Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

The most dangerous place for a black man in America is in a white man’s imagination.

Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?

It is not hopeless, and we are not helpless.

Hey Washington Post, “Democracy Dies in Darkness” was supposed to be a warning, not a mission statement.

This really is a full service blog.

The way to stop violence is to stop manufacturing the hatred that fuels it.

I would try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

You come for women, you’re gonna get your ass kicked.

The arc of history bends toward the same old fuckery.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

They punch you in the face and then start crying because their fist hurts.

Today’s gop: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

Accountability, motherfuckers.

The lights are all blinking red.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

If you don’t believe freedom is for everybody, then the thing you love isn’t freedom, it is privilege.

A fool as well as an oath-breaker.

Dear media: perhaps we ought to let Donald Trump speak for himself!

Consistently wrong since 2002

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Archives for 2014

Thursday Morning Open Thread: The Glass Cliff

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secret service updates danziger

(Jeff Danziger’s website)

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I’ve talked about the phenomenon before, but now Bryce Covert at TNR tells me it has a name:

On Wednesday, Julia Pierson, the first woman to ever lead the Secret Service in its nearly 150-year history, resigned her post amid heavy criticism over an intruder who was able to get as far as the East Room of the White House.

Reasonable people can disagree about whether, ultimately, she deserved to lose her job or whether anyone in charge during such an incident would have to resign. But it’s probably not pure chance that Pierson, who held that position for just a year-and-a-half, was a woman. Time and again, women are put in charge only when there’s a mess, and if they can’t engineer a quick cleanup, they’re shoved out the door. The academics Michelle Ryan and Alex Haslam even coined a term for this phenomenon: They call it getting pushed over the glass cliff.

Pierson was, in fact, explicitly brought in to clean up a mess. When President Obama nominated her last year, it was on the heels of news that Secret Service employees hired prostitutes in Cartagena, Colombia ahead of the president’s arrival. Pierson was meant to be a breath of fresh feminine air to clear out the macho cobwebs still dogging the agency…

… Some women are able to beat the odds and step away from the glass cliff… But many women on the glass cliff simply fall off. Female CEOs, for example, are more likely to end up forced out than men. And when they leave, they are likely to get replaced by a man. As for the Secret Service, it turns out that Joseph Clancy will be Pierson’s temporary replacement, even though he was in charge of the presidential detail the night the Salahis slipped past checkpoints. Make of that what you will.

Back in 2008, when random cab drivers or grocery clerks made vulgar comments about the Democratic primary choices (ask Cole about the trapper joke!), I’d “joke” right back about how once a rich white frat kid like Dubya had completely fubar’d his latest residence, it was always a woman or a not-white man who got called in to clean up the mess. You’d be surprised how many people agreed with that reasoning…
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That being said, what’s on the agenda as we start another day?

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#OccupyHongKong (Still)

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James Fallows has been providing a most informative series of links at the Atlantic. He wrote on Tuesday:

… It would be wonderful to think that the PRC leadership would take the soft-power, high-road route out of this confrontation. It could recognize the maturity and responsibility of the newly politically aware Hong Kong populace. It could cannily assess the advantages to China of “controlling” Hong Kong while letting it continue to operate with rule of law, uncensored Internet, untrammeled media, free universities, transparent financial markets, and all the other attributes of a first-world center. With a light hand, the PRC government could have it both ways.

But that’s not likely. Any more than it’s likely that the current leaders will throw the doors to China open to the world’s journalists—which would be the best way to advance the country’s image, given that more interesting/good is underway there than depressing/bad—or that they’ll uncensor the Internet or realize that they’re magnifying their problems in the long run by jailing, for life, a moderate, intellectual leader of the Uighur cause. This is why it is hard to imagine a pleasant ending to the currently inspiring movement in Hong Kong.

I could say that the Chinese leadership is on a self-destructive course—but, hell, I have said that about America at countless stages. For now, thanks to Hai Zhang; consider reading these items; and most sincere admiration and best wishes to the people of Hong Kong.

