Let’s Just Tell It Like It Is…

Posted: November 7, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Republican presidential politics, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , | 35 Comments

Sharon Bialek

Herman Cain is a sexual predator. Here, from Politico is a portion of Sharon Bialek’s description of what she says Herman Cain did to her. Bialek is the fourth woman to accuse Cain of “inappropriate” behavior and the first to come forward publicly and talk about what he did to her.

“I met Mr. Cain in the lobby of the bar at the Capitol Hilton at around 6:30 p.m. We had drinks at the hotel, and he asked how I liked my room, which is kind of normal, and I said I was very surprised. I said, I can’t believe it, I’ve got this great suite, it’s gorgeous. Mr. Cain kind of smirked, and then said, ‘I upgraded you.’

“He then took me to an Italian restaurant where we had dinner. During dinner, Mr. Cain looked at me and said, ‘Why are you here?’ I said, ‘Actually, Herman, my boyfriend, whom you met, suggested that I meet with you ‘cause he thought you could help me because I really need a job. I was wondering if there’s anything available at the state association level or perhaps if you could speak to someone at the foundation to try to get my job back, perhaps even in a different department.’ He said, ‘I’ll look into that.’

“While we were driving back to the hotel, he said that he would show me where the National Restaurant Association offices were. He parked the car down the block. I thought that we were going to go into the offices so he that could show me around. At that time I had on a black pleated skirt, a suit jacket and a blouse. He had on a suit with his shirt open. But instead of going into the offices, he suddenly reached over and he put his hand on my leg under my skirt and reached for my genitals. He also grabbed my head and brought it toward his crotch. I was very, very surprised and very shocked.

“I said: ‘What are you doing? You know I have a boyfriend. This isn’t what I came here for.’ Mr. Cain said, ‘You want a job, right?’

“I asked him to stop and he did. I asked him to take me back to my hotel which he did, right away.

Is this rape? No, but it certainly fits the definition of sexual assault:

Sexual assault takes many forms including attacks such as rape or attempted rape, as well as any unwanted sexual contact or threats. Usually a sexual assault occurs when someone touches any part of another person’s body in a sexual way, even through clothes, without that person’s consent.

It may also fit the EEOC’s definition of sexual harassment:

Unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature constitutes sexual harassment when submission to or rejection of this conduct explicitly or implicitly affects an individual’s employment, unreasonably interferes with an individual’s work performance or creates an intimidating, hostile or offensive work environment.

Bialek had been working for the organization that Cain headed and was seeking his help in getting a new job with the organization. Therefore, Cain was in a position of power over Bialek.

Quite a few writers seem to be unclear on these concepts. At the NYT Caucus blog Cain’s actions are called “lewd behavior.” CBS calls it “sexually inappropriate behavior.” The AP calls it a “bold sexual advance.” Let’s start calling it what it is: sexual assault. No one has the right to touch another person in a sexual manner without permission, period.

I found this bizarre rationalization for and misrepresentation of Cain’s behavior at a right wing blog called Legal Insurrection, operated by William A. Jacobson of Cornell Law School.

Summary of press conference: Woman alleges that in 1997 after her employment terminated with a National Restaurant Association affiliate, Cain made a single sexual advance at her which she rebuffed and which he stopped after she said no. So the allegation is not one of workplace “sexual harassment” but of an alleged attempt at infidelity.

A variety of people on Twitter are characterizing this as a “serious sexual assualt,” but that is farfetched. Assuming what she says is true, he stopped when she said to stop and she did not allege any actual sexual touching, only an attempt. She says she mentioned to two people at the time that Cain was sexually inappropriate, but did not mention to details to them.

Wrong. Bialek says that Cain “suddenly reached over and he put his hand on my leg under my skirt and reached for my genitals. He also grabbed my head and brought it toward his crotch.” Despite what Jacobson thinks he heard, Bialek clearly said that Cain touched her in a sexual way. The fact that he stopped when she told him to doesn’t change that.

