The family of Eric Rivers, 20, filed a complaint against Madison County Justice Court Judge Bill Weisenberger, who is white, accusing him of striking Rivers at the market on May 8 in Canton, Miss.
“This is 2014, not 1960, where someone could slap a young man and call out, ‘Run, n—–, run,'” former Canton Mayor William Truly, now president of the Canton branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, told the Clarion-Ledger.
An apparent witness, Tammy Westbrook, told the newspaper Rivers was offering to help flea market vendors unload their goods when Weisenberger slapped him twice, then yelled “run, n—-, run” as he fled. Westbrook and her sister, a vendor at the flea market, recalled that they thought Weisenberger was a law enforcement officer because he was wearing a security guard’s uniform.
Weisenberger did not respond to the Clarion-Ledger’s requests for comment.
The local NAACP head told the newspaper that he plans to file further complaints against Weisenberger and expects a grand jury will eventually hear the case.
“No citizen should have to face justice before a judge who holds such a high degree of racial animus and hatred,” Truly said Friday in a news conference, as quoted by the Clarion-Ledger.
Friday Reads: Not-so-Random Acts of Hatred
Posted: June 6, 2014 Filed under: morning reads | Tags: French Quarter Minutemen, gun violence, juvenile violence, Seattle campus shooting, Slender Man Stabbings, vigilante groups 45 CommentsGood Morning!
We’ve had another campus shooting. This time it’s a small christian college in Seattle. These things are becoming so common place in this country that I wonder if any one is safe anywhere from gun violence. Our culture really seems to bring out the worst in many of our people.
Yet, guns aren’t the only way to express violence. Here is The Guardian’s take on the earlier post we had about the Slender Man Stabbings by two 12 year old girls. An act of violence committed against a friend over an imaginary being.
It’s easy to raise a moral panic about the Slender Man, a shadowy internet meme few people over 25 had ever heard of, at least until this week. Administrators and parents can ban the lanky specter – can put a face on the faceless figure – and reassure themselves that they are barring the door to the bogeyman. A fictional, tentacle-sprouting villain doesn’t require us to examine any uncomfortable truths about society.
But when the purported basis for violence or hatred is something more deeply ingrained in our culture, the threat becomes more difficult to face head-on. When crime is linked to deep social problems like misogyny and racism, our temptation is very much to look anywhere else for answers – and that’s dangerous in itself.
On May 31, Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier of Waukesha, Wisconsin, both 12 years old, allegedly lured their friend into the woods and stabbed her 19 times. The victim survived the attack. Both suspects told the police that they attacked their friend in order to become “proxies” of the Slender Man, a fictional character created in 2009 for a Photoshop contest.
Local authorities were quick to blame the culture of online ghost stories. “Parents are strongly encouraged to restrict and monitor their children’s Internet usage,” Waukesha police chief Russell Jack said at a news conference, and the local school district banned a website called CreepyPasta, where much of the lore lived, after the attack.
Reporters are savoring the lurid fantasy like kids around campfire, or an iPad. An Australian news report dubbed CreepyPasta an “internet horror-cult that almost caused a killing”. “Many are wondering: What dark forces does this online urban legend potentially release?” asked a CTV anchor. CNN’s digital correspondent, Kelly Wallace, worried that kids today might be at risk from nefarious fictional creatures because they are generally incapable of differentiating between fantasy and reality. Another CNN opinion writer suggested that “the made-up meme could have inspired monstrous acts in real life”.
Two 12 year old girls face a justice system designed for adults. It also demonstrates that issues of violence, alienation, and juvenile crime are not just 
the province of boys. Does this crime have similarities to the Salem witch accussers and of the odd physical displays of cheerleader in LeRoy, New York in 2011? Does group affiliation and identity of young girls sometimes morph into something vile and dangerous?
There are many conflicting theories about psychological, political and social explanations for the Salem witchhunts. Some historians blame the rise of mercantile capitalism and economic tensions between Salem Village and Salem Town; some cite the boredom of and inattention to young women in the town. What is certainly true is that the panic began when a group of socially-affiliated girls began exhibiting physical symptoms and describing spectral visions.
The historian Mary Beth Norton, who argued in her book In the Devil’s Snare that the witchcraft crisis stemmed from anxieties over the French and Indian war, border disputes over Maine, and a series of violent attacks on Puritans by natives, said by phone that while court records don’t leave us with detailed evidence of how close the young accusers’ relationships were to each other, she could think of at least one tight alliance: between 12-year-old Ann Putnam Jr. and Mercy Lewis, an 18-year-old Maine native whose entire family had been killed in an Indian raid and had been placed as a servant in the Putnam household. Despite their age difference, Norton said, the girls were very close, and, she guessed, likely shared a bed or at least a sleeping loft, as per the domestic arrangements of the time.” She also noted that it was likely that the interpretation of the girls’ fits and visions was guided by Puritan beliefs that Native Americans were devil worshippers, and that, in the midst of bloody conflict between native and Puritan populations, translating the physical tics and social confusions of young women into a widespread campaign against fellow Puritans permitted some fantasy of control, since “if you can’t defeat the Indians in the woods, you can defeat witches in the courtroom.”
Norton drew a connection between Salem and the more recent, non-violent case of cheerleaders in Le Roy, New York, a suburb of Rochester, who exhibited physical symptoms that strongly echoed those displayed by Salem girls. In 2011, a group of these Le Roy students, many of them cheerleaders, began to suffer from tics and stutters, humming and involuntary muscle spasms.
And while our cultural lens wasn’t trained on demonic possession anymore, nearly every other contemporary interpretation was brought to bear: therapists, activists, and journalists attributed the outbreak to everything from environmental toxins to the post-manufacturing economy, social, familial, and academic stresses to absent fathers and mass hysteria.