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Open Thread: They’re Crazy, and We Need to Point That Out

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I don’t find much use for Cole’s “Democratic Stupidity” tag, but I’m beginning to despair that we could stand to be a little less… sensitive to the feelings of our opponents, and a lot more honest about their goals. Ed Kilgore notes the “GOPers Bobbing and Weaving on Cultural Issues“:

As a follow-on to my expression of fury about Joni Ernst having it both ways in the Iowa Senate race, Will Saletan has an instructive round-up on candidate debates around the country in which Republicans are notably on the defensive concerning their views on abortion, marriage equality, and other cultural issues. This is happening not just in blue or purple states, which you might expect, but also in places like Texas and Arizona. It’s sure a role reversal from the behavior of the two parties on cultural issues not that terribly long ago, isn’t it?

But I wouldn’t take much solace from it, particularly if Democrats and/or the media let GOPers get away with their rationalizations, evasions and sheer flip-flopping on such issues. Remember 2010? That was supposedly the year when Republicans were putting aside all those divisive “social issues” to focus like a laser beam on the “fiscal crisis.” It was immediately followed by an epidemic of antichoice legislation in Republican-controlled states, and then the “religious freedom” campaign of 2012…

We’re well past the days of “My opponent may be misguided, but I’m sure s/he is sincere in their beliefs”. Either Joni Ernst and Tom Cotton and Mitch McConnell are theology-addled nitwits, or they’re Kochsucking shills for the robber barons, or they’re just plain lying to voters. Possibly all three!

To quote Mr. Charles P. Pierce:

… The great failing of the Democratic party over the past three-and-a-half decades has been the party’s failure to take political advantage of the obvious prion disease that has afflicted the Republican party since it first ate all the monkey-brains in the mid-1970’s. Whether this was out of cowardice, incompetence, or an overly optimistic view of the inherent sanity of the electorate, is no longer an issue. The failure to make the Republican crazee the Republican party’s standing public identity has encouraged the increased spread, and the increased virulence of the prion disease, with disastrous consequences for the rest of us. Why, in the name of god, would you not call Michele Bachmann crazy? Because it might offend the people who vote for her? It’s supposed to offend those people. Those people beg to be offended, and, by doing so, you at least inject into the discussion the notion that the Republican party has thrown its marbles gleefully to the four winds. A few elections later, that may become the general opinion. After all, the Permanent Republican Majority wasn’t built in a day…

Consider, for a second, how many Democratic candidates had to labor under the narrative that their party was “soft on defense” because a narrative had been established for that in 1972, when a decorated combat pilot named George McGovern was routed by history’s yard waste, Richard Nixon, and how we then watched the celebrated rise of Ronald Reagan who, when McGovern was crash-landing his crippled bomber, was defending the bar of the Brown Derby against the infiltration of starlets. Imagine if, after electing the fools and lightweights to the Senate in 1980, the Democrats were able to construct and sell the notion that the Republican party had surrendered itself to its fringe. If they’d been able to do that, Joni Ernst could be seen as a symptom and not a senator…

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Taking Rape Victims Seriously

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There’s been some media discussion recently about how poorly colleges tend to handle rape allegations…

… In the center of this philosophical, and administrative, debate are the universities, which need to protect students, including innocent boys who may not look innocent, as in the Duke lacrosse case. There are good people here who have dedicated their lives to helping young people, and one of the mysteries of this issue is how they created a system that devastates so many of the students who come to them desperate for help. At some universities, it’s administrative bloat, middle-management laziness, a habit of shoving assault cases under the rug so they don’t become nuisances. At others, too much attention has perhaps been paid to the letter of Title IX and not its spirit, with a sluggishness about giving rape survivors what they want—the accused student out of their dorms, classes, and their lives…

… and then, this appeared in the Washington Post:

The suspect in the disappearance of University of Virginia sophomore Hannah Graham was accused of sexual assaults at two Virginia colleges he attended, and he left each school shortly after each allegation, according to school officials.

