Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Helping Hand

If you want to help the people of Moore, Oklahoma:

The Red Cross has set up shelters in various communities. You can donate to the Red Cross Disaster Relief fund here, and the organization also suggests giving blood at your local hospital or blood bank.

If you want to send a $10 donation to the Disaster Relief fund via text message, you can do so by texting the word REDCROSS to 90999. As in the case with other donations via mobile, the donation will show up on your wireless bill, or be deducted from your balance if you have a prepaid phone. You need to be 18 or older, or have parental permission, to donate this way. (If you change your mind, text the word STOP to 90999.)

Phone: 1-800-RED CROSS (1-800-733-2767); for Spanish speakers, 1-800-257-7575; for TDD, 1-800-220-4095.

Do not send food, clothing, or toys.  They just get in the way.  They need cash and blood.

There are plenty of other charities and agencies to choose from as well.  And, of course, there will be charlatans exploiting the emergency, so make your contribution of your own initiative and hang up on those who call you out of the blue.

Teens In Love

Via Steve Rothaus:

More than 85,000 supporters since Friday have signed an Internet petition demanding felony sex charges be dropped against an 18-year-old lesbian who dated a 14-year-old high-school basketball teammate.

Kaitlyn Hunt of Indian River County is charged with two felony counts of lewd and lascivious battery on a child 12 to 16 years old. If convicted, she would be sentenced from probation to 15 years in prison and registered as a sex offender.

Hunt turned 18 on Aug. 14, 2012. She and a 14-year-old classmate, known as C.S., began dating in November. They first had consensual sex just before Christmas in a bathroom at Sebastian River High School. The relationship continued through February, according to an arrest affidavit.

[...]

Indian River sheriff’s deputies showed up at Hunt’s home on Feb. 16, according to her mother.

“My husband answered the door and they asked for my daughter. She wasn’t home at the time,” Kelley Hunt Smith told The Miami Herald on Monday. “They refused to tell my husband anything. They said it was no big deal, it was just something that happened in school.”

Smith said that when her daughter arrived home, deputies handcuffed and arrested her.

“I flipped out, my husband flipped out, my other daughter was crying hysterically,” she said. “I can’t wrap my head around how they could prosecute an 18-year-old for a felony that carries 15 years in prison. She’s scared to death and trusting her parents. We’ve done everything we can to protect her. We’re doing our best.”

At the sheriff’s office, deputies read Hunt her Miranda rights and she told them about her relationship with C.S. “Your affiant asked Kaitlyn if she knew it was wrong to have sex with C.S. due to C.S. being 14 years old. Kaitlyn stated that she did not think about it because C.S. acted older,” detective Jeremy Shepherd wrote in his report.

[...]

In Florida, the legal age of sexual consent is 18. In 2007, the state adopted a “Romeo and Juliet” law that would keep 18 year olds from being registered as sex offenders if they had consensual sex with classmates age 15 or older.

Hunt doesn’t qualify because her girlfriend was 14 at the time they had sex, Indian River State Attorney Bruce Colton said Monday.

C.S. turned 15 in April, according to Hunt’s mother.

Prosecutors deny that being a same-sex couple had anything to do with it.  And chickens need chapstick.

Church/State

The Supreme Court will hear a case deciding whether or not a town council in upstate New York can open its meetings with a prayer.

For more than a decade starting in 1999, the Town Board began its public meetings with a prayer from a “chaplain of the month.” Town officials said that members of all faiths, and atheists, were welcome to give the opening prayer.

In practice, the federal appeals court in New York said, almost all of the chaplains were Christian.

“A substantial majority of the prayers in the record contained uniquely Christian language,” Judge Guido Calabresi wrote for a unanimous three-judge panel of the court, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. “Roughly two-thirds contained references to ‘Jesus Christ,’ ‘Jesus,’ ‘Your Son’ or the ‘Holy Spirit.’”

Two town residents sued, saying the prayers ran afoul of the First Amendment’s prohibition of the government establishment of religion. The appeals court agreed. “The town’s prayer practice must be viewed as an endorsement of a particular religious viewpoint,” Judge Calabresi wrote.

Cue up the Chorus of The Poor Persecuted Majority who will tell us that there is no place safe in America for them to impose their faith and practice on the rest of us whether we want it or not.

Solution: put an imam in the rotation as “chaplain of the month” and see how quickly they decide to bag the whole thing.

Worst Person Singular

The award goes to Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) for saying that disaster relief for his own state is contingent upon budget cuts somewhere else.

