Tag Archives: top stories

This Jeopardy Champ and Proud Geek Gives Swirlies to Gamergaters in His Spare Time

by ReneeQuisenberr Posted on November 11, 2014

Mother Jones

Like Disney and the WWF, the game show Jeopardy! has its villains—or at least one, in the form of Arthur Chu, the 30-year-old Cleveland native who took home nearly $300,000 after winning an 11-game streak and seemingly pissing off half of America. How? His sins ranged from “pounding the bejesus out of his buzzer” to skipping wildly around the board in search of Daily Doubles, setting longtime viewers’ heads on fire. The “Jeopardy! bad boy” has continued courting controversy since his February appearance with a number of provocative essays on race and gender issues. He’s recently had a lot to say about Gamergate, a fierce debate going on in the world of video games over issues of diversity and harassment of women. I talked to Chu right before his Jeopardy! return in this week’s Tournament of Champions.

Mother Jones: So how does one study for Jeopardy?

Arthur Chu: A lot of flashcards. There’s a whole online community where people archive clues from the past. Since I talked about using that, I think they’ve started writing the show to make it harder.

People say Jeopardy! is getting “dumbed down” because there are more pop culture questions. I think it’s the opposite. There’s only so many classic operas you can study. For pop culture, you have to actually watch the shows. There’s one every week! It’s much harder.

MJ: What’s your buzzer strategy?

AC: The thing about being a lifelong gamer is that my eye-to-hand reaction time is faster than average. I actually went on a website that tests your reaction time and verified this to my satisfaction.

I knew Ken Jennings loved to buzz in and then start to try to figure out the answer after buzzing. Ken’s very smart, but that’s a little too dangerous for me. Jeopardy! is won partially by keeping your mouth shut when you aren’t sure, so you don’t lose points by getting something wrong.

Really, when you practice watching the show, you should practice reading ahead of Alex’s talking so that by the instant he’s done talking, you’ve digested the question and decided whether you know it or not.

MJ: The times you’ve played, were there any categories you just dreaded, and prayed they wouldn’t come up?

AC: Sports was a huge handicap for me in my original run. And what’s worse, it’s known that it was a huge handicap for me because everyone reported on that famous Daily Double where I bet $5 and blew off the clue. So I felt like I had to shore that up, and studied a ton of sports.

MJ: Switching topics to another kind of gaming, the Gamergate debate is clearly on some level a backlash to demands for better diversity in video games. But a lot of gamers say the lack of female lead characters in games—or brown characters, queer characters, and so on—simply isn’t a problem that needs fixing.

AC: You hear a lot of this. “Why are you dragging real-life politics into cyberspace? I go to gaming to get away from real-life issues.” For a lot of geeks, gaming is all about stripping who you are completely and entering this imaginary space, this world that’s made for you, where winning and losing have nothing to do with real life. They try to argue that representation in games has not been an issue because nobody is really themselves in a game; it’s all just avatars. They’re not seeing the many ways in which that’s not true.

This is a conversation that we’ve needed to have for a long time. And now it’s being dragged into the open.

MJ: So why are we having this conversation now?

AC: From the beginning, the internet has been dominated by white men. So if you wanted to be a part of the internet and you weren’t a white man, you had to adapt yourself to their world. It became normal for women on the internet to adopt gender-neutral or male screen names. If you’re not white, you didn’t talk about your background. It became normal to subsume yourself into a generalized American identity.

We’ve sort of reached a tipping point where people are tired of that. People are saying, “Look, I’m gay”—for instance—”and being gay is important to me and I’m going to talk about it and I’m not going to just sit here and pretend that the many little ways you take a crap on my identity don’t matter.”

MJ: I’ve noticed that the vast majority of people supporting Gamergate online are using anonymous avatars, while a lot of the people they’re piling on to are writing under their real names.

AC: It’s part of the whole idea that the internet is just “for lulz,” that the internet’s not real. Look at 4chan culture, which is the ultimate version of shedding your IRL in real life identity—you don’t even keep a consistent screen name from thread to thread. That’s very important to them, this belief in the possibility that what I do online is completely separate from who I really am.

MJ: Do you have any empathy with the young men who are the bulk of this movement, who, whether they realize it or not, are pretty clearly grappling with some gnarly issues of identity and change?

AC: Oh yeah, I do. I think I’ve tried to be open about the fact that I’ve changed a lot. As an early adopter of the internet, I’ve changed as the internet has changed, and I regret a lot of the things that I used to believe or used to do.

MJ: Like what?

AC: For example, in college I was known as Mister Reasonable Neutrality, always trying to find the middle, to be “rational.” And now that’s almost a cliché—that annoying guy on the internet who insists on playing devil’s advocate, on having a “rational debate,” insisting that emotions are always wrong or biased.

It took me a while to realize that it doesn’t help anyone to have these rational debates. A rational debate is never going to lead to an objectively rational conclusion. It’s never going to pull people out of where they are.

MJ: I feel like anyone who’s spent any time on Reddit has met That Guy.

AC: The joke when I was a teenager was, “Someday you’ll all be working for me.” Being a nerd meant being good with computers, book knowledge, and data, and being bad with people. So the idea was that if you got really good at working with things and manipulating objects, you’d reach a point in life where you wouldn’t need people to like you. You’d win purely by merit. There’s nowhere on Earth where this is actually true, but there’s people who believe that.

That’s why so much of nerd culture involves these power fantasies full of magic—literally reshaping the world through thinking about it—and superheroes with super abilities. It’s also why a lot of the people in geeky subcultures gravitate towards libertarianism. There’s a strong ideological belief in wiping out “politics,” because politics means having to interact with people, and negotiating with people who have different interests.

MJ: So you know a bit about being on the receiving end of a lot of online hate. Most of us will never experience anything like this. What was it like?

AC: I’m glad it happened the way it did. I became a C-list celeb for being controversial. I’m the guy everybody hates. I’m the villain. I thought, I can embrace that.

Every time I write an article, it’s like, I’ve already been the “most hated man in America” for this really dumb thing. How could it get any worse if it were for something I actually believe? I’ve got the money already from being on this stupid game show. The limelight is an unexpected bonus. If I use the limelight to make people like me for a fake image of me, abandon these things I was so passionate about back when it was just me writing to a bunch of my friends on Facebook, then what kind of a person am I?

See the article here – 

This Jeopardy Champ and Proud Geek Gives Swirlies to Gamergaters in His Spare Time

Posted in Anchor, Bunn, Cyber, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, solar, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on This Jeopardy Champ and Proud Geek Gives Swirlies to Gamergaters in His Spare Time

Sexts from Scarlett O’Hara

by FelicitRooney Posted on November 8, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

For many people who grow up with their noses in books, meeting their favorite character is the ultimate fantasy. Mallory Ortberg isn’t one of those readers.

“They’re such assholes,” the co-founder of feminist website The Toast says when I ask her who in the Western canon she’d most want as a texting buddy. “I don’t know that I would want any of them to have my phone number, because they would all feel very free to text me at 2:00 in the morning just screaming.”

Ortberg has put a lot of thought into the phone etiquette of literary personalities. Her book Texts from Jane Eyre, published November 4, features imagined exchanges between characters both classic and modern. From Hamlet whining about the relish on his tuna fish sandwich to Scarlett O’Hara sexting Ashley, the conversations are both LOL-worthy and true to the spirit of the works they parody.

Mother Jones: Where’d you get the inspiration for your first “Texts From” piece?

