Tag Archives: kennedy

Creating Panic Is Bad for the Country, But Good for Politicians

by PaulettPearl Posted on August 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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There was another stampede at an airport Sunday night, when passengers at LAX wrongly thought they heard guns being fired:

A loud noise mistaken for gunfire led to rumors that spread at blazing speed in person and on social media, setting off a panic that shut down one of the nation’s busiest airports, as passengers fled terminals and burst through security cordons, and as the police struggled to figure out what was happening and to restore order.

Far from being an isolated episode, it was essentially what had happened on Aug. 13 at a mall in Raleigh, N.C.; on Aug. 14 at Kennedy International Airport in New York; on Aug. 20 at a mall in Michigan; and on Aug. 25 at a mall in Orlando, Fla.

Spreading panic over terrorism has real effects. This is one of them. We are being turned into a nation of babies.

The number of terrorist attacks in the US is minuscule. The number of people in the US who die from terrorist attacks is minuscule. But I suppose the political advantage from scaring the hell out of people about terrorism is fairly substantial. And that’s all that counts, isn’t it?

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Creating Panic Is Bad for the Country, But Good for Politicians

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Calling Someone Crazy Is Not an Insult to the Mentally Ill

by SheritaClune Posted on August 9, 2016

Mother Jones

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Former Rep. Patrick Kennedy is tired of people diagnosing Donald Trump:

What I do know is that we ought to stop casually throwing around terms like “crazy” in this campaign and our daily lives….When that language is commonplace, it becomes that much harder for those experiencing mental illness to openly seek treatment that works. It discriminates, in subtle and overt ways, and extends its reach into schools, workplaces and the health-care system, where we still don’t provide routine mental health exams. When we use that word the way we have, we perpetuate the dangerous, “separate and unequal” treatment of these illnesses, and continue to pretend that the brain isn’t part of the body.

No. Just no. There are lots of words that have both ordinary meanings as well as technical medical meanings. When I say that Donald Trump is a cancer on our society, it’s not an insult to people with leukemia. When I say that Donald Trump is stupid, it’s not an insult to the mentally retarded. And when I say that Donald Trump is crazy, it’s not an insult to people with mental illnesses.

This is the kind of thing that helps power people like Trump in the first place. Sure, a lot of people who gripe about political correctness are just upset that people get on their case these days if they call blacks lazy or Asians inscrutable or women hysterical. There’s not much we can do about this except keep fighting the good fight and wait for them to all die off.

But there are also people who aren’t especially racist or sexist, but nonetheless feel like they have to walk on eggshells around us liberals. Call someone crazy and you’re insulting the mentally ill. Talk about someone “suffering” from an illness and you get a stern lecture about not making assumptions. Ask any number of possibly dumb but innocent questions and you’re committing a microaggression. Wear a sari in a music video and you’re engaging in cultural appropriation.

This kind of hypersensitivity does little good and plenty of harm. We should focus on the big stuff and settle down about the rest of it. It won’t help us win over the racists or sexists—who we don’t need or want anyway—but it will help a lot of other people to feel like it’s not such an emotional trial to hang around liberals, watching their every word in case something new has popped up since the last time they visited. Most people, after all, are neither as plugged in to lefty culture or as hyperverbal as your average university student. Hell, even I sometimes have trouble remembering the approved language to use about things, and I get to sit at the keyboard until I figure it out. Your average schmoe talking in real time hardly has a chance.

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Calling Someone Crazy Is Not an Insult to the Mentally Ill

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Ken Burns on His New Jackie Robinson Documentary: "It’s About Black Lives Matter"

by 0ge7rota Posted on April 10, 2016

Mother Jones

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To acclaimed filmmaker Ken Burns, it’s a no-brainer: If Jackie Robinson were still alive today, he’d be the most beloved figure in the African American community. “The tragedy is that we’ve mythologized him,” Burns says, “and the real tragedy is he died young.”

On Monday, four days before the 69th anniversary of Robinson’s major league debut at Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field, PBS will air the first episode of Burns’ latest documentary, the two-part biography Jackie Robinson. Burns says the film is influenced both by his 1994 epic on the history of baseball and the persistence of Jackie’s widow, Rachel—”without her,” he says, “Jackie would not have been able to make it.” At its heart, the doc is an attempt to go beyond mythology to reveal more about the complicated life of a pioneering ballplayer who, Burns adds, “helped to ignite the modern period of civil rights.”

