Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 1010
August 20, 2015
“Star Wars: Force Awakens” poster artist: “It is far and away probably going to be the best ‘Star Wars’ you’ve ever seen”
Donald Trump says he has no choice but to “scare” Pope Francis: “I’d say, ‘ISIS wants to get you'”
I'm gonna have to scare the Pope because it's the only thing ... The Pope, I hope, can only be scared by God. But the truth is -- you know, if you look at what's going on -- they better hope that capitalism works, because it's the only thing we have right now. And it's a great thing when it works properly.
How exactly would Trump "scare" the Pope?
"I'd say, 'ISIS wants to get you,'" Trump told Cuomo. "You know that ISIS wants to go in and take over the Vatican? You have heard that. You know, that's a dream of theirs, to go into Italy."
Trump, a Protestant, said that while Pope Francis had become increasingly political, he has "great respect for the Pope," adding, "I like him. He seems like a pretty good guy."
Republican presidential frontrunner, Donald Trump, has taken to the burgeoning conservative tradition of criticizing Pope Francis in a new CNN interview. Speaking to CNN's Chris Cuomo, the billionaire businessman said he took issue with Pope Francis' warnings that capitalism can be "toxic" and "corrupt" and said he is "going to have to scare the Pope" in response to his critique of the free market:I'm gonna have to scare the Pope because it's the only thing ... The Pope, I hope, can only be scared by God. But the truth is -- you know, if you look at what's going on -- they better hope that capitalism works, because it's the only thing we have right now. And it's a great thing when it works properly.
How exactly would Trump "scare" the Pope?
"I'd say, 'ISIS wants to get you,'" Trump told Cuomo. "You know that ISIS wants to go in and take over the Vatican? You have heard that. You know, that's a dream of theirs, to go into Italy."
Trump, a Protestant, said that while Pope Francis had become increasingly political, he has "great respect for the Pope," adding, "I like him. He seems like a pretty good guy."
Josh Duggar’s Ashley Madison account: Celebrity infidelity doesn’t justify the outing of hacked clients
St. Louis police deploy tear gas against protesters in night of unrest over killing of 18-year-old man
ST. LOUIS (AP) -- Officers arrested at least nine people and deployed tear gas amid protests in St. Louis over the death of a black 18-year-old who was fatally shot by police after he pointed a gun at them, the city's police chief said.
Chief Sam Dotson said at a news conference late Wednesday that a group of protesters who had blocked an intersection threw glass bottles and bricks at officers and refused orders to clear the roadway. Inert gas was used and when that had no effect on the crowd, police used tear gas to clear the intersection, Dotson said. Those arrested face charges of impeding the flow of traffic and resisting arrest, he said. A vacant building and at least one car were burned.
The demonstration was one of several Wednesday after the killing of 18-year-old Mansur Ball-Bey of St. Louis. Tensions were already high after violence erupted during events marking the anniversary of the death of Michael Brown, the 18-year-old fatally shot last year by a police officer in nearby Ferguson.
Two police officers serving a search warrant encountered two suspects Wednesday afternoon at a home in a crime-troubled section of the city's north side, one of which was Ball-Bey, the chief said. The suspects were fleeing the home as Ball-Bey, who was black, turned and pointed a handgun at the officers, who shot him, Dotson said. He died at the scene.
Both officers, who are white, were unharmed, according to a police report.
Police are searching for the second suspect, who they said is believed to be in his mid- to late teens.
Dotson said four guns, including the handgun wielded by the dead suspect, and crack cocaine were recovered at or near the home, where illegal guns were found during a police search last year.
Dotson did not say whether the handgun found in the dead man's possession was loaded. Messages seeking comment about that from police were not immediately returned Thursday.
A man and woman inside the home were arrested, Dotson said.
Roughly 150 people gathered Wednesday afternoon near the scene of the shooting, questioning the use of deadly force. Some chanted "Black Lives Matter," a mantra used after Brown's death.
As police removed the yellow tape that cordoned off the scene, dozens of people converged on the home, many chanting insults and gesturing obscenely at officers. Several yelling onlookers surrounded individual officers.
"Another youth down by the hands of police," Dex Dockett, 42, who lives nearby, told a reporter. "What could have been done different to de-escalate rather than escalate? They (police) come in with an us-against-them mentality. You've got to have the right kind of cops to engage in these types of neighborhoods."
