No, seriously—he uses real questions and facts and logic and everything! With the help of Jim Walsh of the MIT Security Studies Program, Matthews completely PWNS!!!11! Joshua Muravchik of the conservative cesspool known as the American Enterprise Institute. Muravchik wants to bomb Iran NOW, and Matthews basically exposes him as a brainless warmonger.
So Barack Obama decided to do a series of gospel concerts/campaign appearances across South Carolina, and invited ex-gay and current homobigot gospel singer Donnie McClurkin to be a part of it. Naturally, this is not a popular decision. See Pam and Earl Ofari Hutchison and Truth Wins Out, for a start.
The campaign was keeping mum on the whole thing until last night, at which point it finally issued a statement repudiating McClurkin's views:
"I have clearly stated my belief that gays and lesbians are our brothers and sisters and should be provided the respect, dignity, and rights of all other citizens. I have consistently spoken directly to African-American religious leaders about the need to overcome the homophobia that persists in some parts our community so that we can confront issues like HIV/AIDS and broaden the reach of equal rights in this country," Obama said in the written statement.And then a campaign spokesperson "said McClurkin would remain part of the concert line-up."
"I strongly believe that African Americans and the LGBT community must stand together in the fight for equal rights. And so I strongly disagree with Reverend McClurkin’s views and will continue to fight for these rights as President of the United States to ensure that America is a country that spreads tolerance instead of division," the statement added.
Since announcing his candidacy for president last week, Stephen Colbert is already polling higher than Bill Richardson, Dennis Kucinich, and Mike Gravel:
The Public Opinion Strategies poll this past weekend of 1,000 likely primary voters that included Colbert's name -- as both a Democrat and Republican, as he wishes --- found him drawing 2.3 percent in the Dem race nationally (though he is threatening to run only in his native South Carolina).LOL! That guy's a freaking hoot.
This put his ahead of Richardson (2.1 percent), Rep. Dennis Kucininch (2.1) and, of course, Sen. Mike Gravel. And he trails Sen. Biden by just a tad (he's at 2.7 percent).
Of course he has a long way to go to catch up with the three frontrunners (you know who they are).
But Colbert fares less well among his natural constituency on the GOP side, where he draws less than one percent.
When I was in first grade, my teacher made a comment on my grade card which was frighteningly prescient:
"Plays well with others. Does not follow instructions. "
This might as well have become my mantra-for-life.
Friends have reported equally Pre-Cog teachers who assessed them with phrases that predicted their adult lives, such as:
Woot! Sometime in the last couple of hours, the ol' Site Meter hit three million visitors—which, of course, means a toast is in order!
Honestly, the old man is getting so pathetic, I can barely stand to make fun of him anymore.
Evidence that McCain forgot his medicines the morning of the South Carolina event became obvious when someone on his bus asked what was on his iPod:Okay, McCain has now officially moved beyond generally stoopid into a whole new realm of nutz. I'm not dissing ABBA, because I sing me a mean Fernando, but those bitchez have sold 370 million records. The Beatles have sold over a billion."Dare I say ABBA. Everybody says, 'Ehhh, ABBA.' Why is that? ABBA was the largest selling (recording act ever). Nobody likes them but they sold more records than anybody in the history of the world, including the Beatles. But everybody hates them. (But) you're a no-class guy if you like ABBA. Why does everybody go see 'Mamma Mia?' Hypocrisy! Rank hypocrisy! I'm not embarrassed to say I like ABBA, 'Dancing Queen.'" (emphasis ours)Yeah America, wtf? Fucking "Dancing Queen." All these kids with their hips hop and their Obama…. I just want a hot meal.
If you don't know anything about Richard Mellon Scaife, the best way I can describe him to you in short order is that he is to conservative funding the way Karl Rove is to conservative strategy. Another way to understand him is to look at all the batshit crazy conspiracy rubbish the rightwingers constantly blather about George Soros, then remember that they are masters of projection, and realize they're really talking about their über-moneyman, Scaife.
A "cantankerous, reclusive 75-year-old billionaire" who is "best known for funding efforts to smear then-President Clinton," the twice-married Scaife has "given in excess of $300 million to right-learning activists, watchdogs, and think tanks" including "the family-values-focused Heritage Foundation, which has published papers with titles such as Restoring a Culture of Marriage."
Now his second marriage is coming to a bitter, gloriously ugly end—and it really just couldn't happen to a nicer guy. And check this out:
Three words, people.Oh. Mah. Gawd.
