Don’t try his at home. These are not cuddly creatures:
The secret appears to be the Oreo cookies.
CNN stands firm against covering Benghazi, and against feeling shame
Neo-neocon, writing on the morning of Monday, May 19, 2014:
…[Trey Gowdy’s questions for the press show] how negligent and/or collusive with [the Obama] administration the press has been in covering (or rather, covering up) the Benghazi incident.
If it were possible for the press to reflect and to feel shame, Gowdy’s words would make them do that and feel that. But I’m afraid it’s not.
CNN President Jeff Zucker, speaking on the evening of Monday, May 19, 2014:
CNN Worldwide President Jeff Zucker on Monday said that the network probably won’t be covering the House select committee to investigate Benghazi.
“We’re not going to be shamed into it by others who have political beliefs that want to try to have temper tantrums to shame other news organizations into covering something,” he said when asked if CNN would cover the committee during an interview at a Deadline Club dinner, as recorded by Capital New York.
I’m not saying Zucker reads neo-neocon. It’s just—odd.
This, however, is beyond odd [emphasis mine]:
Zucker also addressed the network’s round-the-clock coverage of the missing Malaysia Airlines plane and how CNN will approach news after the plane era.
“If I take a step back from our coverage of the Malaysian plane’s disappearance, I’m incredibly comfortable with it. I believed early on, right from the start, that it was an enormously important story…
…[N]ow that CNN’s coverage of the missing plane is winding down, Zucker said they’ll start to introduce new programming aimed at a younger audience.
“So we’re still there whenever that happens, but we’re going to supplement that with some different kind of storytelling,” Zucker said of the network’s plane coverage going forward.
What on earth is the “plane era”? And is CNN planning to become the Nickelodeon of cable news? Lastly and perhaps most importantly, what does Zucker mean by “storytelling”?
I can imagine.
1956: Robert Frost, commencement speaker
All this news about commencement speakers being scared away or disinvited or staying the course despite adversity or giving students a tongue-lashing makes me want to return to a commencement address from an earlier time.
That time was 1956, nearly a full sixty years ago. The place was Colby College in Waterville, Maine, and the speaker was the poet Robert Frost. What he had to say to the students there may surprise you. If you want to read the whole speech, go here, but the part that I was most interested in is this portion, which I’ve condensed into short excerpts from the original:
Is our dream, our American dream—that I think Dreiser thought was “An American Tragedy”—is that dream over? Are we on a new dream?
Or is the Constitution something that isn’t performing—a sort of vanishing act, fading as we watch it, and turning into something else? When they call it “a living document,” that means they can have it any way they want it for this generation. That’s the danger…
Let me say what I’d do about it if I were you. I’d go back and read some of the “Federal Papers.” I’d go back and see whose dream it was. Plenty of time, you’ve got it all before you…
…for me the man that comes nearest what I think was the dream, that may be ours still, was Madison. In the “Federal Papers,” go to Madison and see what he thought it was going to be.
What was it going to be? Go along and think about that—using the “think” in the slang: “You’ve got another think coming.” You see? I’ve got another think coming…
I would think that Tom Paine was very little in it…I’ve read a good deal of Tom Paine, and I know a good deal of what he thought. He thought there was something started about the brotherhood of man that was going to set the whole world on fire, sweep the whole world.
So he rushed right off to France about it. And we see what came of it. They had a revolution there. And they had four republics—and not to mention three or four monarchies—since then. Their dream was a very confused dream, if they had a dream.
Another thing that I pick up…about freedom and equality. It occurred to me not so terribly long ago—rather recently—that the more equality I have, the less freedom I have. These two things balance each other.
If one party leans a little more towards the freedom—freedom of enterprise, freedom to assert yourself, freedom to achieve, freedom to win—the other comes in with the tone of mercy and says: “Let’s not let anybody get too far ahead. Let’s have a Sherman Act or something, to keep people from getting too rich.” That’s toward the equality, the fraternity of it.
I didn’t know that for years, didn’t know that the more freedom I had, the less equality I could expect—somebody’d beat me and get ahead of me if we had freedom. (I’m willing to let him get ahead of me, if he can.)…
Can you imagine any poet giving a similar commencement speech today? In fact, I can hardly imagine anyone giving a similar commencement speech today. Frost assumed a certain context for his graduating class listeners—for example, that they knew something about who Dreiser and Tom Paine and Madison might be, and he assumed that what these men said and thought might actually interest and inform them. I’m not at all sure that would be the case now.
