Category Archives: Abrams

Hillary Clinton Is Fundamentally Honest and Trustworthy.

by Sherri0253 Posted on March 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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As we all know, millennials don’t care much for Hillary Clinton. That’s OK. I’m on the other side of that particular fence, but there’s plenty of room for honest differences about her views and whether they’re right for the country—differences that I don’t think are fundamentally rooted in age.

But there’s one issue where I suspect that age really does trip up millennials: the widespread belief that Hillary isn’t trustworthy. It’s easy to understand why they might think this. After all, Hillary has been surrounded by a miasma of scandal for decades—and even if you vaguely know that a lot of the allegations against her weren’t fair, well, where there’s smoke there’s fire. So if you’re familiar with the buzzwords—Whitewater, Travelgate, Vince Foster, the Rose law firm, Troopergate, Ken Starr, Benghazi, Emailgate—but not much else, it’s only human to figure that maybe there really is something fishy in Hillary’s past.

But many of us who lived through this stuff have exactly the opposite view. Not only do we know there’s almost literally nothing to any of these “scandals,” we also know exactly how they were deliberately and cynically manufactured at every step along the way. We were there, watching it happen in real time. So not only do we believe Hillary is basically honest, but the buzzwords actively piss us off. Every time we hear a young progressive kinda sorta suggest that Hillary can’t be trusted, we want to strangle someone. It’s the ultimate proof of how the right wing’s big lie about the Clintons has successfully poisoned not just the electorate in general, but even the progressive movement itself.

I bring this up because I had to blink twice to make sure my eyes weren’t fooling me this morning. Jill Abramson has followed Bill and Hillary Clinton for more than two decades, first in the Washington bureau of the Wall Street Journal, then at the New York Times, where she eventually became Washington bureau chief (and even later, executive editor). Her perch gave her an unrivaled view into Hillary’s actions. Here’s what she had to say today in the Guardian:

I would be “dead rich”, to adapt an infamous Clinton phrase, if I could bill for all the hours I’ve spent covering just about every “scandal” that has enveloped the Clintons. As an editor I’ve launched investigations into her business dealings, her fundraising, her foundation and her marriage. As a reporter my stories stretch back to Whitewater. I’m not a favorite in Hillaryland. That makes what I want to say next surprising.

Hillary Clinton is fundamentally honest and trustworthy.

….Many investigative articles about Clinton end up “raising serious questions” about “potential” conflicts of interest or lapses in her judgment. Of course, she should be held accountable. It was bad judgment, as she has said, to use a private email server. It was colossally stupid to take those hefty speaking fees, but not corrupt. There are no instances I know of where Clinton was doing the bidding of a donor or benefactor.

….I can see why so many voters believe Clinton is hiding something because her instinct is to withhold….Clinton distrusts the press more than any politician I have covered. In her view, journalists breach the perimeter and echo scurrilous claims about her circulated by unreliable rightwing foes.

As Abramson suggests, there are times when Hillary is her own worst enemy. The decades of attacks have made her insular and distrustful, and this often produces a lawyerly demeanor that makes her sound guilty even when she isn’t. As a result, the belief in Hillary’s slipperiness is now such conventional wisdom that it’s almost impossible to dislodge. I just checked Memeorandum to see if anyone was discussing Abramson’s piece, and I was unsurprised to find that it’s gone almost entirely unnoticed.

But the truth is that regardless of how she sometimes sounds, her record is pretty clear: Hillary Clinton really is fundamentally honest and trustworthy. Don’t let the conservative noise machine persuade you otherwise.

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Hillary Clinton Is Fundamentally Honest and Trustworthy.

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Rubio Announces His Neocon Dream Team

by DelHighsmith Posted on March 7, 2016

Mother Jones

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Marco Rubio isn’t just the final, fading hope of the GOP establishment. He’s also the last torch-bearer of neoconservative foreign policy left in the 2016 race. So it’s no surprise that Rubio’s just-announced foreign policy team features some of the big-name neocons who have shaped his hawkish views for years.

Among the 18 members of Rubio’s new “National Security Advisory Council,” which his campaign announced on Monday, are Elliott Abrams, a former special assistant to President George W. Bush who’s best known for lying to Congress about the Reagan administration’s role in the Iran-Contra scandal; Eliot Cohen, a historian, Iraq war supporter, and lawyer at the State Department during the Bush administration; Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security during Bush’s second term; and Michael Mukasey, a Bush administration attorney general.