No. Pre. Nup.
Unfathomable but true, when Scaife (rhymes with safe) married his second wife, Margaret "Ritchie" Scaife, in 1991, he neglected to wall off a fortune that Forbes recently valued at $1.3 billion. This, to understate matters, is likely going to cost him, big time. As part of a temporary settlement, 60-year-old Ritchie Scaife is currently cashing an alimony check that at first glance will look like a typo: $725,000 a month. Or about $24,000 a day, seven days a week. As Richard Scaife's exasperated lawyers put it in a filing, "The temporary order produces an amount so large that just the income from it, invested at 5 percent, is greater each year than the salary of the President of the United States."And what could have prompted this grand severance in the first place?
At some point in late 2005, Ritchie started having suspicions about her husband and hired a private investigator named Keith Scannell, a specialist in high-end surveillance for insurance companies. In December of that year, Scannell followed Richard Scaife to nearby North Huntingdon, home of Doug's Motel, a place where the TVs are bolted to the furniture and rooms can be rented in three-hour increments, for $28. (It's now under new management and renamed the Huntingdon Inn. Head east on Route 8, then east on Route 30.) There, according to Scannell, Scaife spent a few hours with Tammy Sue Vasco.Ahh, romance!
Why a billionaire would shack up at Doug's Motel, of all places, is a mystery. Ditto his choice of companions. Vasco is a tall, blond 43-year-old mother who in 1993 was busted in a sting operation after showing up at a Sheraton hotel and offering to have sex with an undercover cop for $225, the Post-Gazette reported.
Social Register material she is not, but Vasco and Scaife seemed to have a relationship that went beyond the purely professional. The two usually met each other twice a week, for months, at the motel, says an employee of the motel. Scaife would show up in a chauffeured car, dressed in a suit, wearing cuff links, always bearing flowers. Vasco would be waiting in same room every time, Room 5 on the ground floor, facing the parking lot, said the employee. Mr. Dick, as he was known at the motel, would stay for two hours or so, then get back in the car, which had been waiting, and leave.
"I think there is a handful of people who hate America. Unfortunately for them, a lot of them are losing their homes in a forest fire today."—Professional asshole Glenn Beck [via Atrios].
With regard to my earlier post on the AP report about sexual misconduct in schools, Petulant just sent me this video of MSNBC's coverage of the report:
Experts on this say that most of these cases, or many of these cases, go unreported. Either the young people who are the victims are afraid or ashamed or they don't want to get the teacher in trouble, or, when they do report this, it is lost in the records because the administrators or the principals don't take any action on it. So, you're right, these figures probably represent a fraction, how big a fraction we don't know, of the total number of these.Also, at one point, he says that the majority of victims are "female teachers," and I'm almost certain he must have meant "female students." Big difference.
Susan Jacoby in The Secularist's Corner at the Washington Post:
Will there ever be a candidate with the courage to say to these far-right fundamentalists, “You’re bigoted, irrational religious fanatics, and if I have to cozy up to you to be elected, well, I’d rather be right than president.”?No.
Responding to GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee's spectacularly stupid abortion-as-holocaust equivalence—"[F]or the last 35 years, we have aborted more than a million people who would have been in our workforce had we not had the holocaust of liberalized abortion under a flawed Supreme Court ruling in 1973."—LeMew writes:
[I]f abortion is a "holocaust," one wonders why most anti-choicers believe that the alleged primary perpetrators of this genocide should face fewer legal sanctions than if they spat on the sidewalk. And Huckabee would have signed the North Dakota law that also exempted women from punishment for contributing to the "holocaust." Does Huckabee believe that Eichmann should have been exempt from punishment? Or maybe he should stop using this idiotic and spectacularly offensive analogy?Maybe.
This weekend, the AP dispatched an extensive, detailed report about sexual misconduct among educators, ranging from inappropriate speech to rape, and examining the "pass the trash" phenomenon, in which a sexual predator is passed from school to school without ever having charges brought, much the same way predator priests were(/are?) passed from parish to parish in the Catholic church.
Now, "passing the trash" is a problem for American public schools, even without any sexual element; background checks don't turn up ethical offenses of any sort—grade fixing, substance abuse, physical altercations with students, etc.—if the district at which the offense(s) happened make an agreement with the teacher/administrator to seal the record if s/he resigns quietly, saving the district bad publicity. And that happens a lot.
