of GOPround just quit because he couldn’t take the bigotry any more.
Jimmy LaSalvia co-founded political action group GOProud to prove to America that the Republican Party is a safe home for gay conservatives. But he no longer believes his own arguments. On Monday, he announced on his blog that he could no longer take his own party’s refusal to stand up to bigotry: he was leaving the Republican Party and had registered as an Independent. “I am every bit as conservative as I’ve always been, but I just can’t bring myself to carry the Republican label any longer,” he wrote.
His condemnation of the GOP was even stronger when he explained his decision to TIME on Wednesday. The Republican brand,
he says, is so tarnished that he no longer believes it is salvageable. “I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s time to pull the plug on the patient. It’s been brain-dead for a long, long time.”
In a wide-ranging interview with TIME, included before in an abbreviated form, LaSalvia explains the journey that led him to abandon the party ship:
TIME: You are someone who once had lots of hopes for the GOP. What happened?
LASALVIA: I have been my whole life the ultimate team player. I was ‘The Gay for Mitt’ last year. I think that what I did should cause the leadership in the Republican Party to ask themselves, How bad must it be if we’ve even lost Jimmy?
I spent my career working to create an atmosphere in the conservative movement where gay conservatives can be open and honest and live their lives and work within the conservative movement. I wanted it to be a place where straight conservatives could publicly support gay Americans and even eventually come to support civil marriage for gay couples. I feel like I have accomplished that. I had hoped that would be enough to melt the anti-gay bigotry that runs through the ranks of some in the Republican Party. I’ve come to realize that it is not, and that the leadership of the party tolerates bigotry, not just antigay bigotry, but anti-Muslim, any people who are not like us it seems like, because they are afraid of losing that sliver of their base who are anti-gay. And the truth is they are turning off millions more Americans by kowtowing to a group that frankly is losing and who most Americans think are wrong.
The entire party has become a safe haven and magnet for neoconfederates and bigots. Jimmy just came to the realization about 20 years later than me. I am sure there are some folks that seem like reasonable people. But try telling your conservative “friend” you’ve decided that you’re not a christian anymore and see what happens. Reasonable people do not tolerate and enable unreasonable and mean ideas, actions, and speech. My elderly father is the only Republican I allow near me any more and he just about does me in when he spouts all those Fox lies and Republican talking points that are about as far from the truth as they can be. Some times what he says horrifies me but he’s 90.
Our current democratic president and nearly all of his policies are just about as Nixonian as one can get. He’s pushing the new trade agreements. The Affordable Health Care Act was the republican response–called Chaffecare or Dolecare at the time–and the individual mandate is the cost demanded by private insurers for taking on people with pre-existing conditions like ovaries, HIV, or cancer. His budget and the level of government spending represents draconian cuts. His national security programs are still pretty extreme. Yet, every Republican sees him as a socialist. It’s total balderdash and racism!
Here’s a nice South Carolina Republican Senator advocating gun violence to get his views enacted.
South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham’s top-polling primary challenger, state Sen. Lee Bright, stood on the steps of the South Carolina statehouse (Confederate flags proudly displayed behind him) and said:
“If the Tenth Amendment won’t protect the Second, we might have to use the Second to protect the Tenth.”
Lee Bright’s insinuation being, if you don’t let South Carolina do as they want then South Carolinians will take up arms against you.
Go read some of the quotes from this darling of the Tea Party.
Let’s face it. It doesn’t take long for the congress and the U.S. Senate to come in and say, ‘Y’know what? These states are a lot of trouble. They’re gettin’ in the way. They’re organizing these people. They’re having these rallies. They got, you know, they got, some of them are even talking about militias. I mean, we gotta do something about this. So let’s just go ahead and dissolve them.