Abrams and Cohen were members of the Project for a New American Century, an early-2000s group of neconservatives who pushed for big increases in defense spending, more American military intervention abroad, regime change in Iraq, and other policies that became Bush administration staples. Rubio’s foreign policy vision is basically ripped from the group’s platform: He wants to pour money into expanding the military, ramp up missile defense, get aggressive with both Iran and China, and expand the US role in Syria. He also adds modern touches, including beefing up the country’s ability to conduct cyberattacks and rolling back reforms to the Patriot Act in order to reinstate the mass surveillance program that Congress ended last year.

Rubio has reached out to leading neocons ever since his campaign began last year, and even asked visitors to his website to “Join Marco’s Fight For A New American Century!”

Here’s the full list of Rubio’s foreign policy team:

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Rubio Announces His Neocon Dream Team

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We Can All Breathe a Sigh of Relief: Star Wars Toymakers are Not Agents of the Patriarchy

by JuliHAVHqechv Posted on January 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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In an apparent effort to prove that you can do data journalism on literally any topic, Leah Libresco examines the merchandising bonanza of the latest Star Wars movie:

The most-recent “Star Wars” Monopoly set did what the villain of “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” couldn’t, sidelining Rey, the film’s female protagonist…. Fans signed petitions, wrote letters, and tweeted their outrage using the “#WheresRey” hashtag…. The controversy reached its climax when Hasbro, the maker of the game, said Rey will be represented in new editions.

To see whether Rey’s absence was local to Monopoly or more widespread across all “Force Awakens” toys, I did what any sensible data journalist would do: I went to a toy store. Well, a digital one. Toys R Us lists 256 toys in their online “Force Awakens” store, but only 70 of them include any of the major characters introduced in the new movie. Rey holds her own among this group.

“Rey holds her own”? I guess so. She and Finn are the main heroes of the movie, and they’re pretty close in the toy competition. The real news here is a clear anti-human bias: the biggest toy winners are Kylo and Captain Phasma, who spend most or all of the movie in masks, and BB-8, a droid so calculatingly adorable as to bring back involuntary memories of Ewoks.

Anyway, as long as we’re on the subject, you’ve probably all been waiting on the edges of your seats wondering what I thought of the movie. Well, the first week it was too crowded, so I didn’t go. I’m too old for standing in line. The next week, the kids were still out of school, and a friend was visiting who had no interest in the movie. The next week, my mother’s car broke, so I loaned her mine and had no way to get to the theater. By the time I got my car back, I had come down with a cold and didn’t feel like going. So it wasn’t until yesterday that I finally I saw it.

And I was stunned. I was prepared for anything from bad to pretty good, but it turned out to be stultifyingly boring. There’s nothing “wrong” with SWTFA. The acting is OK. The dialog is OK. The effects are OK. The pacing is OK. The direction is OK. The editing is OK. The characters are OK. As a piece of craft, it’s fine. But when you put it all together it’s two hours of nothing. And yet, the residents of Earth have spent a billion dollars on tickets! What the hell is wrong with you people?

The movie’s big mystery, of course, is “Who is Rey?” The answer is, “Who cares?” Here’s my guess: she’s a clone constructed from a preserved pubic hair of Obi-Wan Kenobi. We’ll find out in the exciting sequel!

Anyway, JJ Abrams has now ruined Lost. He’s ruined Star Trek. And he’s ruined Star Wars. He’s a one-man wrecking crew. But there’s a silver lining: at least I can now say with confidence that I’ll never waste money seeing a JJ Abrams production again.

And now for the worst part. I never thought it was possible I’d say this, but I have marginally more respect for George Lucas’s prequels now. They may have sucked, but at least he tried.

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We Can All Breathe a Sigh of Relief: Star Wars Toymakers are Not Agents of the Patriarchy

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I Hated All the Star Wars Movies, Except This One. Here’s Why.

by SharylDellinger Posted on December 18, 2015

Mother Jones

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Star Wars: The Force Awakens just hit theaters. We asked Mother Jones’ own Ben Dreyfuss—a known Star Wars critic—and Edwin Rios—a self-proclaimed fanboy—to share their thoughts after seeing the highly anticipated picture. This discussion has been edited for clarity.

