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I wore my hooded sweatshirt the other night when I went out to eat with my family. My sister's boyfriend wore a hooded sweatshirt, too.
"We're lucky nobody tried to kill us," I told him.
But nobody looked at us askance for wearing hooded sweatshirts, perhaps because we are white people from New England. However, according to Geraldo Rivera, wearing a hooded sweatshirt is asking for trouble - if somebody shoots you while you're wearing one, it's your own damn fault for dressing like a thug. Of course, Geraldo Rivera is an idiot, and would rather blame a hooded sweatshirt for the death of Trayvon Martin than talk about something like racism or whether Stand Your Ground laws make any sense. Yup, blame the victim and his scary hooded sweatshirt.
I wore my hooded sweatshirt the other night because I was cold. But on Sunday churchgoers wore hooded sweatshirts to honor Trayvon Martin. You can read about that here.
After learning about the tragic shooting death of Trayvon Martin, the Florida teenager who was gunned down after leaving a convenience store with Skittles and iced tea, I asked whether it would be OK for me to declare myself a neighborhood watch captain, arm myself and shoot anyone I deemed suspicious. Wouldn't the world be a better place if I did that?
Well, no, it wouldn't - I was being sarcastic. There are a lot of things to object to in the story of Trayvon Martin, and a lot of the discussion has centered on Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law, which gives people who feel threatened the right to use force without first making an attempt to retreat. (Emily Bazelon explains the law's history in Slate.) Trayvon's killer, self-proclaimed neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman, wasn't charged by local police, presumably because no one witnessed the attack and because he claimed self-defense. But recent reports suggest that the local police are a bunch of bumbling fools, and left a whole lot of questions unasked. Fortunately, ThinkProgress has compiled a list of 20 facts about the Martin case, for people who might not realize what an outrage it is.
New York Times columnist Gail Collins is obsessed with Mitt Romney's dog.
She's written about how he once strapped a dog carrier to the roof of his car, loaded his Irish setter Seamus into it, and drove to Canada on vacation, stopping to clean off the car when the dog soiled itself, about 50 times.
I read a lot of media criticism, and media critics have generally criticized Collins' dog obsession. They say Romney's treatment of Seamus on that long-ago road trip is trivia, and should be irrelevant when considering whether he would make a good president. For the most part, I agree with this, but when I mentioned the Romney dog incident to my family, they were aghast. "Why haven't we heard more about this?" my mother wanted to know. Everyone seemed to agree that there had to be something seriously wrong with anyone who would strap their dog to the roof and drive to Canada. They didn't think this detail was trivial at all. They thought it was revealing.
Anyway, the Washington Post has written a piece about poor Seamus, and the role he's playing in the current campaign. Regular people who like dogs - which is a lot of people, by the way - don't think the story is trivia. Like my family, they think it's pertinent and worth talking about. Who knows? Maybe the media critics are wrong.
Mother Jones provides a helpful chart.
One of the most moving moments of last weekend's Academy Awards ceremony occurred when Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy won the Oscar for best documentary short. Her film, "Saving Face," tells the story of a London-based Pakistani plastic surgeon, Dr. Mohammad Jawad, who travels to Pakistan to treat women who have been disfigured by acid attacks, which are typically carried out by abusive men.
Over at ABC News, Christine Amanpour interviews Obaid-Chinoy about her documentary. Click here to see what she has to say. Also, click here to visit the home of the Acid Survivors Foundation in Pakistan.
Last week White House Press Secretary Jay Carney expressed sadness over the death of journalists Marie Colvin and Anthony Shadid overseas, saying they had died "in order to bring truth."
This prompted ABC White House correspondent Jake Tapper to ask how the administration's praise for journalists working in foreign countries squared "with the fact that this administration has been so aggressively trying to stop aggressive journalism in the United States by using the Espionage Act to take whistle-blowers to court?”
It's true. The Obama administration has been prosecuting whitleblowers aggressively - something that Obama indicated he wouldn't do when he was campaigning for office.
According to David Carr at the New York Times:
"The Espionage Act, enacted back in 1917 to punish those who gave aid to our enemies, was used three times in all the prior administrations to bring cases against government officials accused of providing classified information to the media. It has been used six times since the current president took office.
Setting aside the case of Pfc. Bradley Manning, an Army intelligence analyst who is accused of stealing thousands of secret documents, the majority of the recent prosecutions seem to have everything to do with administrative secrecy and very little to do with national security.
In case after case, the Espionage Act has been deployed as a kind of ad hoc Official Secrets Act, which is not a law that has ever found traction in America, a place where the people’s right to know is viewed as superseding the government’s right to hide its business."
The Carr column, which you can find here, explains why the Obama's use of the Espionage Act is bothersome. The piece pairs well with this New Yorker article from May about the government's case against Thomas Drake, a former senior executive at the National Security Agency.