Another neighborhood resident, Fred Price, said he was skeptical about Dotson's account that the suspect pointed a gun at officers before being mortally wounded.
"They provoked the situation," Price, 33, said. "Situations like this make us want to keep the police out of the neighborhood. They're shooting first, then asking questions."
The law gives police officers latitude to use deadly force when they feel physically endangered. The Supreme Court held in a 1989 case that the appropriateness of use of force by officers "must be judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene," rather than evaluated through 20/20 hindsight.
That standard is designed to take into account that police officers frequently must make split-second decisions during fast-evolving confrontations, and should not be subject to overly harsh second-guessing. The Justice Department cited that legal threshold earlier this year when it cleared Ferguson officer Darren Wilson in Brown's shooting.
Protests have become a familiar scene across the St. Louis region since Brown, who was black and unarmed, was killed on Aug. 9, 2014. A St. Louis County grand jury and the U.S. Justice Department declined to charge Wilson, who resigned in November.
Some of those who protested Ball-Bey's killing had already spent the morning in downtown St. Louis, marching to mark the anniversary of the fatal police shooting of Kajieme Powell. He was fatally shot by two St. Louis officers after police said he approached them with a knife. Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce is still reviewing the case to determine whether lethal force was justified.
In addition to the nine arrests at the Wednesday night demonstration, officers responded to reports of burglaries in the area and the fire department was called after a car was set ablaze, according to Dotson. He blamed the crimes on people seeking "notoriety" in a neighborhood "plagued by violence."
On Sunday, a 93-year-old veteran who was part of the famed Tuskegee Airmen - the U.S. military's first black aviators - was the victim of two crimes within minutes in the same area. The veteran was robbed and his car was stolen, but he was unhurt. His car was found Tuesday blocks from where it was taken.
ST. LOUIS (AP) -- Officers arrested at least nine people and deployed tear gas amid protests in St. Louis over the death of a black 18-year-old who was fatally shot by police after he pointed a gun at them, the city's police chief said.
Chief Sam Dotson said at a news conference late Wednesday that a group of protesters who had blocked an intersection threw glass bottles and bricks at officers and refused orders to clear the roadway. Inert gas was used and when that had no effect on the crowd, police used tear gas to clear the intersection, Dotson said. Those arrested face charges of impeding the flow of traffic and resisting arrest, he said. A vacant building and at least one car were burned.
The demonstration was one of several Wednesday after the killing of 18-year-old Mansur Ball-Bey of St. Louis. Tensions were already high after violence erupted during events marking the anniversary of the death of Michael Brown, the 18-year-old fatally shot last year by a police officer in nearby Ferguson.
Two police officers serving a search warrant encountered two suspects Wednesday afternoon at a home in a crime-troubled section of the city's north side, one of which was Ball-Bey, the chief said. The suspects were fleeing the home as Ball-Bey, who was black, turned and pointed a handgun at the officers, who shot him, Dotson said. He died at the scene.
Both officers, who are white, were unharmed, according to a police report.
Police are searching for the second suspect, who they said is believed to be in his mid- to late teens.
Dotson said four guns, including the handgun wielded by the dead suspect, and crack cocaine were recovered at or near the home, where illegal guns were found during a police search last year.
Dotson did not say whether the handgun found in the dead man's possession was loaded. Messages seeking comment about that from police were not immediately returned Thursday.
A man and woman inside the home were arrested, Dotson said.
Roughly 150 people gathered Wednesday afternoon near the scene of the shooting, questioning the use of deadly force. Some chanted "Black Lives Matter," a mantra used after Brown's death.
As police removed the yellow tape that cordoned off the scene, dozens of people converged on the home, many chanting insults and gesturing obscenely at officers. Several yelling onlookers surrounded individual officers.
"Another youth down by the hands of police," Dex Dockett, 42, who lives nearby, told a reporter. "What could have been done different to de-escalate rather than escalate? They (police) come in with an us-against-them mentality. You've got to have the right kind of cops to engage in these types of neighborhoods."
Another neighborhood resident, Fred Price, said he was skeptical about Dotson's account that the suspect pointed a gun at officers before being mortally wounded.
"They provoked the situation," Price, 33, said. "Situations like this make us want to keep the police out of the neighborhood. They're shooting first, then asking questions."
The law gives police officers latitude to use deadly force when they feel physically endangered. The Supreme Court held in a 1989 case that the appropriateness of use of force by officers "must be judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene," rather than evaluated through 20/20 hindsight.