Today’s republicans and today’s republican party are no where near even Barry Goldwater or Ronald Reagan who had some pretty 
outrageous things to say in their day. They would hate Nixon, Ford, Eisenhower, and they dis Lincoln. All you have to do is talk to a Rand Paul follower and you’ll hear nothing but criticism of Lincoln. I don’t even have time to describe how absolutely crazy they are about regulation, the Federal Reserve Bank, balanced budget amendments, and policies that should be fairly noncontroversial that would get people back to work again.
Yes, Bob, I would absolutely say yes to your question: DEMOCRAT? REPUBLICAN? ARE WE REALLY ALL THAT DIFFERENT?
I wouldn’t let people like these near my home, let alone near my daughters. I wouldn’t even let Senator David Vitter near my home or near my daughters. Would you?
If you don’t believe me, ask another person who used to be a big reasonable republican party insider and is another economist. That would be Reagan advisor Bruce Bartlett. Hit him up on his facebook page or just watch his thread. He calls them all wankers now. Frankly, I’ve got worse words for them after my experiences trying to be pro-choice, pro-era, and pro-equal wages for equal work back in the day.
Anyway, that’s my rant illustriously peppered with republican rally signs. You know those great people that did things like boo at gay soldiers and believe in secession, they’re as reasonable as you so I’m sure I’m gonna hear from them here. That way, I wont sully your website.
Friday Reads Over the Rainbow
Posted: January 17, 2014 Filed under: morning reads 53 CommentsGood Morning!
Just a few notes on some passings of folks near and dear to childhoods every where.
Ruth Robinson Duccini died at age 95. She was the last surviving woman munchkin from the movie “Wizard of Oz”. Only one man survives now of the 124 little people cast in the movie.
One of my favorite sitcoms as a kid was “Gilligan’s Island”. Russell Johnson, the professor, passed yesterday at the age of 89.
The third death was that of Dave Madden who played the manager of “The Partridge Family”. 
I am happy to announce that the outrage over the proposed noise ordinance in New Orleans led to its withdrawal last night. Maybe the proximity to February’s elections had something to do with it? I sent a letter to the one council woman that was most likely to opt out and whose election is more iffy. She indicated she would vote no on Wednesday. The Mayor also said he had an issue with the proposal.
Councilwomen Stacy Head and Kristin Gisleson Palmer have withdrawn a controversial proposed noise ordinance that was set to be discussed at a council meeting Friday.
In a joint statement, Head and Palmer acknowledged there has been “much public consternation” over the ordinance.
Palmer said the council will work to craft a different ordinance that has “an even more limited focus” on the Vieux Carré Entertainment District.
Nathan Chapman, a lead supporter of the ordinance, said he supports the decision to “take a breath and focus first on solutions for the French Quarter.”
“At some point, the general public became greatly confused in a negative campaign of disinformation and personal attacks. If the volume of the rhetoric had been turned down a bit, we could have heard each other more, and made progress for the entire city.”
A draft form of a new ordinance will be presented to the next Special Housing and Human Needs Committee meeting on Jan. 27.
The meeting set for Friday has been cancelled.
Today Representatives Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI) and John Conyers (D-MI) and Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) introduced legislation to strengthen the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision last June invalidating a critical section of the VRA. The legislation, known as “The Voting Rights Amendment Act of 2014,” represents the first attempt by a bipartisan group in Congress to reinstate the vital protections of the VRA that the Supreme Court took away.
In the Shelby County v. Holder ruling on June 25, 2013, the Court’s conservative majority struck down Section 4 of the VRA, the formula that compelled specific states with a well-documented history of voting discrimination to clear their voting changes with the federal government under Section 5 of the VRA. The two provisions were always meant to work together; without Section 4, Section 5 became a zombie, applying to zero states.
Section 4 covered nine states (Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia) and parts of six others (in California, Florida, Michigan, New York, North Carolina, South Dakota) based on evidence of voting discrimination against blacks and other minority groups dating back to the 1960s and 1970s. Since the Shelby decision, eight states previously covered under Section 4 have passed or implemented new voting restrictions. This includes onerous new laws in states like North Carolina and Texas, which the Justice Department objected to under other provisions of the VRA (Sections 2 and 3).