Ahead of Monday’s premiere, Burns spoke with Mother Jones about the life obscured by Robinson’s legacy, about the limitations of the slugger’s fame, and about the apocryphal stories still making the rounds today:

Robinson the man was much more complex than Robinson the legend: “You get rid of this sentimental nostalgia about Jackie, that he’s the ‘good Negro’ who turned the other cheek and behaved the way a Negro is supposed to at that time, and understand the fiery, competitive kid who’s unwilling to accept second-class status—and how he carried that throughout his professional life and into his post-baseball life until the very end. It’s an existential story about not just talking the talk, but walking the walk. We begin to realize how important Jackie is. He is obviously the most important person in the history of baseball, and I would suggest in American sports. But the story goes way beyond that.”

“It’s about Black Lives Matter”: “We felt that once you’re free from the barnacles of that sentimentality, once you’ve liberated them from the mythology, then all of a sudden, what’s this film about? Well, it’s about Black Lives Matter. They didn’t call it that back then. It’s about driving while black. It’s about stop-and-frisk. It’s about integrated swimming pools. It’s about the Confederate flag. It’s about black churches that are torched by arsonists. It’s about the Southern strategy, beginning in the 1960s in more fully, took the party of Lincoln, founded in 1844 with one principle, the abolition of slavery, and turned it into and detailed a pact with the devil that Jackie witnessed firsthand. That they would then, because of the civil rights bill, go after disaffected Southern whites who had normally voted Democratic and employ what we call generously the Southern strategy.”

Despite Robinson’s influence, he couldn’t meet with Richard Nixon in the White House: “It goes back to the disappointment Jackie Robinson felt when he had been campaigning for Nixon. He was disappointed that Nixon wouldn’t go to campaign in Harlem, but was even more outraged when Nixon wouldn’t intervene when Dr. King was arrested and was going to be sent to a chain gang where he would’ve been killed. John Kennedy, who Jackie didn’t like at all because he wouldn’t look him in the eye and was terrible up to that point in civil rights, did intervene and called Corretta Scott King, and Bobby Kennedy intervened with a judge, and he did get out on bail. It’s a fascinating story about American politics in the 1960s, where he couldn’t even get into the White House to see Nixon.”

That story about Pee Wee Reese wrapping his arm around Jackie Robinson? Probably didn’t happen: “The most superficial and obvious is the famous story that’s repeated in children’s books and in statues of Pee Wee Reese throwing his arm around him in Cincinnati in the first year, when he was getting unbelievable abuse. The last thing is true. He was getting unbelievable abuse wherever he was going, from opposing teams and from the fans in the stadiums. But Pee Wee is supposed to have walked across the diamond from shortstop to first base, which would’ve never happened, and put his arm around him. There’s no mention of it in Jackie’s autobiography. Full admission: I did a 1994 series on the history of baseball that’s 18 and a half hours, and I promoted those myths, because that’s what Roger Kahn and others were writing and telling us about. But it didn’t happen. There’s no mention in Jackie’s autobiography. There’s no mention in the white press, and more importantly, there was no mention of it in the black press, which would’ve run 25 stories related to this. When we asked Rachel, his surviving widow, about it, she said, ‘I asked them when they were going to build the statue not to use that image.'”

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Ken Burns on His New Jackie Robinson Documentary: "It’s About Black Lives Matter"

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The rising oceans could drown a lot of NASA launch sites

by krynicki Posted on September 23, 2015

The rising oceans could drown a lot of NASA launch sites

By on 23 Sep 2015 4:08 pmcommentsShare

The best part about the end of the world will undoubtedly be the photo ops. Whatever the cause — aliens, viral outbreak, our own self-destruction — the apocalypse will be nothing if not full of ruin porn. Planet of the Apes gave us this iconic image of the fallen Statue of Liberty; The Day After Tomorrow brought us a Manhattan skyline half covered in snow; 28 Days Later showed us the eerily quiet streets of a deserted London. But in real life, things might get a bit more Waterworld.

A recent report from NASA warned that a significant portion of the space agency’s infrastructure is now under threat due to climate change-induced sea-level rise. And as great as a defunct and inundated Kennedy Space Center would look in black and white, this is bad news. Here’s more from NASA:

Sea level rise hits especially close to home because half to two-thirds of NASA’s infrastructure and assets stand within 16 feet (5 meters) of sea level. With at least $32 billion in laboratories, launch pads, airfields, testing facilities, data centers, and other infrastructure spread out across 330 square miles (850 square kilometers)—plus 60,000 employees—NASA has an awful lot of people and property in harm’s way.

