Raul, Barack. Barack, Raul.

President Obama and Raul Castro met today in a moment guaranteed to make Republican heads implode.

President Obama met with Cuban leader Raul Castro on Saturday afternoon, in what Obama called a “historic meeting.” 

"We are now in a position to move on a path toward the future,” Obama told the Cuban leader at the Summit of the Americas in Panama City, according to pool reports. 

"Over time, it is possible for us to turn the page and develop a new relationship between our two countries." 

He noted one of the first tasks the two countries will have to undertake is opening embassies in their respective capitals. 

Through an interpreter, Castro said he agrees with Obama on all points. He said the two leaders can disagree while remaining respectful. 

"We are willing to discuss everything but we need to be patient, very patient,” Castro said. "We might disagree on something today on which we could agree tomorrow."

I never thought I'd see this day.  Cuba and the Castros have been "The bad guys just off the coast of Florida" all my life. But change is coming.  Slowly.  But it's coming.

 

Saving Us From Ourselves

The FBI sure has this knack for allowing twenty-something losers to pretend to carry out terrorist fantasies, then catching them in the act for long, long prison sentences.

Booker was charged with one count of attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction (explosives), one count of attempting to damage property by means of an explosive and one count of attempting to provide material support to ISIS, the Justice Department said in a news release. 

Booker, of Topeka, was arrested at 9 a.m. local time without incident near Manhattan, Kansas, just east of Fort Riley. Prosecutors claim he was making final preparations for setting off a bomb as part of a suicide mission against U.S. military personnel, according to a criminal complaint. 

"I want to assure the public there was never any breach of Fort Riley Military Base, nor was the safety or the security of the base or its personnel ever at risk," FBI Special Agent in Charge Eric Jackson said in a statement. 

Officials said they believe Booker has mental health problems, and he once claimed he was captured by the FBI because he "was with" al Qaeda. 

Booker tried a year ago to join the Army as part of his alleged plot to attack U.S. soldiers, officials said. About three weeks before he was to report for basic training, authorities say he posted a disturbing message on Facebook: "Getting ready to be killed in jihad is a HUGE adrenaline rush!! I am so nervous. NOT because I'm scared to die but I am eager to meet my lord." 

Someone noticed the posting and the FBI was alerted. Prosecutors say he admitted writing it and told FBI agents that he enlisted in the Army so he could kill his fellow soldiers in a similar way as Maj. Nidal Hasan did at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009. Booker allegedly told the agents that he had formulated several plans for waging violent jihad once he was in the Army. 

After the Army decided it had no use for Booker, the FBI sent undercover operatives to talk with him over the next several months, the complaint said. They say Booker told them he wanted to make a car bomb to engage in "violent jihad on behalf of (ISIS)."

The guy needed help and was not a material threat.  Instead the feds allowed him to indulge his twisted fantasy in order to what, put him in a cage for the next quarter of a century? Yeah, that seems like it's a worthy use of tax dollars.

Jesus.

Last Call For WIN THE EVENING

Just because you see something first doesn't mean A) that it's accurate or B) that it's worth writing about.  In the age of social media hoaxes and lightspeed satire, it pays to slow down.

So today, this happened: Bloomberg News fell for a fake news story originally posted at one of those awful sites that plays on confirmation bias to circulate seemingly genuine stories and generate clicks for them: RETRACTED: Nancy Reagan Gives Her Endorsement to … Hillary Clinton? - Bloomberg Politics.

There’s now a notice at the top of the article:

This story has been retracted. We fell for a hoax. Apologies.

And of course the offenders are once again the jokers at "National Report".

Suckers.

Why Slager Will Walk

Not even a week after Officer Michael Slager shot Walter Scott eight times in the back, we find the campaign to make sure Slager is acquitted in the court of public opinion is on in earnest.

Saturday's traffic stop opens like so many others as Scott was stopped in a used Mercedes-Benz he had purchased days earlier, footage from the patrol car showed. At the outset, it's a strikingly benign encounter: The officer is seen walking toward the driver's window, requesting Scott's license and registration. Slager then returns to his cruiser. On the dash cam video, Slager never touches his gun during the stop. He also makes no unreasonable demands or threats. 