That standard is designed to take into account that police officers frequently must make split-second decisions during fast-evolving confrontations, and should not be subject to overly harsh second-guessing. The Justice Department cited that legal threshold earlier this year when it cleared Ferguson officer Darren Wilson in Brown's shooting.
Protests have become a familiar scene across the St. Louis region since Brown, who was black and unarmed, was killed on Aug. 9, 2014. A St. Louis County grand jury and the U.S. Justice Department declined to charge Wilson, who resigned in November.
Some of those who protested Ball-Bey's killing had already spent the morning in downtown St. Louis, marching to mark the anniversary of the fatal police shooting of Kajieme Powell. He was fatally shot by two St. Louis officers after police said he approached them with a knife. Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce is still reviewing the case to determine whether lethal force was justified.
In addition to the nine arrests at the Wednesday night demonstration, officers responded to reports of burglaries in the area and the fire department was called after a car was set ablaze, according to Dotson. He blamed the crimes on people seeking "notoriety" in a neighborhood "plagued by violence."
On Sunday, a 93-year-old veteran who was part of the famed Tuskegee Airmen - the U.S. military's first black aviators - was the victim of two crimes within minutes in the same area. The veteran was robbed and his car was stolen, but he was unhurt. His car was found Tuesday blocks from where it was taken.
ST. LOUIS (AP) -- Officers arrested at least nine people and deployed tear gas amid protests in St. Louis over the death of a black 18-year-old who was fatally shot by police after he pointed a gun at them, the city's police chief said.
Chief Sam Dotson said at a news conference late Wednesday that a group of protesters who had blocked an intersection threw glass bottles and bricks at officers and refused orders to clear the roadway. Inert gas was used and when that had no effect on the crowd, police used tear gas to clear the intersection, Dotson said. Those arrested face charges of impeding the flow of traffic and resisting arrest, he said. A vacant building and at least one car were burned.
The demonstration was one of several Wednesday after the killing of 18-year-old Mansur Ball-Bey of St. Louis. Tensions were already high after violence erupted during events marking the anniversary of the death of Michael Brown, the 18-year-old fatally shot last year by a police officer in nearby Ferguson.
Two police officers serving a search warrant encountered two suspects Wednesday afternoon at a home in a crime-troubled section of the city's north side, one of which was Ball-Bey, the chief said. The suspects were fleeing the home as Ball-Bey, who was black, turned and pointed a handgun at the officers, who shot him, Dotson said. He died at the scene.
Both officers, who are white, were unharmed, according to a police report.
Police are searching for the second suspect, who they said is believed to be in his mid- to late teens.
Dotson said four guns, including the handgun wielded by the dead suspect, and crack cocaine were recovered at or near the home, where illegal guns were found during a police search last year.
Dotson did not say whether the handgun found in the dead man's possession was loaded. Messages seeking comment about that from police were not immediately returned Thursday.
A man and woman inside the home were arrested, Dotson said.
Roughly 150 people gathered Wednesday afternoon near the scene of the shooting, questioning the use of deadly force. Some chanted "Black Lives Matter," a mantra used after Brown's death.
As police removed the yellow tape that cordoned off the scene, dozens of people converged on the home, many chanting insults and gesturing obscenely at officers. Several yelling onlookers surrounded individual officers.
"Another youth down by the hands of police," Dex Dockett, 42, who lives nearby, told a reporter. "What could have been done different to de-escalate rather than escalate? They (police) come in with an us-against-them mentality. You've got to have the right kind of cops to engage in these types of neighborhoods."
Another neighborhood resident, Fred Price, said he was skeptical about Dotson's account that the suspect pointed a gun at officers before being mortally wounded.
"They provoked the situation," Price, 33, said. "Situations like this make us want to keep the police out of the neighborhood. They're shooting first, then asking questions."
The law gives police officers latitude to use deadly force when they feel physically endangered. The Supreme Court held in a 1989 case that the appropriateness of use of force by officers "must be judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene," rather than evaluated through 20/20 hindsight.
That standard is designed to take into account that police officers frequently must make split-second decisions during fast-evolving confrontations, and should not be subject to overly harsh second-guessing. The Justice Department cited that legal threshold earlier this year when it cleared Ferguson officer Darren Wilson in Brown's shooting.