So there's definitely a real and not insignificant issue into which this article has tapped. And, of course, sexual assault is a gravely serious problem, about which I trust my constant writing gives some hint of my fervent belief that it needs more attention.
So why do I hate this article?
Well, let me start by saying that, like any endemic cultural affliction, there are smart ways to address the problem of sexual assault and there are not smart ways—and one of the least productive ways of dealing with the very real and very complex problem of sexual assault is hysteria.
Particularly when it comes to children and sexual assault, creating widespread panic is utterly counterproductive, for a variety of reasons, not least of which being that children who have been assaulted and turn quietly in on themselves are less likely to be noticed, and inevitably there are children who suffer their own kind of abuse by way of being coaxed into accusations that aren't real, cajoled into talking about disturbing details of abuse that never occurred. The Day Care Sex Abuse and/or Satanic Ritualistic Abuse hysterias (often linked) of the 1980's and '90s were just enormous clusterfucks of wasted resources that resulted in almost no convictions that held up to judicial scrutiny after the hysteria began to pass. Meanwhile, there were certainly legitimate cases of abusive day care workers that went unacknowledged as fantastical stories of hundreds of children abused in Satanic rituals at individual daycares ghoulishly captured the nation's attention.
Hysteria is, in a very real way, the flipside of denial—the meticulous refusal to acknowledge an institutional problem, the surreptitious concealment of perpetrators and their crimes, the rejection of responsibility, the denouncing of victims and enforced silence. The willful, deliberate blindness. The strategy most closely associated with the Catholic Church in their attempts to deny the breadth of the problem within its ranks. Two sides of the same coin. In the end, making everyone a suspect is just as dangerous as making no one a suspect.
So back to the AP article. Let's start with the headline the AP gave its report, repeated by nearly every outlet in which I read it: Sexual misconduct plagues US schools.
Plagues.
Hmm. Well, that word strikes me as a wee bit inflammatory, if I'm honest. But let's get into the statistics. Maybe it really is a plague.The seven-month investigation found 2,570 educators whose teaching credentials were revoked, denied, voluntarily surrendered or limited from 2001 through 2005 following allegations of sexual misconduct.
Fucking hell. 2,570. That's a lot.
Young people were the victims in at least 1,801 of the cases, and more than 80 percent of those were students. More than half the educators who were punished by their states also were convicted of crimes related to the misconduct.
Of course, there are also three million public school teachers in the US, making less than one-tenth of one percent (0.08%) of them among the educators reprimanded in some way for sexual misconduct. (Accounting for the fact that 90% of the offenses are committed by the only 24.9% of teachers that are male, that makes 0.3% of male teachers reprimanded in some way for sexual misconduct.) By way of comparison, "A review by America's Catholic bishops found that about 4,400 of 110,000 priests were accused of molesting minors from 1950 through 2002." That's 4%—more than ten times the rate of male public school teachers.
Less plague-like than I might have imagined.
If you note that the AP uses "educators" interchangeably with "teachers" when using that 3 million number, but then also notes that the "the cases that the AP found were those of everyday educators—teachers, school psychologists, principals and superintendents among them," it gets a little messier yet. That's more than 3 million "educators," which means an even smaller percentage of them are sexual predators. Less and less plague-like all the time.
But, okay, maybe the AP was just a little sloppy with their numbers. I'm still willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that they're serious about educating the American public about the very real problem of sexual assault and not just writing an exploitative piece to lay the groundwork of a new hysteria which they'll then milk for all its worth for the next decade. So let's see what else they have to say:Abuse also is treated with misplaced fascination in American culture.
Great point. Now we're getting somewhere.
"It's dealt with in a salacious manner with late-night comedians saying, 'What 14-year-old boy wouldn't want to have sex with his teacher?' It trivializes the whole issue," says Robert Shoop, a professor of educational administration at Kansas State University who wrote a book to help school districts deal with sexual misconduct.
"In other cases, it's reported as if this is some deviant who crawled into the school district -- 'and now that they're gone, everything's OK.' But it's much more prevalent than people would think."
Or would be—if the AP hadn't sent out a file photo of Mary Kay Letourneau to accompany the story, which I found used on a dozen different sites filing this report.
Well done, AP.
Not only does that undermine the extremely important point being made by Mr. Shoop about treating sexual misconduct like a joke, but it also deliberately misrepresents the problem:[The perpetrators are] often popular and recognized for excellence and, in nearly nine out of 10 cases, they're male.