Edwin Rios: BEN!

Ben Dreyfuss: Eddie! OK, Star Wars is here! I just walked out of a 10 a.m. showing. You saw it this morning?

ER: I’ve been up since 4 a.m. Somehow, I’m alive after a 5:15 a.m. showing.

BD: 5:15 a.m. is commitment. That is true love. So let’s start this this way, then: You are a Star Wars fan, correct?

ER: Yeah, back when I was a child, my pops had the original VHS box set. I may or may not have watched it on loop.

BD: OK, so you are saying you love the original Star Wars films because they remind you of playing catch with your dad? There are daddy issues here. Which is fine!

ER: Hmm, I hadn’t thought of that.

BD: OK, so let me just start by saying that I am not a Star Wars fan. I guess when they first came out in the ’70s and early ’80s, the graphics were kickass and new and “wow!” but for people our age they’re not that impressive.

ER: Totally understand that. The first film actually came out in 1977. I would imagine it was pretty revolutionary for its time—the graphics, the camera work, the idea that these randos are traveling through space on an intergalactic adventure.

BD: But let’s talk about this new one. And SPOILER ALERT: We will spoil it all.

ER: Yeah, c’mon, it’s the 21st century, and we’re on the Internet. Spoilers are everywhere. By the way, did you hear Daniel Craig apparently made a cameo?

BD: WHAT?

ER: Yeah! Apparently he was in that scene with Rey, when she asked the Stormtrooper oh so nicely to loosen her restraints.

BD: That was a great scene. OK, general thoughts: I really enjoyed it. I thought it was far and away the best of the series.

ER: See, I’m not sure about “best of the series.” I thoroughly enjoyed every moment, from the iconic John Williams opener to the TIE fighter battle at the end. It harkened to the original trilogy most of the time. But—

BD: Well, I mean we could call this entire fucking film an homage to the original. SO many elements are reproduced. They even joke about it when Harrison Ford is looking at a model of the Death Star and the SUPER DEATH STAR and he says, “I get it. It’s big.”

ER: I mean, it’s a fan’s wet dream.

BD: There is this fight in films like this about whether they should be written for fans or for general audiences. I think you see a lot of ones that go awry are because they’re trying too hard to accommodate the diehards, à la Watchmen, but this one had seemed to also have enough broad appeal to stand on its own.

ER: Totally agree. Can we talk about this cast? That’s what did it for me. It’s just a young and diverse collection of heroes and villains. Badass female lead, badass black and Latino duo.

BD: The leads, whose names I don’t know, but the guy and the girl, they were both pretty fucking amazing.

ER: For sure. This was John Boyega’s (Finn) and Daisy Ridley’s (Rey) launch party. Oh, and Adam freaking Driver killed it as a petulant Darth Vader wannabe.

BD: Totally. And I found, to my surprise, that they really were more interesting than the original actors who admittedly had less to do in this film. But I was sort of bored by their requisite presence and wanted to get back to the Star Wars: The New Class.

ER: A cast of nobodies embodying the allure of an iconic series. It looks all too familiar. Also, can’t forget Oscar Isaac. He was severely underutilized.

BD: Let’s talk a bit about the plot.

ER: How did you feel about the First Order’s weird Nazi overtones?

BD: Oh man! They laid that on thick! That scene with them literally heiling the SS guy?

ER: I literally whispered, “damn, that’s so Nazi,” under my breath when that scene came on.

BD: In one of the first scenes, the Stormtroopers go to the shitty sand planet and are executing people, and the hero, Finn, watches his friend die and there’s the blood on his mask—and he like grows as a person. I mean, from the standpoint of his military career he really did not have a stellar first mission. But I thought the actual emotional moment was some pretty beautiful storytelling that you don’t often see in this genre.

ER: Yeah, it’s something you barely thought about in the original movies. What would happen if a Stormtrooper just said, “Forget this, I’m outta here”? And what if some random scavenger on a desert planet ran into that same Stormtrooper? It’s an alternative perspective on the typical storyline.

BD: How did you feel about the old crew’s presence? Carrie Fisher wasn’t really given much to do.

ER: Neither was R2-D2.

BD: WAIT. R2 D-2. Now I have a question. I totally didn’t understand what the fuck that was about. He had a map but went dark when Luke flew away and then just decided to repower on right at the last second after X many years?