I’ll close with one more quote from Frost, who was an educator for many years of his long long life—not just a poet, although he was certainly that, and not just a farmer, although he did that too when a young man. He was a teacher at all levels: grade school, high school, and college. He was a teacher in many places. He was a teacher when he was obscure and when he was very very famous.
Here’s what he had to say about his attraction to teaching, from a lecture he gave in 1961 at the University of Minnesota:
I’m almost as interested in education as I am in poetry…I’ve had so much to do with education that I say I’m like some monkeys that Darwin tells about.
He showed them a bagful of snakes. And they looked at ’em and and shrieked and threw up their arms and fled. But they couldn’t stay away. They kept coming back and and looking in the bag at the snakes and throwing up their arms and shrieking and running away again.
That’s the way I’ve done for education, about the last fifty, sixty years—sixty, sixty-five years. And here I am again.
Frost died a little over a year later, at the age of 88.
Oregon’s ban on gay marriage struck down
Oregon’s gay marriage ban has been declared null and void:
In a ruling that might never be tested in an appeal, a federal judge in Oregon at midday Monday ruled that the state’s ten-year-old ban on same-sex marriage is invalid under the federal Constitution. U.S. District Judge Michael J. McShane of Eugene did so by applying the most relaxed constitutional test [no “rational basis” for the law].
…It is not clear at this point that anyone has the legal right to pursue an appeal; state officials refused to defend the ban and, in fact, added their support to the challenge by four same-sex couples.
The only other entity that has come forward to provide a defense ”” the National Organization for Marriage, a strong opponent of same-sex marriage ”” was denied a role in the case by Judge McShane last Wednesday. It is now seeking to appeal…
So Oregon follows the same pattern as many other states:
Critics note most states still do not allow gay marriage and that in most of those that do, it was the work of courts or legislatures, not the will of the people.
Oregon law has long prohibited same-sex marriage, and voters added the ban to the state constitution in 2004. The decision [was] approved by 57 percent of voters…
The pattern is of judges saying there’s no rational argument to ban gay marriage, although apparently until a couple of years ago there was not only such an argument, but most people assumed it was self-evident that it was a valid one. Another pattern is of state AGs refusing to defend a current state law as they have sworn to do as part of their jobs. Another pattern is populations who vote overwhelmingly to preserve traditional marriage and have their will overturned by a single judge on these newly-found constitutional grounds. But if the will of the people on the gay marriage issue is changing towards acceptance, as it appears to be (after all, the previous Oregon vote was in 2004, which is the dark ages on this issue), and a new statewide vote on gay marriage could be held to reflect this (which is the way I think it should be done), then why not hold such a vote? In Oregon, they were planning to do so if the judge hadn’t done their work for them, but the judicial route is much simpler and far less risky.
There’s still another pattern, one that was demonstrated in this case and in one of the first cases that set the stage for it, the striking down of Proposition 8. Both bans were overturned by a judge who happens to be gay. Judge Michael J. McShane, the Oregon judge who was appointed by President Obama and took office only a year ago, is the first openly gay federal judge in Oregon:
With one longtime ex-partner, McShane adopted a young boy, now 20, who had come from an abusive home. He’s now helping rear the 13-year-old nephew of his current partner, Gregory Ford, who has gone back to school to become a nurse…
John Eastman, a constitutional law professor and chairman of the National Organization for Marriage, an anti-gay marriage group, questions whether McShane has a conflict.
“The question is not his sexual orientation,” says Eastman, “but whether he is situated identically to the plaintiffs and will benefit from the exact relief he provides to them.”
In other words, McShane could also get the right to marry his partner if he strikes down the Oregon prohibition on gay marriage.
Opponents of same-sex marriage unsuccessfully made the same argument in California when they tried to erase U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker’s 2010 decision striking down that state’s anti-gay-marriage initiative.
After Walker retired from the bench, he said publicly for the first time that he was gay and in a long-term relationship.
Walker’s successor, Judge James Ware, refused to vacate the decision, saying that the presumption about Walker’s state of mind “is as warrantless as the presumption that a female judge is incapable of being impartial in a case in which women seek legal relief.”
