Author Archives: JoanSanderz

Frank Luntz Withdraws University of Pennsylvania Scholarship Over Secret Tape

by JoanSanderz Posted on April 26, 2013

Mother Jones

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Following Mother Jones‘ publication of remarks GOP message man Frank Luntz made to University of Pennsylvania students about conservative talk radio, Luntz has decided to withdraw funding for a university scholarship named after his father that sends students to Washington, DC, according to the Daily Pennsylvanian, an independent student newspaper at the school.

While Luntz is scheduled to speak on a panel at the University during graduation weekend, he said that he would never return to speak after this incident, and would discourage others from speaking here.

“I can’t imagine a speaker coming to Penn and being so open. I can’t imagine a speaker coming to Penn and being so candid,” he said. “Frankly, I think it’ll have a chilling effect on whether speakers do or don’t come. I wish it didn’t.”

He also added that he would not renew a scholarship in his father’s name for students to travel to Washington, D.C.

A student had asked Luntz a question about political polarization, and Luntz had responded by blaming conservative talk radio, saying, “They get great ratings, and they drive the message, and it’s really problematic.” Luntz had asked for his answer to be off the record, and although the student who asked the question agreed to those terms, Aakash Abbi, the student who made the recording and provided it to Mother Jones, did not.

In an op-ed for the Daily Pennsylvanian, Abbi outlined his reasoning for making and leaking the recording, explaining that “in a room filled with scores of independent students, ‘off the record’ is not a Patronus charm. Luntz may have felt that he was invited to speak candidly by acclimation, but I disagreed entirely.”

Frank Luntz has made a very successful career out of advising Republicans on the content of their message. He was asked one of the most important questions of the day in terms of American politics (“what is causing extreme polarization between the parties?”), and refused to speak freely. Why? Because doing so may harm his commercial interest. And this attitude is at the root of the problem. If influential GOP figures like Frank Luntz truly believe that the party’s media kingmakers harm the national interest but refuse to say so for fear of backlash, they knowingly work against the spirit of open and honest debate.

In other words, the people creating the “chilling effect” on discourse are not students like Abbi, but the very people Luntz was afraid to go on the record criticizing in the first place.

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Frank Luntz Withdraws University of Pennsylvania Scholarship Over Secret Tape

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Boy Scouts Poised to Admit Gay Members

by JoanSanderz Posted on April 19, 2013

Mother Jones

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Today’s news from the Boy Scouts:

The Boy Scouts of America called to end a long-standing ban on openly gay members, a spokesman said on Friday, but the organization’s board must still vote in May on whether to ratify the resolution. If the vote is approved, “no youth may be denied membership in the Boy Scouts of America on the basis of sexual orientation or preference alone,” Deron Smith, the organization’s spokesman, told Reuters.

….”This is a historic change for the Boy Scouts,” said Patrick Boyle, whose 1994 book “Scout’s Honor” examined sexual abuse in the Boy Scouts of America. “You have a more than hundred-year-old organization changing what it considered a fundamental belief just a decade ago. That says a lot about the Scouts and a lot about how far the gay rights movement has come in the United States.”

One of the key drivers of the continuing anti-gay policy from the Boy Scouts has been the fact that so many scout troops are sponsored by the Mormon Church. But the longtime Mormon fight against gay marriage, and specifically its support for California’s Proposition 8 in 2008, has been a “PR fiasco” for them. As Stephanie Mencimer reported for us a few days ago, this has led to some changes:

In the five years since the LDS church sent busloads of the faithful to California to canvass neighborhoods, and contributed more than $20 million via its members to support the initiative, it has all but dropped the rope in the public policy tug of war over marriage equality. The change stems from an even more remarkable if somewhat invisible transformation happening within the church, prompted by the ugly fight over Prop. 8 and the ensuing backlash from the flock.

….In response to the anger within Mormon ranks over Prop. 8, the president of the Oakland, California, stake (a stake is akin to a Catholic diocese) began organizing gatherings of gay and straight members to try to bridge the differences. In September 2010, the disgruntled church members received a private audience with one of the church’s top officials, Marlin Jensen, who serves as the LDS’s historian….After listening to them talk, Jensen did something almost unheard of in a church whose strict authoritarian hierarchy is unaccustomed to being challenged from below: He apologized “for the pain that Prop. 8 caused us,” Mayne recalls, choking up at the memory. It was, he says, a “very meaningful event.”

The apology from a high church official turned out to be just the beginning of a cultural shift toward greater acceptance of gays and lesbians within LDS ranks. In 2011, Mayne was called to serve as an official of his local San Francisco ward, as an openly gay man. It was a historic appointment in an institution with a long history of excommunicating openly gay members, which it referred to as people who were “afflicted” with same-sex attraction.

Officially, the LDS church hasn’t changed its policies, but I imagine that behind the scenes its opposition to gay scouts has been considerably tempered in the past few years. This probably played a significant role in today’s decision.

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Boy Scouts Poised to Admit Gay Members

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Major grocers on frankenfish: ‘Hell no, we won’t sell that!’

by JoanSanderz Posted on March 21, 2013

Major grocers on frankenfish: ‘Hell no, we won’t sell that!’

By John Upton

Shutterstock

/ Luiz RochaBlended Atlantic salmon / Chinook salmon / ocean pout, anybody?

What do you call a farmed Atlantic salmon with a Chinook salmon growth-hormone gene and a DNA splice from a cold-loving eel-like fish?

