Eric Cantor under fire for STOCK Act tweaks
Cantor's version strips a provision requiring consultants to disclose their activities.
By SEUNG MIN KIM
2/8/12
Politico
A feel-good bill has suddenly turned nasty.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) has released his version of a congressional insider-trading ban, and it strips a provision that would require so-called political intelligence consultants to disclose their activities, like lobbyists already do. It also scraps a proposal that empowers federal prosecutors going after corruption by public officials.
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That’s stoked backlash from Democrats and even some Republicans, who are furious at Cantor and are accusing the Virginia Republican of watering down the popular legislation that easily passed Senate last week.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) slammed the House for deleting his amendment targeting the political intelligence industry, which tracks action on Capitol Hill and then sells the information to investors. Instead, the House bill requires just a study of the industry’s activities within 12 months.
“It’s astonishing and extremely disappointing that the House would fulfill Wall Street’s wishes by killing this provision,” Grassley said in a statement. “If Congress delays action, the political intelligence industry will stay in the shadows, just the way Wall Street likes it.”
Cantor spokeswoman Laena Fallon said the provision was deleted because it was “extremely broad” and added that the “unintended consequences on the provision could have affected the first amendment rights of everyone participating in local rotaries to national media conglomerates.”
Democrats weren’t comforted by that explanation.
“The thing we greatly feared has come upon us,” Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) told reporters on Wednesday. “It has been weakened, totally, as far as I’m concerned.”
Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), who co-authored with Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) an amendment to crack down on public corruption using a number of measures, said he was “deeply disappointed” his provision had disappeared from the House bill. Leahy noted that a similar measure cleared the House Judiciary Committee in December.
“If we are serious about restoring faith in government and addressing the kinds of egregious misconduct that we have witnessed in recent years in high-profile public corruption cases, Congress must act now to enact serious anti-corruption legislation,” Leahy said in a statement. “The House Republicans’ version of the STOCK Act misses that opportunity.”
For Cantor’s part, the House’s No. 2 Republican has added provisions that he says strengthens the STOCK Act, which explicitly bars lawmakers and their aides from using nonpublic information gained through their jobs to profit themselves.
The new version of the House’s STOCK Act ensures that the bill’s insider-trading ban and its disclosure requirements apply to the executive branch, and it also bans lawmakers convicted of a crime from collecting pensions.
In a shot at House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Republicans also added a so-called “Pelosi provision” that imposes stricter rules on public officials who participate in initial public offerings. The California Democrat was targeted in a “60 Minutes” probe that reported Pelosi and her husband participated in Visa’s IPO while a bill governing credit-card legislation was pending before Congress.
Pelosi has denied any conflict of interest or special access related to the Visa IPO.
Slaughter was peeved at the “Pelosi Provision” when asked about it on Wednesday.
“I think the fact that they put this in was strictly to cause grief to [Pelosi],” Slaughter said, “and I resent it.”
Cantor said in a statement late Tuesday that he consulted “dozens of members” as he reworked the bill. But neither Slaughter nor Rep. Tim Walz (D-Minn.), the primary sponsors of the STOCK Act, worked with Cantor on the new bill, the Democrats said.
Despite the partisan bickering, the legislation is expected to pass when it comes up for a vote Thursday.
Friday, February 10, 2012
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Strom Thurmond is gone but not forgotten; Juan Williams takes a step to the left
Juan Williams stands in for Obama at Fox debate
The GOP celebrates MLK day by booing the black pundit as Gingrich belittles him for asking tough questions on race
BY JOAN WALSH
Salon.com
JAN 17, 2012
The Fox News debate began auspiciously, with moderator Bret Baier noting that it was our national holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Then his actual question had nothing to do with Dr. King. But those of us who feared the debate would duck racial issues worried for naught. The night climaxed with the South Carolina crowd giving Newt Gingrich a standing ovation for smacking down Fox’s leading black contributor, Juan Williams, for his impertinent questions about race.
Williams asked for it, of course. What was he thinking making tough racial queries at a GOP debate in Myrtle Beach, S.C.? First, he asked Romney how he squared his harsh anti-immigrant rhetoric with his own family’s story of moving to and then from Mexico seeking religious freedom. He asked Rick Santorum, who purports to care about poverty, what he would do about high African-American poverty rates. He asked Ron Paul whether he thought the nation’s harsh drug laws were bad for black people. Then he made the mistake of asking Newt Gingrich about his comments that poor urban children came from communities that lacked a “work ethic,” and his calling Barack Obama “the food stamp president.”
Gingrich couldn’t believe his luck. With a gleam in his eye, he thrashed Williams, and Steve Kornacki believes he may have given his candidacy one last shot with his savvy thumping of Fox’s leading black commentator. It hurt to watch. If Newt gets the nomination – he won’t, but a Democrat can dream – he’ll have to thank Williams at the GOP convention in Tampa, Fla., even before he thanks Callista.
Sure, Santorum took his chance to demagogue on race, telling Williams that it only took three things to stay out of poverty in America: “Work, graduate from high school, and get married before you have children.” He didn’t allow that any residue of racism or discrimination might make it harder for African-Americans to work, graduate from high school or marry. Santorum also made unfounded allegations, again, about the Obama administration forbidding certain federal programs from talking about marriage. But at least he answered Williams with some personal respect.
Gingrich looked as happy about Williams’ questions as he looked deflated at the last New Hampshire debate. The former NPR analyst referenced Gingrich’s belittling comments about poor kids lacking role models with a work ethic, and the NAACP “demanding” food stamps not jobs, and asked, “Can’t you see that this is viewed at a minimum as insulting to all Americans, but particularly to African-Americans?”
“No,” Gingrich said petulantly, with a slight pause, “I don’t see that.” The crowd screamed with glee. Gingrich went on to bash unionized janitors in public schools, and I realized that his student-janitor comments represent a right-wing political trifecta, bashing anti-business regulations like child labor laws, public sector unions and lazy “urban” kids. Oh, and he also got to attack elites this time around, insisting his janitor plans drew liberal disapproval because “only the elites despise earning money.”
But Williams didn’t back away. “The suggestion you made was about a lack of work ethic,” he told Gingrich. “It sounds as if you are seeking to belittle people.” The crowd booed Williams lustily, and Gingrich got a special twinkle in his eye. He looked at Williams like he was a soon-to-be ex-wife.
“First of all, Juan” – and there was a slight cheer when the former speaker called the Pulitzer Prize winner “Juan” – “the fact is that more people have been put on food stamps by Barack Obama than any president in American history. I know among the politically correct you’re not supposed to use facts that are uncomfortable.
“Second, you’re the one who earlier raised a key point,” he continued. “The area that ought to be I-73 was called by Barack Obama a corridor of shame because of unemployment. Has it improved in three years? No — they haven’t built the road, they haven’t helped the people, they haven’t done anything. I’m going to continue to help poor people learn how to get a job, learn how to get a better job, and someday learn how to own the job.” The crowd jumped to its feet screaming “Newt! Newt! Newt!” Fox cut to a commercial.
Where to start? Of course Obama hasn’t “put” anyone on food stamps. The Bush economy nearly doubled the poverty rate...
The Story of Juan
Juan Williams was a sometimes-controversial star at NPR until an inflammatory comment about Muslims sent him further into the arms of Fox News. A look at his career through the eyes of several old and skeptical colleagues.
By David Margolick
Vanity Fair
Jan. 18, 2012
A graduate of Haverford College, Williams launched his journalistic career at The Washington Post, which he joined as an intern in 1976. He was clearly talented and ambitious, but many thought his life there additionally charmed because of his friendship with Donald Graham, son of the publisher, who, having once been a cop in D.C., took a liking to Williams. (Asked whether he’d ever paved Williams’s way or, later, gotten him out of scrapes, Graham replied, “The answer is no—N.O.”)
Williams won praise for his willingness to cover rough parts of town and take on liberal black icons like Mayor Marion Barry long before scandals brought him down, thereby incurring charges of disloyalty from Barry and betrayal from the black mainstream. In 1980, he began writing for the Post editorial page. That December, at a convention for black conservatives in San Francisco, he met 32-year-old Clarence Thomas, then an assistant to Senator John Danforth of Missouri. An op-ed column Williams wrote praising Thomas—whose conservatism was, Williams wrote, “born of the same personal anger at racism that fired the militants of the 1960s”—called him to the attention of the Reagan administration, which led to his first presidential appointment, which effectively led to the Supreme Court. (In 1987, by which point Thomas headed the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Williams profiled him in The Atlantic. The notoriously wary, reclusive Thomas opened up to him: what resulted was by far the most probing and insightful piece about him ever written. Williams and Thomas have remained friends and still lunch together occasionally; Thomas attended Williams’s 50th-birthday party.)
Continuing his expedited march up, in the early 1980s Williams became the paper’s junior reporter at the Reagan White House. Colleagues recall he was eager to get into print—sometimes too eager, jumping to conclusions, seasoning stories with his own opinions, failing to make that crucial last phone call. “Juan had talent and drive,” said Lou Cannon, the Reagan biographer who was then the Post’s top man at the White House. “If he’d been more interested in journalism than in being in the limelight he could have been a great reporter. That’s more essential to understanding him than putting him on the liberal/conservative spectrum.”
Civil-rights groups often complained that their side of things went especially unrepresented or misrepresented in Williams’s stories. In September 1985, a dispute emerged when Ralph Neas, then head of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, accused Williams of distorting his words in a news story. Neas was promptly summoned to the Post, where he found a tribunal—consisting of Ben Bradlee, Robert Kaiser, and Boisfeuillet Jones Jr.—then the Post’s executive editor, assistant managing editor for national news, and general counsel, respectively—convened, it appeared to Neas to, find out more about Williams’s work. What emerged, Neas recalled, was a “gentlemen’s agreement”: Williams would stop writing about civil rights. (Bradlee did not return messages; Kaiser declined to comment; Jones says he does not recall such a meeting.)
Williams disputes Neas’s story, and says that his contemporaneous notes proved Neas’s charge unfounded. Nonetheless, within a year he was moved to the Post’s less illustrious magazine.
EYES ON THE PRIZE
Williams turned out plenty of high-profile pieces at the magazine. One story, about a family devastated when one of its members was murdered, was made into a prime-time special by Oprah Winfrey. He went to South Africa to interview Nelson Mandela. And he scored a rare interview with Justice Thurgood Marshall that would later grow into a biography. (Considering Williams untrustworthy, Marshall’s wife, Cecilia, urged her husband and their friends not to speak to Williams for the book. For years, the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense and Education Fund, which Marshall long led, denied Williams access to key Marshall papers.) Williams’s editors at the magazine recall that whatever appeared under his byline usually had to be re-written from the ground up. Fame, not craft, was key.
In 1986, the producer of Eyes on the Prize, Henry Hampton, asked Williams to write the companion volume to what would become the legendary series of civil-rights documentaries. Some of Hampton’s co-workers, noting Williams’s lack of sympathy or any discernable ties to the movement, vehemently opposed Hampton’s choice. But Hampton was in a hurry—the films were nearly complete—and Williams was a name brand from a prestigious paper. And, unlike others who’d begged off, he was ambitious and self-confident enough to think he could do the job quickly.
Here, too, according to people who worked with him, Williams’s work was slipshod, even though he was supplied with all of the research materials. It was also slanted—skeptical or hostile to the people being portrayed sympathetically on the screen—and skewed: inordinately focused, for instance, on the sexual peccadilloes of some participants. Many felt that the project’s editorial director, Robert Lavelle, should have gotten co-writer credit for the companion book. Instead, the byline originally read “Juan Williams with the Eyes on the Prize Production Team.” But in interviews Williams always takes sole credit for the writing; indeed, in later printings, any reference at all to his co-authors has mysteriously disappeared. Some press accounts have even cited the book as the basis of the documentary, rather than the other way around—a misimpression which, his former colleagues complain, infuriated Hampton (who died in 1998), and which Williams has done little or nothing to correct.
Williams calls charges that he has taken excessive credit for the book “ridiculous.” “There are a lot of people who are jealous in the world, and crazy,” he said. Here as elsewhere, even Williams’s critics marvel at his sheer brazenness. “The one thing people could learn from him is the ‘parlay,’” said Callie Crossley, one of the producers of the original batch of Eyes documentaries, who now hosts a public radio show on WGBH in Boston. “Honestly, he was doing branding and inventing himself long before people were talking about it.”
IN THE SPOTLIGHT
In 1991 Williams got attention of a different, less welcome variety, for making sexually suggestive comments to women. They were more jerky than menacing—Williams wasn’t their boss, nor did he press himself on anyone—and seemed designed to grab attention more than anything else. But they were chronic and tasteless, some extremely so. (“With your fingernails painted like that, they look like cherries, and I’d just like to eat them up,” he told one Post employee. On another occasion, he told her that he wanted to put his face where she’d just sat and inhale.)
Grumbling about Williams’s catcalls persisted for several years without ever percolating up to management. But a complaint had just reached Williams’s superiors when, during Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearings in October 1991, Williams wrote a column defending Thomas and calling Anita Hill a mere tool of Democratic activists. Women at the Post grew outraged, demanding that the paper disclose Williams’s own predilections. The paper resisted, but when other news outlets reported on the dispute, the Post had to, too. The charges were “absolutely false,” Williams told Howard Kurtz, who covered the story for the paper, then went on to describe it in his book, Media Circus; the women had taken “a passing word” in the wrong way.
Williams was exiled from the Post newsroom for a couple of weeks, and the matter died down. But when he returned, and told other publications the Post had effectively apologized for treating him so harshly, things reignited. Post editor Leonard Downie then had to meet with 50 women in the paper’s cafeteria; later more than a hundred employees signed a letter complaining about Williams and the paper’s handling of him.
Downie concluded that the allegations were “serious”; Williams acknowledged he’d misbehaved and promised to “change [his] ways.” But his contrition quickly faded. What he told Kurtz shortly thereafter remains his position today: the imbroglio had everything to do with the Thomas-Hill dispute, and little to do with him. In fact, he sees himself as the real victim of the fracas.
The next year Williams went on leave to work on his Marshall book. He continued to work part-time for the Post’s Outlook section, where an editor routinely checked, and corrected, his facts. Williams was more trouble than he was worth, the Post’s top editors concluded; they longed for some politically palatable way to get rid of him. “We hoped for some Act of God that would solve the problem,” one said. “God” then came in two guises. The first was Roger Ailes, head of the then-fledgling Fox News, who in 1997 signed up Williams for part-time punditry. The second was NPR.
The GOP celebrates MLK day by booing the black pundit as Gingrich belittles him for asking tough questions on race
BY JOAN WALSH
Salon.com
JAN 17, 2012
The Fox News debate began auspiciously, with moderator Bret Baier noting that it was our national holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Then his actual question had nothing to do with Dr. King. But those of us who feared the debate would duck racial issues worried for naught. The night climaxed with the South Carolina crowd giving Newt Gingrich a standing ovation for smacking down Fox’s leading black contributor, Juan Williams, for his impertinent questions about race.
Williams asked for it, of course. What was he thinking making tough racial queries at a GOP debate in Myrtle Beach, S.C.? First, he asked Romney how he squared his harsh anti-immigrant rhetoric with his own family’s story of moving to and then from Mexico seeking religious freedom. He asked Rick Santorum, who purports to care about poverty, what he would do about high African-American poverty rates. He asked Ron Paul whether he thought the nation’s harsh drug laws were bad for black people. Then he made the mistake of asking Newt Gingrich about his comments that poor urban children came from communities that lacked a “work ethic,” and his calling Barack Obama “the food stamp president.”
Gingrich couldn’t believe his luck. With a gleam in his eye, he thrashed Williams, and Steve Kornacki believes he may have given his candidacy one last shot with his savvy thumping of Fox’s leading black commentator. It hurt to watch. If Newt gets the nomination – he won’t, but a Democrat can dream – he’ll have to thank Williams at the GOP convention in Tampa, Fla., even before he thanks Callista.
Sure, Santorum took his chance to demagogue on race, telling Williams that it only took three things to stay out of poverty in America: “Work, graduate from high school, and get married before you have children.” He didn’t allow that any residue of racism or discrimination might make it harder for African-Americans to work, graduate from high school or marry. Santorum also made unfounded allegations, again, about the Obama administration forbidding certain federal programs from talking about marriage. But at least he answered Williams with some personal respect.
Gingrich looked as happy about Williams’ questions as he looked deflated at the last New Hampshire debate. The former NPR analyst referenced Gingrich’s belittling comments about poor kids lacking role models with a work ethic, and the NAACP “demanding” food stamps not jobs, and asked, “Can’t you see that this is viewed at a minimum as insulting to all Americans, but particularly to African-Americans?”
“No,” Gingrich said petulantly, with a slight pause, “I don’t see that.” The crowd screamed with glee. Gingrich went on to bash unionized janitors in public schools, and I realized that his student-janitor comments represent a right-wing political trifecta, bashing anti-business regulations like child labor laws, public sector unions and lazy “urban” kids. Oh, and he also got to attack elites this time around, insisting his janitor plans drew liberal disapproval because “only the elites despise earning money.”
But Williams didn’t back away. “The suggestion you made was about a lack of work ethic,” he told Gingrich. “It sounds as if you are seeking to belittle people.” The crowd booed Williams lustily, and Gingrich got a special twinkle in his eye. He looked at Williams like he was a soon-to-be ex-wife.