In an initial court hearing with attorneys involved with the current case, McShane made clear his willingness to recuse himself if there were any concerns ”“ and he didn’t hear any.
This is an incredibly knotty legal question. I’m glad to hear that McShane at least offered to recuse himself if there were objections; I don’t think Judge Walker even made the suggestion, since he wasn’t “out” when the California case he ruled on was decided. But with no one defending the gay marriage ban in Oregon, who would have voiced those objections to McShane? Judges often recuse themselves if there’s even the appearance of a special interest, and there certainly was the appearance of one here. And no, it’s not the equivalent of a category as general as a woman ruling on matters that affect women, because as a gay man in a committed relationship in the state of Oregon, Judge McShane’s interest was far more specific than that (as was Judge Vaughn’s in California).
I don’t think another judge would have found differently in Oregon, however, for the simple reason that no defense was mounted. It’s this rash of AGs refusing to defend the will of the people of their state that is the more global issue here.
[NOTE: Here’s an earlier post of mine on the issue of state AGs refusing to defend state laws.]
Obama says “if only Obama knew”…
…about the problems in the VA:
White House Press Secretary Jay Carney…told reporters that President Barack Obama first learned from a TV news report that his Veterans Administration was denying medical care to vets with secret off-the-books-waiting lists.
The actual quote is this; note how careful Carney is to parse his words about the “specific” reports, because he knows that the White House was told about the general problem when Obama first took office in 2008:
A CNN reporter asked Carney on Monday when the president was ‘first made aware … of these fraudulent lists that were being kept to hide the wait times’ at VA medical centers.
‘You mean the specific allegations,’ Carney asked, ‘that I think were reported first by your news network out of Phoenix, I believe?’
‘We learned about them through the reports.
He’s a sly one, that Carney, isn’t he?
As for Obama, it’s a good thing we have the news, because otherwise he’d never learn about anything that happened under his watch:
After the Operation Fast and Furious scandal broke, Obama responded to national outrage in an interview broadcast by CNN’s John King on October 12, 2011, similarly saying he was out of the loop until he turned on his television…
A few months into his presidency, Obama’s White House approved an unannounced New York City flyover by Air Force One…It was a mistake,’ the president said on April 28, 2009, the day after the flight. ‘It was something we found out about along with all of you. And it will not happen again.’
Last year on May 14, Carney told reporters that Obama had learned about his Department of Justice seizing two months’ worth of Associated Press journalists’ phone records ‘from news reports yesterday, on the road.’
‘We don’t have any independent knowledge of that,’ Carney insisted.
That punt came just one day after Obama himself told the Washington press corps during a joint press conference with UK Prime Minister David Cameron that he was in the dark ”“ until it hit news reports ”“ that the Internal Revenue Service had targeted conservative nonprofit groups for special inquisitions when they applied for tax-exempt status.
‘I first learned about it from the same news reports that I think most people learned about this,’ he said in the East Room of the White House on May 13, 2013. I think it was on Friday…
Why shouldn’t Obama keep doing this? With the cooperation of the MSM, it has worked for him so far.
When you look like Halle Berry, you can wear anything
You can wear anything, I say.
Well, maybe not:
At the moment, it still looks good for Republicans in 2014
At the moment, anyway.
Polls taken in states with competitive Senate races and many contested Congressional districts indicate that people are leaning Republican for 2014. The reason seems to be Obamacare, Obamacare, Obamacare:
As for Obamacare, only 16 percent favor keeping the law as it is. 36 percent favor modification. 48 percent favor outright repeal. 89 percent of voters consider the issue important in deciding how they will vote and 49 percent consider it very important.
On immigration, it’s not at all clear:
The pro-amnesty crowd will emphasize that, by a margin of 71-28, those surveyed favor “comprehensive immigration reform.” But the result is meaningless because respondents weren’t asked whether they favor legalizing illegal immigrants, much less whether they favor allowing them to become citizens. Nearly every conservative I know favors some form of comprehensive immigration reform
Why ask a question so general it can be used by nearly anyone to prove nearly anything? Perhaps that’s the goal.
The VA hospital scandal spreads
I haven’t yet written a big post on the mess at the VA hospital system, and this won’t be that post. But the news on the VA is one of those outrages that even the left can’t quite coverup, it is so blatant.