“That’s always been his position [to offset disaster aid],” a spokesman told the Huffington Post Monday night. “He supported offsets to the bill funding the OKC bombing recovery effort.”

Being consistent doesn’t always make you a better person.  It just makes you an asshole who can be counted on to always do the wrong thing.

Monday, May 20, 2013

Severe Weather

[Moved to the top and updated links.]

The town of Moore, Oklahoma, has been destroyed by a tornado.

A monster tornado ripped through southern Oklahoma City and the suburb of Moore on Monday afternoon, leaving homes and schools in ruins and fires burning out of control.

There was no immediate word on casualties, but aerial footage showed major destruction: homes in rubble, cars flipped over and crushed, residents milling around in shock or combing through debris.

“A large part of the community has been affected,” Jayme Shelton, a spokesman for Moore, told MSNBC.

A forecaster for NBC station KFOR said the tornado was kicking up a debris cloud about 2 miles wide as it tracked east into residential neighborhoods in the Moore area.

Forecasters said the twister could be an EF5, the most devastating category of storm with sustained wind speeds topping 200 mph and “incredible” damage. The National Weather Service will confirm the storm’s intensity.

Oklahoma City police told NBC News southern portions of the city as well as the Moore suburb sustained “major damage… a lot of damage.”

Two elementary schools were heavily damaged, possibly completely destroyed, KFOR reported. Those schools are Briarwood Elementary in Oklahoma City and Plaza Towers Elementary in Moore.

This is the second time the town has been destroyed.  In May 1999, a tornado followed the same path.

Update: MSNBC is reporting at least 51 killed.

Karl Marks

It’s a right-wing tactic to attack the messenger, but in the case of Jonathan Karl, he does have a resume that suggests he might be a tad inclined to see things from a right-wing point of view.

Karl came to mainstream journalism via the Collegiate Network, an organization primarily devoted to promoting and supporting right-leaning newspapers on college campuses (Extra!, 9-10/91)—such as the Rutgers paper launched by the infamous James O’Keefe (Political Correction, 1/27/10). The network, founded in 1979, is one of several projects of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which seeks to strengthen conservative ideology on college campuses. William F. Buckley was the ISI’s first president, and the current board chair is American Spectator publisher Alfred Regnery. Several leading right-wing pundits came out of Collegiate-affiliated papers, including Ann Coulter, Dinesh D’Souza, Michelle Malkin, Rich Lowry and Laura Ingraham (Washington Times, 11/28/04).

The Collegiate Network also provides paid internships and fellowships to place its members at corporate media outlets or influential Beltway publications; 2010-11 placements include the Hill, Roll Call, Dallas Morning News and USA Today. The program’s highest-profile alum is Karl, who was a Collegiate fellow at the neoliberal New Republic magazine.

After a stint at the New York Post, Karl soon found his way to CNN, but he was still connected to ideological pursuits; he was a board member at the right-leaning youth-oriented Third Millennium group and at the Madison Center for Educational Affairs—which, like the Collegiate Network, seeks to strengthen young conservative journalism. After moving to ABC in 2003, Karl contributed several pieces to the neo-con Weekly Standard, such as his April 4, 2005 article praising Bush Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as out to “make her mark with the vigorous pursuit of the president’s freedom and democracy agenda.”

Karl’s high profile at ABC demonstrates that conservative messages can find a comfortable home inside the so-called “liberal” media.

Does that mean that he can’t be a fair and objective reporter when it comes to doing his job?  Not at all.  A lot of journalists work for news organizations that have a political point of view but still are able to do their job without seeming to inject their point of view into their work.  (Of course, to hear the right-wingers tell it, all journalists are left-wing shills for Saul Alinsky, Noam Chomsky, and George Soros, but send a kid to college on a scholarship from the National Review and he’s the soul of objectivity.)

It’s not what he thinks but how he acts that matters, and so far Mr. Karl’s response (see below) tend to lend credence to the notion that in this case, his background and job history does matter.

In his case, you wonder why he’s not working as the head of the Washington bureau at Fox News.

HT to digby.

Being Trendy

I now have a Twitter account.  It is @BobbyBBWW.

I don’t promise I’ll be tweeting every minute of the day, and I won’t be filling you in on everything I do, eat, see, or hear.  For one thing, I can’t twitter from the office, which is where I spend most of my time.  Second, I can’t imagine anyone would actually give a rat’s ass about what I do, eat, see, or hear.

But anyway, I’m on it.  Yip yah.

When The Messenger Is The Story

ABC’s Jonathan Karl is in the uncomfortable position of being the story instead of reporting it.