That number matters for one very important reason that the AP fails to mention: The majority of public school administrators are male, too. On the high school level, where there is the greatest concentration of male teachers (35%, compared to 9% on the elementary level), only 21% of high school principals by 2000 were women—and only 13% of school superintendents. The old Boys' Club is never overtly mentioned as a contributing factor to the problem of sexual misconduct in American public schools, despite the AP framing its report around the story of lifelong shuffled perv Gary C. Lindsey. The report opens thusly:A young teacher in Iowa sheepishly admits that he fondled a fifth-grader's breast. But he doesn't lose his teaching license until one persistent victim and her family go public -- 40 years after the first accusation.
Then, midway through:"You're supposed to be able to send your kids to school knowing that they're going to be safe," says Jennah Bramow, a 20-year-old single mom and waitress in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
And then, it closes with (at least in the extended verion):
While other victims accepted settlement deals and signed confidentiality agreements, she sued her city's schools for failing to protect her from accused teacher Gary C. Lindsey -- and won.
The trial revealed that Lindsey had been forced out of his first teaching job in Oelwein, Iowa, in 1964, after admitting he'd fondled a fifth-grader's breast.
"I guess it was just lust of the flesh," Lindsey told his superintendent. He moved on to schools in Illinois and eventually settled in Cedar Rapids.
Now 68, Lindsey refused multiple requests for an interview. "It never occurs to you people that some people don't want their past opened back up," he said when an AP reporter asked him questions at his home outside Cedar Rapids.
That past, according to court evidence, included abuse accusations from a half-dozen more girls and their parents, along with reprimands from principals that were filed away, explained away and ultimately ignored until 1995, when allegations from Bramow and two other girls forced his early retirement.
Even then, he kept his teaching license until the Bramows filed a complaint with the state. He was never charged criminally.Arthur Sensor, the former superintendent in Oelwein, Iowa, who vividly recalls pressuring Lindsey to quit on Feb. 18, 1964, regrets that he didn't do more to stop him back then.
A man who didn't want to ruin another man's life, passed him forward to another school, another principal, other students, and, of course, ultimately other victims. "Beyond the horror of individual crimes, the larger shame is the institutions that govern education have only sporadically addressed a problem that's been apparent for years," says the AP, also noting they uncovered "a deeply entrenched resistance toward recognizing and fighting abuse. It starts in school hallways, where fellow teachers look away or feel powerless to help. School administrators make behind-the-scenes deals to avoid lawsuits and other trouble." Fellow teachers feel powerless to help because of unresponsive school administrations. Administrations that make clear they are serious about teachers who behave in appropriate and/or criminal ways with their students don't have teachers who feel powerless working for them. This is a top-down problem.
Now, he says, he'd call the police.
"He promised me he wouldn't do it again—that he had learned. And he was a young man, a beginning teacher, had a young wife, a young child." Sensor, now 86 years old, said during testimony at the Bramows' civil trial.
"I wanted to believe him, and I did."
And, at the top, more often than not, sit men—many of whom are just as likely to protect and shelter (or carefully ignore) sexual harassers and predators in their midst as has been the male hierarchy of the Catholic Church, as has the male hierarchy of the US military, as has the male hierarchy of many a police squad, as has male-dominated board rooms in corporate America.
"He was a young man, a beginning teacher, had a young wife, a young child … I wanted to believe him, and I did."
That is a problem not remotely unique to public schools.
In fact, the problem is so very much the same at public schools as everywhere else—the glad-handing, back-slapping, ruthlessly ambitious, Alpha-male good ol' boy is often the guy rewarded with the principal's office, who eventually becomes the superintendent of schools. It's the men least likely to be sympathetic to victims in the position where victims most need an advocate. That's an American problem, not a public school problem.
And now we come back to why I don't like this article. The biggest problems emerging from the AP report—unprosecuted serial perpetrators, unreported crimes, disbelieved victims, victim-blaming—are problems of our entire culture. That doesn't make them not important or not worth addressing—but casting them as a problem exclusively of schools (and "plaguing" schools, no less) is not helpful and may actually be detrimental. It's exactly this kind of article in which hysterias find their roots, for a start.
Beyond that, no good—none—will come of ghettoizing teaching as a profession of perverts. We already underfund schools and underpay teachers; there's really no need to make it a less desirable profession, dissuading decent and talented people in yet one more way from choosing teaching as a profession. I can think of no better way to ensure that the schools are filled with creeps and losers than by going on about how the teaching profession is plagued with sickos until no right-minded person would take the job.
That'll be just great for the kids in public school, won't it? We'll really have helped them out.