What went on with the VA hospitals in recent years has been an escalation of the disorganization in what was already a flawed and seemingly cold-hearted system. The news taps into what most people already knew about the VA system in general and for many decades, which is that there’s been a lot to complain about. In turn, all of that undermines the left’s arguments for a government-run healthcare system.
Here’s a thread to talk about it.
Why the Jill Abramson story interests me
I know a lot of you aren’t interested in it. After all, who cares what’s going on at that leftist Pravda the Times, except for the fact that the story vaguely embarrasses the paper and exposes its hypocrisy and disorganization?
I confess to a bit of fascination with the story, but it’s probably for different reasons than most people who are taken with it. I’m not especially interested in whether there was gender discrimination involved, for example. If there was, it wouldn’t be the first or last time, and if there are merely false accusations of it, it wouldn’t be the first or last time, either. No, it’s the ins and outs of workplace power struggles and personalities that interest me, something like the problems of families or of any group, the interpersonal brouhahas that get people going.
Workplace intrigue stories have many of the same qualities as problem families. They involve groups of people interacting, miscommunications and misunderstandings, power struggles, and intense feelings. The workplace is a little like the family, minus the love and the sex (although, come to think of it, sometimes plus the love and the sex). There are no children in the workplace, but there are certainly people there who can be very very childish.
I don’t read detective novels, but I do like to try to figure out how people tick and especially how groups of people interact with each other. With the Abramson story, we get a tiny little window of the information we’d need to figure out how this snafu happened, and I like to try to guess. That’s it for me—a sort of real-life whodunnit and why.
You can skip the rest of this post if you’re utterly and completely bored by such things. But I’m still interested, and I was happy to see today that David Carr of the NY Times has revealed what I had suspected from the very start, which is that Dean Baquet, who ascended to Abramson’s job when she was canned, had not only complained about her to his buddy Sulzberger but had threatened to leave the Times if she stayed. Baquet played his biggest card, and he triumphed.
Carr’s column, which appeared in the Times itself, is pretty bold considering that fact, and worth reading if you’ve followed the story at all:
When The Times’s publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., stood up at a hastily called meeting in the soaring open newsroom where we usually gather to celebrate the Pulitzers and said that Jill was out, we all just looked at one another. How did our workplace suddenly become a particularly bloody episode of “Game of Thrones”?
It is one thing to gossip or complain about your boss, but quite another to watch her head get chopped off in the cold light of day. The lack of decorum was stunning…
Mr. Sulzberger, working with Mr. Baquet and Mr. Thompson, may have failed to understand the impact Ms. Abramson’s firing would have, both internally and with the public. Planning went into immediately erasing her name from the masthead, but not so much into the splatter it would create…
The current mayhem aside, Mr. Sulzberger’s real failing has been picking two editors who ended up not being right for the job.
Sulzberger is Carr’s boss, too. Wonder if Carr has a back-up offer from another newspaper?
Trey Gowdy: “You were supposed to provide oversight”
This video of Trey Gowdy speaking to the press on Benghazi demonstrates a few things simultaneously.
The first is why Gowdy was a very successful prosecutor. The second is that the manner in which the Obama administration has handled the Benghazi debacle is an outrage and a disgrace. And the third is how negligent and/or collusive with that administration the press has been in covering (or rather, covering up) the Benghazi incident.
If it were possible for the press to reflect and to feel shame, Gowdy’s words would make them do that and feel that. But I’m afraid it’s not.
I don’t remember the first time I ever saw Gowdy, but I do remember thinking that he was a bit strange-looking. But when he opened his mouth and spoke, it almost immediately struck me that he was one of the smartest and most articulate members of Congress I’d ever heard. And nothing I’ve ever heard him say since then has disabused me of that notion.
I listed three things the video demonstrated. But I’d like to offer a fourth: how rare and refreshing it is to hear a politician speaking with clarity, focus, brains, and conviction.
More on the Abramson story: what’s this “public mistreatment” bit?
To me, the most curious phrase in the newest Sulzberger statement about Jill Abramson is this one [italics mine]:
During [Abramson’s] tenure, I heard repeatedly from her newsroom colleagues, women and men, about a series of issues, including arbitrary decision-making, a failure to consult and bring colleagues with her, inadequate communication and the public mistreatment of colleagues…
So, did Abramson put some writer or editor in the stocks? Institute public floggings at the Times? Did she administer a series of public tongue-lashings? Or just criticisms? Is there a rule at the Times that, in order to avoid offending egos and tender sensibilities, an executive can only say negative things about an employee in private? And if this “mistreatment” perpetrated by Abramson was indeed, “public,” could Sulzberger mention more specifically (without naming the recipient of the mistreatment) what she allegedly said or did, so we could get an idea of what sort of offense he might be talking about?