As the reporter Susan Dominus reported in her excellent piece on Le Roy, the case appeared to come down to “two equally poorly understood phenomena: conversion disorder and mass psychogenic illness.” As Dominus reported, “Half of mass psychogenic illnesses occur in schools, and they are far more common in young women than in any other category.” In her piece, Dominus also explored the ways in which many of the sufferers in Le Roy seemed to entail social mirroring, the unconscious sharing of symptoms and affliction. Psychogenic illness, she wrote, “seems deeply connected to empathy and to a longing for what social psychologists call affiliation: belonging.”
The Seattle campus shooting, however, fits the typical lone male shooter profile. What beef will we find with this guy? Failure in school? Failure with women? Will we try to assign mental illness to this guy without looking at his easy access to guns?
A man in his 20s died and at least three others were hospitalized after a young man opened fire with a shotgun inside a Seattle Pacific University engineering building on Thursday afternoon.
A suspect, believed to be the lone gunman, was in custody after a student official and others used pepper spray and physical force to pin him down as he reloaded the shotgun, according to Seattle Police Capt. Chris Fowler.
Harborview Medical Center said four victims had been brought to the hospital, including the man who died shortly after arrival.
A 20-year-old woman was in critical condition and undergoing surgery as of 5:15 p.m. A 24-year-old man and a 22-year-old man suffered minor injuries were in satisfactory condition.
“Today should have been a day of celebration,” Seattle Mayor Ed Murray said to a crowd of reporters at the university, whose last day of classes was to be Friday. “Instead, it’s a day of tragedy and loss. Once again, the epidemic of gun loss has come to Seattle — the epidemic that has been threatening this nation.”
Many students reported that the gunshots — heard throughout the building — sounded like a science experiment, maybe a helium balloon popping.
So, here’s a great local story from my neck of the woods. A group of 4 men have decided to set up a minutemen-like patrol of the French Quarter. The leader–interviewed by the local press–said they were just out to escort workers in the Quarter to their cars. Now, we find this out.
The organizer of the “French Quarter Minutemen,” a group that has announced plans to start armed civilian patrols, is wanted by police. News surfaced Wednesday that the Metairie man behind the group faces an allegation of stalking.
The New Orleans Police Department has issued an arrest warrant on a charge of felony stalking for Aaron Jordan, who is accused of harassing a male Municipal Court judge and a female Municipal Court employee.
“I can’t talk about it because of my lawyer’s advice but it’s something that I’m working on to take care of,” Jordan said in a brief phone interview Wednesday night before abruptly hanging up.
Jordan has been interviewed by several radio and TV stations in the past week, touting his group’s plans to provide licensed armed volunteers to escort restaurant and bar employees through the Quarter safely at night. Just shy of 700 people have “liked” the Minutemens’ Facebook page, but no actual patrols have hit the streets.
Supporters say the patrols will provide a needed supplement to NOPD’s depleted ranks. Critics warn that they could become armed vigilantes who escalate situations and make them more dangerous.
The recent publicity may have spurred the woman to report Jordan, who she claims stalked and harassed her. She was working at municipal court when Jordan was tried and convicted of trespassing in 2009. Details of that case are unknown.
The woman filed the report with police on May 30, after “learning he was a gun advocate” which had “her in even more state of fear of him acting against her and her family,” the warrant says.
A warrant for his arrest was issued that day, said police spokesman Officer Frank Robertson III.
The warrant accuses Jordan of “intentionally and repeatedly” harassing the woman, who was a court staffer while his trespassing case was pending. The woman told police he had sent letters to her “employers and clients,” and that his “ongoing harassment has made her suffer emotional distress.”
After a series of store and restaurant visits by the Open Carry radicals, we have this delightful news item. Some psychopath left a loaded gun in the 
toy aisle of a Target Store in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. It’s a good thing some clerk found it before some child did.
A real gun was found in the toy aisle of Target on Seaboard Street. The police report states a loss prevention worker stumbled upon the gun Friday night.
The gun was in plain view on top of a superhero Playskool toy box when the worker found it; he thought it was a toy. He realized it was real after seeing it was loaded with live ammo.
The fact that it was found in an aisle geared toward children makes some shoppers feel this was no accident.
“I don’t think someone would accidentally drop off a gun. I think he purposely left it there for a child to pick up and think, ‘Oh it’s a toy gun,’ and accidentally point it at somebody and it goes off,” says Kennedy McClain.
Fletcher Armstrong III, a Concealed Weapons Permit instructor with the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, explains it is never too early to start talking gun safety with children.
He narrows it down into four easy-to-understand steps: “If a child comes across a gun they should follow four steps: Stop. Don’t touch. Leave the area, and tell an adult.”
The police report mentions there was a suspicious male walking up and down each toy aisle, including the aisle the gun was found.
I’m going to let y’all discuss this today because I’m pretty disgusted by all of this. I can’t figure out a way we’re going to get rid of this until we quit glorifying violence, guns, and entitlement.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Tuesday Reads: Comedies and Errors
Posted: June 3, 2014 Filed under: morning reads | Tags: Bowe Bergdahl, hostage negotiations, Nicholas Kristof, sex trafficking, Somaly Mam 60 CommentsEvery why hath a wherefore.
William Shakespeare from Comedy of Errors
Good Morning!
I’ve found several stories worth following today.
First, it seems that Somaly Mam of the Cambodian foundation that rescues underage girls from sex work is under heavy scrutiny and criticism. Mam has been the focus of a series of articles in the NYT by Nicholas Kristof as well as documentaries and books. It seems she got creative in her storytelling. Kristof has yet to write or speak on the matter.
In Nicholas Kristof’s columns in the New York Times, he portrayedMs. Mam in an extraordinarily positive light. He was not alone in doing so. Ms. Mam attracted many high-profile supporters, from Susan Sarandon to John Kerry to Sheryl Sandberg.
In a 2009 column, Mr. Kristof told the story of Long Pross, a teenager (also known as Somana) who said that her eye had been gouged out by a pimp, after she was forced into prostitution. Newsweek has reported, based on medical records, that the girl’s missing eye is the result of surgery to remove a non-malignant tumor when she was 13.
