Month: April 2014

Sexual abuse in the quiverfull movement. Is anyone surprised?

by David Atkins

While repulsive, I don’t think this should be a surprise to anyone:

A leading advocate of the patriarchal Quiverfull movement groomed a teenage girl as his “personal sex object” and then used the purity culture to shame her into silence, according to a lawsuit filed by his victim.

Douglas Phillips resigned last year from Vision Forum and Vision Forum Ministries over what he described at the time as an extramarital affair.

But the lawsuit, reported by Right Wing Watch, revealed more details about this relationship and the ways that women are treated in the Quiverfull movement – which has been popularized by the prolific Duggar family and their TLC reality show, 19 Kids and Counting.

Attorneys claim Phillips, a close friend to the Duggar family and an associate of actor Kirk Cameron, “methodically groomed” Lourdes Torres since she was 15 years old and led her to believe they would be married.

Phillips told the girl this was possible because his wife, Beall Phillips, “was going to die soon.”

Torres appeared in two Vision Forum films, “Alone But Not Alone” and the anti-feminist documentary “Return of the Daughters.”

Right Wing Watch also noted that when Torres graduated from high school in 2003, Phillips wrote a blog post commending her parents for “bringing their daughter into mature Christian womanhood.”

But at the same time, according to the lawsuit, Phillips indoctrinated Torres with the “patriarchal mindset” and “subtly began to manipulate Ms. Torres, so that he could use her for his sexual gratification.”

The suit claims Phillips repeatedly groped and touched Torres inappropriately and masturbated on her, “against her wishes and over her objections,” over a period of years.

“While Ms. Torres would have felt compelled to submit to Douglas Phillips, the purity culture would have meant at the same time, her submission made her ‘damaged goods’ in her eyes, the eyes of her family, and her community — raising the cost for her to come forward to call him to account,” the suit claims. “She was, in fact, in a ‘no-win’ situation.”

That “no-win situation” is exactly what religious patriarchs want women to be in. It’s all about sexual control.

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A tinderbox waiting to explode for at least three decades

by digby

This story in the Washington Post about the Kansas assassin is just creepy:

When I learned that the man accused of shooting innocent bystanders Sunday at a Jewish community center and Jewish retirement home in Kansas City was a former Klansman named Glenn Miller, I shuddered.

Thirty-three years ago, when I was an undergraduate at Duke University, I read a small item in the Raleigh News & Observer that mentioned Miller, then the grand dragon of the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Miller, it turns out, ran a paramilitary training camp in rural North Carolina.

I couldn’t understand how, in late-20th-century America, the KKK could operate in the open less than an hour from our elite, ivory-tower campus. I was an editor of Duke’s daily newspaper, the Chronicle, so I did what any reporter would do: I called Miller and asked for an interview. Always looking for publicity, Miller readily said yes, but he had one condition. “We ain’t no equal-opportunity employer, you know,” he said. “So don’t bring down no blacks and no Jews.”

It get worse. “I smell a Jew…..”

I saw Morris Dees last night on Chris Hayes and he explained that this guy lost face among his fellow Nazis and may have been trying to prove his bonafides to his cohorts with this latest shooting. My God …

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Why isn’t this called what it is: terrorism?

by digby

The authorities have charged the Kansas assassin with a hate crime, which it surely is. But just because he was a white American male who wanted to kill Jews instead of a Muslim fanatic wanting to kill Jews (or other Americans) doesn’t make it something other than terrorism, does it?

Mark Potok at the SPLC had this to say on PBS last night:

GWEN IFILL: For anybody watching who is a little confused, I want to be clear this man goes by a couple different names, Frazier Glenn Cross, Glenn Miller, Frazier Miller, just so everybody knows we’re talking about the same person.

Are people like this always loners, individuals, or are there conspiracies out there we should be keeping — or that you are keeping an eye on?

MARK POTOK: Much, much more often than not these days, they are loners, so-called lone wolves.

And that is largely because conspiracies tend to be found out so very quickly, and often quite easily by law enforcement. And also conspiracies, when actually a whole group of people actually plan a crime or a domestic terrorist attack, they will very likely all go down if even only one of them is caught.

So, today, almost all of these attacks, certainly the most dangerous attacks, come from lone wolves or people with operating with just one or two friends like, for instance, Timothy McVeigh in the bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building in 1995.

GWEN IFILL: At what point — you mentioned Timothy McVeigh — that is an example. At what point do we begin to treat these kinds of attacks as domestic terrorism, not just as hate crimes or individual acts?

MARK POTOK: Well, I mean, they are domestic terrorism. Let’s be plain.