The Sensenbrenner-Conyers-Leahy bill strengthens the VRA in five distinct ways
Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein says he will produce blockbuster movie starring Meryl Streep to direct confront the power of the NRA. He broke the news on Sirrius radio on Howard Stern’s show.
Weinstein said he plans on making a movie that will make the NRA “wish they weren’t alive after I’m done with them.”
During a discussion about Weinstein getting into the directing game, the issue of guns weaved its way in. Weinstein admitted that if something like the Holocaust was happening again, “I’d find a gun if that was happening to my people.” That being said, Weinstein doesn’t think “we need guns in this country” and called the NRA a disaster area.”
Oklahoma has become the latest state in the battle ground for Marriage Equality. Discriminatory marriage laws are collapsing all over the country.
The victories keep coming, from unexpected places: A federal judge in Oklahoma today ruled that the state’s constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage violates the U.S. Constitution.
U.S. District Judge Terence Kern’s ruling is on hold pending appeal, so same-sex couples in Oklahoma will not be able to marry immediately, reports theHuman Rights Campaign.Nonetheless, the national LGBT rights group welcomed Kern’s decision with a statement issued by its president, Chad Griffin.
“Judge Kern has come to the conclusion that so many have before him — that the fundamental equality of lesbian and gay couples is guaranteed by the United States Constitution,” Griffin said. “With last year’s historic victories at the Supreme Court guiding the way, it is clear that we are on a path to full and equal citizenship for all lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans. Equality is not just for the coasts anymore, and today’s news from Oklahoma shows that time has come for fairness and dignity to reach every American in all 50 states.”
Two couples — Mary Bishop and Sharon Baldwin, and Gay Phillips and Susan Barton — filed the case,Bishop v. Oklahoma, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Oklahoma in November 2004, the same year the largely conservative state adopted the antigay amendment. Their legal team is led by Don Holladay and James Warner of the Oklahoma City law firm Holladay and Chilton.
With this decision, 19 states and the District of Columbia have approved marriage equality either through legislative action or court decision. This number includes two states with rulings on hold — Utah and Oklahoma — and one state, Illinois, whose law has yet to go into effect. The Illinois marriage equality law is effective June 1, although couples in which at least one partner has a serious illness can apply to receive a marriage license earlier.
It seems Utah may actually be warming up to the idea of Marriage Equality.
Utah is split down the middle on the question of same-sex marriage, indicating a sharp decline in support for the state’s 2004 constitutional ban, according to a new poll.
A Salt Lake Tribune poll by SurveyUSA shows that Utahns are evenly split on the issue with 48 percent in favor of legalizing gay marriage and 48 percent against it. This marks a massive shift in opinion in the strongly conservative state, where 66 percent of voters who participated in the 2004 election approved of the constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriages in Utah.
According to the survey, 36 percent of Utah adults have changed their views of same-sex marriage over time, further complicating an already-tricky legal battle in the state.
There’s one more happy example of marriage equality in Houston Texas! Mayor Parker has married her long time partner.
Houston Mayor Annise Parker and longtime partner Kathy Hubbard are now married – at least in the eyes of 18 states, including California, where the couple formally exchanged vows Thursday in a sunset ceremony in Palm Springs.
“This is a very happy day for us,” Parker said in a news release issued from her office. “We have had to wait a very long time to formalize our commitment to each other. Kathy has been by my side for more than two decades, helping to raise a family, nurture my political career and all of the other ups and down and life events that come with a committed relationship. She is the love of my life and I can’t wait to spend the rest of my life married to her.”
The wedding included family and friends, including the mayor’s mother and Hubbard’s sister, according the mayor’s press office. The Rev. Paul Fromberg, a family friend from San Francisco, presided. Two other close friends from Houston, Judge Steve Kirkland and Mark Parthie, were attendants and formal witnesses. Parker and Hubbard chose Jan. 16 for their wedding because it marks the 23rd anniversary of the start of their lives together, her office said.