Protests have become a familiar scene across the St. Louis region since Brown, who was black and unarmed, was killed on Aug. 9, 2014. A St. Louis County grand jury and the U.S. Justice Department declined to charge Wilson, who resigned in November.
Some of those who protested Ball-Bey's killing had already spent the morning in downtown St. Louis, marching to mark the anniversary of the fatal police shooting of Kajieme Powell. He was fatally shot by two St. Louis officers after police said he approached them with a knife. Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce is still reviewing the case to determine whether lethal force was justified.
In addition to the nine arrests at the Wednesday night demonstration, officers responded to reports of burglaries in the area and the fire department was called after a car was set ablaze, according to Dotson. He blamed the crimes on people seeking "notoriety" in a neighborhood "plagued by violence."
On Sunday, a 93-year-old veteran who was part of the famed Tuskegee Airmen - the U.S. military's first black aviators - was the victim of two crimes within minutes in the same area. The veteran was robbed and his car was stolen, but he was unhurt. His car was found Tuesday blocks from where it was taken.
ST. LOUIS (AP) -- Officers arrested at least nine people and deployed tear gas amid protests in St. Louis over the death of a black 18-year-old who was fatally shot by police after he pointed a gun at them, the city's police chief said.
Chief Sam Dotson said at a news conference late Wednesday that a group of protesters who had blocked an intersection threw glass bottles and bricks at officers and refused orders to clear the roadway. Inert gas was used and when that had no effect on the crowd, police used tear gas to clear the intersection, Dotson said. Those arrested face charges of impeding the flow of traffic and resisting arrest, he said. A vacant building and at least one car were burned.
The demonstration was one of several Wednesday after the killing of 18-year-old Mansur Ball-Bey of St. Louis. Tensions were already high after violence erupted during events marking the anniversary of the death of Michael Brown, the 18-year-old fatally shot last year by a police officer in nearby Ferguson.
Two police officers serving a search warrant encountered two suspects Wednesday afternoon at a home in a crime-troubled section of the city's north side, one of which was Ball-Bey, the chief said. The suspects were fleeing the home as Ball-Bey, who was black, turned and pointed a handgun at the officers, who shot him, Dotson said. He died at the scene.
Both officers, who are white, were unharmed, according to a police report.
Police are searching for the second suspect, who they said is believed to be in his mid- to late teens.
Dotson said four guns, including the handgun wielded by the dead suspect, and crack cocaine were recovered at or near the home, where illegal guns were found during a police search last year.
Dotson did not say whether the handgun found in the dead man's possession was loaded. Messages seeking comment about that from police were not immediately returned Thursday.
A man and woman inside the home were arrested, Dotson said.
Roughly 150 people gathered Wednesday afternoon near the scene of the shooting, questioning the use of deadly force. Some chanted "Black Lives Matter," a mantra used after Brown's death.
As police removed the yellow tape that cordoned off the scene, dozens of people converged on the home, many chanting insults and gesturing obscenely at officers. Several yelling onlookers surrounded individual officers.
"Another youth down by the hands of police," Dex Dockett, 42, who lives nearby, told a reporter. "What could have been done different to de-escalate rather than escalate? They (police) come in with an us-against-them mentality. You've got to have the right kind of cops to engage in these types of neighborhoods."
Another neighborhood resident, Fred Price, said he was skeptical about Dotson's account that the suspect pointed a gun at officers before being mortally wounded.
"They provoked the situation," Price, 33, said. "Situations like this make us want to keep the police out of the neighborhood. They're shooting first, then asking questions."
The law gives police officers latitude to use deadly force when they feel physically endangered. The Supreme Court held in a 1989 case that the appropriateness of use of force by officers "must be judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene," rather than evaluated through 20/20 hindsight.
That standard is designed to take into account that police officers frequently must make split-second decisions during fast-evolving confrontations, and should not be subject to overly harsh second-guessing. The Justice Department cited that legal threshold earlier this year when it cleared Ferguson officer Darren Wilson in Brown's shooting.
Protests have become a familiar scene across the St. Louis region since Brown, who was black and unarmed, was killed on Aug. 9, 2014. A St. Louis County grand jury and the U.S. Justice Department declined to charge Wilson, who resigned in November.
Some of those who protested Ball-Bey's killing had already spent the morning in downtown St. Louis, marching to mark the anniversary of the fatal police shooting of Kajieme Powell. He was fatally shot by two St. Louis officers after police said he approached them with a knife. Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce is still reviewing the case to determine whether lethal force was justified.
