And not an overconfident open-carry asshole with a gun? Interesting:
SEATTLE (AP) — A lone gunman armed with a shotgun opened fire Thursday in a building at a small Seattle university, fatally wounding one person before a student subdued him with pepper spray as he tried to reload, Seattle police said.
A student building monitor at Seattle Pacific University disarmed the gunman, and several other students jumped on top of him and pinned him down until police arrived at the Otto Miller building, police said.
A 19-year-old man died at the hospital. Three other people were injured. A critically injured 20-year-old woman was taken to surgery, Harborview Medical Center spokeswoman Susan Gregg said. A 24-year-old man and a 22-year-old man were in satisfactory condition.
If you lived through the Seventies, there’s a part of you that’s saying, “What, didn’t we settle all this already?” (“This” being safe, legal, accessible abortion.) And you’re right, we did — until the Christian right wing took over the country and bullied the media into submission.
So it’s a positive thing that “Obvious Child” got made in the first place. Huffington Post:
The acknowledgement that sh*t happens, and then you deal with it — sometimes that sh*t being unintended pregnancy and abortion being the way a woman chooses to deal with it — is what “Obvious Child” gets so very right. Using quippy romantic comedy conventions, like when Donna’s one-night stand (played by the adorable Jake Lacy) tracks her down at her place of work only to find her curled up in a giant box, the film strips away the stigma that surrounds terminating a pregnancy.
Donna decides very early on that she needs to get an abortion and then faces other decisions as a result: Should she tell her one-night stand about the pregnancy? Should she tell her mom? How will she pay the nearly all of her rent fee that the procedure costs? And she has a myriad of feelings about all of those decisions, despite the refreshing fact that no one in her life even attempts to dissuade her from going through with the abortion. “We didn’t put that [judgey] character in there because we’ve seen that character, and that’s not a character I wanted to put in a movie,” Robespierre told the audience after a screening of the film sponsored by NARAL Pro-Choice America and Cosmopolitan.
“Obvious Child” also strives for authenticity when it comes to the details of Donna’s visit to Planned Parenthood, from the counseling session she goes through before she schedules her abortion down to what she sips in the waiting room after the procedure. She also asks her best friend (played by Gabby Hoffman), who we learn has previously had an abortion, the questions one can imagine any young woman might want to know the answers to: Does it hurt? (Not really.) How often do you think about it? (Depends.)
“One thing I think our movie fights for, and I will fight for as a person, is that it’s a woman’s right not just to choose but to have complex feelings about that choice,” Slate told NYMag.
But perhaps the most realistic part of the movie is that Donna’s story isn’t solely defined by her unintended pregnancy and that pregnancy’s termination. She cries in bed with her best friend after she gets dumped. She grapples with the intersection of her identity and life experiences, and her work as a comic. She makes awkward comments when out on a date with a boy. She navigates the line between dependency and independence from her parents. And she also happens to be certain that this moment in her life is not the moment she should become a mother.
I have mixed feelings about the film. It’s standard edgy indie fare, with cute rom-com characters. But it’s the spotlight on the abortion — the thing that’s getting such attention for the film — that depresses me. It means that media characters who make a non-agonizing choice to have an abortion, 50 years after Roe v. Wade, are so rare that we applaud them.
And that sucks.
I was talking to a friend who works in reproductive health rights, and I bemoaned the lack of positive abortion models. (We won’t even get into the insane depictions of childbirth in the media.)
I said I still remember when it was a big deal that Erica Kane, the diva of “All My Children,” had the first “positive” abortion on daytime TV. That groundbreaking depiction — of someone who made the decision to have an abortion, but more importantly, didn’t die or become infertile as a result — seemed to open the floodgates. Suddenly, we saw abortion all over the place. It seemed like every other TV Movie of the Week featured a young girl struggling with an unwanted pregnancy.
And of course there was Maude’s abortion. (My Catholic mother, a huge “Maude” fan, never said what she thought of it. But she didn’t denounce it, either.)
In the rare case that abortion actually occurs, it is usually on a program without sponsorship-the 1989 TV movie “Roe v. Wade“ reportedly cost NBC $1 million in lost advertising.
Feeling the pressure
The reasons for this are twofold: the presence of organized pressure groups threatening to boycott the products of advertisers who sponsor shows they disapprove of, and the economic concerns of the networks, threatened by competition from cable TV and home video. These factors lead many people to believe that “Maude`s Dilemma” would not make it onto today`s TV schedules. “You automatically think, `Of course it could be done today, look what we did 20 years ago,'” said Susan Harris, who wrote the “Maude” abortion shows. “But we have a very interesting (political) climate today, with the influence of the religious Right. The economy is different today, and the networks would feel less likely that they could take a stand.“
Parker agreed. “There are a lot of things we did the networks would not touch now,“ he said. “I don`t think they have the courage. They are frightened of pressure groups.“
But Lear isn`t so sure. Once the most powerful producer on TV, he remembers a time when one person could stand up to a network.