The video also shows Scott beginning to get out of the car, his right hand raised above his head. He then quickly gets back into the car and closes the door. After Slager goes back to his patrol car, minutes later, Scott jumps from his car and runs. Slager chases him. 

What's missing is what happens from the time the two men run out of the frame of dashboard video to the time picked up in a bystander's cellphone video a few hundred yards away. The cellphone footage starts with Scott getting to his feet and running away, then Slager firing eight shots at the man's back. 

"It is possible for something to happen in that gap to significantly raise the officer's perception of risk," Seth Stoughton, a former police officer and criminal law professor at the University of South Carolina. 

Scott was almost $7,500 behind in child support and had been in jail three times over the issue, but no bench warrants had been issued directing officers to bring him in. His family has said that he might have run because he was behind on payments again and didn't want to go back to jail. He last paid child support in 2012, court records show.

All Slager has to do in order to walk is testify that Scott tried to attack him during the period Scott ran from the traffic stop until the cell phone video opens, and that he feared for his life.

No jury will convict him. Not in the murder of a black man, because black men are vermin to be exterminated and shot in the back.  We don't count as human, you see.

Slager will lie, and he will walk.  And he'll quietly be hired back as a police officer somewhere.

And Walter Scott will be dead because he was black.

Cruz (Information) Control

GOP presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz is in the "evil liberal media is using my verbatim quotes against me, the bastards!" phase of the campaign, which should last right up until the point he pulls out next year.

In an interview with CNBC, GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz expressed anger towards the “left-wing editorial writers” who liked to call him out for making “non-factual statements.” 

Cruz, speaking to John Harwood during a ten-question interview, dismissed the tendency of people to do things like fact-check his claims supporting his argument that the IRS should be abolished:

HARWOOD: You’ve said a few things that don’t necessarily comport with the facts, like, “125,000 I.R.S. agents, send ‘em to the border.” They’ve only got 25,000 agents or something like. You’ve talked about the job-killing nature of Obamacare. We’re adding jobs at a very healthy clip right now. Why shouldn’t somebody listen to you and say, “The guy’ll just say anything – doesn’t have to be true”? 

CRUZ: There is a game that is played by left-wing editorial writers. It’s this new species of yellow journalism called PolitiFact. Colloquially I was referring to all the employees as agents. That particular stat is in a joke I used. So, they’re literally fact-checking a joke. I say that explicitly tongue in cheek.

Get it?  Any time Ted Cruz says something ridiculously non factual, it's stupid liberals fact-checking a joke and anyone who looks to fact-check his statements are "yellow journalists."

Dear political journalists: you are the enemy to any Republican.  They would see you destroyed as much as they would want to even look at you.  Why treat them as anything other than a cancer on our body politic?

StupidiNews!

• President Obama will meet with Cuban President Raul Castro today, the first time leaders of the two nations have met in more than 50 years.
• Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is expected to formally announce her candidacy for the White House in 2016 as early as this weekend.
• At least 31 people were killed in a bus crash in Morocco when the bus caught on fire immediately after colliding with a truck.
• France is now getting more than 4,000 megawatts of power from solar in 2015, a new record for the country, as Europe moves towards more green energy sources.
• Online giant Amazon is taking services that sell fake 5-star reviews of products to court, suing a California man who runs a service to "boost product review scores".

Last Call For The Facepalm-etto State

South Carolina proving once again that if there's ever an instance where it can be more ass backward than North Carolina, then South Carolina will take that bet and run with it, this time with state Attorney General Alan Wilson doing the honors on fighting the horrible scourge of same-sex marriage.

Here’s the gist of South Carolina’s fascinatingly sexist argument. The state wants to prove that the 14th Amendment—which guarantees “equal protection of the laws” to every “person”—was not intended to displace state marriage laws. And what did those laws look like at the time? One major feature: In many states, married women were not permitted to own property or enter into contracts and had no legal existence apart from their husbands. According to South Carolina, the framers of the 14th Amendment explicitly preserved the rights of states to deprive married women of the ability to function independently from her husband. This right to deprive married women of basic liberties, South Carolina argues, is enshrined in the 10thAmendment and is not at all undercut by the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equality.