Bialek is a Republican and a Tea Party supporter, not a liberal who wants to destroy Cain’s campaign. This should be really bad for him, but so far he isn’t backing down; and many Republicans like Jacobson are still making excuses for him.

At The Grio, Zerlina Maxwell argues that the fact the Bialek is white will finally destroy Cain, but at the NYT, T.R. Frank says not so fast.

…if you think the end of the Cain campaign is at hand, remember this: The end of the Cain campaign has been at hand for months. And yet the end doesn’t arrive. In fact, inspired by Cain’s example of thrusting face exuberantly into fan, I’ll offer my own face: the end isn’t about to arrive now either. I believe that Cain will weather this latest storm. He will suffer embarrassment. People will cringe at what emerges. And he will continue to poll far better than reason should allow.

And check this out:

is it any wonder that Herman Cain has shed a lot of high-level campaign staff members, both within his national organization and in crucial early states like Iowa and New Hampshire? Most of these former staff members have signed nondisclosure agreements, and others would speak to me only off the record. None of them recall their former boss as a sexual harasser. But they do speak of a man so egotistical that careful self-policing would never really enter into the realm of consideration.

They also speak — bitterly — of a candidate with zero interest in policy. They speak of events canceled at the last minute to accommodate any available television interview. They speak of unrelenting self-absorption, even by the standards of a politician.

But they don’t speak of someone who can’t win.

Personally, I think Cain should be gone already. But maybe Frank is right. The latest Gallup poll has Cain still tied with Romney for the lead in the race for the Republican nomination. And we know how much Republicans don’t want Romney.

Time to Change the Federal Definition of Rape

Posted: September 28, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: U.S. Politics, Violence against women, Women's Rights | Tags: , , , , | 15 Comments

Remember awhile back when Republicans in the House tried to pass a law that would allow a woman who had been raped to have an abortion paid for only in the case of “forcible rape?” At the time, there was an uproar on-line and in the corporate media, and the wording of the bill was changed.

At the time, I somehow missed the fact that the official definition used by the FBI in keeping track of crimes statistics not only defines rape as forcible, but also only as vaginal penetration of a female. That leaves out anal and oral rape, rape with objects, and rape of a person who is unconscious, drunk, or drugged by the rapist. It also leaves out rapes of males. Here’s the FBI definition of rape:

“the carnal knowledge of a female, forcibly and against her will”

There’s a story in The New York Times today about efforts to make that definition a whole lot broader and more realistic.

Thousands of sexual assaults that occur in the United States every year are not reflected in the federal government’s yearly crime report because the report uses an archaic definition of rape that is far narrower than the definitions used by most police departments.

This means that local police departments use one definition for their own records and the archaic FBI definition for federal reporting of crime statistics.

“The public has the right to know about the prevalence of crime and violent crime in our communities, and we know that data drives practices, resources, policies and programs,” said Carol Tracy, executive director of the Women’s Law Project in Philadelphia, whose office has campaigned to get the F.B.I. to change its definition of sexual assault. “It’s critical that we strive to have accurate information about this.”

Ms. Tracy spoke Friday at a meeting in Washington, organized by the Police Executive Research Forum, that brought together police chiefs, sex-crime investigators, federal officials and advocates to discuss the limitations of the federal definition and the wider issue of local police departments’ not adequately investigating rape.

So when we hear from the feds that crime rates are dropping, we’re getting false or distorted information, at least as it applied to rape.

According to a September 16, 2010 article at Change.org by Elizabeth Renter, another problem caused by the FBI’s limited definition of rape is that forcible, vaginal rape is the only form of sexual assault that is defined as a Part I office in the FBI’s annual crime report.

While the FBI recognizes other acts as a form of sexual assault, rape is the only crime which they classify as a Part I offense in the Uniform Crime Report, an annually published record of crime rates across the country.