That is quite a positive change!
So, that’s a little bit to get us started today. So, what’s on your reading and blogging list this morning?
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Tuesday Reads: Snowstorm, On-line Harassment, Profiling Snowden, and Other News
Posted: January 21, 2014 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: Barack Obama, morning reads, U.S. Politics, Women's Rights | Tags: Amanda Hess, Amy Wallace, Anderson Cooper, angry on-line commenters, China, Colorado, Dan Verton, Edward Snowden, history of psychology, insider espionage, israel, IT administrators, London Science Museum, Marijuana, on-line sexual harassment, personality profiling, pot tours, psychology, Randi Kaye, Skepchick, snow, trolls, weather | 106 CommentsAlfred Eisenstaedt
Good Morning!!
Looks like another big snowstorm is headed my way this afternoon. Blizzard warning south of Boston, winter storm warning for most areas.
At least I’m not in the blizzard zone for the moment. This appears to be a really big storm. I saw on Twitter this morning that there were whiteout conditions in St. Louis. You can watch a video update the Weather Channel page.
Intellicast – Current Radar in United States:
NBC News reports: Winter storm set to ‘go bananas’ across Northeast.
Yikes! What the heck does that mean? The story doesn’t explain. But meteorologists are begging us not to call it a “polar vortex.”
Anyway, I’m going to have to rush around this morning. I have a package to mail, and I need to get a couple of things at the grocery store. I do have some interesting reads for you today–some of them are pretty long, but well worth reading.
Yesterday, via Tom Watson at Forbes, I came across an essay by long-time feminist blogger Amanda Hess that Watson says has been “widely discussed” for the past week or so. Somehow I missed it. Hess argues that on-line sexual harassment of women will be “the next civil rights issue.” In the essay, she writes about the frequent on-line attacks she and other female writers have experienced (warning: explicit and violent language). Here are the first few paragraphs.
Read the rest at the link. A number of women have written about this issue, and particularly about the lack of protection for women who are harassed on-line from law enforcement–even though the threats sometimes lead to real-life actions. A couple more recent examples:
Skepchick wrote in October about being harassed for her participation in the on-line atheist community, Why I Don’t Just Go to the Cops.
Amy Wallace wrote about her experiences in a NYT op-ed over the weekend: Life as a Female Journalist: Hot or Not?
Along similar lines, I came across this 2010 article in The Boston Globe that provides some insight into why some people spend so much time and energy writing angry comments on line: Inside the mind of the anonymous online poster. The author got an interview with a frequent commenter to The Boston Globe website. He also discusses the problems newspapers face in dealing with angry and trolling comments from anonymous people. Here’s an excerpt:
Read much more at the link.
Yesterday I also happened upon a fascinating article by national security and tech journalist Dan Verton. In the piece, Verton tries to come up with a psychological profile of NSA leaker Edward snowden: What does the history of insider espionage say about Edward Snowden?
Verton discusses Snowden’s history in the light of a study of IT administrators who eventually sabotaged their employers in some way: Inside the Mind of the Insider, by Eric D. Shaw, Jerrold M. Post, and Keven G. Ruby. These are both fairly long pieces, but if you have any interest in the ongoing Snowden saga, they are must reads! A bit more from Verton:
Lots more educated speculation on Snowden’s motives at the link.
In other news . . .
Here’s a spy story I hadn’t heard about in the mainstream media. Report: Israel Passes U.S. Military Technology to China.
That sounds scarier than the stuff Glenn Greenwald has been dribbling out.
From The New Statesman, here’s an exhibit I’d love to see if only I were in London: A history of psychology, warts and mysteries and all.
That sounds amazing.
Finally, a funny story from CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360: CNN reporter high during Anderson Cooper marijuana TV segment.
So . . . what are your recommended reads for today? Please post your links on any topic in the comment thread.
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