Mallory Ortberg: This is actually one of the only projects I’ve ever done where I can 100 percent pinpoint where it got started. It was back on The Awl when The Toast co-founder Nicole Cliffe was doing her Classic Trash series, and she was talking about Gone With the Wind, and somebody in the comments said, “I’m from the South and it’s actually exactly like this now, except everybody has cell phones.”

As soon as I saw that I was just like, “Oh God, the idea of Scarlett O’Hara with the ability to get in touch with all of her friends at any time and ask them for favors is horrific and vivid and amazing.” And I immediately wrote “Texts from Scarlett O’Hara” in like 10 minutes. So weirdly something good has come out of Internet comments—I got a book deal from it.

MJ: Would you say your own texting style is similar to the way the book is written?

MO: As a medium, texting is a really great way to get out of stuff when you know that you’re wrong, but you want to minimize having to make eye contact with someone as you bail on them or tell them that you fucked up. So I have definitely in my in life used a text to be like, “Oh hey, dude, I’m sorry, turns out I can’t make it after all!” like five minutes before I’m supposed to be somewhere.

Texts from Scarlett The Hairpin

MJ: When did you realize that you were funny?

MO: Oh man. I’ve always thought that I was funny. The world has not always agreed, but…I’ve always just been like, “Yes, absolutely, let’s do this! I will make jokes come hell or high water! Even if no one laughs.”

There were a lot of different influences on me. I started reading P.G. Wodehouse when I was about twelve, and that was huge for me. And certainly the classics like Monty Python, The Kids in the Hall, A Bit of Fry and Laurie, very dry British humor. But also like Robert Benchley and James Thurber, your mid-century American humorists. And then I remember when I was a little kid my brother and I would stay up and watch Comedy Central specials and we saw Maria Bamford together. It must’ve been her first standup special, because I think it was 1999—she was a kid. And I just remember being captivated that someone could be that weird in a way that felt so universal.

Henry Holt & Company

MJ: Was the process of coming up with jokes for this book similar to how you come up with stuff you’ve done at The Toast? If you’re working on, say, Women in Western Art History, is that just you sitting in front of Google Images looking at old paintings until something comes to you?

MO: Often it is, yeah. I love the art history ones because it’s so little work for me. There’s so many paintings that when I look at them, the look on the lady’s face is like so clear and her body language and her posture or their physical situation is so immediately recognizable. Anyone who’s been in a conversation they didn’t want to have, or been getting harangued by a little kid they didn’t want to pay attention to or been tired and wanted to go to bed is just like, “Yes, of course.” You can instantly see in this person’s face the universal sense of “Oh God, please leave me alone.”

MJ: How did you know there would be an audience for something like that?

MO: It was really a calculated risk. At the time that we started it, Nicole was coming off about a year or a year and a half as co-editor of The Hairpin, and I had been working as the weekend editor for Gawker and also a place called The Gloss. So by the time we started The Toast it wasn’t a complete leap in the dark. We weren’t completely unknown. The time felt right enough that we were like, “Let’s give this a year, and if it turns out to be the kind of thing that six people love and adore and nobody else cares about, we’ll say that we had a fun time trying something new and we’ll call it quits.” But it was kind of—it wasn’t a shock, but it was a really pleasant surprise that within the first couple of weeks it was clear to us that there were people who felt like The Toast was home for them.

MJ: Do you have a favorite thing that The Toast has published so far?

MO: I have a lot of favorites. We had a woman who wrote a piece about her first name. It was also about her Muslim-American identity and being the daughter of immigrants, and it was just thoughtful and stirring and profound, and it really moved me. That’s definitely up there for me. I also love Nicole’s blind items from Ontario. That’s so weird. That’s so Canadian. Just the blind items about, like, who was late to the potluck and what person was growing medical marijuana. I just love everything Nicole writes.

MJ: So, you’re from the Bay Area—how do you feel about artisanal toast?

MO: You know, when I hear “artisan,” I think of being in social studies and learning about the old classes and the rise of merchants during the late Middle Ages. So that’s what I think of—I picture an old-timey guy at a fucking loom, maybe like trading with some Dutchmen.

Read this article:

Sexts from Scarlett O’Hara

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, solar, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Sexts from Scarlett O’Hara

Here’s What It Looks Like When a Typhoon Devastates Your City

by PennyPalazzi Posted on November 7, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Well before Typhoon Haiyan made landfall in the Philippines on November 8, 2013, weather watchers knew the storm would be terrible. But with more than 6,300 confirmed deaths and billions of dollars in damage, it turned out to be one of the worst natural disasters of the decade. The photos below show what the town of Dulag and the city of Tacloban looked like before and after Haiyan.

Dulag

DigitalGlobe/Google

Tacloban

DigitalGlobe/Google

Tacloban

DigitalGlobe/Google

Tacloban

DigitalGlobe/Google

Tacloban

DigitalGlobe/Google

Tacloban

CNES-Astrium/Google

Tacloban

CNES-Astrium/Google

View original post here – 

Here’s What It Looks Like When a Typhoon Devastates Your City

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Pines, Radius, solar, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Here’s What It Looks Like When a Typhoon Devastates Your City

2014 Was the Year Men Finally Got Feminism

by h7paisjnha Posted on November 6, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

What do the prime minister of India, retired National Football League punter Chris Kluwe, and superstar comedian Aziz Ansari have in common? It’s not that they’ve all walked into a bar, though Ansari could probably figure out the punch line to that joke. They’ve all spoken up for feminism this year, part of an unprecedented wave of men actively engaging with what’s usually called “women’s issues,” though violence and discrimination against women are only women’s issues because they’re things done to women—mostly by men, so maybe they should always have been “men’s issues.”

The arrival of the guys signifies a sea change, part of an extraordinary year for feminism, in which the conversation has been transformed, as have some crucial laws, while new voices and constituencies joined in. There have always been men who agreed on the importance of those women’s issues, and some who spoke up, but never in such numbers or with such effect. And we need them. So consider this a watershed year for feminism.

Take the speech Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi gave on that country’s Independence Day. Usually it’s an occasion for boosterism and pride. Instead, he spoke powerfully of India’s horrendous rape problem. “Brothers and sisters, when we hear about the incidents of rape, we hang our heads in shame,” he said in Hindi. “I want to ask every parent that you have a daughter of 10 or 12 years age, you are always on the alert, every now and then you keep on asking where are you going, when would you come back… Parents ask their daughters hundreds of questions, but have any parents ever dared to ask their son as to where he is going, why he is going out, who his friends are? After all, a rapist is also somebody’s son. He also has parents.”

Continue Reading »

View this article:

2014 Was the Year Men Finally Got Feminism

Posted in Casio, FF, GE, ONA, Oster, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on 2014 Was the Year Men Finally Got Feminism

Obamacare Could Have Turned Millions of Uninsured Americans Into Voters

by Billy Jobs Posted on November 4, 2014

Mother Jones

Since the 2010 midterm elections, Republican-controlled legislatures in 21 states have made it harder to vote, enacting restrictions on early voting, ending same-day registration, and requiring government-issued ID at the polls. Many of these measures have been found to reduce turnout among poorer and minority voters.

Meanwhile, the Affordable Care Act provided President Barack Obama with a tool that could have helped counter the effect of the new laws restricting voting and made it easier for non-white voters to get to the polls. But he decided not to use it.

