If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed. -- Benjamin Franklin
It's part of why freshman Sen. Elizabeth Warren inspires excitement from the party's grassroots, but former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, whose progressive record in office set liberal benchmarks, isn't even polling at 1 percent nationally. It's why Sherrod Brown, a populist white male senator from a must-win battleground state is an afterthought in the presidential sweepstakes. It's why Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, a runner-up to be Obama's running mate in 2008, quickly jumped on the Clinton bandwagon instead of pursuing any national ambitions. On Bernstein's list of 16 possible challengers, 15 are white and nine are white males. That makes many of them untenable standard-bearers in the modern Democratic Party.
Got that? White men are now "untenable" as Democratic candidates, according to Republican white guy, who hopes white men will choose to vote GOP to punish everyone else.
Somehow I don't think Josh here has the best interests of the Democrats in mind.
Tucked deep in HB 465, an anti-abortion bill that would restrict the procedure in several different ways, is an obscure provision that stipulates that “no department at the medical school at East Carolina University or the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill shall permit an employee to perform or supervise the performance of an abortion as part of the employee’s official duties.”
According to the GOP lawmakers who proposed the bill, this particular section of HB 465 will help ensure that taxpayer dollars don’t go toward abortion services. Because East Carolina University (ECU) and the University of North Carolina (UNC) are state schools, abortion opponents don’t want any of their instruction time to be spent on the procedure. But this complicated effort to separate taxpayer money from abortion services could have huge implications for the medical field.
“It takes several steps to get to the point of the regulation,” Elizabeth Nash, the senior states issues associate at the Guttmacher Institute, a think tank that closely tracks abortion-related legislation, told ThinkProgress. “It takes you a couple steps to understand that this would eliminate — or, at the very least, drastically reduce — the abortion training programs that are in place.”
That would have particularly big consequences for UNC, which is ranked as one of the country’s top five OB-GYN residency programs. UNC’s medical school is currently home to a Ryan Program — a national initiative intended to address the growing shortage of abortion providers by providing more opportunities for doctors to be trained in pregnancy termination. Residents can also pursue a separate family planning fellowship that includes opportunities for abortion training and research. If HB 465 is enacted into law, both of those programs could be placed into jeopardy.
“It raises a very serious issue: Who’s going to be training the OB-GYNs at UNC to do abortions, if faculty can’t do them?” Dr. David Grimes, a retired abortion doctor and researcher who completed his own residency at UNC, told ThinkProgress.
The answer, of course, is nobody. If you make it impossible for women to get safe pregnancy termination, and make it impossible for doctors to learn how to perform it safely, then that leaves us in the back alleys with coat hangers.
The chapter of Phi Kappa Psi said in a statement that it would pursue all available legal action. The announcement came a day after a team from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism concluded the magazine failed to follow basic journalistic safeguards in publishing the story, which accused the fraternity of hosting a gang rape.
The story sent shockwaves through the sleepy campus about 70 miles (113 km) from the capital Richmond. Students held demonstrations on campus as well as in front of the fraternity house, which was vandalized after the article was published.
"Clearly our fraternity and its members have been defamed, but more importantly we fear this entire episode may prompt some victims to remain in the shadows, fearful to confront their attackers," Stephen Scipione, the president of the fraternity chapter in Charlottesville, Virginia, said in a statement.
Corporations and unincorporated associations that have recognized legal identities (such as unions, partnerships and the like) can also sue for defamation that causes injury to their organizational reputation, independently of whether any member was defamed. For instance, if someone falsely accuses a corporation of defrauding customers, this might hurt the corporation’s reputation even apart from injury to any particular employee’s reputation. And this is true even for nonprofit corporations, see, e.g., Lega Siciliana Social Club, Inc. v. St. Germain (Conn. Ct. App. 2003); Gorman v. Swaggart (La. Ct. App. 1988) (yes, that’s the Swaggart you’re thinking of). As the Restatement (Second) of Torts § 561(b) puts it,
One who publishes defamatory matter concerning a corporation is subject to liability to it . . . if, although not for profit, it depends upon financial support from the public, and the matter tends to interfere with its activities by prejudicing it in public estimation.