ER: Actually, let’s get back to that, because I have thoughts on that. In a word: It was so fucking implausible. Like WTF R2, NOW YOU WANT TO WAKE UP?

BD: HAHAHAH. It made NO SENSE. They didn’t even try and justify it in dialogued.

ER: Yeah, BB8, who is so adorable, was just like, “Oh shit, you’re awake!” And C3PO is like, “Oh, hi.” Basically.

BD: Is BB8 the ball?

ER: Yeah.

BD: The ball was great. The ball is a fucking star.

ER: Ball So Hard.

BD: Why does the ball talk in clicks and beeps? Like I know R2-D2 does too but it seems very difficult for many of the humans to deal with. Like some know how to speak beep and squeak but other don’t. Why don’t they program the robots to talk in English like Mr. Gold C3PO?

ER: Good question.

BD: THE BALL CAN CLEARLY UNDERSTAND ENGLISH. WHY CAN’T HE SPEAK IT? This is actually my biggest complaint about this movie. I took the time to tweet about it from the theater.

ER: I mean, the droid is still a robot. And it has the capacity to understand, which made it hilarious when Finn was trying to get BB to side with him.

BD: Yeah that was a cute scene. There were a lot of really cute scenes.

ER: Here’s my problem with the plot: It lacked context.

BD: How so?

ER: So let me get this straight: The First Order and the Resistance are fighting. The First Order is basically like the Empire, but not like the Empire. The Resistance is like the Republic, but not actually the Republic. The First Order is controlled by the Dark Side, while the Resistance is trying to establish peace?

BD: Yeah, without any Force. Like they have no Jedi since Luke ran off to play Survivor on some island.

ER: Beautiful shot, by the way. Mark Hamill in his best acting performance since The Kingsman. I just saw that movie recently and was like “OMG Mark Hamill’s head explodes!”

BD: He has spent the last like 20 years doing voiceover work. I think he was in a bunch like animated Batman series.

ER: For sure. He’s kept busy. But back to the plot: Luke has disappeared, and everyone is trying to find him.

BD: You’ve just reminded me of another plot flaw. What sets this movie off aside from the personal revelation that being a Stormtrooper is bad? Like the Super Death Star Ray that the Empire or First Order whatever the hell they’re called is already online. They use it to kill like 10,000,000,000 people midway through and then are going to use it to kill the rest of them. But they didn’t just turn it on. They could have done that months or years or whenever ago.

ER: Right. Also, not a smart move to absorb the sun’s energy to power the weapon. It really screwed the First Order at the end of the day.

BD: I’m no scientist but when suns collapse they like create dark holes I think which are bad. Wait, I have another question. Let’s just acknowledge this right here: Adam Driver or whatever his character’s name is kills Harrison Ford in a pretty obvious moment of like “shake my hand, pa, let’s have a game of catch” and then stabs him in the heart. Then some other shit happens and the girl discovers she has the Force and gets Luke’s lightsaber and then suddenly has all this Force power and does some Force shit and she kills Adam Driver in the woods.

ER: So, two things: I still want to know Rey’s backstory. Whose child is she? And why was she abandoned in the desert? And with whom? But yeah, back to Han Solo’s horrific death scene: It genuinely felt like that moment in Empire Strikes Back, I think, when Luke finds out Vader is his pops and has a WTF moment. Only this time, Kylo Ren seems to have a moment of “maybe I can be good” and then says, “no way” and kills his dad.

BD: So my other question was, how does the girl become so good at sword fighting? I get she has the Force in her because she just has the Force in her, but Adam Driver has been training to kill people with his crucifix lightsaber for years. She just got her first lightsaber and is suddenly winning fucking gold medals in fencing at the Olympics.

ER: If you can fight with a staff in the desert, you can use a lightsaber. Although it also raises the question: How was Finn using the lightsaber so well? He worked in sanitation!

BD: That’s a great point.

ER: He was a janitor, basically. And yet he wielded a lightsaber and went pound for pound against Kylo Ren. Also, let’s appreciate just how much of a child Kylo Ren acted like when things went wrong for him. And how he Force-choked that one general.

BD: Literally having a tantrum and destroying his battleship room with his lightsaber.

ER: He’s got anger and daddy issues.