The average global sea-level has risen eight inches since 1870, NASA reports, but the rate of rise is getting faster and actually doubled over the last 20 years. NASA’s Climate Adaptation Science Investigators (CASI) Working Group recently reported that the agency’s five coastal facilities can expect between 5 and 27 inches of sea-level rise by 2050. It also warned that the coastal flooding that usually happens about once a decade in these areas will become more frequent. In the case of the San Francisco Bay/Ames Research Center area, it could become up to ten times more frequent. Here’s a look at how these areas will fair under a rise of 12 inches:

NASA/NOAA

John Jaeger, a coastal geologist from the University of Florida, told NASA that waves could be “lapping at the launch pads” of the Kennedy Space Center within decades.

So it looks like the moon-landing, Mars-exploring, child-inspiring space agency is in a bit of a pickle. On the one hand, it wants to keep civilians safe by launching off of coasts. On the other hand, the ocean is trying to engulf it. At the same time, mean old Uncle Sam is cutting NASA’s allowance so much that it has to ask its Russian friends for rides to the International Space Station.

The agency’s report ended with a look toward the future. It’s pretty depressing, but if you imagine James Earl Jones reading it aloud amid slow pans of launch pads and space shuttles, astronauts walking in slow motion, and something symphonic playing in the background, you can’t help but believe that NASA’s going to figure this one out:

In some places, they will need to design smarter buildings; in others, they will retrofit and harden old infrastructure. If a facility must stay within sight of the water, then maybe the important laboratories, storage, or assembly rooms should not be on the ground floor. For the launch facilities, which must remain along the shore, beach replenishment, sea wall repair, and dune building may become part of routine maintenance.

But across the space agency, from lab manager to center director to NASA administrator, people will have to continually ask the question: is it time to abandon this place and move inland? It’s a question everyone with coastal property in America will eventually have to answer.

Seriously, though, more than half of U.S. citizens live on the coasts, and a recent study estimated that between $66 billion and $106 billion in infrastructure could be under water by 2050, and between $238 billion to $507 billion in infrastructure could be under by the end of the century. That’s a hell of a lot of ruin porn, but we seem to be doing OK with sparse abandoned factories and boarded up homes. How about we leave the serious stuff to Hollywood?

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Sea Level Rise Hits Home at NASA

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The rising oceans could drown a lot of NASA launch sites

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Even Anti-Gay Activists Predict Victory for Same-Sex Marriage at the Supreme Court

by MarcyHamblin Posted on April 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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As oral arguments in the highly anticipated gay-marriage case Obergefell v. Hodges got underway on Tuesday morning, hundreds of same-sex-marriage supporters gathered outside the Supreme Court to celebrate what they were convinced would be a major victory. A few dozen gay-marriage foes showed up as well, including members of the notorious Westboro Baptist Church, but even they seemed resigned to the fact that their pro-marriage-equality opponents would prevail.

In Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court is considering the legality of same-sex-marriage bans; the case turns on the question of whether the 14th Amendment guarantees the right to same-sex marriage and whether states are required to recognize same-sex unions from other states. After the oral arguments, the New York Times reported that the justices were closely divided on whether same-sex marriage is a constitutional right. A decision is expected at the end of June.

Ben Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church

“I know it’s a fait accompli,” said an unhappy-looking Ben Phelps, 39, a member of the Westboro Baptist Church, the Kansas-based group known for its anti-gay activism and categorized as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Phelps and a small group from his church were protesting on the outskirts of the rally. He held two signs, one that read “God Hates Fags” and the other “Same-Sex Parents Doom Kids.” Phelps predicted the court will rule in favor of same-sex marriage “because we’re in the days of Sodom.”

David Grisham of Repent Amarillo

About 30 yards away, David Grisham, the leader of an anti-gay-marriage group called Repent Amarillo (an outfit the Texas Observer described as a “militant evangelical group that advertises itself as ‘the Special Forces of spiritual warfare'”), shouted into a microphone: “Folks, I’m telling you right now, you’re going to lose your rights if you don’t wake up.”

“I believe the Supreme Court will rule in favor of gay marriage,” Grisham told me after passing the mic to another member of his group. The result, he predicted, would be “persecution for Christians.” He added, “The structure of the family will continue to break down” and “society” will unravel with it.

Gay marriage supporters surround anti-gay protesters.

Grisham and Phelps were in the minority. The overwhelming majority of the crowd had gathered at the court to support marriage equality. “I’m confident,” said Maria Mascaro, 34, who drove down from Philadelphia to attend the rally. “There’s going to be a cocktail after this.”

Albino Periera, 50, and his husband, Joe Kowalcheck, 36, as well as their two dogs, Lola and Nero, made the trip to DC by car from Ormond Beach, Florida. “We’re all very optimistic,” Kowalcheck said. “It would be hard to go backward.”