“First of all, Juan” – and there was a slight cheer when the former speaker called the Pulitzer Prize winner “Juan” – “the fact is that more people have been put on food stamps by Barack Obama than any president in American history. I know among the politically correct you’re not supposed to use facts that are uncomfortable.
“Second, you’re the one who earlier raised a key point,” he continued. “The area that ought to be I-73 was called by Barack Obama a corridor of shame because of unemployment. Has it improved in three years? No — they haven’t built the road, they haven’t helped the people, they haven’t done anything. I’m going to continue to help poor people learn how to get a job, learn how to get a better job, and someday learn how to own the job.” The crowd jumped to its feet screaming “Newt! Newt! Newt!” Fox cut to a commercial.
Where to start? Of course Obama hasn’t “put” anyone on food stamps. The Bush economy nearly doubled the poverty rate...
The Story of Juan
Juan Williams was a sometimes-controversial star at NPR until an inflammatory comment about Muslims sent him further into the arms of Fox News. A look at his career through the eyes of several old and skeptical colleagues.
By David Margolick
Vanity Fair
Jan. 18, 2012
A graduate of Haverford College, Williams launched his journalistic career at The Washington Post, which he joined as an intern in 1976. He was clearly talented and ambitious, but many thought his life there additionally charmed because of his friendship with Donald Graham, son of the publisher, who, having once been a cop in D.C., took a liking to Williams. (Asked whether he’d ever paved Williams’s way or, later, gotten him out of scrapes, Graham replied, “The answer is no—N.O.”)
Williams won praise for his willingness to cover rough parts of town and take on liberal black icons like Mayor Marion Barry long before scandals brought him down, thereby incurring charges of disloyalty from Barry and betrayal from the black mainstream. In 1980, he began writing for the Post editorial page. That December, at a convention for black conservatives in San Francisco, he met 32-year-old Clarence Thomas, then an assistant to Senator John Danforth of Missouri. An op-ed column Williams wrote praising Thomas—whose conservatism was, Williams wrote, “born of the same personal anger at racism that fired the militants of the 1960s”—called him to the attention of the Reagan administration, which led to his first presidential appointment, which effectively led to the Supreme Court. (In 1987, by which point Thomas headed the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Williams profiled him in The Atlantic. The notoriously wary, reclusive Thomas opened up to him: what resulted was by far the most probing and insightful piece about him ever written. Williams and Thomas have remained friends and still lunch together occasionally; Thomas attended Williams’s 50th-birthday party.)
Continuing his expedited march up, in the early 1980s Williams became the paper’s junior reporter at the Reagan White House. Colleagues recall he was eager to get into print—sometimes too eager, jumping to conclusions, seasoning stories with his own opinions, failing to make that crucial last phone call. “Juan had talent and drive,” said Lou Cannon, the Reagan biographer who was then the Post’s top man at the White House. “If he’d been more interested in journalism than in being in the limelight he could have been a great reporter. That’s more essential to understanding him than putting him on the liberal/conservative spectrum.”
Civil-rights groups often complained that their side of things went especially unrepresented or misrepresented in Williams’s stories. In September 1985, a dispute emerged when Ralph Neas, then head of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, accused Williams of distorting his words in a news story. Neas was promptly summoned to the Post, where he found a tribunal—consisting of Ben Bradlee, Robert Kaiser, and Boisfeuillet Jones Jr.—then the Post’s executive editor, assistant managing editor for national news, and general counsel, respectively—convened, it appeared to Neas to, find out more about Williams’s work. What emerged, Neas recalled, was a “gentlemen’s agreement”: Williams would stop writing about civil rights. (Bradlee did not return messages; Kaiser declined to comment; Jones says he does not recall such a meeting.)
Williams disputes Neas’s story, and says that his contemporaneous notes proved Neas’s charge unfounded. Nonetheless, within a year he was moved to the Post’s less illustrious magazine.
EYES ON THE PRIZE
Williams turned out plenty of high-profile pieces at the magazine. One story, about a family devastated when one of its members was murdered, was made into a prime-time special by Oprah Winfrey. He went to South Africa to interview Nelson Mandela. And he scored a rare interview with Justice Thurgood Marshall that would later grow into a biography. (Considering Williams untrustworthy, Marshall’s wife, Cecilia, urged her husband and their friends not to speak to Williams for the book. For years, the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense and Education Fund, which Marshall long led, denied Williams access to key Marshall papers.) Williams’s editors at the magazine recall that whatever appeared under his byline usually had to be re-written from the ground up. Fame, not craft, was key.
In 1986, the producer of Eyes on the Prize, Henry Hampton, asked Williams to write the companion volume to what would become the legendary series of civil-rights documentaries. Some of Hampton’s co-workers, noting Williams’s lack of sympathy or any discernable ties to the movement, vehemently opposed Hampton’s choice. But Hampton was in a hurry—the films were nearly complete—and Williams was a name brand from a prestigious paper. And, unlike others who’d begged off, he was ambitious and self-confident enough to think he could do the job quickly.
Here, too, according to people who worked with him, Williams’s work was slipshod, even though he was supplied with all of the research materials. It was also slanted—skeptical or hostile to the people being portrayed sympathetically on the screen—and skewed: inordinately focused, for instance, on the sexual peccadilloes of some participants. Many felt that the project’s editorial director, Robert Lavelle, should have gotten co-writer credit for the companion book. Instead, the byline originally read “Juan Williams with the Eyes on the Prize Production Team.” But in interviews Williams always takes sole credit for the writing; indeed, in later printings, any reference at all to his co-authors has mysteriously disappeared. Some press accounts have even cited the book as the basis of the documentary, rather than the other way around—a misimpression which, his former colleagues complain, infuriated Hampton (who died in 1998), and which Williams has done little or nothing to correct.
Williams calls charges that he has taken excessive credit for the book “ridiculous.” “There are a lot of people who are jealous in the world, and crazy,” he said. Here as elsewhere, even Williams’s critics marvel at his sheer brazenness. “The one thing people could learn from him is the ‘parlay,’” said Callie Crossley, one of the producers of the original batch of Eyes documentaries, who now hosts a public radio show on WGBH in Boston. “Honestly, he was doing branding and inventing himself long before people were talking about it.”
IN THE SPOTLIGHT
In 1991 Williams got attention of a different, less welcome variety, for making sexually suggestive comments to women. They were more jerky than menacing—Williams wasn’t their boss, nor did he press himself on anyone—and seemed designed to grab attention more than anything else. But they were chronic and tasteless, some extremely so. (“With your fingernails painted like that, they look like cherries, and I’d just like to eat them up,” he told one Post employee. On another occasion, he told her that he wanted to put his face where she’d just sat and inhale.)
Grumbling about Williams’s catcalls persisted for several years without ever percolating up to management. But a complaint had just reached Williams’s superiors when, during Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearings in October 1991, Williams wrote a column defending Thomas and calling Anita Hill a mere tool of Democratic activists. Women at the Post grew outraged, demanding that the paper disclose Williams’s own predilections. The paper resisted, but when other news outlets reported on the dispute, the Post had to, too. The charges were “absolutely false,” Williams told Howard Kurtz, who covered the story for the paper, then went on to describe it in his book, Media Circus; the women had taken “a passing word” in the wrong way.
Williams was exiled from the Post newsroom for a couple of weeks, and the matter died down. But when he returned, and told other publications the Post had effectively apologized for treating him so harshly, things reignited. Post editor Leonard Downie then had to meet with 50 women in the paper’s cafeteria; later more than a hundred employees signed a letter complaining about Williams and the paper’s handling of him.
Downie concluded that the allegations were “serious”; Williams acknowledged he’d misbehaved and promised to “change [his] ways.” But his contrition quickly faded. What he told Kurtz shortly thereafter remains his position today: the imbroglio had everything to do with the Thomas-Hill dispute, and little to do with him. In fact, he sees himself as the real victim of the fracas.
The next year Williams went on leave to work on his Marshall book. He continued to work part-time for the Post’s Outlook section, where an editor routinely checked, and corrected, his facts. Williams was more trouble than he was worth, the Post’s top editors concluded; they longed for some politically palatable way to get rid of him. “We hoped for some Act of God that would solve the problem,” one said. “God” then came in two guises. The first was Roger Ailes, head of the then-fledgling Fox News, who in 1997 signed up Williams for part-time punditry. The second was NPR.
Saturday, December 24, 2011
US regrets Cuba's decision not to release Alan Gross, jailed for bringing Internet equipment to Cuba
US regrets Cuba's decision not to release Alan Gross
Alan Gross's health is said to be deteriorating
BBC
Dec. 24, 2011
The US State Department has said it is disappointed that US citizen Alan Gross is not among some 2,900 prisoners to be released by Cuba.
The prisoners, some convicted of political crimes, will be released over the next few days.
President Raul Castro said the move was a goodwill gesture made after he had received numerous requests from relatives and religious institutions.
But Gross, serving 15 years for crimes against the state, will not be freed.
"If this is correct, we are deeply disappointed and deplore the fact that the Cuban government has decided not to take this opportunity to extend this humanitarian release to Mr Gross this holiday season," Mark Toner, a State Department spokesman, said.
He said Gross's health was deteriorating and his family had suffered for many years hoping for his release.
In his statement, Mr Toner said Gross - jailed for taking internet equipment to the Communist-run island - should be returned to his family "where he belongs".
Black Spring
President Castro said that 86 foreign prisoners from 25 countries would be freed, and that diplomats would be notified shortly.
Continue reading the main story
Cuba mass prisoner releases
1962: Release and expulsion to the US of 1,113 prisoners captured during failed Bay of Pigs invasion
1979: More than 3,000 prisoners released after negotiations with Cuban exiles
1984: Release of 26 political prisoners after a visit from US activist Jesse Jackson
1998: Release of 299 prisoners after an appeal from Pope John Paul II
July 2010: Government agrees to free 52 prisoners in deal brokered by the Catholic Church
December 2011: President Raul Castro announces 2,900 prisoners to be released
(Sources: BBC, Human Rights Watch, Organization of American States)
Havana's refusal to free him has led to frozen relations with the US, despite a brief warming under President Barack Obama.
Gross, 62, was detained in December 2009 while he was delivering computers and communications equipment to the Jewish community in Cuba. He was sentenced in March 2011.
He was working as a State Department contractor...
Alan Gross's health is said to be deteriorating
BBC
Dec. 24, 2011
The US State Department has said it is disappointed that US citizen Alan Gross is not among some 2,900 prisoners to be released by Cuba.
The prisoners, some convicted of political crimes, will be released over the next few days.
President Raul Castro said the move was a goodwill gesture made after he had received numerous requests from relatives and religious institutions.
But Gross, serving 15 years for crimes against the state, will not be freed.
"If this is correct, we are deeply disappointed and deplore the fact that the Cuban government has decided not to take this opportunity to extend this humanitarian release to Mr Gross this holiday season," Mark Toner, a State Department spokesman, said.
He said Gross's health was deteriorating and his family had suffered for many years hoping for his release.
In his statement, Mr Toner said Gross - jailed for taking internet equipment to the Communist-run island - should be returned to his family "where he belongs".
Black Spring
President Castro said that 86 foreign prisoners from 25 countries would be freed, and that diplomats would be notified shortly.
Continue reading the main story
Cuba mass prisoner releases
1962: Release and expulsion to the US of 1,113 prisoners captured during failed Bay of Pigs invasion
1979: More than 3,000 prisoners released after negotiations with Cuban exiles
1984: Release of 26 political prisoners after a visit from US activist Jesse Jackson
1998: Release of 299 prisoners after an appeal from Pope John Paul II
July 2010: Government agrees to free 52 prisoners in deal brokered by the Catholic Church
December 2011: President Raul Castro announces 2,900 prisoners to be released
(Sources: BBC, Human Rights Watch, Organization of American States)
Havana's refusal to free him has led to frozen relations with the US, despite a brief warming under President Barack Obama.
Gross, 62, was detained in December 2009 while he was delivering computers and communications equipment to the Jewish community in Cuba. He was sentenced in March 2011.
He was working as a State Department contractor...
Sunday, December 11, 2011
Gingrich calls Palestinians an ‘invented’ people
Palestinians are descendants of the Biblical Jews. If the Palestinians are an invented people, then the invention occurred thousands of years ago when Abraham, Isaac and Jacob founded the Jewish people. Unlike many of their Jewish cousins, the Palestinians never left the land their ancestors called Judea.
Gingrich calls Palestinians an ‘invented’ people
By Amy Gardner and Philip Rucker
December 9, 2011
Republican presidential contender Newt Gingrich said in a cable TV interview that Palestinians are an “invented” people with no apparent right to their own state, a rejection of a decade of bipartisan U.S. foreign policy.
In the interview, which was taped Wednesday in Washington and will be broadcast Monday on The Jewish Channel, Gingrich spoke about his mistrust of Palestinian leaders, his admiration for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his view that the Obama administration is “favoring the terrorists” with its foreign policy.
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“Remember, there was no Palestine as a state. It was part of the Ottoman Empire,” Gingrich said. “We have invented the Palestinian people, who are in fact Arabs and are historically part of the Arab people, and they had the chance to go many places.”
“For a variety of political reasons,” Gingrich continued, “we have sustained this war against Israel now since the 1940s, and I think it’s tragic.”
Gingrich’s comments, which were first reported by Politico, were met with surprise and dismay by a range of actors on the foreign policy stage, including Democratic and Republican former diplomats and Palestinian and Israeli advocates.
Gingrich did more than fan the flames of the already fraught
Arab-Israeli conflict; he challenged long-standing U.S. policy — initiated by Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush and continued by President Obama — to encourage the establishment of a separate Palestinian state.
“Besides being factually and historically wrong, this statement is unwise,” said Ghaith al-Omari, executive director of the American Task Force on Palestine and a former adviser to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. “Rather than trying to delegitimize or undermine the narrative of either side, it would be much more productive to work towards a solution that guarantees the security and future of both the Palestinians and the Israelis.”
Elliott Abrams, who was a deputy national security adviser under Bush and is now with the Council on Foreign Relations, said: “There was no Jordan or Syria or Iraq, either, so perhaps he would say they are all invented people as well and also have no right to statehood. Whatever was true then, Palestinian nationalism has grown since 1948, and whether we like it or not, it exists.”
Gingrich’s remarks also fed a long-standing narrative about the former House speaker — that he has a penchant for provocative utterances, exciting some while alienating others.
Gingrich’s chief rival for the Republican presidential nomination, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, has been highlighting that narrative this week, and Gingrich’s latest remarks gave Romney more fodder to continue doing so.
On a call with reporters late Friday, former ambassador Mary Kramer, a Romney supporter, said: “I’m not sure that kind of statement gets us any closer to accomplishing an agenda, and so that’s one of the things that I think makes me a little bit nervous about Speaker Gingrich — that he sometimes makes comments that are open to very broad interpretations.”
Gingrich calls Palestinians an ‘invented’ people
By Amy Gardner and Philip Rucker
December 9, 2011
Republican presidential contender Newt Gingrich said in a cable TV interview that Palestinians are an “invented” people with no apparent right to their own state, a rejection of a decade of bipartisan U.S. foreign policy.
In the interview, which was taped Wednesday in Washington and will be broadcast Monday on The Jewish Channel, Gingrich spoke about his mistrust of Palestinian leaders, his admiration for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his view that the Obama administration is “favoring the terrorists” with its foreign policy.
322
Comments
Weigh In
Corrections?
inShare
Gallery
The former House speaker is seeking the Republican presidential nomination.
Read more on PostPolitics.com
Earmark probe finds $834M in requests
Gingrich calls Palestinians an ‘invented’ people
Supreme Court intervenes in Texas redistricting battle
View all Items in this Story
“Remember, there was no Palestine as a state. It was part of the Ottoman Empire,” Gingrich said. “We have invented the Palestinian people, who are in fact Arabs and are historically part of the Arab people, and they had the chance to go many places.”
“For a variety of political reasons,” Gingrich continued, “we have sustained this war against Israel now since the 1940s, and I think it’s tragic.”
Gingrich’s comments, which were first reported by Politico, were met with surprise and dismay by a range of actors on the foreign policy stage, including Democratic and Republican former diplomats and Palestinian and Israeli advocates.
Gingrich did more than fan the flames of the already fraught
Arab-Israeli conflict; he challenged long-standing U.S. policy — initiated by Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush and continued by President Obama — to encourage the establishment of a separate Palestinian state.
“Besides being factually and historically wrong, this statement is unwise,” said Ghaith al-Omari, executive director of the American Task Force on Palestine and a former adviser to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. “Rather than trying to delegitimize or undermine the narrative of either side, it would be much more productive to work towards a solution that guarantees the security and future of both the Palestinians and the Israelis.”
Elliott Abrams, who was a deputy national security adviser under Bush and is now with the Council on Foreign Relations, said: “There was no Jordan or Syria or Iraq, either, so perhaps he would say they are all invented people as well and also have no right to statehood. Whatever was true then, Palestinian nationalism has grown since 1948, and whether we like it or not, it exists.”
Gingrich’s remarks also fed a long-standing narrative about the former House speaker — that he has a penchant for provocative utterances, exciting some while alienating others.