BD: Final thoughts: I really liked it. I think the reason it is better than the original movies (which are overrated) and the prequels (which are garbage but also somewhat underrated because everyone hates them so much) is largely because J.J. Abrams is a better and more technically inventive filmmaker than George Lucas. (also, for the record, I called this months ago)

ER: But Ben, the originals are not overrated, and The Force Awakens exemplifies why. The things that made the Star Wars series great—its pace, its wit, its storytelling—are what made this movie all the more memorable.

BD: NO WHAT MADE IT GREAT WAS THE CAST AND J.J. ABRAMS.

ER: For the Star Wars fan, this was a wet dream come true. For the typical moviegoer, it was straight-up a good holiday action film.

BD: “Wet dream” is a thing I bet most Star Wars fans know well since they’re all adolescent boys with acne. (Sorry, no offense. I was once one too.)

ER: J.J. Abrams, you done good.

BD: And with that, let’s publish this motherfucker.

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I Hated All the Star Wars Movies, Except This One. Here’s Why.

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Music Review: "Sign Spinners" by Natural Information Society and Bitchin Bajas

by ScotHeighway10 Posted on August 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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TRACK 4

“Sign Spinners”

From Natural Information Society and Bitchin Bajas’ Autoimaginary

DRAG CITY

Liner notes: Spectral keyboards, hypnotic bass lines, and lighter-than-air percussion make for a spooky-fun instrumental.

Behind the music: Joshua Abrams launched Natural Information Society to showcase the guimbri, an African lute. Cooper Crain started Bitchin Bajas as a low-key alternative to his techno band Cave.

Check it out if you like: The Doors’ “Riders on the Storm” (minus Jim Morrison).

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Music Review: "Sign Spinners" by Natural Information Society and Bitchin Bajas

Posted in Abrams, Anchor, Citizen, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Music Review: "Sign Spinners" by Natural Information Society and Bitchin Bajas

First Amendment Law is Facing Some Very Big Changes

by JanSpinksg Posted on August 17, 2015

Mother Jones

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Adam Liptak says that Reed v. Town of Gilbert is the sleeper Supreme Court case of the past year. It unanimously struck down an ordinance that discriminated against signs announcing church service times, but only three justices ruled on the basis of existing law. The other six signed an opinion that went further, ruling that many other speech regulations are now subject to “strict scrutiny.” How far will this go?

Strict scrutiny requires the government to prove that the challenged law is “narrowly tailored to serve compelling state interests.” You can stare at those words as long as you like, but here is what you need to know: Strict scrutiny, like a Civil War stomach wound, is generally fatal.

“When a court applies strict scrutiny in determining whether a law is consistent with the First Amendment,” said Mr. Abrams, who has represented The New York Times, “only the rarest statute survives the examination.”

Laws based on the content of speech, the Supreme Court has long held, must face such scrutiny. The key move in Justice Thomas’s opinion was the vast expansion of what counts as content-based. The court used to say laws were content-based if they were adopted to suppress speech with which the government disagreed.

Justice Thomas took a different approach. Any law that singles out a topic for regulation, he said, discriminates based on content and is therefore presumptively unconstitutional.

Securities regulation is a topic. Drug labeling is a topic. Consumer protection is a topic.

This is obviously not news to people who follow this stuff carefully, but it was news to me. Apparently the reach of Reed is pretty spectacular: three laws have been struck down by lower courts in just the past two months based on the reasoning in the case. Any law that treats, say, medical records or political robocalls or commercial speech differently from any other kind of speech is in danger—and there are a lot of laws like this.

They say that hard cases make bad law. But Reed was an easy case. It failed “the laugh test” said Elena Kagan. And yet, it seems likely to have provided an excuse for an astonishingly broad change in how speech is regulated. So far it’s stayed mostly under the radar, but eventually something bigger than panhandling or ballot selfies will get struck down, and suddenly everyone will notice what happened. What then?

Professor Robert Post said the majority opinion, read literally, would so destabilize First Amendment law that courts might have to start looking for alternative approaches. Perhaps courts will rethink what counts as speech, he said, or perhaps they will water down the potency of strict scrutiny.

“One or the other will have to give,” he said, “or else the scope of Reed’s application would have to be limited.”

Stay tuned.