There is nothing to distinguish this from other forms of terrorism. It is a way in this case of terrorizing the Jewish community around Kansas City in particular, but around the country in general. And that’s what terrorism is. It’s a criminal act that is aimed at far more people than the immediate victims.

You know, the law enforcement has been off and on about being candid about the terrorist nature of these attacks. But I think, today, by and large, American law enforcement is perfectly well aware that there is a very serious domestic radical right and some people within that milieu are, in fact, terrorists.

It’s not that they never charge white supremacists with terrorism. But they don’t seem to see it in the same light as Islamic terrorism. But then, white supremacy terrorism has always been given a wide birth in this country. (As is anti-abortion terrorism.)

Juan Colehas a good piece up about this case. And he links to his earlier piece called the Top Ten differences between White Terrorists and Others, which is useful at times like these:

1. White terrorists are called “gunmen.” What does that even mean? A person with a gun? Wouldn’t that be, like, everyone in the US? Other terrorists are called, like, “terrorists.”

2. White terrorists are “troubled loners.” Other terrorists are always suspected of being part of a global plot, even when they are obviously troubled loners.

3. Doing a study on the danger of white terrorists at the Department of Homeland Security will get you sidelined by angry white Congressmen. Doing studies on other kinds of terrorists is a guaranteed promotion.

4. The family of a white terrorist is interviewed, weeping as they wonder where he went wrong. The families of other terrorists are almost never interviewed.

5. White terrorists are part of a “fringe.” Other terrorists are apparently mainstream.

6. White terrorists are random events, like tornadoes. Other terrorists are long-running conspiracies.

7. White terrorists are never called “white.” But other terrorists are given ethnic affiliations.

8. Nobody thinks white terrorists are typical of white people. But other terrorists are considered paragons of their societies.

9. White terrorists are alcoholics, addicts or mentally ill. Other terrorists are apparently clean-living and perfectly sane.

10. There is nothing you can do about white terrorists. Gun control won’t stop them. No policy you could make, no government program, could possibly have an impact on them. But hundreds of billions of dollars must be spent on police and on the Department of Defense, and on TSA, which must virtually strip search 60 million people a year, to deal with other terrorists.

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by digby

Via the AFL-CIO’s awesome web-site called “Executive Paywatch”:

In 2013 the CEO to worker pay ratio was 331:1 and the CEO to minimum wage worker pay ratio was 774:1. America is supposed to be the land of opportunity, a country where hard work and playing by the rules would provide working families a middle-class standard of living. But in recent decades, corporate CEOs have been taking a greater share of the economic pie while wages have stagnated and unemployment remains high.

So what’s the point? This just means that the CEOs work 774 times harder than a janitor or a waitress. Obviously. Also too, they have better character and higher morals. Otherwise, this might be seen as a self-dealing system of exploitation. And it can’t be that. Because if God didn’t think rich people were simply worth more he wouldn’t make it so they could keep all the money.

Is it possible to make too much money? “Is it possible to have too much ambition? Is it possible to be too successful?” Blankfein shoots back. “I don’t want people in this firm to think that they have accomplished as much for themselves as they can and go on vacation. As the guardian of the interests of the shareholders and, by the way, for the purposes of society, I’d like them to continue to do what they are doing. I don’t want to put a cap on their ambition. It’s hard for me to argue for a cap on their compensation.” 

So, it’s business as usual, then, regardless of whether it makes most people howl at the moon with rage? Goldman Sachs, this pillar of the free market, breeder of super-citizens, object of envy and awe will go on raking it in, getting richer than God? An impish grin spreads across Blankfein’s face. Call him a fat cat who mocks the public. Call him wicked. Call him what you will. He is, he says, just a banker “doing God’s work”

Good timing

by digby

Well, not exactly:

The Census Bureau, the authoritative source of health insurance data for more than three decades, is changing its annual survey so thoroughly that it will be difficult to measure the effects of President Obama’s health care law in the next report, due this fall, census officials said.

The changes are intended to improve the accuracy of the survey, being conducted this month in interviews with tens of thousands of households around the country. But the new questions are so different that the findings will not be comparable, the officials said.

An internal Census Bureau document said that the new questionnaire included a “total revision to health insurance questions” and, in a test last year, produced lower estimates of the uninsured. Thus, officials said, it will be difficult to say how much of any change is attributable to the Affordable Care Act and how much to the use of a new survey instrument.

“We are expecting much lower numbers just because of the questions and how they are asked,” said Brett J. O’Hara, chief of the health statistics branch at the Census Bureau.