The allegations of such group misconduct at the fraternity house certainly do harm the fraternity as an organization “in public estimation.” Therefore, if the chapter has independent legal existence, whether as a corporation or as an unincorporated association, and if it can show loss of income from potential members or from donors — or other loss stemming from, for instance, punishment by the university — then it could potentially prevail on this. And the central fraternity could also sue for similar losses, on the theory that its reputation has been tarnished both at UVA and elsewhere.
On the other hand, the organizations can’t recover damages for the emotional distress flowing from the injury to their reputations (since they lack emotions). Individuals can recover such emotional distress damage, even above and beyond actual lost income.
So yeah, I think Rolling Stone may have to settle on this one, and that's before the individual defamation suits are leveled. Where this goes from here, well I'm betting a lot of legal mess across the board, but if there's one guaranteed result from all this it's that campus sexual assaults and rapes will be even less likely than they are now to be reported, especially against fraternity members.
Hot Air's Jazz Shaw demonstrates perfectly the problem with the perception of police brutality in America towards people of color, and specifically black men, and does it in two paragraphs. Number one:
Yesterday, when I wrote about a police shooting in the northeast corner of Illinois, I received some of the same questions which always come up after the cops kill a suspect. Why, some readers ask, must you always defend the police? Why don’t you talk about the bad cops who act maliciously? In general, the answer has been that there are so many good cops and so few bad ones that they tend to merit the benefit of the doubt. But in nearly every one of these situations I have included the caveat that police forces are composed of fallible human beings and there are some bad ones out there. Unfortunately, we seem to have found one of them in South Carolina.
"One bad apple." Got it.
Number two:
Unfortunately, this incident will be run up the flagpole to build on the narrative that there are armies of racist, evil cops out there. It’s equally sad that essentially all of the media coverage – including the article linked above – still has to begin with “a white officer” and “a black suspect” since this would be an equally tragic story regardless of the race of the actors involved. That can’t be avoided, but the best thing that South Carolina can do at this point is to ensure that Officer Slager has a speedy, fair trial and, if found guilty, is punished appropriately. That’s the only thing that will maintain the credibility of the police and keep the system on track.
"All lives matter." Got it.
But some lives aren't as equal as others.
So keep yelling "one bad apple" and "all lives matter" until a white cop shoots and kills another unarmed black man, and we can play this game all over again, to infinity. It'll always be "one bad apple" but that apple will always be a white cop killing a black man. It'll always be "all lives matter" but it will always be a black victim shot and killed by a white cop, and the victim deserved it.
Doctor Science over at Obsidian Wings has a pretty good rundown of what's going on with this weekend's Hugo Award nominees in sci-fi, and the nasty proceedings that followed.
The bottom line is that a couple of male, white sci-fi authors with a conservative bent put together a slate of nominees for their fellow travelers to vote for. They were able to make some headway last year, but this year nearly all the nominees were on one of two slates, one made by author Larry Correia, and the other by America's Favorite Techno-Racist(tm), Vox Day.
Since Day was involved, that attracted the Breitbart crew to further the cause, and the results were pretty predictable:
This year there were two, largely overlapping "conservative" slates: Sad Puppies 3, put together by Brad Torgerson, and Rabid Puppies 2015, by Vox Day. The result: the Best Novella, Novelette, Short Story, Related Work, Editor (Long Form), and Editor (Short Form) categories contain *only* Puppies nominees, all others have been shut out. Only two non-Puppies are in the Best Novel category and in the two Dramatic Presentations, and there's only one each for Pro Artist, Fanzine, Fan Writer, and the Campbell Award.
Some of the other nominees turned down their nominations because they realized they were being used by the various "Puppies" campaigns as cover to deter calls of racism/misogyny, but Doc reminds us that it's all manipulative nonsense.