He’s the one who got the breathless scoop about the White House e-mails that showed the administration was trying to scrub the facts about Benghazi! to make it look like they were trying to keep the heat off the State Department.  But when the White House released the e-mails in their entirety that proved no such thing and it turned out that Mr. Karl had been given second-hand summaries edited and vetted by Republican Congressional staffers, he became the story.  A number of news outlets, including CBS News, flatly contradicted the ABC story, as did the facts themselves, leaving Mr. Karl as the one who had some explaining to do about his work and the story he published.

That’s not a good thing for a reporter, whether or not he or she is right.  Just ask Dan Rather or Judith Miller.  Or, for that matter, Woodward and Bernstein.

Mr. Karl released a statement yesterday afternoon that basically said that while there were some errors made, the story “entirely stands.”  Josh Marshall takes a look at his statement and calls bullshit: How can you have a factual error in a story, yet say that it’s still “entirely” true?

I don’t know if Mr. Karl will keep his job at ABC News, but it’s likely that he will, given that this is a story about a Democratic president and that party does not have the lung power and the shrillness of the GOP to hound someone out of a job.  If this was about a Republican president, you’d be hearing the Mighty Wurlitzer of Fox News and the right wing demanding his head on a spike all the way to Venus.

In Your Opinion

If you listen to some people, President Obama had the worst week in his political career last week and he’s one step away from becoming the new Nixon in terms of popularity in the polls.

That is, if you listen to some people who work for the GOP and Fox News.  As for the rest of us…

According to the survey, which was conducted Friday and Saturday, 53% of Americans say they approve of the job the president is doing, with 45% saying they disapprove. The president’s approval rating was at 51% in CNN’s last poll, which was conducted in early April.

In other words, nobody really gives a shit about the various “scandals” and intrigues going on, ranging from edited e-mails and the Marine umbrella deployment brigade.

So if the Republicans were hoping to get a little traction out of all of this, the answer would be a resounding yawn.

The GOP has a habit of making mountains out of molehills as long as its someone else and the American electorate has tuned them out.

Sunday, May 19, 2013

Sunday Reading

Obstruction — Jonathan Bernstein at Salon on why blocking every move by the president will blow up in the hands of the GOP.

It’s obvious that the unprecedented Senate Republican obstruction of executive branch nominations is bad for the president; it’s bad for the smooth functioning of the government; and it’s bad for voters who elected a Democratic president and a solid, 55-seat Democratic majority in the Senate. I’ve argued, too, that it’s bad for the Senate.

Less obvious? It’s bad for Republicans.

Now, in electoral terms, it can’t be bad for both parties, since electoral politics is a zero-sum game. Indeed, that’s sort of the problem for Republicans; obstruction of these nominations almost certainly has zero electoral effect. After all, most voters couldn’t tell you who the nominees for secretary of labor or to head the Environmental Protection Agency are, let alone the obscure rules Republicans are using to delay their confirmation.

So the effects of massive, across-the-board obstruction are going to be on policy, not elections. And that’s not a zero-sum game – and it will hurt Republicans and Republican-aligned groups, too.

Obstruction backfires against Republicans because it makes it difficult, and perhaps impossible, for them to collectively use the nomination process to make policy demands. Consider, for example, what they’ve done with EPA nominee Gina McCarthy. Senators traditionally ask nominees questions in order, in part, to get them to commit to policies those Senators find acceptable. McCarthy received not the normal dozens of questions, but more than 1,000. That appears to be an extreme case, but it’s not just her, either. As the New York Times reported, Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew had to answer 395. By contrast, George W. Bush’s last Treasury Secretary received 49 questions from Democrats and 32 from Republicans. When you answer hundreds of questions, you might as well answer none; by failing to focus on specific areas of policy they care about, Republicans are likely wasting the opportunity to actually win some policy commitments.

Which Was the Worst? — James Fallows at The Atlantic weighs in on which of the so-called scandals is the one that could be the worst for President Obama.

Obama’s endorsement of the seizure of phone records and investigation suggests surprising blindness to two great and not-very-hidden realities of presidential history.

One is, secrets always get out. Presidents always hate it, and they always do their best to prevent it. Usually they manage to guard the truly life-and-death, real-time operational details — for instance, in Obama’s case, the suspected whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. But always there are leaks. Always. Always. And they are nearly always less consequential than is alleged at the time.