Law enforcement agencies nationwide submit data to the FBI for inclusion in the UCR. Despite this report being completely voluntary, there is said to be a 93 percent participation rate. And though there are always shortcomings and margins of error with any system designed to track crime, the UCR is considered the go-to report when politicians, reporters or other officials need to cite crime statistics. Because of this, it would be in the self serving interest of some agencies to show lower crime rates, to reflect that their crime control techniques are really working when they really aren’t.

But the police wouldn’t do that — would they?

Over the past few years, several metropolitan police forces have come under scrutiny for their handling of rape cases. Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York and Cleveland are just a few cities where law enforcement is alleged to have mishandled or completely ignored reports of rape.

Renter links to a series of investigative articles in the Baltimore Sun that demonstrated that Baltimore Police were discounting more rape reports than any other city in the U.S.

More than 30 percent of the cases investigated by detectives each year are deemed unfounded, five times the national average. Only Louisville and Pittsburgh have reported similar numbers in the recent past, and the number of unfounded rape cases in those cities dropped after police implemented new classification procedures. The increase in unfounded cases comes as the number of rapes reported by Baltimore police has plunged — from 684 in 1995 to 158 in 2009, a decline of nearly 80 percent. Nationally, FBI reports indicate that rapes have fallen 8 percent over the same period.

According to the NYT article linked above, an FBI subcommittee will begin considering a change of their definition of rape on October 18. The New York Times article is the only one I could find dealing with this issue today–except for a reference to the article at the Daily Beast.

Let’s hope other major media outlets pick up this story and run with it. Rape is already assumed to be greatly under-reported. Now we learn that it may not be so much under-reported, but instead minimized or not taken seriously by local police departments.

Missouri school district protects children from critically acclaimed books, but not from rape.

Posted: August 16, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Surreality, Violence against women, Women's Rights | Tags: , , , , , , , | 29 Comments

Vern Minor, Superintendent, Republic School District

This is one of the most outrageous stories I have ever come across. Via Jezabel, the family of a girl in Springfield, Missouri has filed a lawsuit against the Republic School District, claiming the girl was harrassed, sexually assaulted, and raped by a male student on school property.

The suit, filed July 5, alleges when the girl — a special education student — told officials about the harassment, assault and rape that occurred during the 2008-09 school year, they told her they did not believe her. She recanted.

The suit also alleges that, without seeking her mother’s permission, school officials forced the girl to write a letter of apology to the boy and personally deliver it to him. She was then expelled for the rest of the 2008-2009 school year and referred to juvenile authorities for filing a false report.

The suit notes that school officials did not report the girl’s accusation to law enforcement officials, as they are mandated by law to do. Not only that, they apparently didn’t even read the girl’s psychological evaluation–in the school’s files–which described her as “conflict adverse, behaviorally passive” and likely to “forego her own needs and wishes to satisfy the request of others around so she can be accepted.”

In 2010, the girl was “allowed” to return to school, and the harrassment and assaults continued.

In February 2010, the boy allegedly forcibly raped the girl again, this time in the back of the school library. While school officials allegedly expressed skepticism of the girl, her mother took her to the Child Advocacy Center and an exam showed a sexual assault had occurred. DNA in semen found on the girl matched the DNA of the boy she accused, the suit says.

The boy was taken into custody in Juvenile Court and pleaded guilty to charges, the suit says. The specific charges are not stated in the suit.

So there is no question whatsoever that the second rape took place–in the school library! But the school district’s response to the suit claims that the girl’s accusations are “frivolous and have no basis in fact or law.” They further claim that the girl “failed to…protect herself,” and so whatever happened to her was her own fault.

Ironically, this is the same school district that recently banned Kurt Vonnegut’s brilliant novel Slaughterhouse Five and Sara Ockler’s Twenty Boy Summer from their school curricula and libraries. The books were banned by school board members all of whom except one had never read either book, but had been shocked by newspaper column by a Missouri State professor.

Wesley Scroggins, a business professor at Missouri State University, who also pioneered a movement to reshape middle school sex-education classes in Republic’s schools, wrote in a column last year that Vonnegut’s classic contained enough profanity to “make a sailor blush,” and warned that “Twenty Boy Summer” was similarly dangerous.