What's kind of stunning to me is how resolutely the Puppies have ignored issues of *quality* in assembling and arguing for their slate. Last year's slate was unbelievably, insultingly weak -- and I say that as someone whose fiction reading is mostly fanfic. I know a *lot* about bad writing, but I also know the difference between "bad, but I like it" and "objectively well-crafted". Since Torgerson put together the SP3 slate, I feel safe dismissing it out of hand — he's demonstrated that he doesn't have the minimum level of competence at English-wrangling necessary to pick lists of "the best stories".
I often enjoy things that aren't even trying for excellence, but that's not what awards are *for*. Part of what bemuses me about the Puppies is that having high standards, believing in excellence, thinking that there are objective standards of value that don't have anything to do with popularity — these are all things I associate with traditional conservatism. And yet the Puppies seem to be doubling down on a pugnacious rejection of high literary standards — and, in their work, even such bourgeois affectations as grammar.
Another reason I won't vote for anything touched by the Puppies is that two of the most prominent people involved -- indeed, the two most likely to benefit from the slate -- are IMHO actually evil.
As a rule, I don't believe in calling a person "evil". Every human is capable of evil actions as well as good ones, you can't split people into neat "good" and "bad" piles.
However. Sometimes there are people who are pretty consistent about doing evil and seem to be proud of it, so it's fair to just cut to the chase and say they're evil people. If they do something nice, then you can be surprised.
Nice couple of guys, who ended up with a bunch of Hugo nominations between them.
But why do I saw Wright and Beale are the most likely to benefit from the slate?
Wright's case is obvious. With 6 nominations in 4 categories, he has a pretty good chance of adding "Hugo Award-Winning Author" to his resume.
Beale, it turns out, is the founder and maybe editor-in-chief (it's not clear) of Castalia House, a small independent publishing company (supposedly) based in Finland, which ~~somehow~~ managed to put out nine Hugo-nominated works in its first year of operation.
That's just another way this conservative, partisan SF movement is like conservative American politics: look for the grift. Most of the people on the Puppy slates won't get Hugo Awards, but they'll find themselves with bad reputations in the fandom and the industry for years to come. Beale and Wright, though, may well get richer -- while still being admired for their forthright courage against lefty bullying by the followers they've led to harm.
Needless to say, No Award is looking like it might sweep the Hugos this year.
A white police officer has been charged with murder, the mayor of North Charleston, S.C., said Tuesday, after a video surfaced showing him shooting and killing an apparently unarmed black man in the back while he ran away.
The officer, Michael T. Slager, had said he feared for his life because the man took his stun gun in a scuffle after a traffic stop on Saturday. A video, however, shows the officer firing eight times as the man fled. The state charges were announced in a news conference Tuesday evening.
The only reason Michael Slager is facing murder charges is because of this video, which was provided to the New York Times. In it you can clearly see the officer reaching for Scott, who turns around and flees. The officer then takes a shooting stance with his sidearm and fires eight times at the fleeing Scott.
Later in the video, it very much looks like Slager drops his taser next to Scott's body.
The shooting unfolded after Officer Slager stopped a Mercedes-Benz with a broken taillight, according to police reports. The driver, Walter L. Scott, 50, ran away, and Officer Slager chased him into a grassy lot that abuts a muffler shop. He fired his Taser, an electronic stun gun, but it did not stop Mr. Scott, according to police reports.
Moments later, Officer Slager reported on his radio, “Shots fired and the subject is down. He took my Taser,” according to police reports.
But the video, which was taken by a bystander and provided to The New York Times by Mr. Scott’s lawyer, presents a different account. The video begins in the vacant lot, apparently moments after Officer Slager fired his Taser. Wires, which carry the electrical current from the stun gun, appear to be extending from Mr. Scott’s body as the two men tussle and Mr. Scott turns to run.