The 1993 National Voter Registration Act, also known as the Motor Voter law, requires that departments of motor vehicles and other public assistance agencies provide voter registration services. According to HHS, the health insurance exchanges created by the Affordable Care Act count as public assistance agencies under the statute. That means that the assistants who walk uninsured Americans through the exchange’s insurance sign-up process should also have to offer to guide applicants through the voter registration process. While HHS can’t directly control compliance at the state-run health exchanges, the agency can ensure that assistants who help the uninsured sign up for coverage on the federal exchange—called navigators—provide voters with step-by-step guidance on registering to vote. But that hasn’t been happening.

Voting rights advocates have been pressuring HHS for more than a year to reverse course and make sure navigators fully comply with the Motor Voter law. But since a backlash last year by Republicans, the administration has demurred. So the more than 5.4 million uninsured Americans who have signed up for insurance at healthcare.gov since October 1, 2013 have not received extra assistance in registering to vote. Thirty-seven percent of the enrollees who chose to report their ethnicity were minorities.

Lawrence Jacobs, a political science professor at the University of Minnesota and author of Health Care Reform and American Politics, told me earlier this year that the administration is “running from a political fight”:

GOP opposition to signing up new voters through the health insurance exchanges has been fierce. Right-wing talk show yeller Rush Limbaugh said in June that it shows “the purpose of Obamacare… It’s about building a permanent, undefeatable, always-funded Democrat majority.” In March, Republicans on the House Ways and Means committee worried about how Obama-friendly “associations like the now-defunct ACORN”—such as FamiliesUSA and AARP that the administration will fund to help sign up the uninsured—would use applicants’ voting information. Rep. Charles Boustany (R-La.) wrote a letter to HHS this past spring, charging that the health care law “does not give your Department an interest in whether individual Americans choose to vote,” and asking HHS to provide justification for including voter registration questions in health insurance applications.

The Presidential Commission on Election Administration, which Obama created last year to assess voting problems around the country, released a study in January calling for better enforcement of government agencies’ compliance with the Motor Voter law, noting that it was “the election statute most often ignored.”

While the federal exchange website provides a link to the federal voter registration website as part of the health insurance application process, advocates say the department has failed to ensure that navigators automatically offer people who need help with their insurance application aid with voter registration applications as well. “It’s likely that many thousands of citizens would have applied to register to vote if the administration had complied,” says Lisa Danetz, the legal director at the think-tank Demos. “And we know that once registered, people turn out to vote at a relatively good rate.”

It’s not too late for the administration to use Obamacare to help Americans register to vote. Another 10 million uninsured Americans are expected to obtain coverage through the Affordable Care Act in 2015, and more than 24 million a year are expected to sign up 2015 and 2016.

Visit link: 

Obamacare Could Have Turned Millions of Uninsured Americans Into Voters

Posted in Anchor, Citizen, FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Obamacare Could Have Turned Millions of Uninsured Americans Into Voters

To Beat Obamacare, Opponents Resurrect an Old Birther Argument

by WilliamBeaurega Posted on October 31, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>
Obamacare opponents outside the Supreme Court in March, 2014 Jay Mallin/ZUMA

The Supreme Court today is considering whether to hear a challenge to Obamacare that could deprive 8 million people of their newly acquired health insurance. If the court does decide to take the case, though, it will be buying into a legal argument that is frequently deployed by a different group of anti-Obama litigants—those who are trying to challenge the president’s citizenship.

The case, King v. Burwell, is one of a pair of lawsuits (the other is Halbig v. Burwell) seeking to strike a blow to the heart of the Affordable Care Act. As I explained last year:

The argument goes something like this: When Congress wrote the ACA, it said that premium subsidies would be available for certain qualifying citizens who were “enrolled through an Exchange established by the State.” (Emphasis added.) The law doesn’t say that those subsidies are available to people in the 34 states that declined to set up exchanges, where residents must utilize the now-infamously buggy Healthcare.gov, the federal exchange.

That’s where Obamacare opponents see a fatal flaw in the law. The plaintiffs in Halbig claim that they won’t be eligible for tax credits because their states didn’t start an exchange, so they won’t be able to afford insurance. As a result, they argue that they’ll be subject to the fine for not buying insurance, or to avoid the fine, they’ll have to pay a lot for insurance they don’t want. They want the court to block the IRS from implementing the law.

It’s a pretty audacious claim from a bunch of people who are, in fact, being helped quite a bit by Obamacare. One of the plaintiffs in Halbig is actually complaining about being forced to buy insurance that, with the subsidy, costs him $21 a year.

Putting those issues aside, though, the question for the Supreme Court today is whether to take up the King case. Obamacare opponents lost this case in July after it was argued before the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va. The court found that the issues raised by the plaintiffs were indeed serious, and that the statute is vague because of what is essentially a drafting error in the text. But Supreme Court precedent, the judges said, requires them to give deference to regulatory agencies’ interpretation of laws passed by Congress. Those agencies, namely the IRS, have taken the view that Congress intended for everyone to be able to access subsidies, regardless of which exchange they use to buy insurance. (Most of the law’s drafters have endorsed that argument in amicus briefs.)

The Halbig case, however, was heard by a three-judge panel from a different appellate court, in Washington, DC. That panel, which included two conservative GOP appointees, rejected the IRS’s interpretation of the law by and ruled, in a 2-1 vote, that Congress’ screw-up makes the federal health care subsidies unlawful. Generally speaking, when appellate courts disagree in similar cases like this, it’s up to the US Supreme Court to resolve the conflict, and that’s exactly what the King plaintiffs have asked the Supreme Court to do.

But not long after the decision in Halbig, the full DC Circuit set aside the panel decision and agreed to hear the case en banc—meaning that every judge on the circuit will will have a vote. The case is set to be argued in December, and many observers believe the full court, which now includes several Obama appointees, will overturn the lower court ruling and agree with the 4th Circuit that the subsidies are permissible. So technically, there is no circuit split at the moment for the high court to resolve—an argument the government has made in its briefs to the court opposing a high court review.

But the King plaintiffs are arguing that the Supreme Court should take up the case now anyway—because, well, they think it’s really, really important to stop health care reform from moving forward in case it eventually turns out to be illegal. (They’re also arguing that the original DC Circuit panel decision creates a circuit split, but plenty of lawyers disagree with them.)

In their petition to the Supreme Court, the King plaintiffs write, “Given the self-evident enormous importance of the IRS Rule to the ongoing implementation of the ACA, to the immediate economic decisions of millions of Americans and thousands of businesses, and to the currently flowing billions of dollars in expenditures that the D.C. Circuit ruled illegal, the need for this Court’s review is plainly and uniquely urgent.”

That dire language, though, bears some resemblance to the legal rhetoric frequently employed by some of the nation’s most dogged litigators: the birthers—those people who’ve spent the past six years filing lawsuits trying to prove that President Obama is not an American citizen. In years of legal filings, they’ve repeatedly begged the court to rule on Obama’s “legitimacy”—even though every lower court has rejected their claims—because, you know, if it turns out that he’s not really a citizen, that’s a problem the court should fix right away.

Here’s just one example, from the Supreme Court petition in Charles Kerchner v. Barack Hussein Obama II:

If the President and Commander in Chief is ineligible for those offices, both our civilian and military sector need to know that as soon as possible. The President is the Commander in Chief of our military forces. Whether he is legitimate is also vital in maintaining the proper chain of command in our military and in giving legality to all military orders that emanate from him.

Since the President signs all acts passed by Congress into law, it is vitally important that the President be legitimately in power so as to give those laws domestic and international legality.