A great deal of money has been raised to combat sex-trafficking, in part as a result of Mr. Kristof’s writing about Ms. Mam on multiple occasions. And there’s little doubt that sex-trafficking is a problem worth paying attention to, and working to end. But now that Ms. Mam has stepped down from the foundation that bears her name — following not only the Newsweek story but the foundation’s internal investigation — many readers, on Twitter and in emails to my office, are asking what Mr. Kristof’s responsibility is for setting the record straight.
Mam has quit her own foundation.
Somaly Mam’s story is incredible. Her autobiography, “The World of Lost Innocence,” detailed how she was born in a village in the Cambodian rain forest and sold into sexual slavery as a child by her “grandfather.” She was stuck in Southeast Asia’s sex industry for 10 years until she finally escaped in her early 20s (her exact age isn’t clear as she has no birth documents).
Mam began to settle into regular life, marrying a French man, moving to Europe and having children of her own. But her childhood experiences led her to save other girls who were suffering a similar fate. She returned to Cambodia and set up Acting for Women in Distressing Situations (known by its French acronym Afesip), a charity devoted to rescuing women and girls in Cambodia and neighboring Laos who are forced into prostitution.
Her efforts gained her international recognition – a 2009 appearance in the Time 100 was written by Angelina Jolie – and in turn raised millions for the protection of children and women from prostitution. But as incredible as that story is, its accuracy is now in serious doubt. On Wednesday, Gina Reiss-Wilchins, executive director of the Somaly Mam Foundation, a U.S.-based organization that acted as a fundraiser for Afesip, said that Mam had resigned from the foundation after being presented with the findings of an investigation by a California-based law firm, Goodwin Procter (Mam is not currently employed by Afesip).
While the exact details from Goodwin Procter have not been released, allegations of inconsistencies in Mam’s past have been around for years. Doubts went back at least as far as 2012, when Mam gave a speech to the U.N. General Assembly that said that the Cambodian army had killed eight girls after a raid on her organization’s Phnom Penh center in 2004.
Following an investigation by Simon Marks in Cambodia Daily, Mam admitted that the claim was inaccurate. “I had in no way intended to allege that girls were murdered during the shelter raid,” Mam told Cambodia Daily in an e-mail, adding that her comments had been “ambiguous.”
Later that year, Pierre Legros – Mam’s French ex-husband – came forward to describe another incident that had not occurred as Mam had described it. In 2006, Mam told Mariane Pearl, wife of Daniel Pearl, in an article for Glamour Magazine that her teenage daughter had been abducted by human traffickers as revenge for her activism. Mam mentioned the incident again in her U.N. speech, which prompted Legros to respond. His daughter had in fact run away with a boyfriend, he said, claiming that he wanted to protect her privacy and stop her being used as “marketing” for the Somaly Mam Foundation.
Other NGOs working on sex trafficking are trying to pick up the pieces.
What the Somaly Mam story highlights is a state of affairs that many of us in the social change movement bemoan, namely that simple stories of exploitation rarely grab the public’s imagination, the donors, or the press. Unless the overdone images of runny noses, torn clothing, or worse, naked children in a cage waiting to be sold, are splashed on glossy pages, the actual suffering of human beings too often fails to trigger widespread empathy or outrage.
In addition to this heightened need for sensationalism, our society craves numbers. Suffering in small quantities is rarely enough. Given the undercover and “hidden in plain sight” crimes of human trafficking, no entity has been definitively able to pin down the actual number of victims. From the United Nations to national statistics, the numbers range widely from 2.5 million to 20.9 million. Irrespective of the range, all agree that the majority of those estimated individuals are women and children with a majority of that group ending up in the sex trade. In a recent report, theInternational Labor Organization estimated that profits from human trafficking generated $150 billion, two-thirds of which, or $90 billion, stem from commercial sexual exploitation.
Cambodia is designated as a source, transit and destination country for labor and sex trafficking. The U.S. State Department also found that the sale of virgin women and girls continues to be a problem and that Cambodian men form the “largest source of demand for child prostitution.” Regardless of its founder’s personal failings, the Somaly Mam Foundation has plenty of urgent work ahead.
In collaboration with the Cambodian Women’s Crisis Center, Dr. Melissa Farley, of Prostitution Research and Education, interviewed 133 Cambodian men who purchased commercial sex. The study shows that almost all of these male buyers interviewed in Phnom Penh stated that they witnessed extreme violence inflicted on the prostituted women, more often than not controlled by pimps. The men surveyed also saw children available for paid sexual abuse in brothels, bars and massage parlors. One of the “johns” astutely said that “prostitution is the man’s heaven but it is also those girls’ hell.”
The Somaly Mam episode cannot be used as an excuse to deny or ignore the undeniable exploitation of countless human beings in the sex trade
Tons of controversy surrounds the capture and release of American POW Bowe Bergdahl. I’ve been reading some on this and there are several threads of outrage going on. Some felt Bowe should have been left to the Taliban because of some evidence that he went AWOL. Others believe that it’s a value of our country and are armed services to leave no one behind. The right wing is going berserk over some twitters posted by Bergdahl’s father. I’m not sure what the implication is supposed to be, but the entire thing is turning into a circus act. Snow Flake Snookie has hit the grifting trail in search of outrage and funds. Some how, she has decided the soldier’s guilt and fate so any potential military tribunal should just STFU. I’ve been looking for less outraged and more informative sources. Here’s the story from one soldier who was assigned to hunt for Bergdahl along with other soldiers. Some of these soldiers were KIA.