I suppose they figure with all the hoopla around the new law it’s better to have it be part of the chaos rather than waiting another year when it will look as though the numbers are dropping. But honestly, couldn’t someone have thought of this a couple of years ago, before the law took effect?

I cannot say for sure that a conservative regime wouldn’t have managed this timing better. The government is a big lumbering beast and it’s often hard to control all the moving parts. But in general, conservative governments tend to use the government for political purposes more overtly — and get away with it.

For instance, remember this slick play from the Bush admnistration?

They could have just sent the checks.  But instead they first sent every taxpayer a letter taking credit for it. At taxpayers expense! This administration couldn’t even get the funds legitimately necessary to educate people about Obamacare.  And when they went to the private sector to ask if they’d pick up the slack the Republicans went ballistic and accused them of lawbreaking.  (I won’t even go into the bogus IRS scandal that continues to this day.)

The most notorious use of the government for overtly political purposes in the Bush administration was the use of the US Attorneys office to tilt election results, although that one backfired when some prosecutors decided they didn’t want to risk their reputations. But it’s a testament to their chutzpah that they felt so comfortable wielding power that they even tried.

I don’t think the Democrats should stoop to that level of manipulation (and lawbreaking) obviously. But knowing what the other hand is doing and plan ahead for maximum results is simply good management. And I think Democrats tend to discount that skill from a political perspective and often fail to take advantage of opportunities.  At the very least they should be alert to opportunities that avert political problems.

Perhaps it wasn’t possible to effect this change in census questions earlier, although at the pace government moves it’s hard to believe this hasn’t been in the works for some time. Sure, they might have been accused of playing politics. But so what? The Republicans will accuse them of playing politics anyway — and the Democrats would do the same if the shoe were on the other foot.  The difference is that Republicans weigh the pros and cons and don’t worry about the Democrats’ handwringing.  It’s a big advantage for conservatives: they get to rail against Big Government inefficiency even as they use it for their political advantage.

Update: It turns out that the NY Times article is a bit misleading.The change will measure the difference between 2012 and 2013, which should give them a proper baseline for Obamacare.

And yes, the right wingers are freaking out saying this is jacking the number somehow in Obamacare’s favor, which is nonsense of course. And as the Vox link above points out, most of those who follow this issue use a number of tools including Gallup which measures a large sample.

Still, this sort of thing is unhelpful:

Census officials did have at least some concerns about changing the measurement of the uninsured rate at this moment. In a memo obtained by the Times, it was described as “it is coincidental and unfortunate timing.”

“Ideally,” the same memo says, “the redesign would have had at least a few years to gather base line and trend data.”

Maybe they could just get them to shut up?

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ABC must not want a latino audience. They’ve just hired a hardcore immigrant basher

by digby

My new piece for Salon is on Laura “anchor fetus” Ingraham:

Nobody has been more of a vociferous critic of the news media’s alleged liberal bias than talk radio host and conservative commentator Laura Ingraham. Going all the way back to her years as a notorious campus activist making her name as a vicious homophobe (since partially recanted,) she has been hitting the mainstream media for its so-called liberal bias. This “Reliable Sources” exchange with E.J. Dionne from early 2003 is an amusing example of how the best of them get the job done:

KURTZ: Let’s turn now to media bias. E.J. Dionne, you wrote a column recently saying there is no longer any such thing as the big, liberal media. Is this a fantasy we’ve been talking about for some years now? … You’re saying that the “New York Times” and the “L.A. Times” and “The Washington Post” and the networks and magazines have been intimidated and they’re cowering and they can’t do their jobs anymore?

INGRAHAM: I must have missed that.

DIONNE: That’s not what I said…

INGRAHAM: When they cover a Bush press conference, how is it covered? Is it covered in a fair and balanced way…

DIONNE: Bush has gotten an extraordinarily good press. I challenge you to compare…

INGRAHAM: He’s been an extraordinarily good president, much to the media’s chagrin.

You see, when a Republican president gets bad coverage it’s because the press has a liberal bias. When he gets good coverage it’s because he’s so good.

Read the whole thing to get a taste of her real passion: hating on undocumented workers.

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In other privacy news, app maker secretly sells location data of 50 million people. Almost no punishment.

by David Atkins

I have this flashlight app on my phone:

Even judging by the low standards of creepy data-mining apps, “Brightest Flashlight” did something pretty egregious. The free app, which was installed by at least 50 million Android users, transmitted users’ real-time locations to ad networks and other third parties. It was, in other words, a stalking device disguised as a flashlight.