Ian Millhiser, a constitutional policy analyst at the Center for American Progress, says this sort of argument is common among not just birthers, but also tax protesters and other fringe litigants looking to kill off government programs. The Halbig and King plaintiffs, he says, are essentially saying, “Because we have created this crisis whereby filing this lawsuit we have raised the possibility that all of this disruption has happened, it is therefore imperative that you, Supreme Court, take this case to end all this disruption we have created.”

The problem with this line of argument, of course, is that it could be applied to any lawsuit, no matter how frivolous. That’s why Millhiser doesn’t think the Supreme Court is likely to take up the case, at least not until the full DC Circuit delivers its own ruling. A case doesn’t become worthy of Supreme Court review, he says, simply because the plaintiffs have cooked up a legal attack strategy that, if successful, “could lead to catastrophic consequences.” He’ll likely find out if he’s right on Monday, when the court could announce whether it’s taking the case.

Continue reading:

To Beat Obamacare, Opponents Resurrect an Old Birther Argument

Posted in Anchor, Citizen, Everyone, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on To Beat Obamacare, Opponents Resurrect an Old Birther Argument

Republicans Tried to Suppress the Black Vote in North Carolina. It’s Not Working.

by BonitaYuranigh Posted on October 31, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

“The first question I ask my customers is: Are you registered?” Jolanda Smith says.

Smith runs a hair salon on the outskirts of Fayetteville, North Carolina. Her hair is dyed lavender and her arms are covered in heart and shooting-star tattoos. In the lead-up to the midterms, she’s lending her storefront to Democratic Sen. Kay Hagan’s reelection campaign. Smith passes out sample ballots and flyers and tells customers how to register and where their polling location is. Last Saturday morning, she was talking God and voting as she straightened a customer’s hair.

“It’s: Are you gonna vote, yes or no?” she says, sectioning off a lock of hair and pulling it through the iron. “God gave us a choice, and the choices are always yes or no. It’s not maybe. It’s not, ‘Let me think about it,’ ’cause those are excuses…on down from choosing Christ to voting. You gonna vote? Yes or no?”

IN 2013, North Carolina Republicans, led by Hagan’s opponent, state house speaker Thom Tillis, passed a far-reaching voting law that curtails early voting and eliminates same-day registration. The Justice Department sued North Carolina over the law, charging it was discriminatory and would depress minority turnout.

Hagan’s campaign knows that black voter turnout could decide her fate—and, by extension, determine which party controls the Senate for the final two years of President Barack Obama’s term. If African-Americans manage to turn out at presidential-year levels—if they’re at least 21 percent of the electorate—Hagan will probably win, says Tom Jensen, director of the North Carolina-based polling firm Public Policy Polling.

That’s why the Hagan campaign, and its coordinated get-out-the-vote organization Forward North Carolina—along with the NAACP, state Democrats, and get-out-the-vote outfits—launched unprecedented efforts this year to mobilize black voters.

Those efforts are paying off. On the first day of early voting last week, 76-year-old Ruben Betts was sitting on the curb in a shopping center parking lot wearing an “I just voted” sticker on his sweater. The president reminded him to vote this year, he says: “Obama sent me a letter.” As of Thursday, 24 percent of early voters in North Carolina were African-American, according to records from the state board of elections. That’s up from just 17 percent at the same point during the last midterm elections in 2010.

The Hagan field operation, which has 40 offices, 100 staffers, and 10,000 volunteers, is the largest that North Carolina has ever seen in a Senate race. By comparison, the get-out-the-vote campaign for North Carolina Secretary of State Elaine Marshall’s failed Senate bid in 2010 was almost entirely run by volunteers. “We had no money, I mean no money,” says Thomas Mills, a Democratic political consultant who helped coordinate Marshall’s field operation. “And maybe five paid staffers. The difference in what they’ve got now—it’s just not even same thing. There’s no comparison.”

Democrats have spent $1 million on ads aired on black radio stations. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee partnered with the Congressional Black Caucus this month to send black lawmakers on a bus tour through North Carolina and five other battleground states. And Hagan’s campaign is collaborating extensively with black clergy across the state and roughly 150 black small business owners like Smith who are helping turn out voters this year.

Smith says the main issue that convinces her customers to go to the polls is health insurance. (North Carolina didn’t expand Medicaid, so about 500,000 poor North Carolinians are still without insurance.) Jobs top the list, too. Smith’s shop sits on Murchison Road, one of the main drags leading out of Fayetteville. The further you drive from the town center, the less money there is—the storefronts become more faded, the sidewalks get weedier, the landscape grayer. “It’s hard to get a job even if you have a degree,” she says.

Smith adds that anger over the August shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, will also bring people in her community out on Tuesday. “It was more than just him,” she notes, referring to the police brutality she witnesses regularly in her community. “You have some in the system that say, ‘I’m gonna hide behind this badge and use it for injustice instead of justice’…To us it feels like it’s racist.”

T-omnis Cox says he feels like a potential Michael Brown. A 23-year-old who works at a chicken plant in eastern North Carolina, he was hanging out in front of a corner liquor store in Goldsboro last Thursday evening. “It’s hard out here in the world,” he says. “Every day, we’re ducking from cops, we’re ducking from law.” Cox says he’s going to vote for Hagan because “Republicans don’t care about the poor.”

Hagan’s campaign has also reached out to African-American churches as a key component of its voter mobilization effort, urging pastors around the state to help with voter education and registration.

The Rev. Dumas Alexander Harshaw Jr. says his church in downtown Raleigh, First Baptist—which was founded by freed slaves—has always been political. This election cycle, the church has been helping voters register, and handing out sample ballots as well as guidelines on how and where to vote. Last Sunday, Harshaw invited Dr. Everett Ward, the president of St. Augustine’s University, a historically black college in the city, to speak to the members of First Baptist about voting.

“We’ve seen this movie before,” Ward tells the congregation, referring to the slew of policies Tillis and his fellow Republicans in the state Legislature have enacted since 2012 that disproportionately harm minorities. “It had the same title in 1895, in 1958, in 1968: ‘The South Shall Rise Again.'” A few amens rise from the pews. If North Carolina sends Tillis to Washington, Ward continues, “we will lose more opportunity for upward mobility, access to healthcare will disappear, access to higher education will disappear.”

So go vote, he says. “Throughout history…When our people faced discrimination and injustice, we answered the call.”

“Will you go?” Ward asks the congregation, and the chapel fills with “Yes.” “Will you go?” “Yes.”

Not everyone needs to be convinced to exercise their civic duty. “People died so I might have the right to vote,” says Mary Bethel, who is lending her Fayetteville storefront to Hagan’s ground campaign. Last Friday afternoon, she sat at her desk among stacks of papers, envelopes, Post-its and grandchild photos in her small tax shop on Murchison Road, wearing bright red lipstick and lightly smudged glasses. “My parents voted til the day they died,” she adds. “I grew up in segregation. I vote every election.”

Tillis’ record as A leader of the unpopular state Legislature has made it easier for people like Smith and Ward to get black voters to the polls. “Kay Hagan, to me she’s wishy-washy, she’s two-faced. But Tillis is an out-out crook,” says Michael Curtis, a 65-year-old unemployed former construction worker who lives in Raleigh. Democrats haven’t done much for Curtis—he’s been out of a job since Obama was elected, and says he doesn’t have health care—but he’s still voting Hagan. Last year, Tillis voted against expanding Medicaid in North Carolina, which would have provided coverage to a half million uninsured North Carolinians. Tillis led a GOP push to cut funding for substance abuse treatment centers by 12 percent. In 2013, he and his fellow Republicans slashed unemployment benefits for 170,000 North Carolinians and eliminated the state’s Earned Income Tax Credit, while cutting taxes for rich people. And Tillis backed the harsh voter suppression law, too.