Our deployment was hectic and intense in the initial months, but no one could have predicted that a soldier would simply wander off. Looking back on those first 12 weeks, our slice of the war in the vicinity of Sharana resembles a perfectly still snow-globe—a diorama in miniature of all the dust-coated outposts, treeless brown mountains and adobe castles in Paktika province—and between June 25 and June 30, all the forces of nature conspired to turn it over and shake it. On June 25, we suffered our battalion’s first fatality, a platoon leader named First Lieutenant Brian Bradshaw. Five days later, Bergdahl walked away.
His disappearance translated into daily search missions across the entire Afghanistan theater of operations, particularly ours. The combat platoons in our battalion spent the next month on daily helicopter-insertion search missions (called “air assaults”) trying to scour villages for signs of him. Each operations would send multiple platoons and every enabler available in pursuit: radio intercept teams, military working dogs, professional anthropologists used as intelligence gathering teams, Afghan sources in disguise. They would be out for at least 24 hours. I know of some who were on mission for 10 days at a stretch. In July, the temperature was well above 100 degrees Fahrenheit each day.
These cobbled-together units’ task was to search villages one after another. They often took rifle and mortar fire from insurgents, or perhaps just angry locals. They intermittently received resupply from soot-coated Mi-17s piloted by Russian contractors, many of whom were Soviet veterans of Afghanistan. It was hard, dirty and dangerous work. The searches enraged the local civilian population and derailed the counterinsurgency operations taking place at the time. At every juncture I remember the soldiers involved asking why we were burning so much gasoline trying to find a guy who had abandoned his unit in the first place. The war was already absurd and quixotic, but the hunt for Bergdahl was even more infuriating because it was all the result of some kid doing something unnecessary by his own volition.
Some of the contentiousness is due to the five Taliban who were swapped for the soldier. None of these guys will ever be up for humanitarian awards 
and some feel they are still a danger.
Below is information about each of the detainees released.
Khairullah Khairkhwa is the most senior ex-Guantanamo prisoner who comes from “the fraternity of original Taleban who launched the movement in 1994,” according the Afghanistan Analysts Network. He surrendered to President Hamid Karzai’s brother just before he was captured in January 2002. His most prominent position was as governor of Herat Province from 1999 to 2001. He served in various Taliban positions including interior minister and had direct ties to Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden.
Mullah Norullah Noori served as governor of Balkh Province in the Taliban regime and played some role in coordinating the fight against the Northern Alliance. He was a senior Taliban commander in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif when the Taliban fought U.S. forces in late 2001.
Mohammad Fazl commanded the main force fighting the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance in 2001 and served as chief of army staff under the Taliban regime. Human Rights Watch says he could be prosecuted for war crimes for presiding over the mass killing of Shiite Muslims in Afghanistan in 2000 and 2001 as the Taliban sought to consolidate their control over the country. Fazl joined the Taliban early, never held a civilian post, and rose through the ranks because of his fighting ability, ending up up as one of their most important and feared military commanders, according to the Afghanistan Analysts Network.
Abdul Haq Wasiq was the deputy chief of the Taliban regime’s intelligence service and the cousin of the head of the service, Qari Ahmadullah, who was among the Taliban’s founding members, according to the Afghanistan Analysts Network.
Mohammed Nabi was a Taliban official in Khost Province. He served as chief of security for the Taliban in Qalat, Afghanistan, and later worked as a radio operator for the Taliban’s communications office in Kabul.
Conveniently forgotten US history includes huge numbers of deals like this. Ronald Reagan’s arms for hostages deal is only one among many.
The US has all along negotiated with the guerrillas it has fought on the battlefield. William Howard Taft (later president) in the Philippines was all for negotiation with Filipinos who rejected US rule, and he created “attraction zones” to win them over. At the conclusion of the Aguinaldo resistance to US occupation in 1902, Teddy Roosevelt declared a general amnesty for the resistance fighters. These resistance fighters had committed some atrocities, including on captured US troops, but Roosevelt just let them walk free. Talk softly, carry a big stick, and let all the terrorists go, seems to have been his motto.
The US negotiated with the Viet Cong in South Vietnam, who were very much analogous to the Taliban and whom the US would now certainly term “terrorists.” In 1973, the US used intermediaries to negotiate with the Viet Cong for release of captured US soldiers at Loc Ninh. Americans on the political right made a huge issue about 1300 US soldiers never having been released by the Viet Cong (only about 400 were), and the shame that these men were left on the battlefield by the Nixon and Ford administrations. Conservatives seem to want to have it both ways. If you negotiate the release of US captives with the enemy you are “negotiating with terrorists.” If you don’t, then you have left soldiers behind on the battlefield. The fact is that the only way to have freed them was to have offered something for them in detailed negotiations. As for the Viet Cong “terrorists,” many of them are in government now and the US has cordial relations with them.
In the 1980s radical Shiites in Lebanon took American hostages. In order to free them, the Reagan administration not only negotiated with I han’s Ayatollah Khomeini but actually stole T.O.W. anti-aircraft munitions from Pentagon warehouses and shipped them to Tehran, receiving the money for them in black bank accounts and sending it to right wing death squads in Nicaragua. Khomeini and his government were listed as terrorists by the State Department at the time, and selling weapons to Iran was highly illegal. Not only that, but the US was allied with Iraq at the time, so Reagan screwed over Baghdad this way. Reagan did it, in part to free US hostages in Lebanon (Iran put pressure on its clients for their release).
One of the big gag reflexes from the right appears to be the label of “terrorist” as compared to insurgent.
So, what are some other stories that you may want to check out?
Football Hall of Famer Dan Marino sues NFL over concussions
We’ve talked about the horrible damage caused by concussions before. Other players have settled suits but this one is from a big name player.
Yes, you read that right. Female named hurricanes don’t get any respect.
Montana House GOP candidates want to impeach Obama
Can I ever get to the point where I can’t say that the GOP is just bug fuck crazy?
So, those are the items that caught my interest. What’s on your reading and writing list today?
Friday Reads: A little bit of This and a little bit of That
Posted: May 30, 2014 Filed under: just because, morning reads 37 CommentsGood Morning!