Nero, gay marriage supporter

Many supporters were optimistic that Justice Anthony Kennedy, who authored the 2013 opinion striking down part of the Defense of Marriage Act, would be the swing vote in favor of marriage equality. “Public opinion is so in favor” of same-sex marriage, said Barbara Stussman, 48, of Maryland, whose daughter is a lesbian. “I think Justice Kennedy takes that into account.” During oral arguments, however, Kennedy expressed concern about changing the conception of marriage that “has been with us for millennia,” according to the New York Times.

“I think if Kennedy found DOMA to be discriminatory…he’ll find state bans to be discriminatory too,” said Jeremy Cerutti, 35, a lawyer from Philadelphia. “This is our 1960s moment.”

Opponents of gay marriage likewise see this case as a watershed moment.

“This is the case,” said Grisham of Repent Amarillo. “This is like a Roe v. Wade moment.”

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Even Anti-Gay Activists Predict Victory for Same-Sex Marriage at the Supreme Court

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Ruth Bader Ginsburg: "I Wasn’t 100 Percent Sober" During SOTU Address

by ArnetteSoderste Posted on February 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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Contrary to earlier speculation that she had power-napped through last month’s State of the Union Address because it was just so damn dull, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg revealed on Thursday it was actually due to the fact she wasn’t exactly “100 percent sober.”

The 81-year-old justice told a crowd of George Washington University students:

The audience for the most part is awake, because they’re bobbing up and down, and we sit there, stone-faced, sober judges. But we’re not, at least I wasn’t, 100 percent sober. Because before we went to the State of the Union, we had dinner together… Justice Kennedy brought in… it was an Opus something or other, very fine California wine, and I vowed this year, just sparkling water, stay away from the wine, but in the end, the dinner was so delicious, it needed wine.

According to Ginsburg, she was thankfully flanked by colleagues, who, like any good friends, casually nudged her awake when they noticed her dozing off. Watch below:

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Ruth Bader Ginsburg: "I Wasn’t 100 Percent Sober" During SOTU Address

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Is a Major Abortion Showdown Finally In Our Near Future?

by AmieSheppard Posted on October 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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It’s been obvious for a while that sometime soon the Supreme Court is going to take on another major abortion case. So far, what’s kept it from happening is probably the fact that both sides are unsure how it would go. Nobody wants to take the chance of a significant decision going against them and becoming settled law for decades.

But Ian Millhiser suggests today that this might be about to change. Conservatives have been unusually aggressive over the past four years in testing the limits of the law at the state level, and yesterday the Fifth Circuit Court upheld a recently-passed Texas statute that had the effect of shutting down all but eight abortion clinics in the entire state. Ominously, Millhiser says, the majority opinion went to considerable pains to acknowledge that its reading of the law was different from that of other circuit courts:

That’s what’s known as a “circuit split.”….Judge Elrod’s lengthy citation — which includes one case that was decided three years before the Supreme Court built the backbone of current abortion jurisprudence in Planned Parenthood v. Casey — is an unusually ostentatious and gratuitous effort to highlight the fact her own decision is “in conflict with the decision of another United States court of appeals on the same important matter.” If anything, Elrod is exaggerating the extent to which other judges disagree with her.

That’s a very strange tactic for a judge to take unless they are eager to have their opinion reviewed by the justices, and quite confident that their decision will be affirmed if it is reviewed by a higher authority. By calling attention to disagreement among circuit court judges regarding the proper way to resolve abortion cases, Elrod sent a blood-red howler to the Supreme Court telling them to “TAKE THIS CASE!”

Elrod, it should be noted, is not wrong to be confident her decision will be affirmed if it is heard by the justices. Justice Anthony Kennedy, the closest thing the Supreme Court has to a swing vote on abortion, hasn’t cast a pro-choice vote since 1992. As a justice, Kennedy’s considered 21 different abortion restrictions and upheld 20 of them.

Conservatives, including those on the Fifth Circuit, are increasingly confident that Anthony Kennedy’s position on abortion has evolved enough that he’s finally on board with a substantial rewrite of current abortion law. And since the other four conservative justices have been on board for a long time, that’s all it takes. Kennedy might not quite be willing to flatly overturn Roe v. Wade, but it’s a pretty good guess that he’s willing to go pretty far down that road.

We are rapidly approaching a point in half the states in America where abortions will be effectively available only to rich women. They’ll just jet off to clinics in California or New York if they have to. Non-rich women, who can’t afford that, will be forced into motherhood whether they like it or not. At which point conservatives, as usual, will suddenly lose all interest in them except as props for their rants about lazy welfare cheats.