These bills and others Tillis and fellow Republicans forced through after they took control of both the legislature and the governorship in 2012 led the NAACP’s Rev. William Barber to launch the Moral Mondays movement in April 2013. For 74 straight weeks now, protesters have held demonstrations near the state capitol demanding a retreat from the state’s sharp right turn.

Now the NAACP is harnessing that anger to get voters to the polls in the most massive mobilization effort the group has ever made in a non-presidential year. Last Thursday, the first day of early voting in the state, the NAACP led 32 marches to the polls—more than in any previous midterm year. Barber’s organization is also calling all of the 286,000 African-Americans who voted in 2012 and 2008 but didn’t vote in 2010, helping register thousands of new voters, buying radio ads, and reaching out to churches. “African-Americans need to vote because we’re the ones who know the most about voter suppression,” Barber told Mother Jones.

If Hagan loses, though, it won’t be African-Americans’ fault. It will be because too many centrist Democrats voted Republican, Barber says. There are 800,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans in North Carolina, many of whom are white. “You don’t lay the blame of this election on black people.”

Source:  

Republicans Tried to Suppress the Black Vote in North Carolina. It’s Not Working.

Posted in alo, Anchor, Everyone, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Smith's, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Republicans Tried to Suppress the Black Vote in North Carolina. It’s Not Working.

Meet Another GOP Candidate Who’s Pretending He’s Pro-Choice

by Yvette6077 Posted on October 30, 2014

Mother Jones

Over the past few weeks, a number of Republican candidates have run deceptive advertisements or used sneaky language to paper over their hardline views on reproductive rights. Pols who’ve done this include Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, Senate hopeful Scott Brown in New Hampshire, and Colorado gubernatorial candidate Bob Beauprez. Now you can add another name to the list of pro-life GOPers who are suddenly talking about choice: Oregon’s Dennis Richardson.

Richardson, a Republican state representative running for governor, cut an ad (watch it above) featuring a self-described “pro-choice Democrat” named Michelle Horgan. Speaking directly into the camera, Horgan says: “I trust Dennis. He’ll uphold Oregon’s laws to protect my right to choose, and he’ll work hard for Oregon families.”

The language in Richardson’s ad—”He’ll uphold Oregon’s laws to protect my right to choose”—hews closely to the rhetoric used by Walker, Brown, and Beauprez. All of those Republicans have previously sought to restrict women’s reproductive rights (Walker supports eliminating all abortions). But during this election season, they have each tried to strike a moderate tone on the issue.

Richardson’s ad is particularly brazen given his long record of opposing abortion rights. He wrote a letter to the Oregonian in 1990 saying that “a woman relinquishes her unfettered right to control her own body when her actions cause the conception of a baby.” As a state legislator, he sponsored legislation to give unborn fetuses the rights of humans and to require parental notification for abortions. In 2007, he voted against mandating that hospitals offer emergency contraception to women who have been sexually assaulted.

What’s more, Richardson has the endorsement and full-throated support of Oregon Right to Life, the state’s main anti-abortion-rights group. Oregon Right to Life’s PAC has donated $80,000 to Richardson’s campaign. (Right to Life’s $50,000 check in September remains the fourth-largest cash contribution of Richardson’s entire campaign.) In an email blast to its list, the group touted Richardson as “an excellent gubernatorial candidate” who, if elected, would offer the “opportunity to reclaim political ground and hopefully start changing the way Oregon politics treat the abortion issue. We might actually be able to end our ‘reign’ as the only state in America lacking a single restriction on abortion.”

No mistaking that message: In Richardson, the pro-life community sees an opportunity to finally start curbing abortion access in the state of Oregon. But you probably won’t see that message in Richardson’s campaign ads any time soon.

Read this article – 

Meet Another GOP Candidate Who’s Pretending He’s Pro-Choice

Posted in Anchor, Citizen, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Meet Another GOP Candidate Who’s Pretending He’s Pro-Choice

Fox News’ Parent Company Is Really Worried About Global Warming

by FrederiFad Posted on October 29, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The day after Superstorm Sandy devastated much of the East Coast, Al Gore issued a statement linking the storm to climate change. That’s when Fox News went on the attack.

“These global warming claims have been debunked time and time again,” declared Eric Bolling, a former crude oil trader who is now one of the network’s most inflammatory hosts. “Look, it’s weather. Weather changes. Things happen. It has nothing to do with global warming.”

But Fox’s parent company, 21st Century Fox, sees things differently.

Earlier this month, a London-based organization called CDP released hundreds of questionnaires it collected from corporations—including 21st Century Fox—that had agreed to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions and outline the risks global warming could pose to their business. In its submission to CDP, 21st Century Fox noted that climate change “may increase the frequency and power of tropical cyclones” and that the resulting storms could hurt its bottom line. And the company cited Sandy as a prime example:

In the current reporting year, 21st Century Fox was affected by Superstorm Sandy through filming interruptions, travel delays, facility and equipment damange sic and box office closings in the Northeast U.S. The storm showed that 21st Century Fox can be negatively impacted by climate-related weather impacts. Severe weather and climate change also pose physical risks to 21st Century Fox’s supply chain, such as the ability and timeliness with which products and services can be delivered to and from the company.

An entertainment colossus with businesses that include everything from right-wing cable news to blockbuster movies to satellite television, 21st Century Fox is one of two media companies led by Rupert Murdoch. The other is News Corp, which controls newspapers worldwide and which split from 21st Century Fox last year. In its own response to CDP, News Corp also cited Sandy, similarly warning that climate change could disrupt its business by potentially increasing the “frequency and power of tropical cyclones.”

Indeed, Sandy cost Murdoch’s media empire more than $2 million in “damage and filming delays,” according to the documents.

The storm caused significant damage and shutdowns at News Corp plants, and it reportedly disrupted delivery of the Wall Street Journal. (According to one of the documents, “weather-related missed deliveries” of the Journal have been increasing over the last three years.) Murdoch’s entertainment business also took a hit. For example, 21st Century Fox reported that Sandy “reduced sales in a key market” and cited estimates that the storm was largely responsible for a 12 to 25 percent drop in box office sales. And flooding in Brooklyn damaged the set of the The Americans—a TV drama produced by Fox Television Studios—forcing the company to postpone filming. (A Fox spokesperson said the delay lasted “less than two weeks” while the necessary repairs were made.)

Of course, News Corp and Fox were far from the only businesses impacted by Sandy. Delta Airlines, for instance, told CDP that it lost $75 million in revenue. Abercrombie & Fitch lost more than $10 million in sales. And utility giant Con Edison shelled out more than $500 million to fix damage caused by the storm.

But the Murdoch companies’ statements linking Sandy’s devastation to climate change represent a striking contrast to the global warming commentary that often appears in their news outlets. Fox News, in particular, is a hotbed of climate denial; a recent Union of Concerned Scientists study found that fully 72 percent of the network’s climate segments contained “misleading” statements. A Fox editor once directed reporters to cast doubt on temperature data showing that the Earth has warmed.

On the newspaper side, the Wall Street Journal regularly publishes editorials and opinion pieces skeptical of climate science. And according to a report last year from the Australian Center for Independent Journalism, News Corp’s Australian papers are a “major reason” why that country’s media is “a world leader in the promotion of scepticism.”