“In this book,” Scroggins wrote, “drunken teens also end up on the beach, where they use their condoms to have sex.”

Apparently books about consensual sex are wrong, but rapes that take place in the school library are just fine. And if a girl reports being raped, she’ll have to apologize to the boy who did it for speaking up.

This case is very reminiscent of the case of the cheerleader in Texas who was forced to pay damages because she refused to cheer for her rapist, a basketball player. It also reminds me of the case in Muncie, Indiana, in which a girl was raped on school property, and when she reported it, school administrators interrogated the girl and held her for hours in the principal’s office, refusing to report the crime to police.

What is it with school officials who refuse to protect girls from sexual harrassment and rape? The mother of the girl in Muncie is also suing the school system as well as the 16-year-old rapist’s family.

I hope both of these families are successful and that having the pay the settlements will force these school districts to get serious about sexual assault.

Meanwhile, Republic school superintendent Vern Minor should be fired immediately.

Saturday Reads

Posted: July 30, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: A My Pet Goat Moment, Democratic Politics, Federal Budget and Budget deficit, George W. Bush, Medicaid, Medicare, morning reads, Republican politics, Social Security, Team Obama, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics, Violence against women | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 30 Comments

Good Morning news junkies! I’m filling in for WonktheVote today. She is taking a little break from blogging, so Dakinikat, Minkoff Minx, and I are going to take turns doing the Saturday Reads for a little while. So what’s in the news today? Let’s see…

After his blow-up-the-economy plan passed the House yesterday, John Boehner gave a very defensive-sounding speech to justify his treasonous behavior.

A defiant House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) late Friday defended his debt-ceiling plan by saying it is the only viable plan on paper so far….

“I’ve offered ideas, I’ve negotiated,” Boehner said in closing debate on his bill. “Not one time, not one time did the administration ever put any plan on the table. All they would do is criticize what I put out there.

“I stuck my neck out a mile to try to get an agreement with the president of the United States,” Boehner continued to grumbling among Democrats. “Hey, I put revenues on the table in order to try to come to an agreement in order to avert us being where we are. But a lot of people in this town can never say yes.”

He also defended including the ridiculous balanced budget amendment to the Constitution in his bill.

“It’s time for this to happen,” he said. “It enjoys support from both houses of this Congress, and it enjoys bipartisan and widespread support across our country.”

No. It doesn’t, Mr. Speaker.

A short time later the Senate put Boehner’s bill out of its misery.
 Now what?

Despite a day of frenzied legislative maneuvering and another attempt by President Obama to rally public opinion behind some kind of compromise, the two parties made no visible progress in finding common ground, leaving Washington, Wall Street and much of the nation watching the clock toward a deadline of midnight Tuesday.

Reid has made some changes in his plan, hoping to appeal to Senate Republicans. The NYT didn’t elaborate on what these changes are. At Huffpo, Michael McAuliff and Sam Stein say Reid’s plan is now a lot like Mitch McConnell’s. But whatever its contents, Republicans in the House plan to hold a “symbolic vote” on it today in order to “send a message” that whatever the Senate agrees on will not pass the House.

These people are playing with fire. It’s looking like they’re not going to meet the August 2 deadline either.

The seemingly unbridgeable impasse between the two parties as the deadline for raising the nation’s debt limit approaches has Tom Daschle losing sleep, as he never did when he was a Senate Democratic leader in the mid-1990s and Congressional Republicans forced government shutdowns rather than compromise on spending cuts.

“That was nothing compared to this. That was a shutdown of the government; this could be, really, a shutdown of the entire economy,” Mr. Daschle said. “You can’t be too hyperbolic about the ramifications of all this.”

Democrats and Republicans with legislative experience agree that even if both sides decided Saturday to raise the $14.3 trillion borrowing ceiling and to reduce future annual deficits, it would be extremely difficult for the compromise measure to wend its way through Congress before Tuesday’s deadline, given Congressional legislative procedures.