Here’s some updates to some stories we’ve been following.
French Economist Thomas Piketty has responded to the FT attack on his data published in Capital in the 21st Century. Basically, he considers it all very nit picky and doesn’t think it changes his overall thesis and results.
In response to a request from The New York Times to further address the criticisms, which The Financial Times published on Friday, Mr. Piketty, a professor at the Paris School of Economics, wrote that his data were correct, and his conclusions stood: Wealth inequality in Europe and the United States was high in the years before World War I, fell for much of the 20th century, and has been rising sharply again in the past three decades.
He argued that many of the things that The Financial Times identified as sloppy or arbitrary were in fact considered choices, which he explained in footnotes. Reasonable people might disagree with some of his choices of how to handle the data, he says. But even where there’s room for debate, any reasonable changes to his methodology would be small and not alter the broad conclusions, he suggested.
The part of the newspaper’s critique that throws the most doubt on his overall conclusions is its argument that wealth inequality in Britain has risen much less than Mr. Piketty contends. For that, he has sharp words. He says the newspaper’s analysis rests on apples-to-oranges comparisons of past data from tax returns mixed with current data from surveys, which makes the conclusions they reach deeply flawed, and contrary to what a wide range of other studies have found.
“My problem with the FT criticisms is twofold,” he wrote, in a 4,400-word response on his website. “The FT suggests that I made mistakes and errors in my computations, which is simply wrong, as I show below. The corrections proposed by The FT to my series (and with which I disagree) are for the most part relatively minor, and do not affect the long run evolutions and my overall analysis, contrarily to what The FT suggests.”
And those arguments by the newspaper that are not so minor and do undermine his findings, he writes, “are based upon methodological choices that are quite debatable (to say the least).”
Whacko Republican “Conservative Scholar” Ken Blackwell thinks that marriage equality is the cause of the recent mass shootings in Santa Barbara. Yea, I can’t figure it out either. Ignore the war on women and basic misogyny it’s kicked up and blame “Teh GAY!!!!”
Family Research Council senior fellow Ken Blackwell yesterday linked the Isla Vista mass killings to marriage equality laws, which he claimed are destroying the culture. Speaking with FRC president Tony Perkins on “Washington Watch,” Blackwell blamed the shooting on “the crumbling of the moral foundation of the country” and “the attack on natural marriage and the family.”
“When these fundamental institutions are attacked and destroyed and weakened and abandoned, you get what we are now seeing,” Blackwell said, arguing that people who are “blaming the Second Amendment” are “avoiding talking about what is at the root cause of the problem.”
Blackwell has previously described marriage equality advocates as “opponents of natural marriage.”
You remember Joe the Plumber? It wasn’t sufficient he told a grieving father that father’s dead son meant less that Joe’s right to carry whatever 
weapon of death he chose, he topped it with a threat to all politicians.
Samuel Wurzelbacher — better known as Joe the Plumber — likes guns. And he wants everyone to know why.
“Guns are mostly for hunting down politicians who would actively seek to take your freedoms and liberty away from you,” Wurzelbacher wrote on Thursday in a blog post on his website. “Google ‘Hitler, Mao, Kim Jung Il, Castro, Stalin’ just for starters.”
The post was a kind of follow-up to the “open letter” Wurzelbacher published Tuesdayaddressing the parents of the victims of last week’s mass shooting near the University of California, Santa Barbara. Following the shooting, Richard Martinez, whose son Chris was among the victims, blamed “craven, irresponsible politicians” and the National Rifle Association for his son’s death. Wurzelbacher responded by writing that “[a]s harsh as this sounds – your dead kids don’t trump my Constitutional rights.”
In his latest post, Wurzelbacher said his pro-gun arguments also had something to do with Memorial Day.
“I wrote my ‘open letter’ on the eve of Memorial day – a day we honor the fallen heroes that defend and protect our rights,” he wrote. “These men and women that served and paid the ultimate price for our way of life were someone’s dad, mom, brother, sister, or daughter. They made that sacrifice, which guarantees our freedoms because they believe in America. So I’m asking the question: Why are the lives of these brave Americans less important than the victims of Elliot Rodger?”
Wurzelbacher again warned that “left-leaning” politicians and “Marxists” would use Friday’s shooting to “further chip away our rights.
The Oil Industry is doing a job on Louisiana again. I’m afraid there’s no hope for the important ecosystem here.
BP Plc on Wednesday asked Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia to allow the company to avoid making payments to businesses demanding compensation for the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill while litigation continues.
The company acted after the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals lifted an injunction earlier in the day that had prevented payments being made. Last week, the court had decided not to revisit a decision rejecting BP’s bid to block payments to businesses that could not trace their economic losses to the disaster.
Scalia, who has responsibility for emergency applications arising from the 5th Circuit, can either act on BP’s request himself or refer the matter to the nine-member court as a whole. There is no specific deadline by which the court must act.
In the new court filing, BP’s lawyers say that if the payments are not blocked, “countless awards totaling potentially hundreds of millions of dollars will be irreparably scattered to claimants that suffered no injury traceable to BP’s conduct.”
The appeals court in March voted 2-1 to authorize payments on so-called business economic loss claims, and said the injunction preventing payments should be lifted. BP already had said it would seek Supreme Court review of the ruling.
BP is trying to limit payments over the April 20, 2010, explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig and rupture of BP’s Macondo oil well. The disaster killed 11
That’s not all. Our legislature just voted to nullify our popular vote of changes to the composition of Levee Boards because Jindal wants it and the Oil Industry wants it. Again, it’s over the ability of the state to sue these companies for the damage they’ve done and will do down here.
The Louisiana House voted with the oil and gas industry Thursday, supporting a bill that seeks to void a lawsuit filed by a New Orleans area levee board against 97 oil and gas companies.