Gingrich’s chief rival for the Republican presidential nomination, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, has been highlighting that narrative this week, and Gingrich’s latest remarks gave Romney more fodder to continue doing so.
On a call with reporters late Friday, former ambassador Mary Kramer, a Romney supporter, said: “I’m not sure that kind of statement gets us any closer to accomplishing an agenda, and so that’s one of the things that I think makes me a little bit nervous about Speaker Gingrich — that he sometimes makes comments that are open to very broad interpretations.”
Wednesday, December 07, 2011
Republicans want to stop black women from having abortions
“This morning, you can walk into a clinic and get an abortion if you find out your child is African American,” said Patrick Mahoney, a conservative activist.
If you find out your child is African American? So a black woman would have an abortion because she discovers — surprise! — that her fetus is also black?
Before the audience had a chance to digest that, Mahoney began shouting about how abortion is “lynching” — frightening a child in the front row, who cried out and hugged his mother.
Republicans color the abortion debate
By Dana Milbank
Washington Post
December 6, 2011
Rep. Trent Franks established his credentials as a civil rights leader last year when the Arizona Republican argued that, because of high abortion rates in black communities, African Americans were better off under slavery.
But the congressman doesn’t just talk the talk. On Tuesday, he chaired a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing on legislation he is introducing that would protect African American women from themselves — by making it harder for them to have abortions.
Dana Milbank
Dana Milbank writes a regular column on politics.
“In 1847, Frederick Douglass said, ‘Right is of no sex, truth is of no color, God is the father of us all and all are brethren,’ ” Franks proclaimed as he announced what he calls the “Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act of 2011.”
Drawing a line from the Civil War to the suffragist movement to defeating Hitler to the civil rights era, Franks determined that “there is one glaring exception” in the march toward equality. “Forty to 50 percent of all African American babies, virtually one in two, are killed before they are born,” he said. “This is the greatest cause of death for the African Americans.” Franks called the anti-abortion fight “the civil rights struggle that will define our generation.”
Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), who, unlike Franks, is African American and a veteran of the civil rights movement, took a different historical view. “I’ve studied Frederick Douglass more than you,” said Conyers. “I’ve never heard or read him say anything about prenatal nondiscrimination.”
Orwellian naming aside, the House Republicans’ civil rights gambit (which follows passage of a similar bill in Franks’s Arizona and marks an attempt to get an abortion bill to the House floor before year’s end) points to an interesting tactic among conservatives: They have taken on a new, and somewhat suspect, interest in the poor and in the non-white. To justify their social policies, they have stolen the language of victimization from the left. In other words, they are practicing the same identity politics they have long decried.
Newt Gingrich, now threatening Mitt Romney for the Republican presidential nomination, tried a similar argument when he argued for the elimination of “truly stupid” child labor laws and suggested that students could replace the janitors in their schools. He further explained that he was trying to help children in poor neighborhoods who have “no habits of working.”
Developer Donald Trump, who owns a Virginia country club that counts Gingrich as a member, announced this week that he would join with Gingrich to help “kids in very, very poor schools” — by extending his “Apprentice” TV reality show concept to all of 10 lucky kids. “We’re going to be picking 10 young wonderful children, and we’re going to make them apprenti,” Trump said. “We’re going to have a little fun with it.”
This “fun” might sound less patronizing if these conservatives displayed a similar concern for the well-being of the poor and the non-white during debates over budget cuts. But, whatever the motives, lawmakers and conservative activists were not bashful when they held a pre-hearing news conference Tuesday, standing beside posters directed at Latinos and African Americans (“black children are an endangered species”).
“It is horrific that in America today, babies are being killed based on their race and based on their sex,” protested Penny Nance of Concerned Women for America. Other participants in the news conference suggested that Planned Parenthood is “excited to take money specifically earmarked to kill a black baby” and linked abortion-rights advocates to eugenics, euthanasia and the Holocaust...
“This morning, you can walk into a clinic and get an abortion if you find out your child is African American,” said Patrick Mahoney, a conservative activist.
If you find out your child is African American? So a black woman would have an abortion because she discovers — surprise! — that her fetus is also black?
Before the audience had a chance to digest that, Mahoney began shouting about how abortion is “lynching” — frightening a child in the front row, who cried out and hugged his mother.
If you find out your child is African American? So a black woman would have an abortion because she discovers — surprise! — that her fetus is also black?
Before the audience had a chance to digest that, Mahoney began shouting about how abortion is “lynching” — frightening a child in the front row, who cried out and hugged his mother.
Republicans color the abortion debate
By Dana Milbank
Washington Post
December 6, 2011
Rep. Trent Franks established his credentials as a civil rights leader last year when the Arizona Republican argued that, because of high abortion rates in black communities, African Americans were better off under slavery.
But the congressman doesn’t just talk the talk. On Tuesday, he chaired a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing on legislation he is introducing that would protect African American women from themselves — by making it harder for them to have abortions.
Dana Milbank
Dana Milbank writes a regular column on politics.
“In 1847, Frederick Douglass said, ‘Right is of no sex, truth is of no color, God is the father of us all and all are brethren,’ ” Franks proclaimed as he announced what he calls the “Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act of 2011.”
Drawing a line from the Civil War to the suffragist movement to defeating Hitler to the civil rights era, Franks determined that “there is one glaring exception” in the march toward equality. “Forty to 50 percent of all African American babies, virtually one in two, are killed before they are born,” he said. “This is the greatest cause of death for the African Americans.” Franks called the anti-abortion fight “the civil rights struggle that will define our generation.”
Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), who, unlike Franks, is African American and a veteran of the civil rights movement, took a different historical view. “I’ve studied Frederick Douglass more than you,” said Conyers. “I’ve never heard or read him say anything about prenatal nondiscrimination.”
Orwellian naming aside, the House Republicans’ civil rights gambit (which follows passage of a similar bill in Franks’s Arizona and marks an attempt to get an abortion bill to the House floor before year’s end) points to an interesting tactic among conservatives: They have taken on a new, and somewhat suspect, interest in the poor and in the non-white. To justify their social policies, they have stolen the language of victimization from the left. In other words, they are practicing the same identity politics they have long decried.
Newt Gingrich, now threatening Mitt Romney for the Republican presidential nomination, tried a similar argument when he argued for the elimination of “truly stupid” child labor laws and suggested that students could replace the janitors in their schools. He further explained that he was trying to help children in poor neighborhoods who have “no habits of working.”
Developer Donald Trump, who owns a Virginia country club that counts Gingrich as a member, announced this week that he would join with Gingrich to help “kids in very, very poor schools” — by extending his “Apprentice” TV reality show concept to all of 10 lucky kids. “We’re going to be picking 10 young wonderful children, and we’re going to make them apprenti,” Trump said. “We’re going to have a little fun with it.”
This “fun” might sound less patronizing if these conservatives displayed a similar concern for the well-being of the poor and the non-white during debates over budget cuts. But, whatever the motives, lawmakers and conservative activists were not bashful when they held a pre-hearing news conference Tuesday, standing beside posters directed at Latinos and African Americans (“black children are an endangered species”).
“It is horrific that in America today, babies are being killed based on their race and based on their sex,” protested Penny Nance of Concerned Women for America. Other participants in the news conference suggested that Planned Parenthood is “excited to take money specifically earmarked to kill a black baby” and linked abortion-rights advocates to eugenics, euthanasia and the Holocaust...
“This morning, you can walk into a clinic and get an abortion if you find out your child is African American,” said Patrick Mahoney, a conservative activist.
If you find out your child is African American? So a black woman would have an abortion because she discovers — surprise! — that her fetus is also black?
Before the audience had a chance to digest that, Mahoney began shouting about how abortion is “lynching” — frightening a child in the front row, who cried out and hugged his mother.
Monday, December 05, 2011
Jewish Republicans say Ron Paul doesn't understand the difference between a refugee camp and a concentration camp
"...Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry – said they wanted to scrap existing foreign aid commitments and then have each country justify assistance, including Israel." Still, Jewish Republicans see Ron Paul as outside the fold.
Ron Paul excluded from Republican Jewish Coalition forum
Forum for Republican candidates bars Ron Paul, currently polling second in Iowa, for his 'extreme' views on Israel
Chris McGreal
guardian.co.uk
5 December 2011
The Republican Jewish Coalition has barred Ron Paul, one of the party's leading presidential contenders, from its forum for the candidates on Wednesday because of his "misguided and extreme views" on Israel.
Paul, who consistently ranks among the favourites in polls of Republican primary voters despite strong libertarian views that have alienated many in his own party, has rankled Israel's supporters by advocating an end to US aid to the Jewish state. He is also strongly opposed to military action against Iran's nuclear programme and has drawn attention to Israel's own atomic weapons which it does not officially acknowledge.
The RJC director, Matt Brooks, said Paul was excluded for those and other views.
"He's just so far outside of the mainstream of the Republican party and this organisation," he told CBS.
Earlier this year, Paul wrote to congressional colleagues urging them to cut billions of dollars of aid to Israel, Egypt, Pakistan and Jordan. He said that the US "borrowing money from China – or printing it out of thin air – to hand out overseas in attempt to purchase friends has been a failing foreign policy".
At a Republican candidates debate last month, Paul said the US should not back Israel if it attacks Iran's nuclear sites.
"We don't even have a treaty with Israel. Why do we have this automatic commitment that we're going to send our kids and send our money endlessly to Israel? So I think they're quite capable of taking care of themselves," he said.
Critics have described Paul as isolationist and compared him to appeasers of the Nazis. Donald Trump, the billionaire developer who is hosting a Republican debate later this month, took a swipe at Paul on Fox News on Monday: "He doesn't care if Iran gets a nuclear weapon that could wipe out Israel."
Paul has previously fallen afoul of the RJC for being strongly critical of the pro-Israel lobby in Washington and for comments likening conditions in Gaza to a concentration camp in saying that the US should not support the blockade of the territory.
"I think it is absolutely wrong to prevent people who are starving and having problems, almost like in concentration camps, and saying: yes, we endorse this whole concept that we can't allow ships to go in their in a humanitarian way," he said. "I think this would be a perfect opportunity to argue the case: Israel, if you want to do this, you're on your own. We're not backing you up."
Brooks previously criticised Paul when he launched his presidential campaign earlier this year saying his views are "far outside of the Republican mainstream" and that he has "espoused a dangerous isolationist vision for the US and our role in the world".
"He has been a virulent and harsh critic of Israel during his tenure in Congress. Most recently Paul gave an interview in which he voiced his objection to the recent killing of Osama Bin Laden," he said.
But Paul has also said that Israel is a "close friend" of the US, and that it should be free to decide its own position in negotiations with the Palesitnians without pressure from Washington.
Paul has also upset many in his own party by saying that the US brought the 9/11 attacks on itself through its actions in the Middle East and by maintaining military bases in countries such as Saudi Arabia. He advocates severely cutting the US military budget and bringing almost all the country's forces home.
The coalition's barring of Paul comes as the Republicans attempt to shake off the damage done by a question about foreign aid at a candidates debate last month in which three of the leading contenders – Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry – said they wanted to scrap existing foreign aid commitments and then have each country justify assistance, including Israel. Although the candidates swiftly said after the debate that they expected aid to Israel to continue, the damage was done among some of the Jewish state's supporters...
Ron Paul excluded from Republican Jewish Coalition forum
Forum for Republican candidates bars Ron Paul, currently polling second in Iowa, for his 'extreme' views on Israel
Chris McGreal
guardian.co.uk
5 December 2011
The Republican Jewish Coalition has barred Ron Paul, one of the party's leading presidential contenders, from its forum for the candidates on Wednesday because of his "misguided and extreme views" on Israel.
Paul, who consistently ranks among the favourites in polls of Republican primary voters despite strong libertarian views that have alienated many in his own party, has rankled Israel's supporters by advocating an end to US aid to the Jewish state. He is also strongly opposed to military action against Iran's nuclear programme and has drawn attention to Israel's own atomic weapons which it does not officially acknowledge.
The RJC director, Matt Brooks, said Paul was excluded for those and other views.
"He's just so far outside of the mainstream of the Republican party and this organisation," he told CBS.
Earlier this year, Paul wrote to congressional colleagues urging them to cut billions of dollars of aid to Israel, Egypt, Pakistan and Jordan. He said that the US "borrowing money from China – or printing it out of thin air – to hand out overseas in attempt to purchase friends has been a failing foreign policy".
At a Republican candidates debate last month, Paul said the US should not back Israel if it attacks Iran's nuclear sites.
"We don't even have a treaty with Israel. Why do we have this automatic commitment that we're going to send our kids and send our money endlessly to Israel? So I think they're quite capable of taking care of themselves," he said.
Critics have described Paul as isolationist and compared him to appeasers of the Nazis. Donald Trump, the billionaire developer who is hosting a Republican debate later this month, took a swipe at Paul on Fox News on Monday: "He doesn't care if Iran gets a nuclear weapon that could wipe out Israel."
Paul has previously fallen afoul of the RJC for being strongly critical of the pro-Israel lobby in Washington and for comments likening conditions in Gaza to a concentration camp in saying that the US should not support the blockade of the territory.
"I think it is absolutely wrong to prevent people who are starving and having problems, almost like in concentration camps, and saying: yes, we endorse this whole concept that we can't allow ships to go in their in a humanitarian way," he said. "I think this would be a perfect opportunity to argue the case: Israel, if you want to do this, you're on your own. We're not backing you up."
Brooks previously criticised Paul when he launched his presidential campaign earlier this year saying his views are "far outside of the Republican mainstream" and that he has "espoused a dangerous isolationist vision for the US and our role in the world".
"He has been a virulent and harsh critic of Israel during his tenure in Congress. Most recently Paul gave an interview in which he voiced his objection to the recent killing of Osama Bin Laden," he said.
But Paul has also said that Israel is a "close friend" of the US, and that it should be free to decide its own position in negotiations with the Palesitnians without pressure from Washington.
Paul has also upset many in his own party by saying that the US brought the 9/11 attacks on itself through its actions in the Middle East and by maintaining military bases in countries such as Saudi Arabia. He advocates severely cutting the US military budget and bringing almost all the country's forces home.
The coalition's barring of Paul comes as the Republicans attempt to shake off the damage done by a question about foreign aid at a candidates debate last month in which three of the leading contenders – Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry – said they wanted to scrap existing foreign aid commitments and then have each country justify assistance, including Israel. Although the candidates swiftly said after the debate that they expected aid to Israel to continue, the damage was done among some of the Jewish state's supporters...
Friday, November 11, 2011
A Nazi Story That Still Surprises
A Nazi Story That Still Surprises
By DOROTHY RABINOWITZ
Wall Street Journal
With every passing year, every new model of portentous drivel about the Nazi era rolled out by the film industry—"The Reader," about the travails of a concentration camp guard, comes to mind—the more indispensable the facts of history become. The clearer it is, too, how flimsy these film fantasies are as vehicles for drama, compared with that history. The latest reminder of this truth comes with a PBS documentary extraordinary in its detail and revelatory power. It's title, "Elusive Justice: The Search for Nazi War Criminals," may be informative, but it's far from adequate for a work that yields so many surprises, the greatest of which is its freshness. Moving in unexpected directions at every turn, Jonathan Silvers's film averts the burden of predictability—no small accomplishment for work on so familiar a theme.
The Nuremberg trials and their drama are familiar enough to the world, but not the face and the work of the 27-year-old American Army lawyer and investigator Benjamin Ferencz, charged with the task of collecting evidence for the Nuremberg prosecutions. The terrors of entering the just-liberated camps with their hellish scenes—the film provides striking footage, more extensive than the usual documentary clips, of Gen. Dwight Eisenhower doing just that, with Gen. Omar Bradley just behind him—caused him, he tells the filmmakers, to create a self-defense mechanism. The whole scene wasn't real, he told himself—it was "just a case," one of many to get through, in camp after camp. He would become chief prosecutor of a special German unit, the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing units operating on the Eastern front. He found the report of their daily accomplishments, which Germans meticulously recorded—a typical page of which is shown on screen, detailing how many Jewish children were killed, how many men and women had been murdered on a particular date. He counted. "When I got to over a million I stopped counting."
Elusive Justice: The Search for Nazi War Criminals
Tuesday, Nov. 15, 9-11 p.m. EST on PBS, whose dates and times vary; check local listings.
The Contenders
Fridays, 8-9:30 p.m. EST on C-Span
The film offers barely a touch of atrocity footage. Its subject is justice, or as the principals in the first part of the film, the liberated survivors of the camps thought of it, revenge—this documentary's only strained, largely forgettable moments. Far more dramatic testimony—and a startling vision of justice—comes in an interview with the middle-aged son of Hans Frank, governor of occupied Poland, one of the Germans hanged for crimes against humanity. "My father was a murderer," Nicholas Frank declares, "one who sanctioned the acts of all the other criminals who got away." One memory from his childhood stands out—the time a drunken American soldier showed up at the Frank house and lined the family up outside, threatening to shoot them all. His younger brothers and sisters cried piteously, he recalls, "but I had the feeling the soldier was correct—I belonged to a criminal family."
Enlarge Image
TV_REVIEW
TV_REVIEW
Harry Dreifuss/PBS
Nazi war criminal Kurt Lishka in Germany in 1971.
Scene after scene brings the struggle for justice to life, in obscure cases as in the ones best known to history. A middle-aged journalist in Cologne, Germany, has discovered by chance, long years after the war, the name and location of the SS officer who had beaten his grandfather to death upon his arrival in Theresienstadt, a transit camp for Czech Jews and others destined for Auschwitz. The journalist had come upon a 1988 news article about a former member of the SS deported from Italy. He recounts his stubborn effort to get a German court to take action—a story this sophisticated professional tells with ease and eloquence, none of which can conceal the rage that had driven him. His grandfather had been murdered, the killer was in Germany, a democratic state now, and the appropriate prosecutor refused to take action—this could not be the end of the story. It was not.
Candice Bergen, the documentary's excellent narrator, doesn't come to the subject of this film as a stranger. She is the widow of Louis Malle, whose haunting "Au Revoir Les Enfants" (1987) was based on Malle's memory of the French Catholic boys' school he attended during the war. The school had sheltered Jewish students who were ultimately betrayed and dragged off to Auschwitz, where they were gassed upon arrival. The headmaster, Lucien Bunel—Père Jacques de Jésus—was arrested and sent to Mauthausen, one of the deadliest camps in the Nazi system. The Malle film's title quotes his last words to the assembled students as he is taken away.
The film Ms. Bergen narrates covers remarkably extensive territory—including a riveting commentary provided by Willam Gowan, a former U.S. Army counter-intelligence agent, on the so-called Rat Line through which Nazi war criminals of high and low rank escaped punishment by fleeing to Argentina, with help from sympathetic Vatican priests. Characteristically, the film enlarges on a familiar fact, taking it to a deeper level. The arrival of this considerable population of war criminals, an Argentinian journalist attests, had its poisonous effect on the nation as a whole. Most of them, he points out, were experts in exactly the kind of merciless repression and terrorization that the dictatorship in Argentina found useful.
Section after section of the narrative is made rich in the same way—by taking the familiar in this history to newer and deeper levels. This is true no less of the final part on the complicated efforts to deport war criminals living in America. Altogether a rare achievement and a spellbinding one.
By DOROTHY RABINOWITZ
Wall Street Journal
With every passing year, every new model of portentous drivel about the Nazi era rolled out by the film industry—"The Reader," about the travails of a concentration camp guard, comes to mind—the more indispensable the facts of history become. The clearer it is, too, how flimsy these film fantasies are as vehicles for drama, compared with that history. The latest reminder of this truth comes with a PBS documentary extraordinary in its detail and revelatory power. It's title, "Elusive Justice: The Search for Nazi War Criminals," may be informative, but it's far from adequate for a work that yields so many surprises, the greatest of which is its freshness. Moving in unexpected directions at every turn, Jonathan Silvers's film averts the burden of predictability—no small accomplishment for work on so familiar a theme.
The Nuremberg trials and their drama are familiar enough to the world, but not the face and the work of the 27-year-old American Army lawyer and investigator Benjamin Ferencz, charged with the task of collecting evidence for the Nuremberg prosecutions. The terrors of entering the just-liberated camps with their hellish scenes—the film provides striking footage, more extensive than the usual documentary clips, of Gen. Dwight Eisenhower doing just that, with Gen. Omar Bradley just behind him—caused him, he tells the filmmakers, to create a self-defense mechanism. The whole scene wasn't real, he told himself—it was "just a case," one of many to get through, in camp after camp. He would become chief prosecutor of a special German unit, the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing units operating on the Eastern front. He found the report of their daily accomplishments, which Germans meticulously recorded—a typical page of which is shown on screen, detailing how many Jewish children were killed, how many men and women had been murdered on a particular date. He counted. "When I got to over a million I stopped counting."
Elusive Justice: The Search for Nazi War Criminals
Tuesday, Nov. 15, 9-11 p.m. EST on PBS, whose dates and times vary; check local listings.
The Contenders
Fridays, 8-9:30 p.m. EST on C-Span
The film offers barely a touch of atrocity footage. Its subject is justice, or as the principals in the first part of the film, the liberated survivors of the camps thought of it, revenge—this documentary's only strained, largely forgettable moments. Far more dramatic testimony—and a startling vision of justice—comes in an interview with the middle-aged son of Hans Frank, governor of occupied Poland, one of the Germans hanged for crimes against humanity. "My father was a murderer," Nicholas Frank declares, "one who sanctioned the acts of all the other criminals who got away." One memory from his childhood stands out—the time a drunken American soldier showed up at the Frank house and lined the family up outside, threatening to shoot them all. His younger brothers and sisters cried piteously, he recalls, "but I had the feeling the soldier was correct—I belonged to a criminal family."
Enlarge Image
TV_REVIEW
TV_REVIEW
Harry Dreifuss/PBS
Nazi war criminal Kurt Lishka in Germany in 1971.
Scene after scene brings the struggle for justice to life, in obscure cases as in the ones best known to history. A middle-aged journalist in Cologne, Germany, has discovered by chance, long years after the war, the name and location of the SS officer who had beaten his grandfather to death upon his arrival in Theresienstadt, a transit camp for Czech Jews and others destined for Auschwitz. The journalist had come upon a 1988 news article about a former member of the SS deported from Italy. He recounts his stubborn effort to get a German court to take action—a story this sophisticated professional tells with ease and eloquence, none of which can conceal the rage that had driven him. His grandfather had been murdered, the killer was in Germany, a democratic state now, and the appropriate prosecutor refused to take action—this could not be the end of the story. It was not.
Candice Bergen, the documentary's excellent narrator, doesn't come to the subject of this film as a stranger. She is the widow of Louis Malle, whose haunting "Au Revoir Les Enfants" (1987) was based on Malle's memory of the French Catholic boys' school he attended during the war. The school had sheltered Jewish students who were ultimately betrayed and dragged off to Auschwitz, where they were gassed upon arrival. The headmaster, Lucien Bunel—Père Jacques de Jésus—was arrested and sent to Mauthausen, one of the deadliest camps in the Nazi system. The Malle film's title quotes his last words to the assembled students as he is taken away.
The film Ms. Bergen narrates covers remarkably extensive territory—including a riveting commentary provided by Willam Gowan, a former U.S. Army counter-intelligence agent, on the so-called Rat Line through which Nazi war criminals of high and low rank escaped punishment by fleeing to Argentina, with help from sympathetic Vatican priests. Characteristically, the film enlarges on a familiar fact, taking it to a deeper level. The arrival of this considerable population of war criminals, an Argentinian journalist attests, had its poisonous effect on the nation as a whole. Most of them, he points out, were experts in exactly the kind of merciless repression and terrorization that the dictatorship in Argentina found useful.
Section after section of the narrative is made rich in the same way—by taking the familiar in this history to newer and deeper levels. This is true no less of the final part on the complicated efforts to deport war criminals living in America. Altogether a rare achievement and a spellbinding one.
Thursday, November 10, 2011
Rick Perry can't remember which government agency he's decided to eliminate
Nov 9, 2011
The moment Rick Perry’s candidacy collapsed
He provides what may be the most painful, cringe-inducing slip-up in debate history VIDEO
By Steve Kornacki
The good news for Rick Perry is that everyone will probably stop talking about his bizarre New Hampshire speech now. The bad news is: He created an even more cringe-inducing YouTube moment at Wednesday night’s Republican presidential debate — one that probably represents the most embarrassing public slip-up in what has been a campaign full of them for Perry.
Video is posted below, but we’ll stick to the transcript up here and pick things up mid-answer, a little more than an hour into the debate, when Perry — who had been mostly ignored by the moderators and his fellow candidates — tried to win some attention by talking about which Cabinet departments he’d eliminate as president:
PERRY: And I will tell you, it’s three agencies of government when I get there that are gone – Commerce, Education, and, the, uh, what’s the third one there? Let’s see…
RON PAUL (holding up five fingers): Five.
PERRY: Oh, five. OK. So, Commerce, Education, and the uh, uh, uh…
MITT ROMNEY: EPA?
PERRY: EPA. There you go.
DEBATE QUESTIONER JOHN HARWOOD: Seriously? Is EPA the one you’re talking about?
PERRY: No sir, No sir. We were talking about the agencies of government – EPA needs to be rebuilt, there’s no doubt about that…
HARWOOD: But you can’t name the third one?
PERRY: The third agency of government I would, I would do away with – Education, the uh, Commerce, and let’s see – I can’t, the third one. The third one there. Oops...
Update: The transcript has been changed to show that it was Mitt Romney — and not Ron Paul — who actually suggested the EPA to Perry. (h/t reader DR) Also, it’s probably worth noting that Perry, in an answer to a separate question more than ten minutes later, said that the Energy Department was the third “agency” he was grasping for.
The moment Rick Perry’s candidacy collapsed
He provides what may be the most painful, cringe-inducing slip-up in debate history VIDEO
By Steve Kornacki
The good news for Rick Perry is that everyone will probably stop talking about his bizarre New Hampshire speech now. The bad news is: He created an even more cringe-inducing YouTube moment at Wednesday night’s Republican presidential debate — one that probably represents the most embarrassing public slip-up in what has been a campaign full of them for Perry.
Video is posted below, but we’ll stick to the transcript up here and pick things up mid-answer, a little more than an hour into the debate, when Perry — who had been mostly ignored by the moderators and his fellow candidates — tried to win some attention by talking about which Cabinet departments he’d eliminate as president:
PERRY: And I will tell you, it’s three agencies of government when I get there that are gone – Commerce, Education, and, the, uh, what’s the third one there? Let’s see…
RON PAUL (holding up five fingers): Five.
PERRY: Oh, five. OK. So, Commerce, Education, and the uh, uh, uh…
MITT ROMNEY: EPA?
PERRY: EPA. There you go.
DEBATE QUESTIONER JOHN HARWOOD: Seriously? Is EPA the one you’re talking about?
PERRY: No sir, No sir. We were talking about the agencies of government – EPA needs to be rebuilt, there’s no doubt about that…
HARWOOD: But you can’t name the third one?
PERRY: The third agency of government I would, I would do away with – Education, the uh, Commerce, and let’s see – I can’t, the third one. The third one there. Oops...
Update: The transcript has been changed to show that it was Mitt Romney — and not Ron Paul — who actually suggested the EPA to Perry. (h/t reader DR) Also, it’s probably worth noting that Perry, in an answer to a separate question more than ten minutes later, said that the Energy Department was the third “agency” he was grasping for.
Wednesday, November 09, 2011
Fossil Teeth Put Humans in Europe Earlier Than Thought
New evidence reinforces the suspicion that modern humans exterminated their Neanderthal cousins. The other suspect is climate change.
Fossil Teeth Put Humans in Europe Earlier Than Thought
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
New York Times
November 2, 2011
The fossils seemed hardly worth a second look. The one from England was only a piece of jawbone with three teeth, and the other, from southern Italy, was nothing more than two infant teeth. But scientists went ahead, re-examining them with refined techniques, and found that one specimen’s age had previously been significantly underestimated and that the other’s dating and identity had been misinterpreted.
They had in fact discovered the oldest known skeletal remains of anatomically modern humans in the whole of Europe, two international research teams reported Wednesday.
The scientists who made the discovery and others who study human origins say they expect the findings to reignite debate over the relative capabilities of the immigrant modern humans and the indigenous Neanderthals, their closest hominid relatives; the extent of their interactions; and perhaps the reasons behind the Neanderthal extinction. The findings have already prompted speculation that the Homo sapiens migrations into Europe may have come in at least two separate waves, rather than just one.
In tests conducted at the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit in England, the baby teeth from Italy were dated at 43,000 to 45,000 years old. Other analysis showed the teeth to be those of a modern human, not a Neanderthal, as previously thought when the fossil was unearthed in 1964 from the Grotta del Cavallo.
Similar tests at Oxford established that the age of the jawbone, from Kents Cavern near Torquay, Devon, had been significantly underestimated, by about 7,000 years, probably because of contamination when it was originally dated in 1989. The age is now set at 41,500 to 44,200 years old, making this the oldest known modern human fossil from northwestern Europe.
These dates are remarkable on several counts, scientists said. The earliest reliably dated European modern human specimen, up to now, came from the Pestera cu Oase site in Romania, a long way east from the English coast. The Romanian fossil’s age is estimated at 37,800 to 42,000 years old. No stone tools or other artifacts were found with it.
And in the absence of early fossils, archaeologists had not been sure who made some of the stone tools they were uncovering, the arriving humans or the Neanderthals. It had been generally assumed that modern humans probably entered Europe at least as early as 45,000 years ago, based on changing patterns of artifacts that soon followed.
The two papers describing the new research were published Wednesday by the journal Nature. The lead author of the jawbone report was Thomas Higham of the University of Oxford. The principal author of the report on the baby teeth from Cavallo was Stefano Benazzi of the University of Vienna.
Not only does the jawbone indicate “the wide and rapid dispersal of the earliest moderns across Europe” during the last ice age, more than 40,000 years ago, Dr. Higham’s team wrote, it was also found in cave layers associated with a technology that archaeologists call the Aurignacian culture. The scientists said this “fills a key gap” between the earliest human skeletal remains and the earliest dated stone and bone Aurignacian tools and weapons.
Erik Trinkaus, a paleoanthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis and an author of the Higham paper, said the artifacts associated with the Kents Cavern fossil confirm “what researchers have long suspected, that the human newcomers spread the Aurignacian culture.”
In a statement issued by Oxford, Dr. Higham also pointed out that the earlier dates for these fossils meant “that early humans must have coexisted with Neanderthals in this part of the world, something which a number of researchers have doubted.”
The confirmed early appearance of modern humans in Europe gave them more time for contacts with Neanderthals before the latter’s extinction about 30,000 years ago. Although recent genetic research shows some evidence of interbreeding between the species, there was uncertainty as to how much contact the two had in Europe, as opposed to earlier interactions in western Asia. It is still not clear how widespread was the Neanderthal population in their final millenniums; after a steady decline, the last of them seemed to disappear in their cul-de-sac of a refuge in southern Iberia.
Determining the age for any samples more than 40,000 years old was no sure thing. At that age, levels of remaining radiocarbon are low, and contamination can be a serious problem. As an alternative, Katerina Douka of Oxford, a member of the team examining the Italian specimen, focused on the dating of marine shell beads found in the same archaeological levels as the teeth, a technique that has proven successful at other sites in Europe.
When the teeth had been classified as Neanderthal, it was assumed that artifacts in the Cavallo site — bone tools and ornaments in a style known as the Uluzzian culture — were also considered Neanderthal creations. Now archaeologists suspect that they should be attributed to modern humans.
Ian Tattersall, a paleoanthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York who was not involved in the research, said, “The tendency right now is to downplay associating Neanderthals with any cultural developments after humans got to Europe.”
Chris Stringer and Tim Compton, both of the Natural History Museum, London, and members of the Higham group, obtained radiocarbon dates of animal bones found close to the jawbone in Kents Cavern and used a statistical modeling method to calculate the age of the human fossil. They further used CT scans to produce 3-D models of the worn teeth and thus confirm that the fossil was indeed from a human, not a Neanderthal.
“Everybody is going to wish some of that evidence was better,” Dr. Tattersall said. “It is pretty slender, but I have no reason to dispute it.”
Dr. Stringer elaborated in an e-mail on some possible implications of the two discoveries. Perhaps some of the “transitional cultures” that preceded the Aurignacian, he said, were introduced by “multiple early waves of modern humans coming into Europe.” For example, the Kents Cavern fossil might represent an early dispersal through Central Europe that crossed into Britain on a land bridge where the North Sea is now. The Cavallo remains might represent a possibly even earlier migration along the Soouthern European coasts.
Richard G. Klein, an archaeologist at Stanford University, said he was “really impressed” by the new findings. Hearing of Dr. Stringer’s idea, Dr. Klein joined in the spirit of conjecture, noting that Homo sapiens was on the move at that time, venturing as far as Australia by about 45,000 years ago.
Fossil Teeth Put Humans in Europe Earlier Than Thought
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
New York Times
November 2, 2011
The fossils seemed hardly worth a second look. The one from England was only a piece of jawbone with three teeth, and the other, from southern Italy, was nothing more than two infant teeth. But scientists went ahead, re-examining them with refined techniques, and found that one specimen’s age had previously been significantly underestimated and that the other’s dating and identity had been misinterpreted.
They had in fact discovered the oldest known skeletal remains of anatomically modern humans in the whole of Europe, two international research teams reported Wednesday.
The scientists who made the discovery and others who study human origins say they expect the findings to reignite debate over the relative capabilities of the immigrant modern humans and the indigenous Neanderthals, their closest hominid relatives; the extent of their interactions; and perhaps the reasons behind the Neanderthal extinction. The findings have already prompted speculation that the Homo sapiens migrations into Europe may have come in at least two separate waves, rather than just one.
In tests conducted at the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit in England, the baby teeth from Italy were dated at 43,000 to 45,000 years old. Other analysis showed the teeth to be those of a modern human, not a Neanderthal, as previously thought when the fossil was unearthed in 1964 from the Grotta del Cavallo.
Similar tests at Oxford established that the age of the jawbone, from Kents Cavern near Torquay, Devon, had been significantly underestimated, by about 7,000 years, probably because of contamination when it was originally dated in 1989. The age is now set at 41,500 to 44,200 years old, making this the oldest known modern human fossil from northwestern Europe.
These dates are remarkable on several counts, scientists said. The earliest reliably dated European modern human specimen, up to now, came from the Pestera cu Oase site in Romania, a long way east from the English coast. The Romanian fossil’s age is estimated at 37,800 to 42,000 years old. No stone tools or other artifacts were found with it.
And in the absence of early fossils, archaeologists had not been sure who made some of the stone tools they were uncovering, the arriving humans or the Neanderthals. It had been generally assumed that modern humans probably entered Europe at least as early as 45,000 years ago, based on changing patterns of artifacts that soon followed.
The two papers describing the new research were published Wednesday by the journal Nature. The lead author of the jawbone report was Thomas Higham of the University of Oxford. The principal author of the report on the baby teeth from Cavallo was Stefano Benazzi of the University of Vienna.
Not only does the jawbone indicate “the wide and rapid dispersal of the earliest moderns across Europe” during the last ice age, more than 40,000 years ago, Dr. Higham’s team wrote, it was also found in cave layers associated with a technology that archaeologists call the Aurignacian culture. The scientists said this “fills a key gap” between the earliest human skeletal remains and the earliest dated stone and bone Aurignacian tools and weapons.
Erik Trinkaus, a paleoanthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis and an author of the Higham paper, said the artifacts associated with the Kents Cavern fossil confirm “what researchers have long suspected, that the human newcomers spread the Aurignacian culture.”
In a statement issued by Oxford, Dr. Higham also pointed out that the earlier dates for these fossils meant “that early humans must have coexisted with Neanderthals in this part of the world, something which a number of researchers have doubted.”
The confirmed early appearance of modern humans in Europe gave them more time for contacts with Neanderthals before the latter’s extinction about 30,000 years ago. Although recent genetic research shows some evidence of interbreeding between the species, there was uncertainty as to how much contact the two had in Europe, as opposed to earlier interactions in western Asia. It is still not clear how widespread was the Neanderthal population in their final millenniums; after a steady decline, the last of them seemed to disappear in their cul-de-sac of a refuge in southern Iberia.
Determining the age for any samples more than 40,000 years old was no sure thing. At that age, levels of remaining radiocarbon are low, and contamination can be a serious problem. As an alternative, Katerina Douka of Oxford, a member of the team examining the Italian specimen, focused on the dating of marine shell beads found in the same archaeological levels as the teeth, a technique that has proven successful at other sites in Europe.
When the teeth had been classified as Neanderthal, it was assumed that artifacts in the Cavallo site — bone tools and ornaments in a style known as the Uluzzian culture — were also considered Neanderthal creations. Now archaeologists suspect that they should be attributed to modern humans.
Ian Tattersall, a paleoanthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York who was not involved in the research, said, “The tendency right now is to downplay associating Neanderthals with any cultural developments after humans got to Europe.”
Chris Stringer and Tim Compton, both of the Natural History Museum, London, and members of the Higham group, obtained radiocarbon dates of animal bones found close to the jawbone in Kents Cavern and used a statistical modeling method to calculate the age of the human fossil. They further used CT scans to produce 3-D models of the worn teeth and thus confirm that the fossil was indeed from a human, not a Neanderthal.
“Everybody is going to wish some of that evidence was better,” Dr. Tattersall said. “It is pretty slender, but I have no reason to dispute it.”
Dr. Stringer elaborated in an e-mail on some possible implications of the two discoveries. Perhaps some of the “transitional cultures” that preceded the Aurignacian, he said, were introduced by “multiple early waves of modern humans coming into Europe.” For example, the Kents Cavern fossil might represent an early dispersal through Central Europe that crossed into Britain on a land bridge where the North Sea is now. The Cavallo remains might represent a possibly even earlier migration along the Soouthern European coasts.
Richard G. Klein, an archaeologist at Stanford University, said he was “really impressed” by the new findings. Hearing of Dr. Stringer’s idea, Dr. Klein joined in the spirit of conjecture, noting that Homo sapiens was on the move at that time, venturing as far as Australia by about 45,000 years ago.
Friday, November 04, 2011
The Koch brothers and Herman Cain
Koch-backed group confirms financial ties to Cain campaign manager
By NBC's Michael Isikoff
Nov. 4, 2011
A major conservative advocacy group, funded by Koch family oil interests, says it is reviewing its "financial dealings" with a Wisconsin charity headed by Herman Cain's campaign manager, raising fresh questions about the source of tens of thousands of dollars in funds that were used to pay expenses for Cain's presidential campaign.
The Center for Public Integrity reported late Thursday that Americans for Prosperity, one of the largest and most prominent of conservative political groups, has confirmed unspecified financial transactions with two closely linked Wisconsin non-profits -- Prosperity USA and Wisconsin Prosperity Network -- that were founded by Mark Block, Cain's campaign manager.
One of those groups, Prosperity USA, paid for $37,000 in expenses, including iPads, charter flights and items, for Cain's presidential campaign, according to financial documents disclosed this week by the Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel.
Non-profits are barred by law from paying for campaign expenses, and when the allegations first surfaced this week -- at the same time as the sexual harassment charges against the presidential candidate -- Cain said he would order an investigation of whether there were improper campaign violations.
Cain's campaign lawyer, Steve Bienek, declined to answer questions from NBC about the transactions between the Wisconsin charities headed by Block and the campaign, saying only that the campaign has retained an outside law firm to review them.
"We take these allegations very seriously," he said.
But the Center for Public Integrity report by Peter Stone raises additional questions as to whether Americans for Prosperity (AFP) funds were used by Block to pay Cain campaign expenses. AFP had "financial dealings with Prosperity USA and/or the Wisconsin Prosperity Network," Levi Russell, the spokesman for AFT is quoted as saying.
(Russell confirmed the transactions to NBC News, but declined to elaborate, and added that the group had no reason to believe there was any wrongdoing on its part.)
Some of those transactions are hinted at in the documents released by the Journal-Sentinel: They show a $5,000 expense in February 2011 for Cain to attend a meeting of a group called RightNation "at request of AFP" and that Block made a trip to Washington to meet with AFP's president Tim Phillips and David Koch."
Koch and his oil industry brother Charles Koch were the founders of Americans for Prosperity, but the group -- like most non-profits -- declines to identify its donors.
By NBC's Michael Isikoff
Nov. 4, 2011
A major conservative advocacy group, funded by Koch family oil interests, says it is reviewing its "financial dealings" with a Wisconsin charity headed by Herman Cain's campaign manager, raising fresh questions about the source of tens of thousands of dollars in funds that were used to pay expenses for Cain's presidential campaign.
The Center for Public Integrity reported late Thursday that Americans for Prosperity, one of the largest and most prominent of conservative political groups, has confirmed unspecified financial transactions with two closely linked Wisconsin non-profits -- Prosperity USA and Wisconsin Prosperity Network -- that were founded by Mark Block, Cain's campaign manager.
One of those groups, Prosperity USA, paid for $37,000 in expenses, including iPads, charter flights and items, for Cain's presidential campaign, according to financial documents disclosed this week by the Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel.
Non-profits are barred by law from paying for campaign expenses, and when the allegations first surfaced this week -- at the same time as the sexual harassment charges against the presidential candidate -- Cain said he would order an investigation of whether there were improper campaign violations.
Cain's campaign lawyer, Steve Bienek, declined to answer questions from NBC about the transactions between the Wisconsin charities headed by Block and the campaign, saying only that the campaign has retained an outside law firm to review them.
"We take these allegations very seriously," he said.
But the Center for Public Integrity report by Peter Stone raises additional questions as to whether Americans for Prosperity (AFP) funds were used by Block to pay Cain campaign expenses. AFP had "financial dealings with Prosperity USA and/or the Wisconsin Prosperity Network," Levi Russell, the spokesman for AFT is quoted as saying.
(Russell confirmed the transactions to NBC News, but declined to elaborate, and added that the group had no reason to believe there was any wrongdoing on its part.)
Some of those transactions are hinted at in the documents released by the Journal-Sentinel: They show a $5,000 expense in February 2011 for Cain to attend a meeting of a group called RightNation "at request of AFP" and that Block made a trip to Washington to meet with AFP's president Tim Phillips and David Koch."
Koch and his oil industry brother Charles Koch were the founders of Americans for Prosperity, but the group -- like most non-profits -- declines to identify its donors.
Monday, October 31, 2011
Canoodling with cavemen gave healthy boost to human genome, study finds
AUG. 25, 2011
Canoodling with cavemen gave healthy boost to human genome, study finds
BY SUSAN L. YOUNG
Stanford School of Medicine
Laurent Abi-Rached, Paul Norman and Libby Guethlein are co-authors of research on how the genome of geographically-distinct human populations vary in the amount and type of immune-system genes inherited from evolutionary cousins, the Neanderthals and Denisovans. People in Papua New Guinea, for instance, have a particularly high percentage of one type of immune-system gene that is rarely found in people in Africa.
For a few years now, scientists have known that humans and their evolutionary cousins had some casual flings, but now it appears that these liaisons led to a more meaningful relationship.
Sex with Neanderthals and another close relative — the recently discovered Denisovans — has endowed some human gene pools with beneficial versions of immune system genes, report researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine in an article published online Aug. 25 in Science Express.
Although modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans share a common ancestor in Africa, the groups split into separate, distinct populations approximately 400,000 years ago. The Neanderthal lineage migrated northwestward into West Asia and Europe, and the Denisovan lineage moved northeastward into East Asia. The ancestors of modern man stayed in Africa until 65,000 years or so ago, when they expanded into Eurasia and then encountered the other human-like groups. In some cases, the rendezvous were amorous in nature.
Last year, a partial genome sequence of Neanderthals, who died out approximately 30,000 years ago, revealed that these trysts left as much as 4 percent Neanderthal DNA in the genetic blueprint of some present-day humans. Last December, the genome of another human cousin, the extinct Denisovans, made clear that up to 6 percent of some people's genomes are Denisovan in origin.
Now, a team of researchers led by Peter Parham, PhD, professor of structural biology and of microbiology and immunology, has found that these matings had a positive effect on modern human fitness. "The cross breeding wasn’t just a random event that happened, it gave something useful to the gene pool of the modern human," said Parham, who is senior author of the study.
The useful gift was the introduction of new variants of immune system genes called the HLA class-1 genes, which are critical for our body's ability to recognize and destroy pathogens. HLA genes are some of the most variable and adaptable genes in our genome, in part because the rapid evolution of viruses demands flexibility on the part of our immune system.
"The HLA gene system, with its diversity of variants, is like a magnifying glass," said lead author Laurent Abi-Rached, PhD, explaining that it provides a lot more detail about the history of populations than typical gene families. Abi-Rached is a research associate in the Parham lab.
Prior to the sequencing of the Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes, Parham and his group had suspected that at least one HLA variant came from archaic humans. They determined that the variant known as HLA-B*73 is rare in present-day African populations but occurs with significant frequency in West Asian populations. The ethnic distribution of HLA-B*73 and its similarity across populations suggested that it came from a relatively recent co-mingling of modern human and archaic human DNA, which most likely would have happened outside of Africa. Parham's team wanted to discern which archaic humans were the source of the HLA-B*73 gene type. In the last year they have found the answer in the genome sequence of a recently discovered human relative, the Denisovans, whose existence first came to light in 2008 with the discovery of an unfamiliar finger bone and tooth in a cave in Siberia...
Canoodling with cavemen gave healthy boost to human genome, study finds
BY SUSAN L. YOUNG
Stanford School of Medicine
Laurent Abi-Rached, Paul Norman and Libby Guethlein are co-authors of research on how the genome of geographically-distinct human populations vary in the amount and type of immune-system genes inherited from evolutionary cousins, the Neanderthals and Denisovans. People in Papua New Guinea, for instance, have a particularly high percentage of one type of immune-system gene that is rarely found in people in Africa.
For a few years now, scientists have known that humans and their evolutionary cousins had some casual flings, but now it appears that these liaisons led to a more meaningful relationship.
Sex with Neanderthals and another close relative — the recently discovered Denisovans — has endowed some human gene pools with beneficial versions of immune system genes, report researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine in an article published online Aug. 25 in Science Express.
Although modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans share a common ancestor in Africa, the groups split into separate, distinct populations approximately 400,000 years ago. The Neanderthal lineage migrated northwestward into West Asia and Europe, and the Denisovan lineage moved northeastward into East Asia. The ancestors of modern man stayed in Africa until 65,000 years or so ago, when they expanded into Eurasia and then encountered the other human-like groups. In some cases, the rendezvous were amorous in nature.
Last year, a partial genome sequence of Neanderthals, who died out approximately 30,000 years ago, revealed that these trysts left as much as 4 percent Neanderthal DNA in the genetic blueprint of some present-day humans. Last December, the genome of another human cousin, the extinct Denisovans, made clear that up to 6 percent of some people's genomes are Denisovan in origin.
Now, a team of researchers led by Peter Parham, PhD, professor of structural biology and of microbiology and immunology, has found that these matings had a positive effect on modern human fitness. "The cross breeding wasn’t just a random event that happened, it gave something useful to the gene pool of the modern human," said Parham, who is senior author of the study.
The useful gift was the introduction of new variants of immune system genes called the HLA class-1 genes, which are critical for our body's ability to recognize and destroy pathogens. HLA genes are some of the most variable and adaptable genes in our genome, in part because the rapid evolution of viruses demands flexibility on the part of our immune system.
"The HLA gene system, with its diversity of variants, is like a magnifying glass," said lead author Laurent Abi-Rached, PhD, explaining that it provides a lot more detail about the history of populations than typical gene families. Abi-Rached is a research associate in the Parham lab.
Prior to the sequencing of the Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes, Parham and his group had suspected that at least one HLA variant came from archaic humans. They determined that the variant known as HLA-B*73 is rare in present-day African populations but occurs with significant frequency in West Asian populations. The ethnic distribution of HLA-B*73 and its similarity across populations suggested that it came from a relatively recent co-mingling of modern human and archaic human DNA, which most likely would have happened outside of Africa. Parham's team wanted to discern which archaic humans were the source of the HLA-B*73 gene type. In the last year they have found the answer in the genome sequence of a recently discovered human relative, the Denisovans, whose existence first came to light in 2008 with the discovery of an unfamiliar finger bone and tooth in a cave in Siberia...
Genes of extinct ancestor survive in modern humans
Global map of Denisovan gene frequency in modern human genomes
Genes of extinct ancestor survive in modern humans
By Brandon Keim, wired.com
Oct. 31, 2011
Genes inherited from long-extinct human ancestors may be more common than thought, suggesting a Homo sapiens origin story with more than a few evolutionary one-night stands.
The latest findings involve genes from Denisovans, a recently discovered member of the Homo genus who lived in central and eastern Asia until 40,000 years ago. Denisovans, humans and neanderthals last shared a common ancestor about 1 million years ago.
Earlier research found lingering Denisovan traces in genomes of people from Oceania. Now they’ve been found in southeast Asia, too.
“We haven’t been a very exclusive species, with a very narrow origin,” said Martin Jacobsson. Interbreeding with other members of the human family tree “is not a unique event. It’s a more complex story than we thought before.”
In a study published Oct. 31 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Jacobsson and co-author Pontus Skoglund searched through 1,500 human genome scans from around the world for genes found in Denisovans but not chimpanzees or Neanderthals.
While the previous finding of Denisovan inheritance involved analysis of ultra-high-resolution human genome scans, of which only a few exist, Jacobsson used low-resolution scans. These are more commonly available and allowed the researchers to detect Denisovan signals in genomes from mainland southeast Asia. A signal also appeared in South America, but Jacobsson said that’s probably a false positive.
The 40,000 year-old tooth from which Denisovans were first identified in 2010
The 40,000 year-old tooth from which Denisovans were first identified in 2010
David Reich et al./Nature.
Beyond the fun of knowing that Denisovan genomes live on, the findings add to a growing sense of the richness of the human evolutionary story.
Until relatively recently, it was thought that human ancestors trekked out of Africa about 100,000 years ago in a single straight shot, descending without diversion into modernity. But what’s emerged from fossil findings in recent years is a picture of Homo sapiens and its near relatives flowing out of Africa again and again, with some populations vanishing and others surviving, often living side-by-side.
Now, thanks to well-preserved ancient genomes, it’s possible to look at mixing: Evidence of interbreeding with Neanderthals in northern Europe was found, followed by the Denisovan studies. Critically, the new findings fit a genetic pattern suggesting multiple episodes of interbreeding with Denisovans.
“We were evolving for a little while, then isolated, then mixed again,” said Jacobsson. “It’s not so simple that you can say, there’s only been one admixture.”
“I find it really cool that people use the archaic genomes we produced to try to arrive at new insights,” said geneticist Svante Paabo of Germany’s Max Planck Institute, who originally sequenced the Denisovan genome from 40,000 year-old fingerbones found in a Siberian cave. “Of course one will have to see which of them hold up.”
As for what Denisovan genes do for people who have them, it’s hard to say. Unlike Neanderthal genes, which seem to have given human immune systems a boost, Denisovan gene function isn’t yet understood...
Sunday, October 23, 2011
The birthers eat their own
The birthers eat their own
By Dana Milbank
Washington Post
October 21, 2011
Say what you will about the birthers, but don’t call them partisan.
The people who brought you the Barack Obama birth-certificate hullabaloo now have a new target: Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, a man often speculated to be the next Republican vice presidential nominee. While they’re at it, they also have Bobby Jindal, the Republican governor of Louisiana and perhaps a future presidential candidate, in their sights.
Each man, the birthers say, is ineligible to be president because he runs afoul of the constitutional requirement that a president must be a “natural born citizen” of the United States. Rubio’s parents were Cuban nationals at the time of his birth, and Jindal’s parents were citizens of India.
The good news for the birthers is that this suggests they were going after Obama, whose father was a Kenyan national, not because of the president’s political party. The bad news is that this supports the suspicion that they were going after Obama because of his race.
When I heard of the birthers’ latest targets, from a participant in my online chat, I figured it was a joke. But, sure enough, Alex Leary of the St. Petersburg Times reported that various bright lights of the birther community – Mario Apuzzo, Charles Kerchner and Orly Taitz – were casting doubt on Rubio’s eligibility.
“Senator Marco Rubio is not a natural born citizen of the United States to constitutional standards,” Kerchner writes on his blog. “He was born a dual citizen of both Cuba and the USA. He is thus not eligible to serve as the president or vice president.” A few months ago, Kerchner used the same logic to proclaim, “Jindal is NOT a natural-born citizen of the United States. His parents were not U.S. citizens when he was born.”
This relies on a rather expansive interpretation of “natural born.” At this rate, it is surely only a matter of time before birthers begin to pronounce candidates ineligible if they were born by C-section, or if their mothers were given pain medications during childbirth. Will Donald Trump demand to see their medical records?
The absurd accusations of the birthers by themselves won’t stop Jindal or Rubio from becoming president. There are far more serious impediments in their way — most recently a devastating report by The Post’s Manuel Roig-Franzia proving false the central narrative of Rubio’s political rise: that he is the son of exiles who fled Cuba under Castro. In fact, his parents left the island, apparently for economic reasons, 21 / 2 years before Castro came to power.
But the wild new turn the birthers have taken should serve as a timely reminder to Republican leaders that they need to push back more forcefully against the angry and the unstable in their ranks. Too often, they have done the opposite. Jindal, for example, encouraged the birthers this year when he announced his support for legislation that would require candidates for federal office to show proof of their U.S. birth before being allowed on the ballot in Louisiana. It was, as many pointed out, a sad gesture for a man born Piyush Jindal...
By Dana Milbank
Washington Post
October 21, 2011
Say what you will about the birthers, but don’t call them partisan.
The people who brought you the Barack Obama birth-certificate hullabaloo now have a new target: Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, a man often speculated to be the next Republican vice presidential nominee. While they’re at it, they also have Bobby Jindal, the Republican governor of Louisiana and perhaps a future presidential candidate, in their sights.
Each man, the birthers say, is ineligible to be president because he runs afoul of the constitutional requirement that a president must be a “natural born citizen” of the United States. Rubio’s parents were Cuban nationals at the time of his birth, and Jindal’s parents were citizens of India.
The good news for the birthers is that this suggests they were going after Obama, whose father was a Kenyan national, not because of the president’s political party. The bad news is that this supports the suspicion that they were going after Obama because of his race.
When I heard of the birthers’ latest targets, from a participant in my online chat, I figured it was a joke. But, sure enough, Alex Leary of the St. Petersburg Times reported that various bright lights of the birther community – Mario Apuzzo, Charles Kerchner and Orly Taitz – were casting doubt on Rubio’s eligibility.
“Senator Marco Rubio is not a natural born citizen of the United States to constitutional standards,” Kerchner writes on his blog. “He was born a dual citizen of both Cuba and the USA. He is thus not eligible to serve as the president or vice president.” A few months ago, Kerchner used the same logic to proclaim, “Jindal is NOT a natural-born citizen of the United States. His parents were not U.S. citizens when he was born.”
This relies on a rather expansive interpretation of “natural born.” At this rate, it is surely only a matter of time before birthers begin to pronounce candidates ineligible if they were born by C-section, or if their mothers were given pain medications during childbirth. Will Donald Trump demand to see their medical records?
The absurd accusations of the birthers by themselves won’t stop Jindal or Rubio from becoming president. There are far more serious impediments in their way — most recently a devastating report by The Post’s Manuel Roig-Franzia proving false the central narrative of Rubio’s political rise: that he is the son of exiles who fled Cuba under Castro. In fact, his parents left the island, apparently for economic reasons, 21 / 2 years before Castro came to power.
But the wild new turn the birthers have taken should serve as a timely reminder to Republican leaders that they need to push back more forcefully against the angry and the unstable in their ranks. Too often, they have done the opposite. Jindal, for example, encouraged the birthers this year when he announced his support for legislation that would require candidates for federal office to show proof of their U.S. birth before being allowed on the ballot in Louisiana. It was, as many pointed out, a sad gesture for a man born Piyush Jindal...
Name changers: 285 Indian girls no longer 'unwanted'
Name changers: 285 Indian girls no longer 'unwanted'
District hopes renaming ceremony will give girls new dignity, fight discrimination
By CHAYA BABU
10/22/2011
MUMBAI, India — Hundreds of Indian girls whose names mean "unwanted" in Hifndi chose new names Saturday for a fresh start in life.
A central Indian district held a renaming ceremony it hopes will give the girls new dignity and help fight widespread gender discrimination that gives India a skewed gender ratio, with far more boys than girls.
The girls — wearing their best outfits with barrettes, braids and bows in their hair — lined up to receive certificates with their new names along with small flower bouquets from Satara district officials in Maharashtra state.
In shedding names like "Nakusa" or "Nakushi," which mean "unwanted" in Hindi, some girls chose to name themselves after Bollywood stars like "Aishwarya" or Hindu goddesses like "Savitri." Some just wanted traditional names with happier meanings, such as "Vaishali" or "prosperous, beautiful and good."
Only on msnbc.com
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Flooded Thailand races to rescue pets, loose crocs
"Now in school, my classmates and friends will be calling me this new name, and that makes me very happy," said a 15-year-old girl who had been named Nakusa by a grandfather disappointed by her birth. She chose the new name "Ashmita," which means "very tough" or "rock hard" in Hindi.
The plight of girls in India came to a focus as this year's census showed the nation's sex ratio had dropped over the past decade from 927 girls for every 1,000 boys under the age of 6 to 914.
Maharashtra state's ratio is well below that, with just 883 girls for every 1,000 boys — down from 913 a decade ago. In the district of Satara, it is even lower at 881.
Such ratios are the result of abortions of female fetuses, or just sheer neglect leading to a higher death rate among girls. The problem is so serious in India that hospitals are legally banned from revealing the gender of an unborn fetus in order to prevent sex-selective abortions, though evidence suggests the information gets out.
Part of the reason Indians favor sons is the enormous expense of marrying off girls. Families often go into debt arranging marriages and paying for elaborate dowries. A boy, on the other hand, will one day bring home a bride and dowry. Hindu custom also dictates that only sons can light their parents' funeral pyres.
Fighting on behalf of girls
Over the years, and again now, there are efforts to fight the discrimination.
Advertise | AdChoices
"Nakusa is a very negative name as far as female discrimination is concerned," said Satara district health officer Dr. Bhagwan Pawar, who came up with the idea for the renaming ceremony...
District hopes renaming ceremony will give girls new dignity, fight discrimination
By CHAYA BABU
10/22/2011
MUMBAI, India — Hundreds of Indian girls whose names mean "unwanted" in Hifndi chose new names Saturday for a fresh start in life.
A central Indian district held a renaming ceremony it hopes will give the girls new dignity and help fight widespread gender discrimination that gives India a skewed gender ratio, with far more boys than girls.
The girls — wearing their best outfits with barrettes, braids and bows in their hair — lined up to receive certificates with their new names along with small flower bouquets from Satara district officials in Maharashtra state.
In shedding names like "Nakusa" or "Nakushi," which mean "unwanted" in Hindi, some girls chose to name themselves after Bollywood stars like "Aishwarya" or Hindu goddesses like "Savitri." Some just wanted traditional names with happier meanings, such as "Vaishali" or "prosperous, beautiful and good."
Only on msnbc.com
Clinton: No one should doubt commitment to Iraq
'I am happy': Libyans line up to see Gadhafi's body
4-month-old receives heart transplant
'Occupy' protesters find allies among the wealthy
Dating after diagnosis: Love in the time of chemotherapy
It's A Snap! Vote for your favorite travel photo
Flooded Thailand races to rescue pets, loose crocs
"Now in school, my classmates and friends will be calling me this new name, and that makes me very happy," said a 15-year-old girl who had been named Nakusa by a grandfather disappointed by her birth. She chose the new name "Ashmita," which means "very tough" or "rock hard" in Hindi.
The plight of girls in India came to a focus as this year's census showed the nation's sex ratio had dropped over the past decade from 927 girls for every 1,000 boys under the age of 6 to 914.
Maharashtra state's ratio is well below that, with just 883 girls for every 1,000 boys — down from 913 a decade ago. In the district of Satara, it is even lower at 881.
Such ratios are the result of abortions of female fetuses, or just sheer neglect leading to a higher death rate among girls. The problem is so serious in India that hospitals are legally banned from revealing the gender of an unborn fetus in order to prevent sex-selective abortions, though evidence suggests the information gets out.
Part of the reason Indians favor sons is the enormous expense of marrying off girls. Families often go into debt arranging marriages and paying for elaborate dowries. A boy, on the other hand, will one day bring home a bride and dowry. Hindu custom also dictates that only sons can light their parents' funeral pyres.
Fighting on behalf of girls
Over the years, and again now, there are efforts to fight the discrimination.
Advertise | AdChoices
"Nakusa is a very negative name as far as female discrimination is concerned," said Satara district health officer Dr. Bhagwan Pawar, who came up with the idea for the renaming ceremony...
Saturday, October 22, 2011
In 1952, corporate taxes were 6.1% of GDP; in 2009, corporate taxes were 1% of GDP
50 Amazing Numbers About the Economy
By Morgan Housel
The Motley Fool
October 21, 2011
...In 1952, corporate taxes were 6.1% of GDP, and employment taxes were 1.8% of GDP.
In 2009, corporate taxes were 1% of GDP, and employment taxes were 6.3% of GDP...
By Morgan Housel
The Motley Fool
October 21, 2011
...In 1952, corporate taxes were 6.1% of GDP, and employment taxes were 1.8% of GDP.
In 2009, corporate taxes were 1% of GDP, and employment taxes were 6.3% of GDP...
Tea Party Nation tells small Business not to Hire
Tea Party Nation tells small Business not to Hire
Oct 21, 2011
By Schuyler Thorpe
AllVoices.com
The political organizations wants small businesses to go on "strike"
President Obama's jobs bill has been rebuffed by Republicans and now the Tea Party Nation has sent out a statement to its members requesting that they don't hire anyone in order to further hurt the president.
On the Tea Party Nation's website, Melissa Brookstone criticizes the president's administration and the Democrat-controlled Senate as being allied in forcing the United States into socialism and away from capitalism.
Jobs bill supporters estimate that the president's bill could create nearly 2 million jobs.
On the other hand, Brookstone not only alleges the president has assumed "dictatorial powers," but that the administration, Senate Democrats, "Progressive socailsts from all around the coutnry, especially those from Hollywood and the left leaning media" have colluded to create an "anti-business, an anti-free market, and an anti-capitalist (anti-individual rights and property ownership) agenda."
Brookstone charges that Democrats "have participated in what appears to be a globalist socialst agenda of redistribution of wealth, and the waging of class warfare against our constitutional republic's heritage of inidividual rights, free market capitalism, and indeed our Constitution itself, with the ultimate goal of collapsing the U.S. economy and globalizing us into socialism."
Brookstone continues to rail against President Obama, Democrats, liberals and, generally, anyone in support of their policies, but then in concluding her remarks, she adopts a stance that defies logic.
"I, an American small business owner, part of the class that produces the vast majority of real, wealth producing jobs in this country, hereby resolve that I will not hire a single person until this war against business and my country is stopped."
"I hereby declare that my job creation potential is now ceased," she writes. "I'm on strike!"
Regardless of one's political beliefs, it seems that finding a solution to the current high unemployment would benefit everyone.
Oct 21, 2011
By Schuyler Thorpe
AllVoices.com
The political organizations wants small businesses to go on "strike"
President Obama's jobs bill has been rebuffed by Republicans and now the Tea Party Nation has sent out a statement to its members requesting that they don't hire anyone in order to further hurt the president.
On the Tea Party Nation's website, Melissa Brookstone criticizes the president's administration and the Democrat-controlled Senate as being allied in forcing the United States into socialism and away from capitalism.
Jobs bill supporters estimate that the president's bill could create nearly 2 million jobs.
On the other hand, Brookstone not only alleges the president has assumed "dictatorial powers," but that the administration, Senate Democrats, "Progressive socailsts from all around the coutnry, especially those from Hollywood and the left leaning media" have colluded to create an "anti-business, an anti-free market, and an anti-capitalist (anti-individual rights and property ownership) agenda."
Brookstone charges that Democrats "have participated in what appears to be a globalist socialst agenda of redistribution of wealth, and the waging of class warfare against our constitutional republic's heritage of inidividual rights, free market capitalism, and indeed our Constitution itself, with the ultimate goal of collapsing the U.S. economy and globalizing us into socialism."
Brookstone continues to rail against President Obama, Democrats, liberals and, generally, anyone in support of their policies, but then in concluding her remarks, she adopts a stance that defies logic.
"I, an American small business owner, part of the class that produces the vast majority of real, wealth producing jobs in this country, hereby resolve that I will not hire a single person until this war against business and my country is stopped."
"I hereby declare that my job creation potential is now ceased," she writes. "I'm on strike!"
Regardless of one's political beliefs, it seems that finding a solution to the current high unemployment would benefit everyone.
Thursday, October 20, 2011
Escondido immigrant turned over to ICE; four minor childen left at home
Escondido woman turned over to immigration after domestic violence incident
By EDWARD SIFUENTES
October 19, 2011
A woman who called the Escondido Police Department to report that she was beaten by her boyfriend was herself arrested and later turned over to immigration authorities after she was booked at the Vista jail, a case that critics say illustrates the problems inherent in local police getting involved in immigration enforcement.
Elena Cabrera, 36, said she came home tired from work on the morning of Aug. 20 and wanted to sleep a little. But her then live-in boyfriend, Jorge Melgar, 50, wanted her to do house chores and began beating her when she refused. When police arrived, he told the officers that she had also hit him, Cabrera said.
Cabrera said she did not hit him, but was arrested anyway. She had a bloody lip and bruises on her face, she said.
Escondido police Lt. Craig Carter said both people were arrested on suspicion of domestic violence and there were injuries on both of them. Carter said the department did not turn Cabrera over to immigration authorities.
After the couple was arrested, the couple's four minor children were left home alone, Cabrera said. Police are investigating the family's complaint that the kids were left without supervision, Carter said.
Bill Flores, a retired assistant sheriff and a member of the human rights group El Grupo, said Escondido's close working relationship with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement hurts its ability to protect the community. He said police officers knew that Cabrera would be screened for immigration violations at the Vista jail and chose to take her into custody.
Incidents like Cabrera's hurt the department's relationship with the community, Flores said, making immigrants less likely to report crimes in the future.
"Everybody in that neighborhood found out what happened," Flores said. "She was a victim of domestic violence, she was taken to jail and she ended up getting turned over to ICE. All because she sought help from the Escondido Police Department."
After being arrested, Cabrera was taken to the Escondido Police Department and later to the Vista jail, where ICE placed an immigration hold on her, apparently as part of its Secure Communities program. Secure Communities links local jails to federal databases to identify illegal immigrants who are booked into the facilities.
"I never thought that this would happen to me," Cabrera said during an interview last week. "To me, it was a complete surprise."
A spokeswoman for ICE in San Diego declined to comment on the case.
Cabrera spent several days at the Vista jail before she was turned over to immigration authorities. Cabrera had an immigration petition pending as a victim of domestic violence related to a prior relationship. Under a law called the Violence Against Women Act of 1994, battered women who are married to U.S. citizens can apply for an immigrant visa.
Melgar, a legal resident, was not turned over to immigration authorities. He spent four days in jail before he was released.
Lilia Velasquez, a San Diego immigration attorney representing Cabrera, said having the visa petition does not necessarily mean that a victim is safe from deportation. However, under a new policy by the Obama administration, immigration authorities have discretion on when to pursue deportation procedures.
The Obama administration has said it wants to focus its resources on deporting violent illegal immigrant criminals, immigrants who have been ordered deported by an immigration judge and people who repeatedly have been caught in the country illegally.
"Given the new policy of prosecutorial discretion, ICE should have removed the hold (on Cabrera) once they ascertained she was a (Violence Against Women Act) beneficiary," Velasquez said.
The San Diego County District Attorney's office declined to file charges against either Cabrera or her boyfriend. She was released from immigration custody on Aug. 28 due to her Violence Against Women Act visa petition.
Critics say that the Obama administration's immigration policies, including Secure Communities, have created a dragnet that catches not only violent criminals but also people whose only violation is being in the country illegally. Those policies break families apart, tearing parents away from their U.S.-born children, critics say.
While she was detained, Cabrera's four children, ages 3 to 17 years old, were left in her Escondido home without supervision, she said. Her oldest daughter, Tayana Zarate, 17, said she had to care for her siblings while trying to figure out where her mother was being held and how to have her released.
Tayana said a neighbor helped her buy food and drove her around to find her mother.
"They never asked who I was, my name, how old I was, is there a grown-up in the house?" Tayana said last week. "They don't care."
The family filed a complaint with the police department for leaving the children without supervision. Tayana and her mother spoke with police detectives last Thursday night about the complaint.
Carter said the officers noted in their report that they left the children in the care of an "18-year-old female."
The department also came under fire last year when it announced that it had forged a new alliance with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement allowing several immigration officers to work out of its headquarters. Operation Joint Effort, as the program is called, is the only one of its kind in the county. It has been credited by the department with the arrest of over 400 criminal illegal immigrants since it started in May 2010...
By EDWARD SIFUENTES
October 19, 2011
A woman who called the Escondido Police Department to report that she was beaten by her boyfriend was herself arrested and later turned over to immigration authorities after she was booked at the Vista jail, a case that critics say illustrates the problems inherent in local police getting involved in immigration enforcement.
Elena Cabrera, 36, said she came home tired from work on the morning of Aug. 20 and wanted to sleep a little. But her then live-in boyfriend, Jorge Melgar, 50, wanted her to do house chores and began beating her when she refused. When police arrived, he told the officers that she had also hit him, Cabrera said.
Cabrera said she did not hit him, but was arrested anyway. She had a bloody lip and bruises on her face, she said.
Escondido police Lt. Craig Carter said both people were arrested on suspicion of domestic violence and there were injuries on both of them. Carter said the department did not turn Cabrera over to immigration authorities.
After the couple was arrested, the couple's four minor children were left home alone, Cabrera said. Police are investigating the family's complaint that the kids were left without supervision, Carter said.
Bill Flores, a retired assistant sheriff and a member of the human rights group El Grupo, said Escondido's close working relationship with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement hurts its ability to protect the community. He said police officers knew that Cabrera would be screened for immigration violations at the Vista jail and chose to take her into custody.
Incidents like Cabrera's hurt the department's relationship with the community, Flores said, making immigrants less likely to report crimes in the future.
"Everybody in that neighborhood found out what happened," Flores said. "She was a victim of domestic violence, she was taken to jail and she ended up getting turned over to ICE. All because she sought help from the Escondido Police Department."
After being arrested, Cabrera was taken to the Escondido Police Department and later to the Vista jail, where ICE placed an immigration hold on her, apparently as part of its Secure Communities program. Secure Communities links local jails to federal databases to identify illegal immigrants who are booked into the facilities.
"I never thought that this would happen to me," Cabrera said during an interview last week. "To me, it was a complete surprise."
A spokeswoman for ICE in San Diego declined to comment on the case.
Cabrera spent several days at the Vista jail before she was turned over to immigration authorities. Cabrera had an immigration petition pending as a victim of domestic violence related to a prior relationship. Under a law called the Violence Against Women Act of 1994, battered women who are married to U.S. citizens can apply for an immigrant visa.
Melgar, a legal resident, was not turned over to immigration authorities. He spent four days in jail before he was released.
Lilia Velasquez, a San Diego immigration attorney representing Cabrera, said having the visa petition does not necessarily mean that a victim is safe from deportation. However, under a new policy by the Obama administration, immigration authorities have discretion on when to pursue deportation procedures.
The Obama administration has said it wants to focus its resources on deporting violent illegal immigrant criminals, immigrants who have been ordered deported by an immigration judge and people who repeatedly have been caught in the country illegally.
"Given the new policy of prosecutorial discretion, ICE should have removed the hold (on Cabrera) once they ascertained she was a (Violence Against Women Act) beneficiary," Velasquez said.
The San Diego County District Attorney's office declined to file charges against either Cabrera or her boyfriend. She was released from immigration custody on Aug. 28 due to her Violence Against Women Act visa petition.
Critics say that the Obama administration's immigration policies, including Secure Communities, have created a dragnet that catches not only violent criminals but also people whose only violation is being in the country illegally. Those policies break families apart, tearing parents away from their U.S.-born children, critics say.
While she was detained, Cabrera's four children, ages 3 to 17 years old, were left in her Escondido home without supervision, she said. Her oldest daughter, Tayana Zarate, 17, said she had to care for her siblings while trying to figure out where her mother was being held and how to have her released.
Tayana said a neighbor helped her buy food and drove her around to find her mother.
"They never asked who I was, my name, how old I was, is there a grown-up in the house?" Tayana said last week. "They don't care."
The family filed a complaint with the police department for leaving the children without supervision. Tayana and her mother spoke with police detectives last Thursday night about the complaint.
Carter said the officers noted in their report that they left the children in the care of an "18-year-old female."
The department also came under fire last year when it announced that it had forged a new alliance with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement allowing several immigration officers to work out of its headquarters. Operation Joint Effort, as the program is called, is the only one of its kind in the county. It has been credited by the department with the arrest of over 400 criminal illegal immigrants since it started in May 2010...
Friday, October 07, 2011
The story of our holy Constitution
(Credit: Ian Huebert)
Oct 7, 2011
Introducing: A Tea People’s History
Exclusive read from the history book they won't teach in schools! The story of our holy Constitution
By Alex Pareene
Salon.com
We're exceptionally proud to bring you this excerpt from Salon's new e-book, "A Tea People's History," by Alex Pareene. You can buy the full e-book for $2.99 on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
The Continental Congress organized the new nation with a document called the American Rules of Acquisition, an early precursor to our Constitution. While the Rules — also known as the Articles of Confederation — wisely established a weak central government and powerful states’ rights, there was a certain spark missing — the spark of Natural Law, which was the Founders’ preferred phrase for the Ten Commandments.
Some argue that the Articles of Confederation created a federal government that was too small and weak, but in fact the primary problem with the Articles was that they were far too left-wing. Government bureaucracy killed nearly 2,000 soldiers at Valley Forge. It was apparent that a change was needed!
While planting some hemp one day, George Washington discovered an early draft of the Constitution, written in ancient Egyptian on a series of golden plates buried deep within the ground at Mount Vernon. James Madison translated and elaborated on the text, with the help of Thomas Jefferson and an angel. The excited Founders immediately called for a Constitutional Convention to officially ratify the document and formally make America the best country ever.
The Constitution was written with 74 essential guiding principles in mind, based on the principles of Natural Law as laid out by Polybius, Cicero, Thomas Hooker, Coke, Montesquieu, Blackstone, John Locke, Adam Smith, Moses and Jesus. Some of them include:
Principle 6: All Men are created (by God) equal (before God).
Principle 7: The proper role of government is to protect equal rights, not special rights for cross-dressing Wiccans with ADHD and “the differently abled” and every other interest group under the sun.
Principle 10: Property rights are the most important inalienable right of all.
Principle 17: If anything ever goes wrong, it is not because of any flaws in the Constitution or with the Founders.
Principle 20: In fact, if something goes wrong, it is because America has strayed from the original glorious divinely inspired mission of the Founders.
Principle 21: But it’s OK, because they predicted that would happen.
In their wiseness, the Founders explicitly rejected the direct election of senators, progressive taxation, welfare and collective bargaining for public employees. In fact, Ben Franklin argued that public employees shouldn’t even be paid, at all. As he said, at the time:
“To bring the matter nearer home, have we not seen the greatest and most important of our offices, that of general of our armies, executed for eight years together, without the smallest salary, by a patriot whom I will not now offend by any other praise; and this, through fatigues and distresses, in common with the other brave men, his military friends and companions, and the constant anxieties peculiar to his station? If he can do it, should a mere instructor of youths not stop complaining about his recompense? They don’t even work all year! Can the public treasury handle giving a mere public carriage-driver half his salary upon his retirement at the age of thirty? I think not! Especially when your average carriage-hand is living to be nearly forty, these dayes.”
The Founders also explicitly designed America to be a Christian nation. After all, the Natural Laws that make every man equal are the laws of God. All of the Founders believed in God. All of them. They all believed in God and thought everyone should believe in God and worship Him. It’s just a fact. Get over it. Also Jefferson’s “wall” between church and state just meant that the federal government couldn’t interfere with churches, but in fact the Founders wanted all religions to be encouraged, because worshiping God makes us virtuous, and only a virtuous people can handle self-rule. This is why the Founders came up with the “In God We Trust” motto, which they put on all the money and in the Pledge of Allegiance. It was Ben Franklin’s idea, along with the eagle, God’s favorite bird. Madison is the one who decided everyone should be sworn in on a Bible.
After agreeing unanimously on all the Golden Plate-derived portions of the document, the Founders set about writing the BiIl of Rights. There is a friendly debate among historians about whether the First Amendment — which establishes the right of Real Americans to Speak Common Sense Truths without fear of getting attacked by America-hating trolls and the lamestream media — or the Second Amendment — which establishes the right of Corporations to bear automatic weapons — is more important, but the Founders truly believed that both were essential for Freedom.
Fun Fact: When Washington took office as our first president, not all the states had ratified the Constitution, and the Articles of Confederation said that no changes could be made without every state’s approval. This is proof that the Founders officially approved of seceding from the Union, and endorsed Rick Perry.
Buy the full “A Tea People’s History” for $2.99 on Amazon or Barnes & Noble.
Thursday, October 06, 2011
Ridiculed crystal work wins Nobel for Israeli
Ridiculed crystal work wins Nobel for Israeli
An Israeli scientist whose work was once ridiculed for being out of line with received thinking won the 2011 Nobel Prize for chemistry on Wednesday for discovering different ways in which atoms could be packed together in solid materials.
By Patrick Lannin and Veronica Ek
Oct 6, 2011
(Reuters) - An Israeli scientist who suffered years of ridicule and even lost a research post for claiming to have found an entirely new class of solid material was awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry on Wednesday for his discovery of quasicrystals.
Three decades after Dan Shechtman looked with an electron microscope at a metal alloy and saw a pattern familiar in Islamic art but then unknown at a molecular level, those non-stick, rust-free, heat-resistant quasicrystals are finding their way into tools from LEDs to engines and frying pans.
Shechtman, 70, from Israel's Technion institute in Haifa, was working in the United States in 1982 when he observed atoms in a crystal he had made form a five-sided pattern that did not repeat itself, defying received wisdom that they must create repetitious patterns, like triangles, squares or hexagons.
"People just laughed at me," Shechtman recalled in an interview this year with Israeli newspaper Haaretz, noting how Linus Pauling, a colossus of science and double Nobel laureate, mounted a frightening "crusade" against him, saying: "There is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists."
After telling Shechtman to go back and read the textbook, the head of his research group asked him to leave for "bringing disgrace" on the team. "I felt rejected," Shechtman remembered.
"His discovery was extremely controversial," said the Nobel Committee at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which granted him the 10-million crown ($1.5-million) award.
"Dan Shechtman had to fight a fierce battle against established science ... His battle eventually forced scientists to reconsider their conception of the very nature of matter.
"In quasicrystals, we find the fascinating mosaics of the Arabic world reproduced at the level of atoms: regular patterns that never repeat themselves."
A PRIZE FOR THOUSANDS
On Wednesday, Shechtman said he was "excited" but at pains to praise fellow scientists, many of whom once doubted him.
Nancy Jackson, the president of the American Chemical Society (ACS), called it "a great work of discovery."
Scientists had previously thought solid matter had only two states -- crystalline, like diamonds, where atoms are arranged in rigid rows, and amorphous, like metals, with no particular order. Quasicrystalline matter offers a third possibility and opens the door to new kinds of materials for use in industry.
Sometimes referred to as Shechtmanite in the discoverer's honor, hundreds of quasicrystals have been synthesized in laboratories. Two years ago, scientists reported the first naturally occurring find of quasicrystals in eastern Russia.
David Phillips, president of Britain's Royal Society of Chemistry, called them "quite beautiful." Interlocking arrays of stars, circles and floral shapes are typical.
"You can normally explain in simple terms where in a crystal each atom sits - they are very symmetrical," Phillips said. "With quasicrystals, that symmetry is broken: there are regular patterns in the structure, but never repeating."
An intriguing feature of such patterns, also found in Arab mosaics, is that the mathematical constant known as the Greek letter tau, or the "golden ratio," occurs over and over again. Underlying it is a sequence worked out by Fibonacci in the 13th century, where each number is the sum of the preceding two.
Living things, including flowers, fruit and shellfish, also demonstrate similar arrangements, which scientists associate with the efficient packing of materials into growing organisms.
Quasicrystals are very hard and are poor conductors of heat and electricity, offering uses as thermoelectric materials, which convert heat into electricity. They also have non-stick surfaces, handy for frying pans, and appear in energy-saving light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and heat insulation in engines.
Astrid Graslund, secretary for the Nobel Committee for chemistry, said: "The practical applications are as of now, not so many. But the material has unexpected properties. It is very strong, it has hardly any friction on the surface. It doesn't want to react with anything -- they cannot ... become rusty.
"But it is more a conceptual insight - that these materials exist and we need to re-write all textbooks about crystals - it's a shift of the paradigm, which I think is most important."
BATTLE OF BELIEF
Since Galileo was mocked by established scientists and persecuted by the church in the 16th century for observing that the Earth moved round the Sun rather than the reverse, overturning accepted wisdom has never been easy, as several of this year's Nobel prizewinners in science have shown.
Research that was largely ignored for years secured the medicine prize for the late Ralph Steinman and the astounding finding that the universe's expansion was speeding up not slowing down meant the physics prize for its joint discoverers.
But in a year when science is in a froth over whether particles may have been fired from Geneva to Italy faster than the speed of light -- apparently defying Einstein -- few in the modern age have had to battle disbelief as hard as Shechtman.
"He dealt with the skepticism in a very scientific and gentlemanly manner and answered his critics as every scientist should -- through science," Ron Lifshitz, a physics professor at Tel Aviv University, told Reuters. "There were also personal slurs but those did not warrant a response ... He believed in his own work and carried on with determination."
Interviewed about his Nobel by television in Israel, where the award was big national news for a small country with a long roster of laureates, Shechtman spoke of a photograph in his office that showed a small cat sipping water, surrounded by angry dogs; a biblical inscription read: "Though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I will fear no evil."
"That's the way I felt for many years," Shechtman chuckled. "It accurately describes the situation, during that period."
He "trusted in his science," however, and came to see the criticism by the late Pauling, which Shechtman has described as "almost theological," as a positive source of strength:
"When you're a young scientist, and you're faced with perhaps the top international scientist, Professor Linus Pauling ... and he argues with you as an equal, and you know that he is wrong - that's not really such a bad feeling."
(Additional reporting by Simon Johnson in Stockholm, Ben Hirschler in London, Julie Steenhuysen in Chicago and Dan Williams, Ori Lewis and Jeffrey Heller in Jerusalem; Writing by Alastair Macdonald)
(The Nobel Committee at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences corrects laureate's first name to Dan from Daniel)
An Israeli scientist whose work was once ridiculed for being out of line with received thinking won the 2011 Nobel Prize for chemistry on Wednesday for discovering different ways in which atoms could be packed together in solid materials.
By Patrick Lannin and Veronica Ek
Oct 6, 2011
(Reuters) - An Israeli scientist who suffered years of ridicule and even lost a research post for claiming to have found an entirely new class of solid material was awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry on Wednesday for his discovery of quasicrystals.
Three decades after Dan Shechtman looked with an electron microscope at a metal alloy and saw a pattern familiar in Islamic art but then unknown at a molecular level, those non-stick, rust-free, heat-resistant quasicrystals are finding their way into tools from LEDs to engines and frying pans.
Shechtman, 70, from Israel's Technion institute in Haifa, was working in the United States in 1982 when he observed atoms in a crystal he had made form a five-sided pattern that did not repeat itself, defying received wisdom that they must create repetitious patterns, like triangles, squares or hexagons.
"People just laughed at me," Shechtman recalled in an interview this year with Israeli newspaper Haaretz, noting how Linus Pauling, a colossus of science and double Nobel laureate, mounted a frightening "crusade" against him, saying: "There is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists."
After telling Shechtman to go back and read the textbook, the head of his research group asked him to leave for "bringing disgrace" on the team. "I felt rejected," Shechtman remembered.
"His discovery was extremely controversial," said the Nobel Committee at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which granted him the 10-million crown ($1.5-million) award.
"Dan Shechtman had to fight a fierce battle against established science ... His battle eventually forced scientists to reconsider their conception of the very nature of matter.
"In quasicrystals, we find the fascinating mosaics of the Arabic world reproduced at the level of atoms: regular patterns that never repeat themselves."
A PRIZE FOR THOUSANDS
On Wednesday, Shechtman said he was "excited" but at pains to praise fellow scientists, many of whom once doubted him.
Nancy Jackson, the president of the American Chemical Society (ACS), called it "a great work of discovery."
Scientists had previously thought solid matter had only two states -- crystalline, like diamonds, where atoms are arranged in rigid rows, and amorphous, like metals, with no particular order. Quasicrystalline matter offers a third possibility and opens the door to new kinds of materials for use in industry.
Sometimes referred to as Shechtmanite in the discoverer's honor, hundreds of quasicrystals have been synthesized in laboratories. Two years ago, scientists reported the first naturally occurring find of quasicrystals in eastern Russia.
David Phillips, president of Britain's Royal Society of Chemistry, called them "quite beautiful." Interlocking arrays of stars, circles and floral shapes are typical.
"You can normally explain in simple terms where in a crystal each atom sits - they are very symmetrical," Phillips said. "With quasicrystals, that symmetry is broken: there are regular patterns in the structure, but never repeating."
An intriguing feature of such patterns, also found in Arab mosaics, is that the mathematical constant known as the Greek letter tau, or the "golden ratio," occurs over and over again. Underlying it is a sequence worked out by Fibonacci in the 13th century, where each number is the sum of the preceding two.
Living things, including flowers, fruit and shellfish, also demonstrate similar arrangements, which scientists associate with the efficient packing of materials into growing organisms.
Quasicrystals are very hard and are poor conductors of heat and electricity, offering uses as thermoelectric materials, which convert heat into electricity. They also have non-stick surfaces, handy for frying pans, and appear in energy-saving light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and heat insulation in engines.
Astrid Graslund, secretary for the Nobel Committee for chemistry, said: "The practical applications are as of now, not so many. But the material has unexpected properties. It is very strong, it has hardly any friction on the surface. It doesn't want to react with anything -- they cannot ... become rusty.
"But it is more a conceptual insight - that these materials exist and we need to re-write all textbooks about crystals - it's a shift of the paradigm, which I think is most important."
BATTLE OF BELIEF
Since Galileo was mocked by established scientists and persecuted by the church in the 16th century for observing that the Earth moved round the Sun rather than the reverse, overturning accepted wisdom has never been easy, as several of this year's Nobel prizewinners in science have shown.
Research that was largely ignored for years secured the medicine prize for the late Ralph Steinman and the astounding finding that the universe's expansion was speeding up not slowing down meant the physics prize for its joint discoverers.
But in a year when science is in a froth over whether particles may have been fired from Geneva to Italy faster than the speed of light -- apparently defying Einstein -- few in the modern age have had to battle disbelief as hard as Shechtman.
"He dealt with the skepticism in a very scientific and gentlemanly manner and answered his critics as every scientist should -- through science," Ron Lifshitz, a physics professor at Tel Aviv University, told Reuters. "There were also personal slurs but those did not warrant a response ... He believed in his own work and carried on with determination."
Interviewed about his Nobel by television in Israel, where the award was big national news for a small country with a long roster of laureates, Shechtman spoke of a photograph in his office that showed a small cat sipping water, surrounded by angry dogs; a biblical inscription read: "Though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I will fear no evil."
"That's the way I felt for many years," Shechtman chuckled. "It accurately describes the situation, during that period."
He "trusted in his science," however, and came to see the criticism by the late Pauling, which Shechtman has described as "almost theological," as a positive source of strength:
"When you're a young scientist, and you're faced with perhaps the top international scientist, Professor Linus Pauling ... and he argues with you as an equal, and you know that he is wrong - that's not really such a bad feeling."
(Additional reporting by Simon Johnson in Stockholm, Ben Hirschler in London, Julie Steenhuysen in Chicago and Dan Williams, Ori Lewis and Jeffrey Heller in Jerusalem; Writing by Alastair Macdonald)
(The Nobel Committee at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences corrects laureate's first name to Dan from Daniel)
Saturday, October 01, 2011
This American Life: A man who has searched 18 years for the right couch
Cat and Mouse
This American Life
Originally aired 02.24.2006
In most games of cat and mouse, you've got the chaser and you got the chased, right? And both of them are pretty much in constant motion. But here's a story where the mouse is not moving at all. In fact, the mouse is an inanimate object. And yet, somehow it cannot be caught. David Segal reports.
David Segal
I've known Eric for just about 20 years. And for nearly the entire length of our friendship, he's been hunting quarry that everyone else cornered a long time ago, something nobody really thinks of as the sort of thing you hunt.
Eric
I've been looking for the right sofa for about 18 years.
David Segal
Yes, he said 18 years. And yes, he said sofa. All of this started after Eric left graduate school. And briefly, it looked like it would be a fairly conventional shopping experience. He spotted a sofa he liked at Pottery Barn, an off-white number with a slip cover. And he had a matching pair delivered. But once they arrived, he knew he'd made a big mistake. The lines were all wrong. The fabric wasn't right. He returned the goods within a week. And after that, the shopping experience was never conventional again. His quest moved into what I call its "Ahab/Moby Dick" phase. He began to stalk his couch.
For years he'd subscribe to these high-end furniture magazines. And slowly, he started to build a clip file of advertisements and photographs. He learned the ins and outs of couch construction, the proper materials for the frame--
Eric
What they call kiln-dried hardwood.
David Segal
Invisible stitching. Cushion filling.
Eric
There's a firmness but a softness, which is actually not all that easy to achieve.
David Segal
The fabric for the covering--
Eric
The kind of the boucle that they do, which is the fabric that I was keen on.
David Segal
And of course, all important, the springs.
Eric
What's called eight-way hand-tied, I think, which is, they do eight-way hand tying of the coils.
David Segal
I should say, Eric's not this way when he's buying clothes. He's not this way when he's ordering dinner. He's not this way with a lot of things. But when it's something he cares about, he's methodical and he's relentless. But with the sofa, he went further than he ever had before. By the time his search entered its 10th year-- that's more than twice as long as it took scientists at the Manhattan Project to develop the atom bomb-- Eric was honing in.
He'd started shopping in these swanky boutiques, places that don't even have storefronts, places where someone has to tell you the address and then buzz you in. He had his eyes on the work of a sofa superstar named Jean-Michel Frank. And there was one piece in particular that he decided was the couch of his dreams. It was a $12,000 three-seater of Italian nutwood in a beeswax finish. Eric found the one place in the country where it was for sale.
Eric
A place called Ralph Pucci.
David Segal
So you walked around this place, and did you fall in love with any of the sofas? Did you hear the church music you were looking for?
Eric
Yeah, well, it's interesting. The short answer is, I didn't, which was kind of dismaying. When I saw it in person, I was actually a little underwhelmed.
David Segal
So you ultimately passed on all of the sofas that you came across during your 15- to 18-year search for the perfect sofa.
Eric
Right.
David Segal
Could you describe your current sofa?
Eric
That's just plain mean.
David Segal
Where did you get your current sofa?
Eric
So I got my current sofa for free. It was a donation from a friend that I was helping move out of his apartment. The polyester fill cushions have gotten flattened to the point where if you plop down, if you just kind of collapse into my sofa, you will actually hurt yourself.
David Segal
More than a few times in these past 18 years, Eric and I have tried to figure out what this sofa thing is really about. Perhaps it won't shock you to learn that Eric is single. He's had a fair number of girlfriends. With some he's even shared the story of his never-ending couch adventure. And guess what, they don't seem very amused.
Eric
Yeah. I mean, it kind of drives them crazy.
David Segal
To review. Just after college, he found something he liked, lived with it briefly, and then decided it wasn't good enough and sent it packing. He started pursuing exotic specimens that conformed to a narrower and more unattainable ideal. He subscribed to glossy, photo-rich magazines, which only reinforced his yearning for this unattainable ideal. And then, after years of searching, he finally came face-to-face with that ideal. He found it lacking. Do you see where I'm going here? Often, when I talk to him about his quest, I want to say, wait, are we still talking about a couch?
Eric
Do I hold out for one that really knocks me out or do I just settle for something that is-- that I can live with, but really doesn't knock me out?
David Segal
But does it not worry you that you might live a sofa-less, single life?
Eric
Yeah. I mean, absolutely. This is probably the thing that causes me more concern and dismay and questions as anything in my life. I really, really like being together. And I'm not all that crazy about being alone.
David Segal
One thing that's interesting about the tale of Eric's nonstop sofa safari-- which I've heard him tell more than a few times-- is that it ticks off nearly as many people as it amuses. Some are actually angry when he's done with the story. And I think I know why. Two radically different world views are clashing here, one in which life is all about seeking perfection, and the other in which you make normal compromises and settle for good instead of great. The settlers consider the perfection people to be babies and whiners. The perfection people see the settlers as strangely hostile milquetoasts who've given up, who aren't striving for greatness, who've been cowed into lowering their standards.
Personally, I know that part of me wants to tell Eric, don't yield. Do not surrender. Hold fast. Wait for that transformative moment, even if it means you're alone and drooling on a frat house futon for the rest of your life. And another part of me wants to tell him exactly what a former girlfriend once told him, and I quote, "Just buy a [BLEEP] couch."
Ira Glass
David Segal is a reporter for the Washington Post.
This American Life
Originally aired 02.24.2006
In most games of cat and mouse, you've got the chaser and you got the chased, right? And both of them are pretty much in constant motion. But here's a story where the mouse is not moving at all. In fact, the mouse is an inanimate object. And yet, somehow it cannot be caught. David Segal reports.
David Segal
I've known Eric for just about 20 years. And for nearly the entire length of our friendship, he's been hunting quarry that everyone else cornered a long time ago, something nobody really thinks of as the sort of thing you hunt.
Eric
I've been looking for the right sofa for about 18 years.
David Segal
Yes, he said 18 years. And yes, he said sofa. All of this started after Eric left graduate school. And briefly, it looked like it would be a fairly conventional shopping experience. He spotted a sofa he liked at Pottery Barn, an off-white number with a slip cover. And he had a matching pair delivered. But once they arrived, he knew he'd made a big mistake. The lines were all wrong. The fabric wasn't right. He returned the goods within a week. And after that, the shopping experience was never conventional again. His quest moved into what I call its "Ahab/Moby Dick" phase. He began to stalk his couch.
For years he'd subscribe to these high-end furniture magazines. And slowly, he started to build a clip file of advertisements and photographs. He learned the ins and outs of couch construction, the proper materials for the frame--
Eric
What they call kiln-dried hardwood.
David Segal
Invisible stitching. Cushion filling.
Eric
There's a firmness but a softness, which is actually not all that easy to achieve.
David Segal
The fabric for the covering--
Eric
The kind of the boucle that they do, which is the fabric that I was keen on.
David Segal
And of course, all important, the springs.
Eric
What's called eight-way hand-tied, I think, which is, they do eight-way hand tying of the coils.
David Segal
I should say, Eric's not this way when he's buying clothes. He's not this way when he's ordering dinner. He's not this way with a lot of things. But when it's something he cares about, he's methodical and he's relentless. But with the sofa, he went further than he ever had before. By the time his search entered its 10th year-- that's more than twice as long as it took scientists at the Manhattan Project to develop the atom bomb-- Eric was honing in.
He'd started shopping in these swanky boutiques, places that don't even have storefronts, places where someone has to tell you the address and then buzz you in. He had his eyes on the work of a sofa superstar named Jean-Michel Frank. And there was one piece in particular that he decided was the couch of his dreams. It was a $12,000 three-seater of Italian nutwood in a beeswax finish. Eric found the one place in the country where it was for sale.
Eric
A place called Ralph Pucci.
David Segal
So you walked around this place, and did you fall in love with any of the sofas? Did you hear the church music you were looking for?
Eric
Yeah, well, it's interesting. The short answer is, I didn't, which was kind of dismaying. When I saw it in person, I was actually a little underwhelmed.
David Segal
So you ultimately passed on all of the sofas that you came across during your 15- to 18-year search for the perfect sofa.
Eric
Right.
David Segal
Could you describe your current sofa?
Eric
That's just plain mean.
David Segal
Where did you get your current sofa?
Eric
So I got my current sofa for free. It was a donation from a friend that I was helping move out of his apartment. The polyester fill cushions have gotten flattened to the point where if you plop down, if you just kind of collapse into my sofa, you will actually hurt yourself.
David Segal
More than a few times in these past 18 years, Eric and I have tried to figure out what this sofa thing is really about. Perhaps it won't shock you to learn that Eric is single. He's had a fair number of girlfriends. With some he's even shared the story of his never-ending couch adventure. And guess what, they don't seem very amused.
Eric
Yeah. I mean, it kind of drives them crazy.
David Segal
To review. Just after college, he found something he liked, lived with it briefly, and then decided it wasn't good enough and sent it packing. He started pursuing exotic specimens that conformed to a narrower and more unattainable ideal. He subscribed to glossy, photo-rich magazines, which only reinforced his yearning for this unattainable ideal. And then, after years of searching, he finally came face-to-face with that ideal. He found it lacking. Do you see where I'm going here? Often, when I talk to him about his quest, I want to say, wait, are we still talking about a couch?
Eric
Do I hold out for one that really knocks me out or do I just settle for something that is-- that I can live with, but really doesn't knock me out?
David Segal
But does it not worry you that you might live a sofa-less, single life?
Eric
Yeah. I mean, absolutely. This is probably the thing that causes me more concern and dismay and questions as anything in my life. I really, really like being together. And I'm not all that crazy about being alone.
David Segal
One thing that's interesting about the tale of Eric's nonstop sofa safari-- which I've heard him tell more than a few times-- is that it ticks off nearly as many people as it amuses. Some are actually angry when he's done with the story. And I think I know why. Two radically different world views are clashing here, one in which life is all about seeking perfection, and the other in which you make normal compromises and settle for good instead of great. The settlers consider the perfection people to be babies and whiners. The perfection people see the settlers as strangely hostile milquetoasts who've given up, who aren't striving for greatness, who've been cowed into lowering their standards.
Personally, I know that part of me wants to tell Eric, don't yield. Do not surrender. Hold fast. Wait for that transformative moment, even if it means you're alone and drooling on a frat house futon for the rest of your life. And another part of me wants to tell him exactly what a former girlfriend once told him, and I quote, "Just buy a [BLEEP] couch."
Ira Glass
David Segal is a reporter for the Washington Post.
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Jamey Rodemeyer, 14-Year-Old Boy, Commits Suicide After Gay Bullying, Parents Carry On Message
Jamey Rodemeyer, 14-Year-Old Boy, Commits Suicide After Gay Bullying, Parents Carry On Message
The Huffington Post
Dean Praetorius
9/22/11
Jamey Rodemeyer, a 14-year-old boy from Williamsville, NY, took his life Sunday after what his parents claim was years of bullying because of struggles with his sexuality.
His parents, Tracy and Tim Rodemeyer, say that Jamey faced bullies for years, though things intensified in middle school, according to NBC 2. Jamey recently became a freshman at Williamsville North High School.
In the wake of their loss, the Rodemeyers hope to carry on a message of anti-bullying and acceptance. "To the kids who are bullying they have to realize that words are very powerful and what you think is just fun and games isn't to some people, and you are destroying a lot of lives," Jamey's father told WIVB.
Tracy Rodemeyer misses her son, but hopes the loss can still be used to teach a message of tolerance. "It took him away from our family way too early and we're just convinced that he had a purpose on this planet and it was to touch as many people as he could," she told NBC 2.
According to NBC, the Rodemeyers had gone to the school about the problem in the past. Jamey even sought counseling to learn to deal with the problem, but it seems it wasn't enough.
While they say their son seemed happy in the days leading up to the tragedy, his "It Gets Better" YouTube posting from May includes details about how intense the bullying was.
Through it all, Jamey remained outwardly optimistic. “That's all you have to do. Just love yourself and you're set. And I promise you, it'll get better,” he said in the video, which you can see in full below.
Gay bullying has been gaining increasing attention in the media, as a number of tragedies has brought the issue into the spotlight. Earlier this month the California State Senate passed "Seth's Law" a measure designed to curb anti-gay bullying in schools.
Need help? In the U.S., call 1-800-273-8255 for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline or visit stopbullying.gov.
The Huffington Post
Dean Praetorius
9/22/11
Jamey Rodemeyer, a 14-year-old boy from Williamsville, NY, took his life Sunday after what his parents claim was years of bullying because of struggles with his sexuality.
His parents, Tracy and Tim Rodemeyer, say that Jamey faced bullies for years, though things intensified in middle school, according to NBC 2. Jamey recently became a freshman at Williamsville North High School.
In the wake of their loss, the Rodemeyers hope to carry on a message of anti-bullying and acceptance. "To the kids who are bullying they have to realize that words are very powerful and what you think is just fun and games isn't to some people, and you are destroying a lot of lives," Jamey's father told WIVB.
Tracy Rodemeyer misses her son, but hopes the loss can still be used to teach a message of tolerance. "It took him away from our family way too early and we're just convinced that he had a purpose on this planet and it was to touch as many people as he could," she told NBC 2.
According to NBC, the Rodemeyers had gone to the school about the problem in the past. Jamey even sought counseling to learn to deal with the problem, but it seems it wasn't enough.
While they say their son seemed happy in the days leading up to the tragedy, his "It Gets Better" YouTube posting from May includes details about how intense the bullying was.
Through it all, Jamey remained outwardly optimistic. “That's all you have to do. Just love yourself and you're set. And I promise you, it'll get better,” he said in the video, which you can see in full below.
Gay bullying has been gaining increasing attention in the media, as a number of tragedies has brought the issue into the spotlight. Earlier this month the California State Senate passed "Seth's Law" a measure designed to curb anti-gay bullying in schools.
Need help? In the U.S., call 1-800-273-8255 for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline or visit stopbullying.gov.
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