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First Amendment Law is Facing Some Very Big Changes

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Gawker Took Only One Day to Report and Vet the Story That Blew Up in Its Face

by ValentinaFrueh7 Posted on July 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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Gawker took just one workday to investigate, vet, and publish its now-infamous article about a CFO’s alleged extramarital sexting with a gay porn star, Mother Jones has learned from multiple sources—a tight timeframe in which big legal and editorial decisions were made, with massive consequences for the company.

The article, by 27-year-old staff writer Jordan Sargent, was based on texts provided by a man who tried to blackmail a publishing executive, and left a trail of destruction after it hit Gawker’s front page last Thursday. Gawker thrust an arguably private individual into a media storm about journalistic ethics, and prompted top-level resignations after the site’s publisher deleted the post a day later, an act that staffers said breached a sacred divide between editorial and business operations. Multiple rounds of knife-sharpening and bloodletting ensued.

A quick turnaround on a big scoop
The timeline provided to Mother Jones adds a new detail to accounts from inside the company about how events transpired, pre-publication, and could raise tricky legal questions if the publishing executive chooses to sue Gawker.

Nick Denton, the site’s founder and publisher, has written that the publication of the article was “a close call around which there were more internal disagreements than usual.” He later wrote, “We believe we were within our legal right to publish,” inferring that at least some legal consideration went into running the story. The reporting, research, and these sorts of weighty discussions and dissents, as described by Denton, all took place in one day, according to a staffer. (Denton did not respond to an email requesting an interview for my story. Sargent also declined to be interviewed.)

The rush to publish could be a problem. Renowned first amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams told me that while the ultimate defense in any libel suit is whether or not the facts are true, Gawker’s internal processes could have some bearing on the jury. “There’s no doubt that the jury would be presented with evidence which would reveal the internal deliberative process,” he said. A lack of due diligence, he explained, would bear “directly on whether they acted negligently.”

Another issue is the question of whether the person was a public or a private figure. If the person were ruled to be a private figure, the standards for libel are lower than for a public one. Abrams points out that “if he is a private figure then it depends on what state the action is brought in to determine the level of care, but it can be as little as negligence, acting irresponsibly under the the circumstances, in gathering the information.”

“If they didn’t spend enough time checking out the accuracy of the story, that could be used with great effect against them,” he said. “If it arose in a blackmail situation, that is also a blinking yellow light, if not a blinking red one, to take very special care to make sure it’s true.”

Ken Paulson, the president of the First Amendment Center at the Newseum Institute, and former editor-in-chief of USA Today notes, “Stories get reported and published in a single day all the time. But articles that damage someone’s reputation are typically vetted over a longer period.”

Speed itself doesn’t necessarily hamper a good vetting process, he said, especially if the reporter and editors have the goods. (Gawker claims the article is legally bulletproof.) But in a pressure-cooker situation, “Additional review may turn up issues that could give you pause about publishing,” he said.

“I just don’t think the story is about ‘outing’ at all”
One of the most criticized aspects of Sargent’s story was that he and his editors “outed” a man seeking a gay hook-up. The story seemed to many critics to be a relic from a time when simply being gay was newsworthy. “Somewhere along the way, what was once a scarlet letter became just another consonant in the personal resume,” wrote the late New York Times media critic David Carr in 2013, about Gawker’s curious obsession with outing. “A person’s sexual orientation is not only not news, it’s not very interesting.” Withering comments from readers reflected this, and Gawker’s publisher and founder Nick Denton recognized as much when he wrote last week: “The point of this story was not in my view sufficient to offset the embarrassment to the subject and his family.” He later said: “I was ashamed to have my name and Gawker’s associated with a story on the private life of a closeted gay man who some felt had done nothing to warrant the attention.” (Based on Sargent’s reporting, it’s unclear whether Gawker’s subject was indeed closeted.)

But the same staffer I spoke to with behind-the-scenes knowledge said that “outing” the man played a negligible role in editorial discussions. “Gawker is not like other media companies,” this staffer said, adding that they “don’t fret about the consequences” of mentioning the fact that someone is gay. His sexuality was “so beyond the story’s consideration,” the staffer added later. (Denton told the Daily Beast it’s not his job to sign-off on individual articles for Gawker, and while he knew about the piece, he hadn’t read it before publication.) Editor-in-chief Max Read and executive editor Tommy Craggs have publicly claimed responsibility for the article.