The alleged assaults occurred within an 11-month span from 2002 to 2003 as Jesse L. “LJ” Matthew Jr. moved from Liberty University in Lynchburg to Christopher Newport University in Newport News. Police investigated each report, but neither resulted in a criminal case, according to the Lynchburg prosecutor and a review of online court records in Newport News…

Christopher Newport confirmed the sexual assault allegation against Matthew on Wednesday in response to a public-records request by The Washington Post. School spokeswoman Lori Jacobs said records indicate that Matthew was accused of a sexual assault on campus on Sept. 7, 2003, which campus police investigated. Jacobs declined to say what action was taken after the allegation or how the case was resolved. Matthew left the university less than a week later…

Lynchburg Commonwealth’s Attorney Michael Doucette said that Matthew was the subject of a sexual assault investigation by Lynchburg police in 2002, when he was a student at Liberty. Another student accused Matthew of raping her on campus, Doucette said, and the case went to Lynchburg prosecutors. But Doucette said the woman declined to press charges and no independent witnesses could be found to corroborate her account, so no charges were filed…

Of course, Liberty is a “Christian” university, and has been accused in the past of preferring to eject both victims and offenders in sexual violence cases, under the well-known “she must’ve done something to deserve it” legal defense.

Not that it’s only the “religious” schools. When Donald Gene Miller made a name for himself, I was working in the same large campus facility as one of the women he murdered — a shy, church-going recent divorcee. While she was still officially missing, my boss (who was a casual acquaintance) tried putting together a reward-for-information fund, which was not so easy in those pre-internet days. A depressing number of the victim’s “friends” refused to help, on the grounds that, well, she must’ve done something to get herself in trouble, even assuming she hadn’t just run off on her own. (When Miller was apprehended, he eventually admitted he’d chosen his victims because they all went to the same adult Bible-study classes as he did… not out of religious mania, but just because they were available.)

Hindsight is always 20/20, but there’s got to be a better way of separating “college kids will do stupid stuff” from “budding serial predators find campuses a rich hunting ground”. I like to think that things have gotten better for victims of sexual violence since 1978, but apparently there’s still much work to be done…

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Monty Python Was There First

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Republicans and libertarians claim to hate big government, but they actually love it when it is in your uterus:

A new Alabama regulation, the most radical parental consent law in the country, puts minors seeking abortions virtually on trial, appoints a guardian for their fetus, and could drag family, friends, and acquaintances into court. The law, currently under challenge by the ACLU, went into effect on July 1. It allows the court to appoint the embryo or fetus a “guardian ad litem,” which is a person, usually a lawyer, tasked with advocating for the embryo’s interests in court. It also requires that the district attorney appear to represent the interests of the state — which the law explicitly says are “to protect unborn life.” And the DA can call the young woman’s friends, family members, teachers or employers as witnesses if he deems it necessary.

Are all DA’s referred to as “he,” even if they are female? Serious question.

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To the Surprise of No One

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If white people went through as much bullshit as black people did, we would be burning down buildings in every state in the nation:

The St. Louis County prosecutor’s office is investigating an accusation of misconduct on the grand jury that is hearing the case against the Ferguson police officer who shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown.

Ed Magee, the spokesman for county prosecutor Robert McCulloch, said they received the information from a “Twitter user” Wednesday morning.

“We are looking into the matter,” he said.

An account of possible jury misconduct surfaced Wednesday morning on Twitter, when several users sent messages about one juror who may have discussed evidence in the case with a friend.

In one of those messages, a person tweeted that they are friends with a member of the jury who doesn’t believe there is enough evidence to warrant an arrest of the officer, Darren Wilson.

The same person who tweeted about being friends with a member of the jury has also tweeted messages of support for Wilson.

Special Prosecutor. NOW.

Well done, Jay Nixon.

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