Something — it is not clear whether it is the stun gun — is either tossed or knocked to the ground behind the two men and Officer Slager draws his gun, the video shows. When the officer fires, Mr. Scott appears to be 15 to 20 feet away and fleeing. He falls after the last of eight shots.
So no, he didn't take the officer's taser, and the officer shot Scott multiple times while he was running away. Then he dropped the taser next to Scott's body.
Three months into what allies once confidently described as a “shock and awe” drive to overcome his rivals and dominate the Republican presidential field, Jeb Bush’s early campaigning looks like the juggernaut that wasn’t.
He is grappling with the Republican Party’s prickly and demanding ideological blocs, particularly evangelical leaders and pro-Israel hawks. He is struggling to win over grass-roots activists in Iowa and New Hampshire, states he has visited only a handful of times. And Mr. Bush’s undisputed advantage — the millions of dollars streaming rapidly into his political organization — may not be enough to knock out other contenders.
For all the Republican “bundlers” who have signed up to raise money for Mr. Bush, others remain uncommitted or are hedging their bets by aiding more than one candidate. Some are privately chafing at what they view as the Bush camp’s presumption of their loyalty.
Other wealthy donors, mindful of their power to reshape the Republican race with “super PAC” donations, have been more direct: The casino magnate Sheldon Adelson recently made what two people briefed on it described as an “animated” call to one of Mr. Bush’s top supporters after former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, a Bush adviser, criticizedPrime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel in a speech in March.
It is a far cry, party officials, activists and donors said, from the early success of George W. Bush, Mr. Bush’s brother, in securing the 2000 Republican presidential nomination.
For the Bush family, inevitability is not what it used to be. “There hasn’t been a coalescing around him like there was for his brother in 1998 and 1999,” said Ed Martin, who led the Missouri Republican Party until February and is now president of the Eagle Forum, the conservative group founded by Phyllis Schlafly. “I just don’t have a sense among big donors and Republican leaders that this is Jeb’s to lose.”
This is all wishful thinking, frankly. If the last week in Indiana proved one thing, it's that the corporate wing of the GOP is firmly in charge, and the Tea Party nut jobs aren't calling the shots anymore. Bad bets in 2012 won't be made again this time around.
Jeb may be a meatball, but in the end I think he's more inevitable than Hillary as the respective 2016 nominee of their party. Too much old money, old power, and old skeletons for something new to emerge from the party of the 1850s.
Columbia School Journalism dean Steve Coll writes the autopsy of Rolling Stone's journalistic credibility as last November's disaster of a sexual assault story has now officially been retracted. Coll's 12,000 word deconstruction is longer than the original article by about a third and is absolutely brutal to the magazine, the Columbia J-school author, and her editors.
The collapse of "A Rape on Campus" does not involve the kinds of fabrication by reporters that have occurred in some other infamous cases of journalistic meltdown. In 2003, the New York Times reporter Jayson Blair resigned after editors concluded that he had invented stories from whole cloth. In February, NBC News suspended anchor Brian Williams after he admitted that he told tall tales about his wartime reporting in Iraq. There is no evidence in Erdely's materials or from interviews with her subjects that she invented facts; the problem was that she relied on what Jackie told her without vetting its accuracy.
"It's been an extraordinarily painful and humbling experience," Woods said. "I've learned that even the most trusted and experienced people – including, and maybe especially, myself – can make grave errors in judgment."
Yet Rolling Stone's senior editors are unanimous in the belief that the story's failure does not require them to change their editorial systems. "It's not like I think we need to overhaul our process, and I don't think we need to necessarily institute a lot of new ways of doing things," Dana said. "We just have to do what we've always done and just make sure we don't make this mistake again." Coco McPherson, the fact-checking chief, said, "I one hundred percent do not think that the policies that we have in place failed. I think decisions were made around those because of the subject matter."