But all signs point to August 2 passing with no budget bill. As we all know, President Obama could end the struggle at any time with an executive order, but then he’d have to put off gutting Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid for a little bit longer. He can’t allow that, now can he?

Stay tuned…

There has been a disturbing string of sexual assaults on women in Ann Arbor, Michigan over the past two weeks. the assaults have taken place near the University of Michigan campus. There have been six attacks, two of which were rapes. In the others, women were grabbed and fondled, but managed to escape.

Two different composite sketches of the suspect have been developed. Police aren’t sure if there is just one perpetrator two. The FBI is now involved in the investigation.

The agency will be assisting Ann Arbor police at the city’s request, said FBI spokeswoman Sandra Berchtold. She did not provide any details about the agency’s role.

The six attacks occurred between July 15 and 26, and between the hours of 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. The victims were traumatized, said police spokeswoman Lt. Renee Bush.

Ann Arbor Police Chief Barnett Jones said he did not know if the attacks were linked. He warned in a letter to university staff, faculty and students that there was a “predator or predators operating in our community.”

Emily Zinn and her boyfriend were sleeping when one of the rapes took place right outside their apartment.

…an 18-year-old woman was pulled behind a wall outside Zinn’s bedroom window and raped on July 18.

She first noticed something was wrong when she and her boyfriend, Matt McAnelly, 24, a University of Michigan graduate student, heard the girl sobbing outside about 12:45 a.m.

“We heard a girl crying and ‘Help me, help me,’ ” Zinn said. “She was saying, ‘He left, I’m alone,’ so we didn’t really know what was happening.”

The couple heard nothing while the girl was being attacked.

This monster (or monsters) must be stopped ASAP.

Is the U.S. on the verge of a revolution?

On last night’s The Big Picture with progressive talk show host Thom Hartmann, author Neil Howe discussed how he and William Strauss came to accurately predict today’s political crisis in their 1997 book “The Fourth Turning,” and offered speculation as to what might happen next….

Speaking of the generational differences between today’s new guard and the retiring baby boomers, Howe said that cultural forces have essentially forced this crisis, with “culture warriors” and “values voters” in direct contention with “gen x” for control of the national budget.

“Are we on the verge of another ‘fourth turning’ — another major crash leading to a world war and a world-wide depression?” Hartmann asked.

“No,” Howe said. “I hope it won’t be bad. I hope the destructive will be avoided to the furthest extent possible and the constructive, which always comes out of a fourth turning… will be maximized.”

Watch it:

———————————————–

A judge has ordered the release of Richard Nixon’s grand jury testimony about the Watergate scandal.

U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth granted a request by historian Stanley Kutler, who has written several books about Nixon and Watergate, and others to unseal the testimony given on June 23 and 24 in 1975.

Nixon was questioned about the political scandal during the 1970s that resulted from the break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington….

Lamberth ruled in the 15-page opinion that the special circumstances, especially the undisputed historical interest in Nixon’s testimony, far outweighed the need to keep the records secret. Grand jury proceedings typically remain secret.

The Obama administration opposed the release of Nixon’s testimony. It figures, doesn’t it?

Finally, here’s a fascinating bit of historical revisionism from George W. Bush.

In a rare interview with the National Geographic Channel, Bush reflects on what was going through his mind at the most dramatic moment of his presidency when he was informed that a second passenger jet had hit New York’s World Trade Center.

Bush was visiting a Florida classroom and the incident, which was caught on TV film, and has often been used by critics to ridicule his apparently blank face.

But Bush claims he deliberately decided to stay in his seat so as not to alarm the children and to “project a sense of calm.”

“I had been in enough crises to know that the first thing a leader has to do is to project calm,” he added.

I wonder what “crises” he’s talking about? Just about the only thing he did as Governor of Texas was execute people. Let’s watch Bush’s demeanor on 9/11/2001 and see how well he projected “a sense of calm.”