Fox News, two weeks before Superstom Sandy Screenshot: Media Matters/Fox News

This tension is nothing new for Murdoch’s companies. In 2011, Fox News hosts were attacking climate scientists even as Murdoch was announcing that News Corp had become carbon neutral. Media Matters (my former employer) wrote at the time that the “contrast between what News Corp’s chairman says and what its employees actually do is a stark illustration of the company’s attempt to play both sides of the climate issue.”

The companies’ concerns about possible climate disruptions go far beyond Sandy. “To the extent that any increase in frequency of extreme events can be correlated to a trend like climate change,” writes 21st Century Fox in its CDP submission, “there is a continued need to prepare for business disruptions.” It warns that “extended and severe droughts” could worsen wildfires in Southern California, where much of its entertainment business is based. And it cites recent wildfires in Russia and floods in Australia that “disrupted film and TV productions and caused property damage.”

News Corp has similar concerns about increasing wildfire risk, writing that its Australian businesses operate “in regions with bushfire risks, and 2013 saw the extreme fire season start earlier than previous years.” And the company points to another—less obvious—threat from climate change. As droughts become more frequent and more severe, writes News Corp, there could be unpredictable consequences for the forestry industry that produces the paper its newspapers are printed on. But don’t worry: The Wall Street Journal’s climate-change editorials are available online.

This article is from: 

Fox News’ Parent Company Is Really Worried About Global Warming

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Fox News’ Parent Company Is Really Worried About Global Warming

The Mother Jones Guide to Evil NBA Owners

by JungDellinger Posted on October 29, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Advertise on MotherJones.com

Six months ago, the NBA rid itself of its worst owner, perpetual sleazebag Donald Sterling. Everyone praised the swift, harsh punishment meted out by commissioner Adam Silver for Sterling’s racist tirade—well, almost everyone. Shortly after the league announced the lifetime ban of the Clippers owner, Dallas Mavericks owner and Shark Tank celeb Mark Cuban called the league’s move “a very, very slippery slope.”

Cuban got on board the next day, even tweeting that he agreed 100 percent with Silver’s decision. But what was he so worried about? Well, the league’s 30 owners might not have Sterling-like baggage, but there’s plenty of embarrassing biographical material to mine—offensive emails, family feuds, sketchy business deals, and more—just like we here at Mother Jones did for their counterparts in baseball and football. So, with an eye on political contributions and general scumbaggery, here’s how the NBA’s most powerful men (and woman) stack up:

Atlanta
Boston
Brooklyn
Charlotte
Chicago
Cleveland
Dallas
Denver
Detroit
Golden State
Houston
Indiana
LA Clippers
LA Lakers
Memphis
Miami
Milwaukee
Minnesota
New Orleans
New York
Oklahoma City
Orlando
Philadelphia
Phoenix
Portland
Sacramento
San Antonio
Toronto
Utah
Washington

EASTERN CONFERENCE

Atlanta Hawks: Bruce Levenson, reportedly worth $500 million, likely won’t be the Hawks owner for long, not after the email he self-reported to the league following the Sterling debacle. The offending missive included observations like “My theory is that the black crowd scared away the whites and there are simply not enough affluent black fans to build a significant season ticket base” and “i want the music to be music familiar to a 40 year old white guy if that’s our season tixs demo,” and “I have even bitched that the kiss cam is too black.” (Notably, a league higher-up told one reporter that Levenson didn’t actually self-report the email, and others have suggested that he might have used it as an ownership exit strategy.)

Boston Celtics: Wycliffe “Wyc” Grousbeck—son of H. Irving Grousbeck, the cofounder of Continental Cablevision, which sold for $5.3 billion in 1996—was a Princeton rower before becoming a venture capitalist and eventually buying the Celtics with his dad in 2002. In his spare time, Grousbeck moonlights as a drummer (he once played with former Celtic Walter McCarty). His brother, a singer-songwriter who goes by Peter Walker, told the Boston Globe in 2004 that “Wyc’s pretty much a straight-up rock dude.”

Private equity investor Stephen Pagliuca is managing director at Mitt Romney’s old haunt, Bain Capital. But Pagliuca’s politics lean left: He’s a big Democratic donor, and in 2009 he ran for the party’s nomination to replace Ted Kennedy. He came in last of four candidates.

Brooklyn Nets: The famously tech averse Russian oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov (who reportedly doesn’t use a cellphone or computer in his office) bought the Nets for $200 million in 2010 and helped oversee their move from New Jersey to Brooklyn. He’s one of the tabloids’ favorite back-page curiosities, and why not? In 2007, he famously brought eight Russian models with him to the French Alps to help entertain the dozens of business associates he was partying with. French authorities temporarily detained him, fearing that he was encouraging prostitution. Prokhorov’s response: The French elite were just jealous because they were way behind when it came to fashion, life, and sex drive. (He later told 60 Minutes that he hadn’t yet found a woman who cooked well enough to marry.) He’s also really into jet skiing:

Charlotte Hornets: Six NBA titles. Five league MVP awards. Countless pairs of ripped jeans. Michael Jordan has stumbled often since his days as the league’s premier player, gumming it up as an executive, sneaker mogul, and even Hall of Fame inductee. Legendary for his competitive nature—and penchant for attacking teammates he saw as weak links—His Airness can’t seem to help himself when it comes to being the official arbiter of all-time NBA greatness. Mix in a decade as management, and you get plenty of “Back in my day…” moments, like when he recently called out superstars LeBron James and Dirk Nowitzki for suggesting that the league scale back its 82-game schedule: “Are they ready to give up money to play fewer games? That’s the question, because you can’t make the same amount of money playing fewer games.”

Chicago Bulls: Jerry Reinsdorf, who also owns baseball’s White Sox, has always been more of a baseball man. That’s where he’s focused much of his energy over the years, becoming one of the players union’s biggest adversaries and a pioneer of publicly funded stadiums. When he threatened to move the Sox to Florida in the early 1990s, he got a sweetheart deal from Illinois—or, as one confidant told the Chicago Sun-Times in 1993, “Not only are there ticket subsidies from the state, but if a light goes out in the bathroom, the state pays for the bulb and the installation. If we sent him to the Middle East to deal with the Arabs, they wouldn’t have any oil left. He’s that good.”

Cleveland Cavaliers: Not only is Dan Gilbert the nation’s most notorious user of Comic Sans, he’s also the billionaire owner of the country’s second-largest mortgage lender, Quicken Loans. And while Quicken has cultivated a squeaky-clean image over the years—note its annual place on those best-places-to-work lists, as well as its goofy emphasis on Gilbert’s “isms”—it did face its share of post-crisis lawsuits. Now that LeBron is back in Cleveland, Gilbert has just one rebuilding project to focus on: his commitment to turn around his hometown of Detroit, where he has bought and updated some 60 downtown properties at a reported cost of $1.3 billion, and moved 12,000 of his own employees there. (Some even have taken to calling downtown Detroit “Gilbertville.”) It’s a risk, but then again, Gilbert bankrolled roughly half of a $47 million campaign to bring gambling to Ohio via a 2009 ballot initiative. The initiative passed, and Gilbert’s Horseshoe Casino opened in downtown Cleveland in 2012.

Detroit Pistons: Tom Gores, 50, is a Beverly Hills tech buyout king and owner of Platinum Equity, which has bought out everything from steel manufacturers to the San Diego Union-Tribune (though it lost out on a bid for the Boston Globe back in 2009). Gores was born in Israel and moved to the Detroit area as a child; he worked at his brother Alec’s software company and private equity firm before leaving to start Platinum. The brothers’ relationship cooled when it was revealed that Tom, who is married with three kids, had a sexual relationship with Lisa Gores, Alec’s wife. (Alec had Los Angeles private detective Anthony Pellicano follow Lisa and Tom, and the scoop came out in Pellicano’s 2008 trial for illegal wiretapping.) For photos of Gores’ squinching game, check out the gallery at TomGores.com.

