Last Call For The Stuebenville Shuffle

Ohio AG Mike Dewine is still a voter-suppressing douchebag, but he promised to do the right thing in the Steubenville rape case, and it looks like that his office has finally delivered with new charges.

A grand jury investigating the 2012 rape of a 16-year-old girl in Steubenville, Ohio, has indicted four school employees, including the school superintendent, who faces felony charges, Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine announced Monday.

Steubenville City Schools Superintendent Michael McVey faces three felony counts: one charge of tampering with evidence and two counts of obstructing justice. He also is charged with making a false statement and obstructing official business, both misdemeanors, DeWine said.

Also indicted was elementary school principal Lynnett Gorman and wrestling coach Seth Fluharty, both of whom are charged with misdemeanor failure to report child abuse. Volunteer assistant Steubenville football coach Matt Bellardine was charged with four misdemeanors: allowing underage drinking, obstructing official business, making a false statement and contributing to the unruliness or delinquency of a child.

This brings to six the number of people the grand jury has indicted after two students were convicted of rape, DeWine said. A school technology director and his daughter were indicted in October.

All I have to say is good, and about gorram time.  The school apparently did everything they could to protect the high school football program and not the student who was raped.  If that's the mindset of a school superintendent, they deserve to face felony charges.

The two boys convicted of the crime are serving their time, but the real book needs to be thrown at the adults who enabled them, and good for DeWine getting this right.

Fitting then that these indictments were announced on the United Nations' International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women.

A Healthy Load Of Crap

Wisconsin GOP Gov. Scott Walker has some interesting ideas about what constitutes a "healthy balance" of rights when it comes to same-sex anything, apparently.

In an interview with Bloomberg TV that was recorded on Friday, host Al Hunt asked the Wisconsin governor if the U.S. House should follow the Senate and pass a bill banning discrimination against LGBT people. 

Walker insisted that he had not looked at the Senate measure barring workplace discrimination, but said that Wisconsin had similar laws in place for years. 

“They’ve worked quite effectively,” he explained. “We’re also a state that has a constitutional amendment that defines marriage as one man, one woman.” 

“We’ve had no problems… limited problems with that,” Walker added. “At the same time, we have a constitutional amendment that defines marriage.” 

“There’s a healthy balance there.”

Gotta have the parts where you treat The Gay(tm) like human beings offset by treating them as diseased lunatics who could spread The Gayness(tm).  That's a "healthy balance" if you're a Republican bigot, apparently.  Good cop, bad cop.  Carrot and stick.  Anti-discrimination laws and enshrined bigotry.

What?  Rights are rights and not subject to whatever the hell bigots want to define them as?  Boy, where have you been for the last 150 years?

Everything's Coming Up Munich

John Holbo over at Crooked Timber isn't the only person to notice the neo-con crowd has completely lost anything remotely marble-shaped over this Iran deal:

I knew folks on the right were going to be upset about the Iran deal, but isn’t this a bit much? The Corner has gone Everyday-is-like-Munich full neocon. 

OK, maybe there’s no point in even bothering, but just look at this post, “Munich II”, by James Jay Carafano (vice president of foreign- and defense-policy studies at the Heritage Foundation.) He is banging on about how ‘realism’, presumably in the I-R sense, opposes this deal. But, even as he’s trying to make the case, he can’t help inadvertently making the case that the other side has got the better realist case. 

What does Carafano think we should hold out for? “Any diplomatic deal that is not grounded in shared interests or a common sense of justice will surely fail.” 

That just means there’s no possibility of any diplomatic deal. Ever. If there’s any truth to realism. States are self-interested. Iran wants what’s good for Iran. US wants what’s good for US. There isn’t any overriding, operative sense of justice that overrides all that. So we’re done. This is Realism 101, right?

Yes, followed by the part where we pick up Iran and throw them against the wall for good measure a couple of times to let them know that this is our planet, and you can either be our friend and helpful vassal to our corporate oligarchy or get Regime Change(tm).  All this Munich 1938/Neville Chamberlain garbage is because Obama has called their bluff.  Now these idiots are left hoping that a nuclear weapon detonates in a major American city and kills hundreds of thousands just so they can say "I told you so."

And since us getting nuked is now "assured", we have every right apparently to go flatten Iran first before that happens.  Consequences, schmonsequences!

Of course, I'm also told there's no difference between Obama and Bush, so why Obama keeps doing the opposite of what Bush would have done and proving otherwise is just making things very inconvenient for certain parts of the Left.

StupidiNews!

• A major winter storm has claimed 8 lives over the weekend as snow and ice continue to fall in the desert Southwest and Texas.
• China is warning the US to stay out of its dispute with Japan over the Senkaku Islands as Beijing's navy is moving to blockade the area.
• Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu voiced total opposition to this weekend's six-party deal with Iran, saying it is not a party to the settlement and that it reserves the right to take action for self-defense.
• By a nearly 2-to-1 margin, Swiss voters rejected a referendum that would limit CEO pay to 12 times that of the company's average worker.
• Texas's state school board has approved all but one science textbook with the science parts intact, with provisional approval for the last.