——————————————

Here’s what one of the children who was in the classroom that day had to say about it:

“The president he just sat there, and his face — he just went dead,” says Jaimie, who was among the second graders in the classroom where President Bush learned of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

Jamie’s one of the kids featured in Nickelodeon’s Linda Ellerbee news special, “What Happened?: The story of September 11, 2001,” which debuts Sept. 1.

That’s all the news I’ve got for today. What are you reading and blogging about?

Strauss-Kahn Accuser’s Words “Misrepresented” in Leaks to Media

Posted: July 28, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Violence against women, Women's Rights, worker rights | Tags: , , , , , , , | 10 Comments

Nafissatou Diallo

Just a short time ago, the woman who accused former IMF head Dominque Strauss-Kahn of sexually assaulting her spoke briefly at press conference at a Brooklyn church.

“I’m here because I had people call me a lot of bad names,” Ms. Diallo said softly at the Christian Cultural Center on Flatlands Avenue. “A lot of things they said about me was not true.”

Before being introduced by Rev. A.R. Bernard, senior pastor at the center, Ms. Diallo, 32, dressed in a dark suit, rubbed her fingers together slowly, blinking often as she gazed out the windows of the lobby, past the bank of cameras and reporters.
“Me and my family, we are going through a lot,” she said. “We cry every day.”

She spoke for less than five minutes and was escorted from the podium when she finished without taking any questions; her lawyer, Kenneth Thompson, and other supporters remained at the microphone and spoke with reporters.

Diallo’s attorney says that the Manhattan DA’s office either mistranslated or deliberately misinterpreted taped conversations she had with an Arizona prison inmate.

Ms. Diallo and her lead lawyer, Kenneth P. Thompson, spent much of Wednesday at the district attorney’s office in Manhattan, where they listened to a recording of conversations Ms. Diallo had with a fellow African immigrant in an Arizona jail after she said she was attacked. Law enforcement officials told Mr. Thompson and The New York Times last month that Ms. Diallo could be heard saying on the tape “words to the effect of: ‘Don’t worry, this guy has a lot of money. I know what I’m doing.’ ”

But after listening to the recording on Wednesday, Mr. Thompson told reporters at a news conference that Ms. Diallo’s statements had been mischaracterized. He said that at no point did she raise the issue of Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s wealth or status in the way that prosecutors had described it. Rather, he said, the man she was speaking with, who initiated the calls to Ms. Diallo, remarked during one conversation that Ms. Diallo could stand to gain money from the case, but she quickly dismissed the idea and said it was a matter for her lawyer.

Thompson also noted that in the first phone call, Diallo’s description of what happened with Strauss-Kahn was

consistent with what she told investigators a day earlier. In sexual-assault cases, people who hear an early account of an attack are called “outcry witnesses,” and are often used to buttress the credibility of a person making an accusation.

“She told the guy that someone tried to rape her at her job,” Mr. Thompson said in an interview after his news conference. “She said: ‘I didn’t know who he was. We fought each other. Because he wasn’t able to take off my clothes, he put his penis in my mouth. He touched me. They took me to the hospital, and they arrested him.’ ”

The DA’s office said they could not comment on evidence in an ongoing investigation. But didn’t they already have quite a bit to say? Someone leaked negative information about Diallo to the media, resulting in Strauss-Kahn being released on bail while his accuser was treated like a liar and money-grubber. From CNN Justice:

The hotel maid who has accused the then-head of the International Monetary Fund of sexually assaulting her met Wednesday with prosecutors for at least seven hours….

Prior meetings between the maid, Nafissatou Diallo, and prosecutors who are deciding whether to pursue charges against French financier Dominique Strauss-Kahn ended abruptly last month after Thompson accused Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance of “abandoning” her.

Prosecutors had disclosed credibility issues with Diallo, who is from Guinea.

[….]

Diallo’s attorney said the Sofitel New York employee wants to tell a jury what happened to her. “I want justice. I want him to go to jail,” Diallo told ABC’s “Good Morning America” in an interview that aired this week.

I give Diallo a lot of credit for coming forward publicly and revealing her identity. I hope Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance will let her have her day in court.

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