In December, the Federal Trade Commission exposed the app’s antics and also announced a proposed settlement with the app maker, GoldenShores Technologies, a one-man operation based in Idaho. In doing so, the agency explained how Brightest Flashlight used legal flim-flam in a privacy policy and user license agreement to obscure what the app was up to.

The terms are now final, and they’re underwhelming, to put it mildly.

In a Wednesday announcement, the FTC confirmed that GoldenShores and owner Erik Geidl are not to collect app users’ geolocation without clearly explaining how and why they’re doing so and, in broad terms, say who is receiving that information. The flashlight app maker will also have to keep records for the FTC to inspect, and Geidl will have to tell the agency about any new businesses he decides to start in the next 10 years. He also has 10 days as of the order to delete all the data he collected.

On paper, the order looks like stern stuff but, in practice, it’s hard to see how this amounts to real punishment. Even though Geidl did something deeply unethical, compromising the privacy of tens of millions of people, he will not pay a cent for his misdeeds.

I suppose I could uninstall the app from my phone, but what would be the point? It’s not as if Google, Verizon, Microsoft, Twitter and about a dozen other companies don’t also know my precise GPS location every single second of every single day. Facebook would know, too, in addition to the hundred other things it knows about me–if I bothered to put a Facebook app on my phone.

Dozens of companies know every single website I’ve ever visited. A dozen different financial institutions know every single purchase I’ve ever made that wasn’t in cash. I guess a few dozen more companies knowing exactly where I am every single day won’t much much of a difference. I pretty much gave up on any passive expectation of privacy long ago.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Google, Verizon and AT&T couldn’t essentially ID most drug dealers and their customers just by using big data to figure out who hangs out suspiciously long in places people wouldn’t normally hang out, and who comes to visit them at those places. Fairly soon dozens of different companies will have the ability as well. Given what we know about the NSA at this point, I’d be surprised if the government didn’t already have that data. I just think they probably don’t care all that much.

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Chasing leakers by any means necessary

by digby

Kind of fitting that this piece by Spencer Ackerman ran the day the Guardian and its NSA reporters (including Spencer) won the Pulitzer Prize:

The US government’s troubled military trials of terrorism suspects were dealt another blow on Monday when proceedings were halted after an allegation surfaced that the Federal Bureau of Investigation turned a member of a 9/11 defendant’s defense team into a secret informant.

Judge James Pohl, the army colonel overseeing the controversial military commission at Guantánamo, gaveled a hearing out of session after barely 30 minutes on Monday morning, following the revelation of a motion filed by the defense stipulating that the FBI approached an unidentified member of the team during the course of an investigation into how a manifesto by accused 9/11 architect Khalid Shaikh Mohammed found its way to the media.

Defense attorneys argued the government plunged them into a potential conflict of interest, as they would need to potentially defend themselves against a leak investigation, risking their ability to put their clients’ legal needs ahead of their own.

They implored Pohl to investigate, and if necessary, assign their clients with new independent counsel to advise the defendants about the existence and implications of conflict of interest. That could be a lengthy process – potentially the next delay for a proceeding that has yet to get out of the pretrial stage nearly two years after the latest incarnation of the 9/11 military trials began.

“We have an impossible situation in terms of representing our client … on any issue,” said James Harrington, a civilian attorney for Mohammed’s co-defendant Ramzi bin al-Shibh in the case, which carries the death penalty.

“To say this is a chilling experience for all of us is a gross understatement,” Harrington said.

That would be the point, I’m pretty sure. Nothing must stop the pursuit of leakers. Nothing. Even if it means subversion of the constitution. Because freedom.

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The Pulitzers reward real journalism

by digby

Congratulations to the winners. It gives me hope that journalism still understands its role in a free society:

Totally deserved in every way.

Update: Of course…

Awarding the Pulitzer to Snowden enablers is a disgrace
— Rep. Pete King (@RepPeteKing) April 14, 2014

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Welfare works. Private sector charity doesn’t

by David Atkins

Matt Yglesias puts together a simple chart showing the awesome power of the welfare state to do good:

The “T&T” in the chart refers to “taxes and transfers”: i.e., the implementation of large-scale social welfare programs.

The only reason that our poverty rates haven’t gone down as much as those those of other countries is, of course, that our social welfare programs are far weaker than in those other countries. As Yglesias says:

The point? Child poverty is a problem government can help solve, if voters want it to. In Scandinavia, voters do want the problem solved, and they’re willing to pay the taxes necessary to get there. In the United States, not so much.

We may be a more religious nation than most. But that quite clearly hasn’t made us more moral.

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