Yet better and clearer policies about reporting practices, pseudonyms and attribution might well have prevented the magazine's errors. The checking department should have been more assertive about questioning editorial decisions that the story's checker justifiably doubted. Dana said he was not told of reporting holes like the failure to contact the three friends or the decision to use misleading attributions to obscure that fact.
For his part, Coll does provide a fair number of things that should immediately be improved by the magazine, and for journalists covering sexual assault in any capacity. Whether or not anyone listens is the key, but the bottom line is I would not expect to see anything resembling a hard-hitting expose' on college sexual assault and rape anytime soon, and the damage done by Rolling Stone here plays right into the idiotic right-wing myth that sexual assault simply doesn't happen on campus.
People, not just women, will be hurt and will not report assault because of this article and the fallout from it. Period.
And that's Rolling Stone's biggest shame.
Were we as interested in flaying the malefactors behind journalistic malpractice when FOX or the Wall Street Journal commits it, daily.
Kansas welfare recipients will be unable to get more than $25 per day in benefits under a new law sent this week to Republican Gov. Sam Brownback's desk by the state legislature.
The bill also prohibits welfare recipients from spending their benefits at certain types of businesses, including liquor stores, fortune tellers, swimming pools and cruise ships.
"We're trying to make sure those benefits are used the way they were intended," state Rep. Michael O'Donnell (R) said, according to the Topeka Capital-Journal. "This is about prosperity. This is about having a great life."
By the way, that $25 a day limit means that should you want to use cash assistance to pay your rent, you'd have to keep making $25 withdrawals daily, each time incurring a 85-cent processing fee. And that's if you can find an ATM that gives $5s. Bank ATMs in America only are stocked with 20 dollar bills, so really it's a series of $20 withdrawals with a 4.25 percent surcharge.
Democrats tried to amend the bill, but let's not forget that the goal of government is to punish those who are poor until they choose to stop being poor because America.
John Oliver's Last Week Tonight on HBO is by far the best of the "informational satire" shows out there, mainly because with the show being on pay cable, Oliver can say whatever the hell he wants to, and it's far funnier and more effective than Jon Stewart or even Colbert on top of his game. So far Oliver has really yet to make a major miss like Colbert did on the rare occasion (or Stewart did far more often, descending into "both sides do it" nonsense just to be a contrary bastard.)
So it was with some trepidation that I watched this week's episode as it tackled government surveillance and an interview with Dudebro Defector himself. If there was any subject where Oliver's razor wit could have faded into preachy garbage, it would be praying at the church of the Snowbro.
Oliver didn’t pull any punches. “How many of those documents have you actually read?” he asked Snowden with a palpable air of skepticism. “I do understand what I turned over,” the ex-CIA systems admin mumbled.
Not good enough. “There’s a difference between understanding what’s in the documents and reading what’s in the documents… because when you’re handing over thousands of NSA documents the last thing you’d want to do is read them,” Oliver said.
He continued, “So the New York Times took a slide, didn’t redact it properly, and in the end it was possible for people to see that something was being used in Mosul on al Qaeda.”
“That is a problem,” Snowden replied.
“Well, that’s a fuckup,” said Oliver.
“It is a fuckup, and those things do happen in reporting. In journalism, we have to accept that some mistakes will be made. This is a fundamental concept of liberty,” Snowden said.
“Right. But you have to own that then,” grilled Oliver. “You’re giving documents with information you know could be harmful, which could get out there.”
It's kind of sad that by far the best interview that I've seen with Edward Snowden, one that actually explains where he believes he's coming from in his own words, was conducted by a fake news host. Snowden came across here as an actual person and not a techno-martyr. He honestly believes he did the right thing, but Oliver pointed out that Snowden had managed to dodge the consequences of what he did, and for once, Snowden seems to actually think about those consequences and the responsibility he has for those actions. I don't think anyone has ever forced him to consider those consequences before, certainly not in any of the other interviews I've seen him in.
And then Oliver explains NSA surveillance through something that we can all understand: penis pictures. It's actually very good and he makes some excellent points about the NSA having done unacceptable acts in our name.