Indiana Pacers: Herbert Simon and his nephew David run one of the world’s largest real estate investment funds, the Simon Property Group. He has eight kids and is on marriage No. 3, to former Miss Thailand Bui Simon. He started SPG with his brother, Melvin, David’s father. When Melvin died, his widow, Bren, feuded with her stepchildren, calling David “a terrorist” and stepdaughter Debbie “Debbie bin Laden.” Herbert and Bui fought off three successive lawsuits from former domestic employees—all brought by the same attorney.

Miami Heat: In a 2005 Washington Post profile of Heat owner Micky Arison, team president and then-coach Pat Riley raved about him: “He’s about as down to earth as you’re going to get for a billionaire…He doesn’t need, nor does he pursue, the spotlight.” Arison took over Carnival Cruises from father Fred and presided over its rise—as well as its recent Poop Cruise-era fall. (He stepped down as CEO last year.) Still, Arison seems to take setbacks in stride, given his gracious response to LeBron James’ departure for Cleveland this past offseason and his general outlook on the business world (as told to the Post): “In any given year, out of 30 NBA teams, there is only one winner. In business, we can all be winners.”

Milwaukee Bucks: The most memorable thing hedge fund exec Wesley Edens—whom Vanity Fair described as a “cerebral, intense, very private wunderkind”—has done as one of the Bucks’ new owners is send his 18-year-old daughter, Mallory, to the NBA Draft Lottery this past May to represent the Bucks. (The team snagged the second pick.)

Meanwhile, fellow hedge fund exec and Clinton confidant Marc Lasry was up for consideration for the French ambassadorship—only to pull out just before stories emerged about his taste for high-stakes poker.

New York Knicks: Where to start with tabloid staple and Cablevision CEO James Dolan? With the sexual-harassment scandal involving former coach Isiah Thomas and team executive Anucha Browne Sanders? Or perhaps the lawsuit this past March from a shareholder alleging “grossly excessive” executive pay after Cablevision’s board approved $80 million in bonuses for Dolan and his father, chairman Charles Dolan? Then there’s the endless kookiness surrounding the team’s media policy, which requires a member of the PR office to be present for all interviews with Knicks players and coaches—and then to send transcripts up the chain of command, even to Dolan? Oh, and Dolan also fronts a band called JD & the Straight Shot. He wrote a song called “Under That Hood” (It’s all good/Under my hood/So misunderstood) about Trayvon Martin.

Orlando Magic: From Andy Kroll’s expansive profile on Richard DeVos and his political family:

He fit the part of GOP rainmaker-in-chief, wearing a diamond pinkie ring and Gucci loafers, driving a Rolls-Royce and frequently commuting to his nearby office by helicopter. He once docked Amway’s $5 million yacht on the Potomac River in Washington to hold court with Michigan’s congressional delegation, RNC staffers, and personnel from 12 embassies representing countries where Amway did business. DeVos was also a strident voice within the party: In an era when Republicans still courted labor, he urged the GOP to ignore union members. “If they want to be represented by somebody else,” he once said, “good for them.” At a party meeting in 1982, he called the recession that was spiking inflation and unemployment “beneficial” and “a cleansing tonic” for society.

DeVos recently was the subject of an Orlando Sentinel column headlined, “Is Magic’s Rich DeVos Next NBA Owner to Become a Target?” (The story, which came out after the Sterling fiasco, was about DeVos’ anti-gay views.)

Philadelphia 76ers: Buyout-firm maven Joshua Harris made his billions in private equity, cofounding Apollo Global Management, which made headlines in 2011 when it was revealed that it had paid a former California Public Employees’ Retirement System board member tens of millions of dollars to score billions in investments from the pension fund. (Apollo wasn’t accused of wrongdoing.) Harris, who also owns the New Jersey Devils, reportedly is on the verge of buying the English Premier League’s Crystal Palace. Meanwhile, the rebuilding-focused Sixers continue to suck; in April, following the team’s 19-63 season, Harris called the year “a huge success.”

Toronto Raptors: There are many fun things about the NBA’s only foreign franchise, including its throwback dino uniforms, its F-bomb-dropping general manager, and one of the smartest and most raucous fanbases in the NBA. (And, occasionally, Drake.) Owner Larry Tanenbaum, however, is boring as sin.

Washington Wizards: For a glimpse of Ted Leonsis at his peak, this 1995 New York Times Magazine profile is chock full of great stuff: As a bachelor, Leonsis would occasionally bring an Elvis bust with him when dining out with friends; later, as an AOL exec, he came around to the fact that the company was more Norman Rockwell than MTV: “Face it, when you go to a cocktail party and America Online diskettes are being used as coasters, you know you’ve become mainstream.” These days, Leonsis is DC sports royalty as owner of the Wizards, the WNBA’s Mystics, and the NHL’s Capitals—he once got into a physical altercation with a heckling fan, who accused Leonsis of grabbing his neck and throwing him to the ground after a Caps game.

WESTERN CONFERENCE

Dallas Mavericks: What is there left to say about Mark Cuban? The guy speaks for himself: This year alone, the self-made billionaire and self-identified Randian has defended Donald Sterling, waded into the Trayvon Martin controversy, and predicted the NFL would collapse within 10 years. Over the years, he’s been fined nearly $2 million by the league, tried to draft Michael Bloomberg to run for president, and commissioned a mural about his life. He’s come out of an insider-trading trial unscathed and actually built a pretty decent basketball team. Literally and figuratively, he’s the biggest shark in the tank.

Denver Nuggets: Stan Kroenke—a.k.a. “Silent Stan” for his reluctance to talk to the media—collects sports franchises like trophies. Besides the Nuggets, the multibillionaire owns the Colorado Avalanche, the St. Louis Rams, a MLS franchise, a lacrosse team, and has a majority share of the UK soccer club Arsenal. He’s made good money in real estate, but buying a bunch of teams is easier when you’re married to Ann Walton, of the Bentonville Waltons. Kroenke served on Walmart’s Board of Directors in the 1990s and has benefited from Walton ties for decades: The Denver Post reports that his retail ventures (often anchored by the megastore) have landed hundreds of millions in tax breaks.

Golden State Warriors: Peter Guber’s résumé sounds more appropriate for a Lakers owner. He’s a longtime showbiz exec and producer of big-time hits like Rain Man and The Color Purple. Since the ’90s, he has run Mandalay Entertainment, which has produced art-house gems like I Know What You Did Last Summer and I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. Guber is a fairly loyal Democrat, but he’s also said on record that President Obama has disappointed Hollywood, and he has sometimes donated to Republicans, such as the late former Sen. Ted Stevens. The Warriors have thrived under Guber’s tenure, but he may not have mastered email yet: He recently replied-all to the entire organization, writing that he had to learn “hoodish” in addition to the languages of the Warriors’ international players. (He claims that he meant to write Yiddish.)

Joe Lacob is the more hands-on, day-to-day owner of the Warriors. He’s a partner at the elite Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, which is the subject of a nasty, ongoing sexual-harassment lawsuit. Ellen Pao, a former partner, is suing the company for wrongful termination after she reported sexual harassment to senior management.