Tough to market.

Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, Aldi, and other grocery chains that together run more than 2,000 stores across the U.S. announced this week that they would not sell AquaBounty Technologies’ AquAdvantage® Salmon, aka frankenfish, even if the Food and Drug Administration issues expected approvals.

From a press release put out by Friends of the Earth, which has been waging a campaign that helped convince the retailers to keep the freak fish off their shelves:

Stores that have committed to not offer the salmon or other genetically engineered seafood include the national retailers Trader Joe’s (367 stores), Aldi (1,230 stores), Whole Foods (325 stores in US); regional chains such as Marsh Supermarkets (93 stores in Indiana and Ohio), PCC Natural Markets (9 stores in Washington State); and co-ops in Minnesota, New York, California and Kansas.

“We applaud these retailers for listening to the vast majority of their customers who want sustainable, natural seafood for their families. Now it’s time for other food retailers, including Walmart, Costco and Safeway, to follow suit and let their customers know they will not be selling unlabeled, poorly studied genetically engineered seafood,” said Eric Hoffman, food & technology policy campaigner with Friends of the Earth.

The AquAdvantage® fish is a genetically engineered Atlantic salmon. Added to its genetic makeup is DNA taken from Chinook salmon that triggers fasters growth, particularly during the first two years of life. Because Atlantic salmon naturally grow only during the warmer months, scientists also inserted some DNA from the ocean pout, an eel-resembling creature that revels in the cold. The genetic switch from the ocean pout causes the salmon to churn out growth hormones year-round, further accelerating the speed at which it grows. (The ® means that you are not allowed to sell your own genetically engineered freak fish under the name “AquAdvantage.”)

Many Americans are apparently uncomfortable with this type of genetic manipulation, for some reason.

A San Jose Mercury News reporter stood outside a Trader Joe’s outlet on Tuesday and asked shoppers what they thought about the company’s decision. They seemed to like it.

“It definitely makes me want to shop here,” said Linda Terra of San Jose as her husband, Rod, loaded up their groceries.

The couple tries to eat seafood, especially salmon, at least twice a week.

“I wish everybody would label everything,” Rod Terra said. “What could it hurt?”

Well, Rod, maybe it would hurt the frankenfish’s feelings?

John Upton is a science aficionado and green news junkie who

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Major grocers on frankenfish: ‘Hell no, we won’t sell that!’

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Ashley Judd in DC: I’m a Three-Time Rape Survivor

by JoanSanderz Posted on March 1, 2013

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In her first appearance in Washington, DC since hinting at running for Senate in January, Ashley Judd opened up about the sexual abuse she was subjected to when she was younger.

Judd, who is considering a challenge to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R) next fall as a Democrat, did not take questions from the press—although she did allude to reporters briefly as the “people here who don’t give a rat’s you-know-what about violence”—spoke for more than a hour on Friday at George Washington University on virtually anything but electoral politics. (Topics ranged from child prostitution, to female empowerment, to reproductive health care, to corruption in the Democratic Republic of Congo, to her Kentucky roots.)

But her most candid remarks may have come when she was asked if she had any advice for women who have been sexually assaulted:

I’ve been aware of gender violence all my life, being a survivor of gender violence. Yet I was astonished when I went to graduate school and started to do a deeper dive on gender violence here in America how prevalent rape and attempted rape is, particularly amongst young people. Am I correct that it’s one in three college* students, college women? So that’s a lot. That’s a third of us in this room. And I think part of what’s important, in addition to how we shape the narrative, is that we all have the courage to talk about it, because we’re as sick as our secrets and the shame keeps us in isolation. And when we find that shared experience, we gather our strength and our hope. So for example, I’m a three-time survivor of rape, and about that I have no shame, because it was never my shame to begin with—it was the perpetrator’s shame. And only when I was a grown empowered adult and had healthy boundaries and had the opportunity to do helpful work on that trauma was I able to say, okay, that perpetrator was shameless, and put their shame on me. Now I gave that shame back, and it’s my job to break my isolation and talk with other girls and other women.

At that point, she acknowledged the audience reaction. “I see some people crying,” Judd said. “And that’s good.”

At that, Judd returned to talking about her work, mostly overseas, working with kids who had been sexually abused. “Because I am that kid,” she said. “I was that kid. And there are least a third of the people in this room who would tell that same story if they had the opportunity.”

Later in the Q&A, a self-identified rape survivor thanked Judd for her answer. “I am glad that you spoke openly today, because I felt so alone,” she said. “I know it is one in four because by my senior year in college I could count.”

Judd first discussed her childhood trauma in her 2011 memoir, All That is Bitter and Sweet. “An old man everyone knew beckoned me into a dark, empty corner of the business and offered me a quarter for the pinball machine at the pizza place if I’d sit on his lap,” she wrote. “He opened his arms, I climbed up, and I was shocked when he suddenly cinched his arms around me, squeezing me and smothering my mouth with his, jabbing his tongue deep into my mouth.”

Although the discussion of rape elicited the greatest emotional reaction from the audience, the bigger takeaway from Judd’s talk—at least according to my Twitter feed—was Judd’s frequent lapses into Hollywoodese. She referenced her friendship with Bono more than once, and at one point joked about spending winters in Scotland (where her husband is from).

*Estimates vary, but it’s somewhere between 20 and 25 percent.

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Ashley Judd in DC: I’m a Three-Time Rape Survivor

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