If there's anything I took away from this, it's that Snowden is naive and didn't quite fully understand the megatonnage of the stuff he swiped before he put it out there. And he didn't understand it because he never had time to dissect it all and still hasn't.
And frankly, this interview is an admission that he hasn't even read over everything he got his hands on. People did that for him, and that's a problem. It also means that when he said he did evaluate all the documents he took out of the NSA in his NBC interview last year, he was lying, point blank.
That's a major concern and no matter what you think of the guy personally, he has feet of clay. Snowden's defense of his actions were 100% based on having evaluated all the documents he took from the NSA, and finding them all worthy of public release, that the necessity of releasing them outweighed the harm the information might cause.
We know now that was complete nonsense. He took it all and released it all and didn't carefully evaluate it. The NSA has to answer for what it has done, but so does Edward Snowden.
Once again Republicans in Tennessee's legislature have killed GOP Gov. Bill Haslam's plans to expand health insurance. What makes "Republicans tell thousands of voters to shut up and die" actually newsworthy is that Haslam was pushing what national Republicans say they want as far as replacing Obamacare's Medicaid expansion: vouchers and health savings accounts. The plan didn't even make it out of a state Senate committee.
It was never very likely the nine-member committee, eight of whom are Republicans, would approve the plan. Opponents repeatedly said they thought the plan would end up costing the state tax money, questioned whether Tennessee could opt out of the plan and criticized its ties to the Affordable Care Act, also known as "Obamacare."
During the hearing Tuesday, though, there was very little discussion. Sen. Dolores Gresham, R-Somerville, asked one question about the plan, the only question asked by a committee member.
"It was disconcerting to see the lack of any meaningful discussion. The people of Tennessee deserved better from their legislature today," said Senate Democratic Caucus Chairman Jeff Yarbro, D-Nashville.
Yarbro initially sponsored the resolution that allowed Haslam to move forward with the plan during the regular session after a GOP-backed measure failed in a special legislative session earlier this year. After a subcommittee and committee approved the plan, GOP Sens. Doug Overbey and Richard Briggs took over as lead sponsors of the resolution.
"It is not an expansion to Medicaid. It is a new approach. It is a Tennessee approach," Overbey, R-Maryville, told the committee Tuesday.
Overbey sponsored the resolution during the special session, and Briggs, who also is a doctor, voted for the plan when it died in special session. Because of concerns raised during that session, lawmakers amended the latest version of Insure Tennessee.
The new plan required Haslam to wait until after the U.S. Supreme Court rules on the ACA case called King v. Burwell; created a six-month "lockout" for people who don't pay Insure Tennessee premiums; and required Haslam to have a letter from federal health officials promising to let Tennessee end the program at any time.
Otherwise, the plan is the same as introduced during the special session. The plan creates two programs for people who earn up to 138 percent of the federal poverty line: one would create vouchers for people whose employers offer insurance that they cannot afford, and a second program would create savings accounts that members could use to pay costs after partaking in healthy choices, such as appropriate use of an emergency room.
"Is Insure Tennessee Obamacare? I think you can give it a resounding no, it is not," said Briggs, R-Knoxville.
And Insure Tennessee's Republican plan lost the committee vote 2-6-1. If poor people die, they're no longer the state's problem, are they?
When Republicans say they want to replace Obamacare with a Republican version, point to Tennessee as proof they are lying.
Even with the Biden Administration adults in charge and Democrats in control on Congress (barely), there remains an increasingly crumbling global economy imperiling the world, rising nationalism and deadly racism across Europe and Asia, a seemingly endless war against terror, a federal government nobody trusts or believes in, global climate change putting us on the brink of destruction and a Village media that barely does its job on even the best day.
Needless to say there's a lot of Stupid out there when we need solutions. Dangerous levels of Stupid.
Into the fray, dear Reader. Tray tables, crash helmets, arms inside blog at all times.
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