With the 59-39 House vote, the proposal is one step from passage. The Senate-backed billmust return to the Senate for consideration of changes that solidify the bill’s intent to kill the lawsuit. Gov. Bobby Jindal supports the measure.
The Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East filed a lawsuit against 97 oil and gas companies, alleging their drilling activities damaged Louisiana’s coast and vulnerable wetlands.
Lawsuit supporters say the industry hasn’t sufficiently been held accountable for the damage done by dredging for canals and pipelines. Critics call it an attack on a valuable state industry, a boon for trial lawyers and a lawsuit that the levee board had no authority to file.
The bill by Sen. Bret Allain, R-Franklin, would define which governmental entities can bring legal claims about management of Louisiana’s coastal zones to entities designated in the Coastal Zone Management Act. Levee boards aren’t on the list.
That would offer a legal argument to have the levee board’s lawsuit thrown out. The bill specifies that its provisions “shall be applicable to all claims existing or actions pending.”
Rep. Joel Robideaux, R-Lafayette, who handled the proposal in the House, said it protects industry from “rogue agencies” that file lawsuits without standing to do so.
“They shouldn’t have even gone down this path,” Robideaux said of the levee board.
Rep. Eddie Lambert, R-Gonzales, said a court should decide whether the board had the legal authority to file a lawsuit. Robideaux replied that he wanted to give the courts more information.
“This isn’t about clarifying existing law,” said Rep. John Bel Edwards, D-Amite, who voted against the measure. “The courts know how to read a law and apply it.”
Edwards said if the lawsuit was frivolous and improperly filed, the oil and gas industry wouldn’t be fighting so hard to pass Allain’s bill. He and other opponents of the bill said it sought to immunize the industry from paying for damages they caused.
You can read General Russell Honore’s op ed on this in the NYT here. He was on Maddow last night too. He’s been a tireless advocate of the enviornment down here since he found out how so much damage done by hurricanes recently is due to what the oil and gas industry has done to us. That’s just the side issues compared to what they’ve done directly.
“A final effort to restrict the authority’s power to sue these industries is expected to come Thursday (May 29) before the State House of Representatives, where it has the support of the Republican governor, Bobby Jindal, and legislative allies of oil and gas. The bill has already passed the Senate. The House needs to defeat the bill,” he wrote.
“That won’t assure us that the oil and gas industries will fix the damage they’ve caused to our coast over decades. But it will give the citizens of Louisiana their day in court to stand up and say, ‘We’ve had enough.’ “
The president may be poised to do something about carbon emissions from coal burning plants without congress. It’s about time we take global warming seriously and the damage done to our planet by the extraction and burning of all these fossil fuels.
President Obama will use his executive authority to cut carbon emissions from the nation’s coal-fired power plants by up to 20 percent, according to people familiar with his plans, which will spur the creation of a state cap-and-trade program forcing industry to pay for the carbon pollution it creates.
Mr. Obama will unveil his plans in a new regulation, written by the Environmental Protection Agency, at the White House on Monday. It would be the strongest action ever taken by an American president to tackle climate change and could become one of the defining elements of Mr. Obama’s legacy.
Cutting carbon emissions by 20 percent — a substantial amount — would be the most important step in the administration’s pledged goal to reduce pollution over the next six years and could eventually shut down hundreds of coal-fired power plants across the country. The regulation would have far more impact on the environment than the Keystone pipeline, which many administration officials consider a political sideshow, and is certain to be met with opposition from Republicans who say that Mr. Obama will be using his executive authority as a back door to force through an inflammatory cap-and-trade policy he could not get through Congress.
People familiar with the rule say that it will set a national limit on carbon pollution from coal plants, but that it will allow each state to come up with its own plan to cut emissions based on a menu of options that include adding wind and solar power, energy-efficiency technology and creating or joining state cap-and-trade programs. Cap-and-trade programs are effectively carbon taxes that place a limit on carbon pollution and create markets for buying and selling government-issued pollution permits.
Coal plants are the nation’s largest source of the greenhouse gases that scientists say are the chief cause of global warming.
So that’s it for me today! What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Thursday Reads
Posted: May 29, 2014 Filed under: 2014 elections, morning reads | Tags: Maya Angelou 18 CommentsGood Morning!
The world lost the great activist, poet, author, and educator Maya Angelou yesterday. She was an outstanding person who led a full and productive life.
Maya Angelou, whose landmark book of 1969, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” — a lyrical, unsparing account of her childhood in the Jim Crow South — was among the first autobiographies by a 20th-century black woman to reach a wide general readership, died on Wednesday at her home in Winston-Salem, N.C. She was 86.
Her death was confirmed by her longtime literary agent, Helen Brann. The cause was not immediately known, but Ms. Brann said Ms. Angelou had been frail for some time and had heart problems.
In a statement, President Obama said, “Today, Michelle and I join millions around the world in remembering one of the brightest lights of our time — a brilliant writer, a fierce friend and a truly phenomenal woman,” adding, “She inspired my own mother to name my sister Maya.”
Though her memoirs, which eventually filled six volumes, garnered more critical praise than her poetry did, Ms. Angelou (pronounced AHN-zhe-low) very likely received her widest exposure on a chilly January day in 1993, when she delivered her inaugural poem, “On the Pulse of Morning,” at the swearing-in of Bill Clinton, the nation’s 42nd president. He, like Ms. Angelou, had grown up in Arkansas.
I had to fortune and pleasure to meet Dr. Angelou when I was barely pregnant with oldest daughter at a conference. I was lucky to hear her speak and
to be able to spend some time speaking with her. I actually have that meeting on a VHS tape that I will have to transfer to DVD one day. It also has me with Kate Millet and Bette Friedan and is one of my most prized possessions. I spoke to her about my teaching experience in an alternative high school where they basically dumped teenage pregnant girls and uncontrollable boys. I used to give them copies of her book “I know why the Caged Bird Sings”. She was amazing. She was serene in a strong way. I have to say she had a deep and profound effect on me then and every time I had the pleasure to read something she wrote.