The Atlantic presents a five-question quiz.
Even as the Wisconsin protests in February and March of last year continued to gain momentum, achieving a recall election for the state’s sitting governor, Scott Walker, seemed to me a far off, dim hope. Gathering the 540,208 signatures needed to initiate a recall struck me as completely implausible. Strangely, it may have been witnessing the tens of thousands of people at the rallies that allowed me to imagine multiplying a population that size, and then trying to collect signatures from it. Of course I knew I didn’t have to collect half a million signatures by myself - at least, technically I knew that - but I still carried an oppressive feeling that I was alone in this fight.
Governor Walker had ignited the massive weekly gatherings and occupation of the capitol building shortly after he took office. With rapid passage, his budget bill all but dismantled public labor unions, cut off significant funding for public services, including education, and was just the beginning of enacting, without public debate, a lengthy list of policies detrimental to a wide swath of Wisconsin residents and their rights.
My sense of loneliness in the effort does seem hard to justify when surrounded by so many people willingly and vocally expressing the exact same frustrations and anger I felt. Perhaps it was my belief that this passion I was witnessing - even over so many weeks, and gaining strength at that – would dissipate as short attention spans inevitably drifted to new issues and lack of leadership and organization doomed any plans for the more directed protest of a recall campaign.
I had seen bad organization in political campaigns before. Actually, that’s all I’d seen. Not that I was an old hand at being involved politically, but the few for which I’d volunteered left me disillusioned that my efforts had in any way bent the trajectory of political space and time. I typically volunteered in order to channel my frustrations and angst into productive use. I wanted to make an impact on the outcome of a campaign that otherwise seemed to be teetering on the edge of failure. I knocked on doors, I called people - compete strangers to me - reminding them to vote.
I finally got around to reading the excellent Rolling Stone story about the suicide cluster in the Anoka-Hennepin school district in Minnesota - nine teenagers in two years. Because four of the dead were gay or perceived as such, the article focuses on the anti-gay climate in the district, and the district's bizarro Sexual Orientation Curriculum Policy, which has just been repealed.
This is the sort of article you read and feel like almost every adult in it should be punched in the face FOR DOING NOTHING WHILE CHILDREN KILL THEMSELVES. Some of the adults actually indicate that if you're "choosing" to be gay, then you're choosing a lifestyle where you're more likely to kill yourself, and that's your responsibility. Another thing I picked up on is the general sense from these jokers is that being gay will send you directly to hell, and being harassed and bullied and urged to become straight isn't as bad as all that, especially if you do reject the dreadful "homosexual lifestyle" and thus spare yourself a trip to hell.
You don't have to be gay to be offended by the stupidity of the Anoka-Hennepin school district. You just have to be a decent person. And if you've been bullied in school, as I was, you'll relate to the frustration of watching a bunch of cowardly adults refusing to do anything about it. You might even relate to the feelings of one kid who, having just completed his freshman year, couldn't believe he had to SUFFER THROUGH THREE MORE YEARS OF HIGH SCHOOL. I remember feeling that way myself - three more years of this crap? It does get better, as they say, but sometimes that can be hard for 14 and 15-year-olds to understand.
The Rolling Stone story also pairs well with the recent New Yorker story on the Rutgers suicide last year, which involved a gay student and an insensitive roommate who thought nothing of violating has privacy and gossiping about him with other people.
Turns out most people need, use or somehow benefit from a government-subsidzed safety net!
And if this is true, can the safety net really be so evil?
Anyway, this New York Times story has the scoop.
Hopefully Ayn Rand is spinning in her grave!
Adam Gopnik's New Yorker piece about our insanely high incarceration rate appears to be the must-read of the week.
I've followed the story of Gabrielle Giffords, the Arizona congresswoman who was shot a year ago, fairly closely.
News of Giffords' brain injury and recovery often bring back memories of my sister's near-fatal accident and miraculous recovery, and now the New York Times has put together an interesting article about Tucson a year after the Giffords' shooting. Times columnist Dan Barry also visited Tucson, for a piece that you can read here.
When I worked as a reporter in Birmingham, I used to say that every story had an Alabama connection. The latest evidence that this is true is a story about a sperm donor scandal in New Zealand involving a former Birmingham city councilman and conservative Christian candidate for governor, Bill Johnson.
Johnson has spent the past year in Christchurch, helping with earthquake recovery. Unbeknownst to his wife, he has also been donating sperm, seeking women, including lesbian couples, who want to have children on the Internet, according to news reports. At least nine women have received his sperm, and three are now pregnant; New Zealand fertility clinic guidelines recommend that no man donate sperm to more than four families. Also, Johnson campaigned on an anti-gay platform back in Alabama.
Asked whether his wife knew about his activities, Johnson said, "She does now."
Anyway, strange story. Click here for the Mobile Press-Register's take, or here for the New Zealand Herald's take.