“We are still working in an industry where clout matters,“ he said.
“Could I get an abortion story on my show (“The Powers That Be“) on network? Absolutely not. Ask me that question if we become a wild `Murphy Brown` success.`
TV has power, real power, to shape the thinking and the lives of people who watch. You’d like to think it wasn’t that simple — but it is. I knew someone who was in a home for unwed mothers, and she was planning to give her baby up for adoption — and so were most of the girls in there with her.
Until one of their favorite pregnant soap opera characters realized “I could never give away my own flesh and blood!” They all changed their minds along with her. Oy.
And then we had the movie “Knocked Up.” Dear God, a high-powered TV producer doesn’t even consider having abortion after a one-night stand? Really?
This, of course, comes back to misogyny and the idea that only “bad” (selfish, uncaring, unfeminine, etc.) women have abortions. So we see the same media images, over and over again.
That’s why it’s important to support films like “Obvious Child” and show that there’s an audience for stories about abortion — romantic comedies, even. But it’s not enough, because the working-class and poor women aren’t going to the local arts cinema. To do that, we need to get stories on TV. Don’t let the right wing freeze out the other side of the story.
If when you see a negative depiction of abortion on TV, call the network and complain. We have to start pushing as hard as the other side does.
See, this is what rape culture looks like around the world. But don’t kid yourself it’s any different from a frat party here:
In late May, two girls living in a village in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh went outside to use the bathroom. That night they were gang-raped, and they were found dead the next day, hanging from a mango tree.
As horrible as the crime is, comments about rape made by politicians in that state and another have spurred further outrage. Babulal Gaur, home minister of the neighboring state of Madhya Pradesh, today called rape “a social crime which depends on men and women. Sometimes it’s right, sometimes it’s wrong.” He also said that “until there’s a complaint, nothing can happen.”
And yet in the case of the two girls, who were from an untouchable caste, a complaint reportedly was made—and nothing happened. Amnesty International says that when one of the girls’ fathers approached police the night the cousins went missing, “the policemen on duty refused to register or investigate the complaint and slapped him instead.” (Three people, all brothers, have reportedly confessed to the rape; five people have been arrested in total, two of whom are police.)
Gaur’s comment about rape “sometimes” being right follows similar comments made by politicians in Uttar Pradesh, where the two cousins were raped. The chief minister there, Akhilesh Yadav, pushed back against journalists who had asked him about the topic: “You’re not facing any danger, are you?” he asked. “Then why are you worried? What’s it to you?” Yadav’s father, also a politician, made headlines when he struck a similar note in April, saying that “boys will be boys.”
Hillary Rodham Clinton, in her strongest language yet about her 2002 Senate vote to authorize military action in Iraq, writes in her forthcoming memoir that “I still got it wrong,” CBS News reported Thursday afternoon.
In “Hard Choices,” Clinton, a former secretary of state and former U.S. senator who is exploring a 2016 presidential campaign, writes: “(M)any Senators came to wish they had voted against the resolution. I was one of them. As the war dragged on, with every letter I sent to a family in New York who had lost a son or daughter, a father or mother, my mistake become (sic) more painful.”
Clinton continues, “I thought I had acted in good faith and made the best decision I could with the information I had. And I wasn’t alone in getting it wrong. But I still got it wrong. Plain and simple.”
CBS News obtained an early copy of Clinton’s book, not scheduled for release until next Tuesday, and published excerpts on its Web site Thursday afternoon. Clinton also writes about the Sept. 11, 2012, terror attacks in Benghazi, Libya, as well as the Obama administration’s attempts to secure freedom for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the Arab Spring, the Osama bin Laden raid and U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, Russia and Syria, according to CBS News.
Fox News reported Thursday on what it described as “secret documents” showing Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl converted to Islam and even declared himself a “warrior” for the religion during his five years of captivity.
Citing “secret documents prepared on the basis of a purported eyewitness account,” Fox’s James Rosen wrote that Bergdahl had a roller-coaster experience after he was captured in 2009.
There were times, according to Rosen, when Bergdahl was “treated very much like a hostage,” and other times the soldier bonded with his captors and was even allowed to carry a gun.
According to the report, Bergdahl managed to escape for five days at one point and. After he was re-captured, he was reportedly locked in a cage “like an animal.”