Growing up in St. Louis, Mo., and Stamps, Ark., she was Marguerite Johnson. It was her brother who first called her Maya, and the name stuck. Later she added the Angelou, a version of her first husband’s name.
Angelou left a troubled childhood and the segregated world of Arkansas behind and began a career as a dancer and singer. She toured Europe in the1950s with a production of Porgy and Bess, studied dance with Martha Graham and performed with Alvin Ailey on television. In 1957 she recorded an album called “Calypso Lady.”
“I was known as Miss Calypso, and when I’d forget the lyric, I would tell the audience, ‘I seem to have forgotten the lyric. Now I will dance.’ And I would move around a bit,” she recalled with a laugh during a 2008 interview with NPR.
“She really believed that life was a banquet,” says Patrik Henry Bass, an editor at Essence Magazine. When he read Angelou’s memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, he saw parallels in his own life in a small town in North Carolina. He says everyone in the African-American community looked up to her; she was a celebrity but she was one of them. He remembers seeing her on television and hearing her speak.
“When we think of her, we often think about her books, of course, and her poems,” he says. “But in the African-American community, certainly, we heard so much of her work recited, so I think about her voice. You would hear that voice, and that voice would capture a humanity, and that voice would calm you in so many ways through some of the most significant challenges.”
Film director John Singleton grew up in a very different part of the country. But he remembers the effect Angelou’s poem “Still I Rise” had on him as a kid. It begins:
You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.
“I come from South Central Los Angeles,” he says. It’s “a place where we learn to puff up our chests to make ourselves bigger than we are because we have so many forces knocking us down — including some of our own. And so that poem … it pumps me up, you know. … It makes me feel better about myself, or at least made me feel better about myself when I was young.”
Singleton used Angelou’s poems in his 1993 film Poetic Justice. Angelou also had a small part in the movie. Singleton says he thinks of Angelou as a griot — a traditional African storyteller.
Longtime Texas GOP observers have noticed the sea change, too. They say the grassroots now controls the GOP.
“Things certainly have changed. The conservative grassroots activists have come to dominate the party establishment, offsetting or pushing aside some of the more traditional business/donor community,” said Texas Republican strategist Ray Sullivan, a former top aide to both Gov. Rick Perry and former President George W. Bush.
Sullivan said grassroots groups are much more organized and unified than in the past. They can also depend on help from national groups like the Senate Conservatives Fund and the Club for Growth.
“The conservative factions largely within Tea Party brands have become very well organized and have a significant amount of influence in Republican primary elections,” he added.
Two-thirds of Americans in a new Washington Post-ABC News poll disapprove of the Republican strategist raising questions about Clinton’s age and health in advance of her potential presidential run. The lopsided negative reaction to Rove’s commentary — just 26 percent approve of his topic of criticism — includes majorities of every age group as well as Democrats and independents. Republicans split evenly on the issue, with 45 percent approving and 46 percent disapproving of Rove broaching the issue.
One of the most durable myths in recent history is that the religious right, the coalition of conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists, emerged as a political movement in response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling legalizing abortion. The tale goes something like this: Evangelicals, who had been politically quiescent for decades, were so morally outraged by Roe that they resolved to organize in order to overturn it.
This myth of origins is oft repeated by the movement’s leaders. In his 2005 book, Jerry Falwell, the firebrand fundamentalist preacher, recounts his distress upon reading about the ruling in the Jan. 23, 1973, edition of the Lynchburg News: “I sat there staring at the Roe v. Wadestory,” Falwell writes, “growing more and more fearful of the consequences of the Supreme Court’s act and wondering why so few voices had been raised against it.” Evangelicals, he decided, needed to organize.
Some of these anti-Roe crusaders even went so far as to call themselves “new abolitionists,” invoking their antebellum predecessors who had fought to eradicate slavery.
But the abortion myth quickly collapses under historical scrutiny. In fact, it wasn’t until 1979—a full six years after Roe—that evangelical leaders, at the behest of conservative activist Paul Weyrich, seized on abortion not for moral reasons, but as a rallying-cry to deny President Jimmy Carter a second term. Why? Because the anti-abortion crusade was more palatable than the religious right’s real motive: protecting segregated schools. So much for the new abolitionism.
Tuesday Reads: Same as it ever was
Posted: May 27, 2014 Filed under: morning reads 42 CommentsGood Morning!
Did you enjoy your long weekend? The cats and I have been getting Temple acclimated to City life and the rule of Miles. Temple is an extremely bright and friendly dog! She’s been charming the neighborhood too. It’s fun to see all these recent transplants see the basic Louisiana dog for the first time. The Catahoula leopard dog really has the most beautiful coat you’ve ever seen and it comes in a variety of colors and patterns. I was surprised to learn that it was the first true North America Dog Breed. Temple is a Silver Leopard Catahoula cur with a mix of something that’s not clear. She’s a little on the small side which is fine by me.
Speaking of Louisiana Curs, the administration of La Tech decided to “honor” Phil “marry a teenage girl so she’ll pluck your ducks for ya” Robertson in a really sneaky last minute ploy to avoid bad publicity and responses. I can only assume they’re trying to get his money. Still, the local GLBT student body association and some professors walked out in protest.
On Friday afternoon, a group of Louisiana Tech students involved in Prism, the organization for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) students and their allies on campus, were alerted to the fact that the university would honor Phil Robertson from the popular reality TV show Duck Dynasty at the commencement ceremony held on Saturday.
Students only found out about Robertson’s role in commencement from faculty members, who also found out about the award the day before the ceremony.
Only a few months ago, Robertson came under fire for anti-LGBT comments in his interview with GQ Magazine. As soon as they found out about the recognition of the reality TV star, Prism members and other students at LA Tech began organizing a social media action to let the university know they did not support the university’s actions.