As I said at the start of this piece, there are smart ways to address the problem of sexual assault—and addressing it wisely and effectively within the specific confines of the public school system is dependent on many of the same precepts of addressing it wisely and effectively anywhere else, starting with education for both students and school staff on precisely what constitutes sexual misconduct and how it should be reported, and including the presence of a well-trained victims' advocate independent from the administration, someone who isn't inclined to make deals with sexual predators out of a sense of fraternity, a sense of obligation to protect the school, or any other reason that doesn't have fuck all to do with justice and safety.
Justice and safety in any school—or workplace, or organization, or even family—are always a top-down proposition. The most important component to protecting people is a willingness to prioritize their protection rationally and steadily—and comprehensively, by creating an environment where everyone is regarded as equals and treated with dignity, where there's no question that an adult touching a little girl's breast is wrong.
[Following up on Jeff's post below, from a writer's persepctive.]
J.K. Rowling brings Albus Dumbledore out of the closet.
Harry Potter fans, the rumors are true: Albus Dumbledore, master wizard and Headmaster of Hogwarts, is gay. J.K. Rowling, author of the mega-selling fantasy series that ended last summer, outed the beloved character Friday night while appearing before a full house at Carnegie Hall.In for a penny, in for a pound.
After reading briefly from the final book, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," she took questions from audience members.
She was asked by one young fan whether Dumbledore finds "true love."
"Dumbledore is gay," the author responded to gasps and applause.
She then explained that Dumbledore was smitten with rival Gellert Grindelwald, whom he defeated long ago in a battle between good and bad wizards. "Falling in love can blind us to an extent," Rowling said of Dumbledore's feelings, adding that Dumbledore was "horribly, terribly let down."
Dumbledore's love, she observed, was his "great tragedy."
"Oh, my god," Rowling concluded with a laugh, "the fan fiction."
[...]
Rowling, finishing a brief "Open Book Tour" of the United States, her first tour here since 2000, also said that she regarded her Potter books as a "prolonged argument for tolerance" and urged her fans to "question authority."
Not everyone likes her work, Rowling said, likely referring to Christian groups that have alleged the books promote witchcraft. Her news about Dumbledore, she said, will give them one more reason.
I'm very tired of hearing people who are unwilling to change the constitution, but seem more than willing to change the holy word of God as it relates to the definition of marriage."So saith Gov. Mike Huckabee at the convention of Christian conservatives. Perhaps someone should point out to Mr. Huckabee that the United States Constitution is not a religious manifesto and that neither "God" nor the "definition of marriage" is in the Constitution in the first place. Second, the definition of marriage has been changing throughout history, as most recently as forty years ago when the Supreme Court overturned bans on interracial marriage. If Mr. Huckabee truly wishes to return us to the biblical model of marriage, he'd better be ready to accept polygamy and women being sold off by their fathers to the highest bidder.
by SAP
Oh, look: Melissa's old buddy Sheriff Joe Arpaio is back in the news.
Plainclothes Maricopa County Sheriff's officers arrested New Times founders, Village Voice Media Executive Editor Michael Lacey and Chairman/CEO Jim Larkin at their homes late Thursday evening for revealing grand jury information in their recent story Grand Jury Targets New Times and Its Readers. Both were taken into custody and have yet to be bailed out. Lacey is believed to be in the 4th Ave. Jail. And there are reports that Larkin was taken to a substation in Mesa.
In a related incident, New Times reporter Ray Stern was issued a citation today for taking digital photos of Sheriff's Office documents at the law offices of Iafrate and Associates in Phoenix. This is particularly absurd since all Stern did was try to take pictures of MCSO press releases -- public documents by any definition. When asked to leave by Michelle Iafrate, the head of the law firm, he did so without incident.
It's believed the arrests have nothing to do with Judge Baca, the judge in charge of the grand jury currently investigating Phoenix New Times. Speculation is that New Times enemy Dennis Wilenchik, the special prosecutor in the case, may have filed a complaint against Lacey and Larkin, and that's the reason they were arrested.
Published yesterday, the cover story with its dual byline revealed details of an ongoing grand jury inquiry into a law allegedly violated years ago when reporter John Dougherty revealed Sheriff Arpaio's address in a column. Dougherty was looking into Sheriff Joe's real estate transactions at the time. The law makes it illegal to publish the address online, not in the physical paper.
This is a little story about what happened at our house Wednesday night. All true. So, it takes place in our kitchen:
