You remember Roy Moore. He was the Alabama judge who was challenged by the ACLU for posting a copy of the Ten Commandments in his courtroom and began jury deliberations with a prayer for divine guidance. He became the personification of the movement in the United States to reduce the wall of separation between Church and State. Most people assumed that he has returned to well-deserved obscurity. Well guess again. As of last night, he is again the Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court.
We have yet another tragedy of a gay student bullied to the point that he committed suicide. Tim Ribberink, 20, left a note saying that he simply could not take the teasing and isolation anymore despite his love for his parents. His image puts another face on the costs of homophobia and intolerance. Ribberlink was studying to be a history teacher.
I have previously written about the rise of shaming punishments in the United States in both blogs (here and here and here and here) and columns (here and here). We can now add Cleveland Municipal Court Judge Pinkey S. Carr to the ignoble line of judge meting out their own forms of justice through humiliating acts. In this case, as shown in the video below, Shena Hardin, 32, is requiring to wear a sign calling herself an “idiot” in public for repeatedly driving around a school bus on the sidewalk while children were boarding.
Of all of the races yesterday, the most interesting for me was the Missouri Senate race. Senator Claire McCaskill was one of the least popular members of the Senate and a virtual guarantee for defeat until Rep. Todd Akin delivered victory from the jaws of defeat. Akin’s infamous rape remarks made him completely toxic to the entire nation and the GOP leadership quickly called for his withdrawal from the race. Akin treated the suggestion as absurd and allowed two deadlines to pass that would have allowed his party to repair the damage that he caused. At one time, politicians would put the interests of their party and their country before their own. However, we live in a different time and Akin is the face of the times: egotistical, selfish, and extremist. Linda MacMahon in Connecticut cut the same intensely egotistical image: spending $100 million of her own money in two unsuccessful efforts to make herself a Senator despite a fairly toxic personality and image associated with professional wrestling. Despite the sound defeat in the last election, MacMahon spent even more of her own money as the former chief executive of World Wrestling Entertainment to secure a second defeat. The question for the GOP is whether the disaster this election will cause anyone in the party to consider the eradication of moderates in their party and the loss of what we once called “Rockefeller Republicans.”
As the polls grind to a close, various images linger from the humorous of a surfer voting in California fresh from the beach with his board to the inspiring of a woman in labor insisting on voting before going to the hospital. However, one image remains consistent across the country: absurdly long line. Despite scandals from 2008 of people waiting for hours to vote, election officials have again produced endless lines by failing to produce adequate voting machines for the expected vote in many areas. My voting place in McLean was wonderful – enough machines and short lines. However, I have heard nightmare stories from others around the region including over three hour waits in Maryland.
There are just some lines that politicians should leave to others like Senator Vitter (R., La.) denouncing others as “prostitutes” or former Senator Craig (R., Idaho) denouncing the critics for “pandering” to voters (as hypothetical examples). Bill Clinton reached that point Monday when he asked without a shadow of discomfort or awkwardness when voters really wanted a president who would lie to them with a straight face. Continue reading “Clinton: We Don’t Need A President Who WIll Not Tell You The Truth”→
We have yet another horrific rape case in India. In this case, a 13-year-old girl who is part of low Dalit caste was abducted and gang raped by men from the higher Jats caste. They took pictures of the rape and threatened to release them if she told anyone. Eventually her mother discovered the truth and told her father, a gardener. The father’s shame under the cultural and religious norms of the area was so great that he drank pesticide and killed himself. In response to the outrage, local leader, Jitender Chhatar blamed fast foods for the rape while the state’s former chief minister, Om Prakash Chautala, called for the lowering of the age of consent to marriage to 15 to combat rapes in the country.
In torts, we are about to discuss animal liability and a case this week captures the liability line in such cases. In Montana, a twenty-four-year old employee of the Animals of Montana was killed by a grizzly bear raised in captivity to appear on films and photographic images.