Students, faculty, and people across the state posted Facebook statuses and tweeted at Louisiana Tech using the hashtag #NoHonorInBigotry to send a message to the university.
Hannah Ellsworth, President of Prism, said, “We wanted to make a statement displaying our disapproval of the honoring, and for several reasons, including the minimal time we were given to react, a social media campaign was the best way to do this. Faculty, staff, and students didn’t have any time to give input since no one new until the day before.”
The social media campaign accompanied a walk-out by several faculty members during the commencement ceremony.
Prism is a coalition member of Equality Louisiana (EQLA), a statewide coalition of over 30 LGBT and allied organizations. The student organization had the support of EQLA and other advocates.
I am surprised at the number of people who think that a university should just allow anybody to stand up and represent them as an “honored” alum no 
matter what they say because “free speech”. I’m sure if Ol’ Phil had done a program knocking jeebus and white people those same people would be hollering about the hate and religious persecution they feel.
In Bobby Jindal’s Louisiana, an Indy car Track is worth more than a child with Down’s Syndrome. Jindal shifted 4.5 million dollars in state funds from helping persons with disabilities to fund an Indy-style Race Track.
Several budget changes made by the Senate Finance Committee Sunday has state senators scratching their heads, but one — the shifting of $4.5 million from helping persons with developmental disabilities to pay for development of an Indy-style race track — has raised concerns for a number of lawmakers.
Even some senators on the committee said Monday they believe that action could be overturned when House Bill 1 is debated by the full Senate, even though Gov. Bobby Jindal promised the developer the state would supply the money.
How on earth could that happen?
The Louisiana Legislature is poised to take $4 million of your tax dollars away from supporting disabled Louisianians in order to give it to a corporate indycar event at a private racetrack owned by a multi-millionaire. That is not spin:
“We’re taking money away from the disabled community and giving it to motor sports?” Claitor asked during the committee meeting.
“The answer to your question, Sen. Claitor, is yes,” said Sen. Jack Donahue, R-Mandeville, the committee’s chairman, in response.
Outrageous
After the meeting, Donahue said he was optimistic that more money could be found for services for people with disabilities as the budget advances through the legislative process. Money had to be put toward IndyCar, he said, because Jindal had promised $4.5 million in upgrades to NOLA Motorsports Parkin Avondale as part of the deal to lure the event to New Orleans.
NOLA Motorsports is owned by Laney Chouest, a multi-millionaire co-owner of Edison Chouest Offshore (ECO). He seems like a fine enough chap, one devoted to building a world class racetrack. Now, of course, he’s done it with his own fortune. Good for him. He even opened it to the public, so normal folks could go racing or go-karting around his prize.
But the idea that we need to pay for $4m in “track improvements” to “lure” a billion-dollar national racing league to New Orleans for a race almost no one cars about, INSTEAD of patching our meager budget for the disabled, is absolutely sick. Just because Jindal “promised” the billionaire owners he’d scoop some tax dollars up for them. Absolutely sick.
It’s really hard to know what to say to that isn’t it?
But, the more you think things will change for the better, the more it because clear that there are quite a few people that will not get with the program. I may complain about Louisiana, but the one thing that I can say is it is never as bad here as it is in Mississippi.
So, even though we are inching towards marriage equality and our first woman president, we still have to deal with the violence that comes with those 
men that think women should be available to them sexually at all times.
A California man allegedly fired his gun at three women Saturday morning who refused to have sex with him and his friends.
The women, estimated to be between about 18 and 19 years old, had gone to the home of three men late Friday night in the northern California town of Stockton, according to Stockton Police. After the men asked to have sex and the women refused, the men kicked the girls out, Stockton Police Department Public Information Officer Joseph Silva told ThinkProgress. When the women started to leave, multiple shots were fired, but none of the women were injured, Silva said. The women fled the area to a nearby Buffalo Wild Wings, where they called police.
All three girls corroborated the story, according to Silva. The security guard in the building also heard the shots and called the police independently. Silva said eight shell casings were found at the crime scene, but the men cannot be found. He does not know whether the gun was possessed legally.
The suspected gunman is Keith Binder, 21. But police have not yet arrested or charged him, saying the case is still under investigation and Binder has not been located. Two other men were at the scene, but police only know their nicknames: “Little D” and “Little Eggy.”
The incident occurred around 1:45 a.m. Saturday morning — just hours after Elliot Rodger took took seven lives in Santa Barbara, Calfornia, over what he described as retribution for women’s lack of sexual interest in him.
We’ve talked a lot bout rape culture and misogyny. We read these stories that are so shocking! I wish society spent as much time teaching our straight young men not to rape women as us mothers of girls spend teaching our daughters to avoid being the victims of rape, sexual harassment, and battery. Men in our society and nearly all societies get the idea that women are available to them at all times in any way they desire and they are in no way at fault for anything that happens. As a matter of fact, even our media makes up excuses for them.
Just as past school shootings in America, the media has reacted by isolating the event as a monstrous and heinous act with no precedent. Rather than seeing Elliot Rodger as a product of society, the media has depicted him as a bloodthirsty madman, a mere glitch in the system. And yet the facts show a very different story.
…
What happened in Santa Barbara is nothing less than a hate crime, and yet mainstream news outlets are distilling the issue to “mental illness” and “premeditated mass murder.” Although we should be shocked by Elliot Rodger’s actions, we should not be surprised. In fact, most school shootings share chillingly similar characteristics. It’s time we stop treating these incidents as anomalies and start recognizing the deep societal issues at play.
The thing that makes me the most mad is the folks that claim that when the GLBT community or women or minorities stand up to say this is not just “boys being boys” or religious people whose rights to believe whatever should be respected or “just” another mentally ill person they are being intolerant. It trivializes and mischaracterizes every one’s concerns and further enables these outrageous examples of entitlement and privilege. Besides, why tolerate bigotry and bullies?
So, some times it just seems that it is and will be the same as it ever was.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
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