The other great historical constant is that after-the-fact hunts for leakers always go wrong. That is because they criminalize the delicate but essential relationship between reporters and government officials. The prosecutors always come across as over-reaching and too intrusive. The reporters and their news organizations always end up in a no-win situation: sometimes spending time in jail, often put in financial distress by legal costs, always torn between their professional/personal obligation to maintain confidence with their sources and the demands of prosecutors. And no good purpose is ever served.

Obama should know this. He must know it. He must know that no president looks better in history’s eyes for anti-leak prosecutions, and that many look worse. He must know the temptations that work on any president: the temptation to steadily arrogate executive power, to become so resentful of the limits on his power in domestic-legislation fights that he is drawn toward his untrammeled international authority, to slide imperceptibly from his (unavoidable) role as the person who must make countless hard decisions to a sense that his judgment automatically equals what is best for the country. He must know what the open-ended “war on terror” has done to the balance of powers, the fabric of life, and the rule of law in our country. Obama’s (and America’s) ideal, Abraham Lincoln, infringed heavily on civil liberties in the name of wartime emergency. That war, like Franklin Roosevelt’s, had a definable end.

I think Barack Obama has made a bad mistake in endorsing this investigation. It is one of the rare times I question not his effectiveness or tactics but his judgment. I hope he reconsiders.

Pity Party — Frank Bruni says that winning in America, be it on The Voice or in politics, relies on having a hard-luck story to tug at the heartstrings.

There’s a vivid streak of this in history, from Abe Lincoln’s log home to Bill Clinton’s turbulent one. But it seems more florid now. The economy’s stubborn funk has ratcheted up our suspicion of perks and privileges and our support for underdogs, to a point where we’re less taken with what people have achieved than with what they’ve endured.

In politics and in prime time, the contestants with the most traction are frequently the contestants with the gravest trials: afflictions, addictions, lost loves, lost dogs. I’m kidding about the canines, but only slightly. If there aren’t any epic setbacks in your biography, your political consultants or your “Voice” producers will find and amplify whatever garden-variety sorrows do exist. They’re like divining rods for tears, Yo-Yo Ma’s of the heartstrings.

That’s surely why a sort of weariness and skepticism was the response among a few New Yorkers I know to last week’s revelations by Christine Quinn, the mayoral candidate, that she’d struggled with bulimia and alcoholism. They’ve grown so inured to the process of public figures rummaging through the past for hard knocks that they greet it in a jaded fashion, wondering how to tell the real aches from the exaggerated ones.

Fetishized misfortune — hardship porn — has numbed them. That’s the biggest problem with it. It equates and mashes everything into one sentimental mush, cheapening uncommon suffering by showcasing it alongside the rest. It bends all life stories into identical arcs, no matter how different those stories are.

Doonesbury — Facial recognition.

Saturday, May 18, 2013

In Perspective

Andrew Sullivan gets in Peggy Noonan’s face for writing “We are in the midst of the worst Washington scandal since Watergate.”

Can she actually believe this? Has this president broken the law, lied under oath, or authorized war crimes? Has he traded arms for hostages with Iran? Has he knowingly sent his cabinet out to tell lies about his sex life? Has he sat by idly as an American city was destroyed by a hurricane? Has he started a war with no planning for an occupation? Has he started a war based on a lie, and destroyed the US’ credibility and moral standing while he was at it, leaving nothing but a smoldering and now rekindled civil sectarian war?

So far as I can tell, this president has done nothing illegal, unethical or even wrong.

Charlie Pierce adds his wisdom:

For the benefit of wandering fetuses who may have joined our program in progress—and for the benefit of aging stenographers whose memories may be failing them—here is what has happened in the IRS “scandal” so far. There was bureaucratic dumbassery in the IRS office in Cincinnati to which there was something of an inadequate response by the home office in Washington. This dumbassery concerned the criteria involved in the certification process of 501 (c) 4 groups which, since the Citizens United decision was handed down, have become the biggest scam against democracy this side of whatever Michelle Rhee comes up with next. (It did not involve, you know, actual IRS audits of said groups. It was about…paperwork.) Subsequently, the IRS blew the whistle on itself. The president fired an interim commissioner. Somebody else resigned. The president got angry about it. And that’s it.

And to top off the week, there was a HUGE scandal about President Obama asking two Marines to hold umbrellas over him and the Prime Minister of Turkey.  What an outrage!  Why is he still president?

Because history shows that lots of other presidents, including St. Ronald, have been there and done that.  Oh, and so did the Sarah Palin, the dingbat who started the whole flap in the first place.

So there.

ETA: FC points to a little bit of background on Grand Inquisitor Darrell Issa, who has his own past to account for.

HT to ntodd.