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Is a Major Abortion Showdown Finally In Our Near Future?

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Justice Kennedy: DOMA Had to Go Because It "Humiliates Tens of Thousands of Children"

by Gustavo Stanfield Posted on June 26, 2013

Mother Jones

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More Mother Jones coverage of gay rights and marriage equality


Supreme Court Rules on DOMA and Prop 8: A Great Day to Be Gay


The Best (or Worst) Lines From Scalia’s Angry Dissent on the Supreme Court’s Defense of Marriage Act Ruling


Here Are the 7 Worst Things Antonin Scalia Has Said or Written About Homosexuality


Which Politicians Supported Gay Marriage and When?


What the Gay-Marriage Ruling Means for Immigration Reform


VIDEO: The 5 Most Comically Bad Anti-Gay Ads, Ever


Mac McClelland on Gay Rights in Uganda


Gay by Choice? The Science of Sexual Identity


Gay by Choice? Yeah, What If?

In a 5-4 ruling Wednesday, the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), the 1996 law preventing the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriage. The majority opinion, written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, said that the law was tantamount to the “deprivation of the equal liberty of persons that is protected by the Fifth Amendment.”

There is a striking aspect to Kennedy’s surprisingly passionate opinion: He focuses directly on the children of same-sex couples. DOMA, he writes, “humiliates tens of thousands of children now being raised by same-sex couples. The law in question makes it even more difficult for the children to understand the integrity and closeness of their own family and its concord with other families in their community and in their daily lives.”

In a sense, this turns on its head one of the main bogeymen used by activists opposed to marriage equality: that gay marriage will somehow harm children and disrupt families. To the contrary, Kennedy argues that striking down DOMA will give dignity to same-sex families and help end the suffering of children caused by the current the law.

Just ahead of the decision, the American Spectator’s John Guardiano toed the conservative line, arguing in a post that same-sex marriage is “part and parcel of an overaching effort to undermine and deprecate traditional marriage and the traditional family.” (He noted the rise in single-parent homes and the problems caused by fatherlessness, and yet also admitted that rising divorce rates preceded any whiff of a marriage equality movement.)

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Justice Kennedy: DOMA Had to Go Because It "Humiliates Tens of Thousands of Children"

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Courting White House arrest over Keystone XL: Rancher, financier, Kennedy, Sierra Club head

by RubinkJoseph Posted on February 13, 2013

Courting White House arrest over Keystone XL: Rancher, financier, Kennedy, Sierra Club head

By Philip Bump

For the first time in the Sierra Club’s 121-year history — and only 164 years after Henry David Thoreau’s famed treatise on the topic — the executive director of the organization will be arrested in an act of civil disobedience.

The event (which entices members of the press with a promise of “great visuals”) will happen shortly before noon today outside of the White House. The issue spurring such drastic action by Sierra Club director Michael Brune is the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, meaning that Brune will be something like the 1,200th person arrested at the White House protesting that issue.

Brune will be joined by about 50 others, including Bill McKibben of 350.org (and Grist’s board), civil rights leader Julian Bond, Robert Kennedy, Jr., and actress Daryl Hannah (who has been arrested at a White House Keystone protest before). Also included at the event: Randy Thompson, a Nebraska rancher who has emerged as a leader in that state’s fight against the pipeline. According to Fortune magazine, fund manager Jeremy Grantham also plans to participate. “I have told scientists to be persuasive, be brave and be arrested, if necessary, so it only seems proper to do this,” Grantham told the magazine. (Full disclosure: Grantham’s foundation is a funder of Grist.)

tarsandsaction

From a November 2011 protest against Keystone XL.

In a tweet this morning, McKibben suggested that the goal isn’t protest.

A letter from event organizers reinforces that message.

The president can’t work miracles by himself. An obstructionist Congress stands in the way of progress and innovation. But President Obama has the executive authority and the mandate from the American people to stand up to the fossil fuel industry, and to reject the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline right now. …

Today we risk arrest because a global crisis unfolds before our eyes. We have the solutions to this climate crisis. We have a moral obligation to stand stand for immediate, bold action to solve climate disruption. We can do it, and we will.

Several years ago, NASA climate scientist James Hansen suggested that building the Keystone XL pipeline would be “game over” for the climate, helping to inspire robust opposition to it from environmentalists. Last January, the president declined to approve the permit needed to build the pipeline across the U.S.-Canada border, following the initial campaign of protests from 350.org and other activists.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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Courting White House arrest over Keystone XL: Rancher, financier, Kennedy, Sierra Club head

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