Houston Rockets: A billionaire New York financier, Leslie Alexander fits the stereotype of a fat-cat owner: He’s got a $42 million penthouse in Manhattan and launched a Hamptons wine club with a $50,000 entry fee. He ran First Marblehead, a for-profit student loan company that tanked during the 2008 financial meltdown—but not before cashing out nearly $300 million in stock. His love of green extends beyond taking people’s money, though—he’s also an outspoken animal rights activist who has given hundreds of thousands of dollars to PETA and affiliated groups. He also reportedly donated to a militant animal rights group whose US leaders were convicted of terrorism charges in 2006.

Los Angeles Clippers: Steve Ballmer is the newest (and with a net worth of $22.5 billion, richest) addition to the owners’ club. He forked over $2 billion in pocket change this year to rescue the Clippers from Donald Sterling. He’s fresh off a 14-year tenure as Microsoft’s CEO, abruptly quitting after years of internal and external criticism of his leadership. To be fair, he did preside over a very rough patch for the company—losing billions, getting beat by Apple, and overseeing the flop of the Zune. Forbes even called him the “worst CEO of a large publicly traded American company…without a doubt.” The famously exuberant BasketBallmer is now looking to rebound with the resurgent Clips—but not before banning Apple products from the locker room.

Los Angeles Lakers: Technically, the six children of Jerry Buss—the longtime Lakers owner who died last year—own a majority share of the team, but day-to-day owner Jeanie Buss has the final say. (Brother Jim focuses on basketball operations.) That unofficially makes her the league’s sole female owner. Despite her short tenure, she’s been criticized for the crazy deal she offered Kobe Bryant and her engagement to Lakers legend (and Knicks president) Phil Jackson. Earlier this year, Jackson was being considered for a job with the Lakers, but Jim was against hiring him, leading to even more Buss family strife.

Memphis Grizzlies: At 36, Robert J. Pera is the youngest NBA owner, and one of the world’s youngest billionaires. The Silicon Valley native founded Ubiquiti, an internet technology company that wants to kill off Cisco in the quest to wifi-ify America’s offices and cities. A former high school player, the 6-foot-3 Pera tweeted that he could easily take Mark Cuban in a 1-on-1, and even challenged Michael Jordan to a $1 million game. (Jordan called it “comical.”)

Minnesota Timberwolves: Glen Taylor has that classic life story: grew up on a farm, pulled himself by the bootstraps, and made himself into a multibillionaire by cobbling together a business empire based on printing and electronics. Big surprise, then, that he’s a staunch Republican: He was a Minnesota state senator from 1981 to 1990 and has given more than $700,000 to Republicans, particularly fellow Minnesotans like Rep. Michelle Bachmann. (He also just bought the left-leaning Minneapolis Star-Tribune for $100 million, and suggested he’d make it more conservative.) Politics aside, Minnesotans have been critical of Taylor’s track record as owner: He feuded with star big man Kevin Love and lost him to the Cleveland Cavaliers. The Timberwolves, meanwhile, suffer the league’s longest playoff drought.

New Orleans Pelicans: Tom Benson’s two-pronged moneymaking strategy consists of selling cars and taking taxpayers’ money. Louisiana’s richest man, he owns dealerships all over the state and in Texas too, in addition to New Orleans’ Fox affiliate and the New Orleans Saints. Thanks to a complex deal he negotiated on the Superdome (yup, he also owns that), Benson is set to rake in nearly $400 million in state subsidies on the taxpayers’ dime. He initially wanted to move the team—especially after Hurricane Katrina—but it seems he’s settled for this deal. Benson was honored with a statue outside the Superdome for his trouble; Louisiana has cut health care and education funding to save money.

Oklahoma City Thunder: Oklahoma hedge fund baron Clayton Bennett is easily the most hated man in the Pacific Northwest: He’s responsible for moving the beloved Seattle SuperSonics to Oklahoma City. In 2006, Bennett bought the team from Starbucks founder Howard Schultz and essentially promised to keep the team in Seattle. Almost immediately, he and his co-owners conspired to move the team, while assuring Sonics fans they’d stay. Minority owner and Bennett buddy Aubrey McClendon even went on the record in 2007, saying that they’d never intended to keep the team in Seattle. (McClendon, who founded the Chesapeake Energy Corporation, is a leading proponent of fracking, opponent of gay rights, and—as if all that weren’t enough—a former Swift Boater.) In spring 2008, Bennett and McClendon got their wish: The Sonics were officially defunct, and replaced by the Oklahoma City Thunder. Seattle was devastated.

Phoenix Suns: It’s tough to find an owner as loathed by his team’s fans as Robert Sarver. The 53-year-old Tucson native made his money running and selling a series of community banks, writing more than $1 billion in loans to Arizona businesses and homeowners during and after the financial crisis. He bought the Suns in 2004, and since then has presided over a steady exodus of talent—both on and off the court. Phoenix fans, who argue that he’s insanely cheap, are hyperbolic about his tenure, arguing that he’s run the team into the ground for his own profit. ESPN’s Bill Simmons once said Sarver “destroyed basketball” in Phoenix.

Portland Trail Blazers: Paul Allen does a lot of things: The Microsoft cofounder is an investor, philanthropist, film producer, art collector, blues musician, and yachting enthusiast. In his spare time, he tends to his sports franchises: the Blazers, the Seattle Seahawks, and soccer’s Seattle Sounders. He’s worth more than $16 billion and has pledged to give at least half of that away (e.g., his $100 million gift to fight Ebola). He’s given generously to political causes, including $1 million to back a charter-school bill with his old pal Bill Gates and more than $500,000 to committees and candidates—65 percent of it to Democrats.

Sacramento Kings: Vivek Ranadivé, an Indian-born billionaire—and the first and only Asian American NBA owner—could be the Most Interesting Man in Silicon Valley. He attended MIT, supposedly as a penniless exchange student, and went on to engineer software that digitized stock trading for Wall Street giants like Goldman Sachs. His Twitter feed is a steady stream of chill: hanging out with Shaq, hobnobbing with world leaders, and fawning over his wannabe pop-star daughter, whom he coached to a girls’ basketball championship. In addition to trying to turn around the long-struggling Kings, Ranadivé also has the modest goal of revolutionizing data, and has huddled with the new Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi—no friend to Muslims—on bringing basketball to India.

San Antonio Spurs: Peter Holt is American tractor royalty: His great-grandfather built the first one a century ago, and his family’s company, Holt Cat, is the biggest Caterpillar dealer in the country. His small-market team has won five NBA titles—all without paying a luxury tax—making Holt one of the more admired owners in the league. He counts Rick Perry in his fan club: The Texas guv has received more than $500,000 in campaign contributions from Holt since 2000, and returned the favor with a state appointment (Parks and Wildlife Commission) and some generous, multimillion-dollar tax breaks for Holt’s businesses.

Utah Jazz: Greg Miller inherited the Jazz from his dad, Larry, along with an expansive business empire that includes real estate, retail, and car dealerships. He seems an affable guy—although not even he was immune to feuding with Karl Malone—with a Twitter feed that showcases his globetrotting off-road expeditions. (He was even on Undercover Boss!) Miller is also a devout Mormon who credits “divine intervention” for the success of his franchise and businesses. During the 2012 election cycle, the Miller family companies gave nearly $1 million to the Mitt Romney super-PAC Restore Our Future after a brief flirtation with former Utah governor and Mormon cool-dad Jon Huntsman.

See original article:

The Mother Jones Guide to Evil NBA Owners

Posted in alo, Anchor, Casio, Down To Earth, Everyone, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, ONA, PUR, Sterling, Ultima, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Mother Jones Guide to Evil NBA Owners