Yes, I know there is a Code of Conduct for POWs. Like many things that are meant only for those at the bottom of the food chain, it’s a cruel joke. Torture breaks people. Easy for the brave men who send kids into battle to make these rules when we know they don’t observe the rules themselves. (Geneva Conventions, anyone?)
So anything this guy did to survive is fine with me.
I think of the many people I know who got knocked down and never got back up. I think about my friend Lyn, who just couldn’t take it. I know there must be thundreds of thousands in the same horrible place:
A comprehensive study of long-term unemployed published by Rutgers University’s John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development in 2011 found that the vast majority of unemployed workers experienced stress in their relationships with family and friends and that at least 11 percent reported seeking professional help for their depression within the previous 12 months.
One in two of the respondents in the two-year national study said they began avoiding friends and associates out of a sense of shame and embarrassment — a self-imposed isolation that hurt their ability to network to find work.
“Because of the persistence of high levels of long term unemployment there are millions of people who are suffering from mental health problems and many of them are going untreated by professionals,” Carl Van Horn, a professor of public policy and economics at Rutgers and head of the Heldrich Center, said this week.
“Losing a job is more than just a financial crisis for people,” Van Horn says. “It creates numerous other damage: stress, anxiety, substance abuse, fights, and conflicts in the family and feelings of embarrassment and depression.”
The plight of many of the long-term unemployed became even direr in late December after Congress allowed jobless benefits to expire for more than 1.6 million Americans. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) vowed that renewing an extension of federal unemployment insurance benefits would be the first order of business when the Senate returned in January, but Republicans have blocked Democratic efforts to extend the program for those who exhausted their 26 weeks of state benefits.
“There are now 1.6 million unemployed Americans cut off and 2.3 million children affected,” said Sarah Ayres, a policy analyst with the liberal Center for American Progress. “This money is going to people who are going to spend it — they’re putting it right back into the economy. This is really a self-inflicted economic wound.”
The number of individual recipients whose benefits expire runs to about 70,000 a week.
The mental health crisis among the long term unemployed rarely gets much attention, although Van Horn has described the combination of long-term unemployment and diminished government support as “a silent mental health epidemic.”
Long-term unemployment frequently causes depression, drug and alcohol abuses, spousal abuse, divorce, and even suicide. Many of these unemployed Americans couldn’t afford to seek professional help because they lost their employer-provided health care insurance when they were laid off. At the same time, federal, state, and local governments cut back on spending for mental health clinics and outreach in response to budget crises spawned by the bad economy.
A 2013 Urban Institute study on the consequences of long-term unemployment found, “The long-term unemployed also tend to earn less once they find new jobs. They tend to be in poorer health and have children with worse academic performance than similar workers who avoided unemployment.”
This is the primary for the Republican Senate race, and Chris McDaniels is the “too crazy even for Mississippi” teabagger candidate. The numbers are (or were) very, very close and now they’ll be a runoff:
The Hinds County Sheriff’s Department is investigating why three people, including a high-ranking Chris McDaniel campaign official, were found locked in the Hinds County Courthouse in Jackson hours after an election official says the building was closed early Wednesday morning.
Hinds County Sheriff’s Department spokesman Othor Cain said investigators are trying to figure out how Janis Lane, Scott Brewster and Rob Chambers entered the courthouse. They were inside until about 3:45 a.m., Cain said.
Brewster is a former coordinator of presidential candidate Newt Gingrich’s Mississippi operation and is currently McDaniel’s campaign coalition coordinator.
“There are conflicting stories from the three of them, which began to raise the red flag, and we’re trying to get to the bottom of it,” Cain said. “No official charges have been filed at this point, but we don’t know where the investigation will lead us.”
[…] McDaniel campaign spokesman Noel Fritsch issued a statement late Wednesday saying the campaign “sent people to the Hinds courthouse to obtain the outstanding numbers and observe the count.” The statement reiterated the people were allowed in by “uniformed personnel” and then being locked inside.
“Predictably, a close Cochran ally wants to make hay out of this. Sadly, the Cochran campaign wants to make this election about anything but issues. Mississippians deserve better than this sort of distraction politics,” Fritsch said in the statement.
Cochran campaign spokesman Jordan Russell said, “It is astonishing that the same people who are up to their eyeballs in four felons breaking into a nursing home are also up to their eyeballs in potentially breaking in somewhere else again.”
“And this time they can’t deny that a paid staffer is involved,” Russell said. “At some point you got to say enough is enough. How many more arrests of allies and McDaniel team members before we can say this has gone too far?”