The crux of South Carolina’s brief, then, is this: If the 14th Amendment permits discrimination against married women, it surely also allows discrimination against gay people who wish to wed. In fact, according to South Carolina, the 14th Amendment forbids only racial discrimination, leaving states free to disadvantage women and gays in any way they wish.

Let's take a step back.

South Carolina's official position is that the 14th Amendment only applies to race, so women and LGBTQ Americans are not subject to being treated as human beings.  The Equal Protection clause does not apply to them in any way, because at the time the 14th Amendment was written, women had fewer rights then men did (like voting).

This is the argument the state is giving to the Supreme Court in order to stop same-sex marriage.

That's astounding.  It ignores a good 100 years plus of legal precedent, not to mention makes the argument that the 10th Amendment gives states the power to discriminate legally against women and gays and lesbians and a host of other people.  It's incompatible with our society as a whole and I can't even imagine Scalia buying this argument.

But that's where South Carolina is.

Dear America

Dear America:

"Are you convinced yet that with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton that there's simply no room for white men in the Democrat party anymore?"

--Josh Kraushaar, National Journal

Bonus Verbatim Stupid(tm):

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.

Gray Area Anatomy

North Carolina Republicans are going after state medical schools for the crime of teaching abortion procedures now.

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.

And that's exactly what Republicans want.

StupidiNews!

• Iran is calling for an end to all economic sanctions up front as part of any final nuclear deal signed with the West.
• Indictments in the New Jersey Port Authority scandal investigation into improper lane closures on the George Washington Bridge may come as soon as next week.
• Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has been found guilty on all 30 counts related to the twin bombing attacks that killed two and injured 264 others in 2013.
• Italian Finance Minister Pier Carlo Padoan says he is confident that a bailout agreement for Greece will be ready in time for a meeting of EU finance ministers on April 24th.
• AT&T will pay $25 million to settle an FCC investigation into call center employees in Mexico, Colombia, and the Philippines stealing the data of thousands of US customers.

Last Call For The Real Victims

The Phi Kappa Psi fraternity at University of Virginia is suing Rolling Stone magazine for defamation, fallout for its now discredited and retracted campus rape story from last year.

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.

Proving that in a court of law, well, the guys at Volokh Conspiracy admit that's not going to be much of a problem.

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.

One Bad Apple, All Lives Matter

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.

It'll always be.

Pounded Puppies, Or The Adventures Of Hurricane Hugo

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.

Correia turned his own nomination down out of some goofy act of selflessness, or something.  Vox Day on the other hand sees this as the first step in the destruction of sci-fi publishing houses like Tor Books, and in the Grim Future of White Supremacy, all authors are Vox Day.

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.

He's of course talking about Vox Day, real name Theodore Beale (a guy who rides that "white people are genetically superior to others" train like a boss) and his sidekick John C. Wright, who once called the writers of Nickelodeon's Legend of Korra series "traitors" and termites" who needed to be "exterminated" .

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.

StupidiNews!

• Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel appeared humbled as he won the city's first ever mayoral runoff election last night to capture a second term and "a second chance".
• Kansas has become the first state to ban a second-trimester abortion procedure used in fewer than 10% of abortions in the US.
• A US District Court judge in Texas continues to refuse to lift a temporary block on President Obama's executive orders on immigration, claiming the administration misled the court.
• Dutch energy giant Shell will buy Brazilian energy company BG Group for $70 billion in what could be the beginning of another round of energy mega-mergers while oil prices continue to slump.
• The DEA ran an extensive phone metadata collection program from 1992 through 2013, according to a major story in USA Today.

Last Call For Eight Is Enough

Eight shots to his back while running away from a police officer.

This is how Walter Scott died in North Charleston.

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.

This is the police in America in 2015.