Instead, the focus of the writer and editors was on detailing “the lengthy story about his attempt to arrange this multi-city, bizarre meeting in Chicago,” the staffer said. “Obviously it necessitated reporting that he was seeking an escort that happens to be male.” If the escort had been a female, the source argued, there would have been no accompanying backlash from critics. This, the staffer said, is a double standard: “I disagree with the premise that the outing was a big deal.”

Asked to clarify later, this staffer doubled-down: “We have never, never shied away from outing people.”

Rather than being a controversy about potentially “outing” a gay man with kids, the staffer said, “I think the more salient outrage was about whether or not he was a public figure.” He was public enough, the staffer insists. Media critics and observers have been largely uniform in disagreeing with this assertion.

But Gawker’s no-holds-barred, outing-doesn’t-matter approach risks missing a more subtle recent change in America. It’s not that readers don’t care about sexuality, as Carr argued. They might just be more sensitive: Americans are more attuned to the dangers posed by coming out than ever before. Caitlyn Jenner used the occasion of receiving an ESPY courage award last week, for example, to focus the nation’s attention on trans teens. “They’re getting bullied,” Jenner said. “They’re getting beaten up. They’re getting murdered. And they’re committing suicide.” LGBT Americans are being attacked by fire, by fists, and are sometimes rejected by those closest to them—something that’s increasingly covered by the media. In the world of confessional YouTube clips and ubiquitous cell phone footage, when coming out goes badly, it can also go viral, finding a sympathetic audience.

Is there ever a time when journalists should out people?

Traditionally, one news requirement (though surely not the only one), has been that the outed individual is living a lie while hurting others: a chest-thumper, for example, working against gays while fishing for sex with them on the side. Think conservative congressman Larry Craig’s outing in 2007 by Roll Call. There is a good case to be made that it is in the public interest to expose a culture warrior with double standards.

And people have made the argument that outing a hugely famous person will help advance the cause of acceptance. Andrew Sullivan introduced an email exchange with Anderson Cooper that was the CNN’s anchor’s official (and sanctioned) coming out moment, by writing: “We still have pastors calling for the death of gay people, bullying incidents and suicides among gay kids… So these ‘non-events’ are still also events of a kind; and they matter. The visibility of gay people is one of the core means for our equality.” Sullivan has previously wondered openly about the sexuality of Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, despite denials. “Since when is asking someone about her orientation an ‘accusation’? Is being gay something one is ‘accused’ of?” Sullivan wrote to The Daily Beast.

But Gawker employees evidently feel the same argument applies to the non-famous, too. “If you think his life was ‘ruined’ because you perceive him to be gay, you are homophobic,” wrote Rich Juzwiak, Jordan Sargent’s colleague, on his personal Kinja page. “If you think a life in the closet is preferable to a life outside of it, you are homophobic.”

“I just don’t think the story is about outing at all,” the staffer told me. “It’s such a dumb criticism. There are a lot of dumb people on Twitter.”

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Gawker Took Only One Day to Report and Vet the Story That Blew Up in Its Face

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Marco Rubio Wants to Make Neocons Cool Again

by TristanFrank Posted on May 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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All-but-announced presidential candidate Jeb Bush caused a stir recently when he cited his brother, former President George W. Bush, as a top policy adviser on the Middle East. But it’s fellow Floridian Sen. Marco Rubio who has made a Bush-era neoconservative foreign policy a centerpiece of his bid for the Republican presidential nomination.

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Marco Rubio Wants to Make Neocons Cool Again

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Marco Rubio’s 2016 Campaign Could Depend on This Billionaire Car Dealer

by TJJWileyuimnxfyo Posted on March 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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As Jeb Bush sucks up cash from Florida’s wealthy Republican donors for his all-but-announced presidential bid—his allies have set a goal of raising $100 million by the end of the month—many of the state’s wealthiest conservatives have passed over Sen. Marco Rubio, another possible 2016 contender, who like Bush hails from South Florida. But Rubio’s ability to compete for the Republican nomination, should he enter the race, may be preserved by one very rich man.