Another curious thing to me is Sulzberger’s repeated use of the word “colleagues.” Now, my own experience with a corporate workplace was very short, and so long ago that I hesitate to even say. So maybe things are completely different now. But my recollection is that the boss is the boss and colleagues are more your peers, people at approximately a similar level to you in ye olde hierarchy.
Abramson was the boss for most everyone at the Times, although she had two bosses above her, Sulzberger (the owner) and Thompson (the CEO). Everyone else was under her, not a “colleague” exactly (at least not in my definition of the word), although she certainly had to interact with them and could not afford to brutalize them or their egos. Obviously, quite a few people felt stomped on—but were they actually stomped on, or were they being ultra-sensitive? At this point we really don’t know. Does Sulzberger know? Or maybe it doesn’t matter what the reality was; if the perception is too widespread, something is wrong, and a boss becomes ineffective and probably has to go.
Any boss faces the dilemma of how to walk the line in exerting his/her authority. How much is too much and will be perceived as tyranny or insult, causing a backlash? How little is too little and will be taken advantage of and perceived as weakness? And then of course there’s the gender question of whether these things are perceived differently when practiced by a man or by a woman, or when received by a man or by a woman.
[ADDENDUM: This is pretty good, too.]
Lactose and me
People often claim they’re lactose intolerant. But few people know for sure because few people have been tested for it.
I am one of those lucky, lucky few. For some reason (sadism?), a doctor subjected me to the test many decades ago. I even lived to tell about it.
And what I have to tell you is this: if you are truly lactose intolerant, the test is a cruel one. The way it works is that you fast overnight and then they take some blood and determine your fasting blood sugar. There are newer tests that don’t involve blood drawing, but they all involve the next step, which is the crucial one as far as I’m concerned: they give you a nice big drink of lactose.
Ever drink a lactose solution? It’s not all that pleasant, but the taste is not really the problem. A huge glass of it—I can’t recall whether it was 12 ounces or 16, but whatever it was it was a lot—can be swilled down even by those who hate milk, as I do. But if you really are lactose intolerant, it means you cannot digest the lactose in it, and there’s an awful lot of lactose in it, and so…well, you figure it out. Suffice to say you become very ill, and the bathroom becomes your very best friend.
Every half hour after ingesting the stuff (or was it every hour?) you return to the lab for another blood drawing. The idea is that if you are actually absorbing the lactose, which is milk sugar, your blood sugar level will rise initially and then fall over time in a certain pattern. This will determine not only whether you are in fact lactose intolerant, but to what degree.
For those of you who don’t know how lactose intolerance works, here’s the scoop:
Most mammals normally cease to produce lactase [the enzyme that digests milk], becoming lactose intolerant, after weaning, but some human populations have developed lactase persistence, in which lactase production continues into adulthood. It is estimated that 75% of adults worldwide show some decrease in lactase activity during adulthood. The frequency of decreased lactase activity ranges from 5% in northern Europe through 71% for Sicily to more than 90% in some African and Asian countries. This distribution is now thought to have been caused by recent natural selection favoring lactase-persistent individuals in cultures in which dairy products are available as a food source.
When my results became available I was told by the doctor that, unlike most people who are lactose intolerant, I had absolutely no rise in blood sugar level, which indicated I am completely lactose intolerant. That is, I don’t seem to be able to squeeze even a smidgeon of lactase out of my gastric spigots. And yet in fact I can ingest a certain amount of ice cream without too much difficulty. Where there’s a will there’s a way, I guess.
The whole thing reminds me of the fact that those who suggest that everyone would do well to eat a certain diet—such as, for example, the so-called “paleo” diet—because humans evolved on that diet are ignoring the many thousands of years of human adaptation and evolution since then. Lactose intolerance is almost unheard-of in northern Europeans, for example, and very common in people of Mediterranean origin. It rises to a high of 80% to 90% of Asians, African-Americans, and Jews.
I always hated milk, anyway, even as a toddler. It tasted so, so…milky. So being lactose intolerant is no biggee for me.