The plight of homosexuals in Russia is getting worse under Vladimir Putin. Gays and lesbians had their own Spring movement after the fall of the Soviet Union — coming out of the closet after decades of repression. Then came Putin and his alliance with the Russian Orthodox Church. Putin’s government quickly used gays and lesbians as targets of political attacks. Those political attacks have now turned to actual attacks as thugs raid gay bars and clubs — beating down both men and women while the police do nothing. The recent legislation banning “gay propaganda” (and a ban on parades for 100 years in Moscow) has triggered the increase in attacks as homophobes see official support for their violent campaigns.
Cook County Judge Susan McDunn has had a controversial career with allegations from anti-gay bias to sheer incompetence. She is now adding suggestions of paranoia after appearing in federal court demanding to know what secret and sealed cases have been brought against her — despite the fact that no one has any evidence of such cases existing. Yet, McDunn insists “I’m not paranoid.” She could add that “even if I am paranoid it doesn’t mean my spiritual adviser is not after me.”
Pastor John D. White of Broomfield Township, Michigan is under arrest in a bizarre murder of the daughter of his fiancé in fulfillment of a sexual fantasy. The 14 members of Christ Community Fellowship Church knew that White was an ex-con but believed that he had changed in finding God.
Recently we discussed how Syrians were taking credit for sending Hurricane Sandy to devastate the United States as punishment for our opposition to the Assad regime. According to these sources, the hurricane was the creation of Iranian scientists and we noted that Christian ministers like Pat Robertson have long treated hurricanes as simple divine punishment — not some manufactured Sharia storm. Now, some Muslim clerics have shifted the account to a more traditional “God’s vengeance” theory. Clerics are telling the faithful that the hurricane was punishment for the recent YouTube video, “Innocence of Muslims.” Thank God it was only a trailer. It is frightening to imagine what would have been sent for the full-length movie.
There is a disturbing account of a death of a young man who participated in the annual Halloween celebrations in New Orleans. Clayton Otwell, 21, went to New Orleans with a friend to go to the Voodoo Festival in the City Park. After helping a stranger, he was offered the chance to try a new type of drug called 25-I. It took just one drop up the nose to kill him. The drug is called “N-Bomb” for its chemical composition 25I-NBOMe and is an extremely potent synthetic substance analogous to LSD.
The great storm that ravaged the east coast this past week brought into sharper focus than all of the presidential debates combined the central issue facing voters on Tuesday. Those who continue to believe that we are all in this together applauded the non-partisan meetings between President Obama and New Jersey governor Christ Christie. The ideologues on the right saw those same meetings as a cynical betrayal of conservative orthodoxy. Alternatively, they approved the initial response of Rep. Steve King (R. Iowa), who subordinated concern over the needs of the storm’s victims to the question of what budget cuts would need to be made before providing federal assistance. These distinct responses accentuated the fact that the election is not about economic policy or religious freedom or the mess in the Middle East. It is not about climate change or energy independence or immigration reform. And it is not about abortion or same-sex marriage or the rights of public unions. At its core, the election is a referendum on affirming or rescinding the social contract. All the rest is committee work.
As mentioned in the last installment of this series, silence in various forms can be just as potent a propaganda tool as words or images proper. Variations of this tactic were presented as were examples of successful and unsuccessful attempts at its utilization. This last week a news story appeared that illustrates one of the major types of failure associated with this tactic and it is one that is every more likely and hard to avoid in the Information Age. This type of failure is known colloquially as the Streisand Effect; whereby an attempt to hide or remove a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information more widely, usually facilitated by the Internet.
“Don’t look at this!”
Named for singer Barbra Streisand, it is a modern term for an old phenomena. Similar to the meme of “Banned in Boston”, it revolves around the idea that forbidden fruit is the most tempting and that banning or censoring something often makes that item or information more desirable. Babs got her name attached to this propaganda phenomena when in 2003 she attempted to suppress photographs of her residence and inadvertently generated further publicity. This publicity was notably “improved” – although if you’re Babs you might say “exacerbated” – by the World Wide Web.
You remember Roy Moore. He was the Alabama judge who was challenged by the ACLU for posting a copy of the Ten Commandments in his courtroom and began jury deliberations with a prayer for divine guidance. He became the personification of the movement in the United States to reduce the wall of separation between Church and State. Most people assumed that he has returned to well-deserved obscurity. Well guess again. As of last night, he is again the Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court.