Norman Braman, an 82-year-old billionaire car dealer in Miami and former owner of the Philadelphia Eagles, has taken a shine to the freshman senator and could spend up to $10 million on a Rubio run, according to the Miami Herald. “I will be providing substantial support and that will be public when that occurs,” Braman tells Mother Jones, while declining to confirm the $10 million number. Rubio is expected to make his 2016 bid official in the next few weeks.

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Marco Rubio’s 2016 Campaign Could Depend on This Billionaire Car Dealer

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Yes There’s a Bush and a Clinton, but the 2016 Elections Represent Something Scary and New

by FloreneHusk Posted on March 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Have you ever undertaken some task you felt less than qualified for, but knew that someone needed to do? Consider this piece my version of that, and let me put what I do understand about it in a nutshell: based on developments in our post-9/11 world, we could be watching the birth of a new American political system and way of governing for which, as yet, we have no name.

And here’s what I find strange: the evidence of this, however inchoate, is all around us and yet it’s as if we can’t bear to take it in or make sense of it or even say that it might be so.

Let me make my case, however minimally, based on five areas in which at least the faint outlines of that new system seem to be emerging: political campaigns and elections; the privatization of Washington through the marriage of the corporation and the state; the de-legitimization of our traditional system of governance; the empowerment of the national security state as an untouchable fourth branch of government; and the demobilization of “we the people.”

Whatever this may add up to, it seems to be based, at least in part, on the increasing concentration of wealth and power in a new plutocratic class and in that ever-expanding national security state. Certainly, something out of the ordinary is underway, and yet its birth pangs, while widely reported, are generally categorized as aspects of an exceedingly familiar American system somewhat in disarray.

1. 1 percent Elections

Check out the news about the 2016 presidential election and you’ll quickly feel a sense of been-there, done-that. As a start, the two names most associated with it, Bush and Clinton, couldn’t be more familiar, highlighting as they do the curiously dynastic quality of recent presidential contests. (If a Bush or Clinton should win in 2016 and again in 2020, a member of one of those families will have controlled the presidency for 28 of the last 36 years.)

Take, for instance, “Why 2016 Is Likely to Become a Close Race,” a recent piece Nate Cohn wrote for my hometown paper. A noted election statistician, Cohn points out that, despite Hillary Clinton’s historically staggering lead in Democratic primary polls (and lack of serious challengers), she could lose the general election. He bases this on what we know about her polling popularity from the Monica Lewinsky moment of the 1990s to the present. Cohn assures readers that Hillary will not “be a Democratic Eisenhower, a popular, senior statesperson who cruises to an easy victory.” It’s the sort of comparison that offers a certain implicit reassurance about the near future. (No, Virginia, we haven’t left the world of politics in which former general and president Dwight D. Eisenhower can still be a touchstone.)

Cohn may be right when it comes to Hillary’s electability, but this is not Dwight D. Eisenhower’s or even Al Gore’s America. If you want a measure of that, consider this year’s primaries. I mean, of course, the 2015 ones. Once upon a time, the campaign season started with candidates flocking to Iowa and New Hampshire early in the election year to establish their bona fides among party voters. These days, however, those are already late primaries.

The early primaries, the ones that count, take place among a small group of millionaires and billionaires, a new caste flush with cash who will personally, or through complex networks of funders, pour multi-millions of dollars into the campaigns of candidates of their choice. So the early primaries—this year mainly a Republican affair—are taking place in resort spots like Las Vegas, Rancho Mirage, California, and Sea Island, Georgia, as has been widely reported. These “contests” involve groveling politicians appearing at the beck and call of the rich and powerful, and so reflect our new 1 percent electoral system. (The main pro-Hillary super PAC, for instance, is aiming for a kitty of $500 million heading into 2016, while the Koch brothers network has already promised to drop almost $1 billion into the coming campaign season, doubling their efforts in the last presidential election year.)

Ever since the Supreme Court opened up the ultimate floodgates with its 2010 Citizens United decision, each subsequent election has seen record-breaking amounts of money donated and spent. The 2012 presidential campaign was the first $2 billion election; campaign 2016 is expected to hit the $5 billion mark without breaking a sweat. By comparison, according to Burton Abrams and Russell Settle in their study, “The Effect of Broadcasting on Political Campaign Spending,” Republicans and Democrats spent just under $13 million combined in 1956 when Eisenhower won his second term.

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Yes There’s a Bush and a Clinton, but the 2016 Elections Represent Something Scary and New

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