In addition to the nine arrests at the Wednesday night demonstration, officers responded to reports of burglaries in the area and the fire department was called after a car was set ablaze, according to Dotson. He blamed the crimes on people seeking "notoriety" in a neighborhood "plagued by violence."
On Sunday, a 93-year-old veteran who was part of the famed Tuskegee Airmen - the U.S. military's first black aviators - was the victim of two crimes within minutes in the same area. The veteran was robbed and his car was stolen, but he was unhurt. His car was found Tuesday blocks from where it was taken.
White America needs to wake up: Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders & the unacknowledged crimes of American justice
“Certainly, if the problem is to be solved then in the final sense, hearts must be changed. Religion and education must play a great role in changing the heart. But we must go on to say that while it may be true that morality cannot be legislated, behavior can be regulated. It may be true that the law cannot change the heart but it can restrain the heartless. It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me but it can keep him from lynching me and I think that is pretty important, also.”Feelings matter for politics. And if “white hearts” don’t change, they are always capable of reconfiguring systems to maintain white hegemony. Moreover, I think when Black millennial voters continue to express their hesitancy about voting, that part of their desire for measures that fully overhaul the current system has to do with a fundamental distrust of white politicians and their white constituents. The Black Lives Matter movement engages white people in terms of whether they have personally grappled with their own white privilege. It counts as co-conspirators and allies those white people who are willing to call out the problems among other white people. White people who have not grappled with the ways they are beneficiaries of white supremacy or white people who revel in the singularity of their status as anti-racists (meaning they are unwilling to go back and challenge other white people) are viewed as suspect and, ultimately, as a liability. Hillary Clinton conceded to the Boston BLM leaders that their mistrust and skepticism are “historically fair,” “psychologically fair,” and “economically fair.” She also conceded that for the most part we should not expect “white hearts” to change. Thus she sounds a King-ian note when calling for legislation, sanctions and systemic changes to do what moral suasion cannot do. The problem is that nearly 50 years after the death of King, young Black people are not convinced that changing systems and laws without changing social consciousness will fix the problem either. For instance, in White v. Crook (1966), a U.S. District Court in Alabama struck down the all white, all male jury system after Black residents of Lowndes County, Ala., challenged the processes by which women in particular were excluded from participation on juries. Two of the attorneys for the plaintiffs were famed white feminist legal scholar Dorothy Kenyon and Black feminist legal scholar Pauli Murray. Nearly 50 years later, a sweeping new study has emerged to suggest that in Alabama, North Carolina, Louisiana and Georgia, prosecutors strike Black jurors from juries at “double or triple the rates” of other citizens. In Shreveport, Louisiana, Blacks are struck from juries at three times the rate of anyone else. Only 25 percent of jurors in Caddo Parish, where Shreveport is located, are Black, but the population is between 44 percent and 48 percent Black, and the town now has its second Black mayor. One of my two hometowns, Shreveport sends the most Black men to death row of any district in the United States, and is located in a state that incarcerates more people per capita than anywhere in the world. Having diverse and representative juries becomes critical in this context. The acquittal rates of Black defendants arise by several percentage points based upon how many Black people sit on juries. If fewer than 2 Black people are jurors, there are no acquittals of Black defendants. When the number rises to 3 jurors, the acquittal rate goes up to 12 percent. When the number is 5 or more, the acquittal rate goes to 19 percent. One could read this and conclude that Black people are biased toward Black defendants. That may be true. But these numbers also suggest that white people are roundly biased against Black defendants. The New York Times reporting on this study found that use of peremptory challenges by Shreveport prosecutors was particularly troubling. In one case, a Black man with dreadlocks was struck from the jury because the defendant in the case also had dreadlocks. Surely, the same hairy logic does not apply to white jurors and defendants. By contrast, a white woman who indicated that she would not challenge her jury peers if they made racially prejudiced remarks during deliberations was not struck from the jury. White v. Crook was viewed at the time as a broad corrective to a a jury system that had been a farce for African-Americans in the first half of the 20th century. But five decades later, African-Americans in Southern locales are still routinely excluded from jury service for a range of reasons that appear on the surface to be “race-neutral,” as one Shreveport prosecutor described his challenges. But there can be no “race-neutral” politics of jury selection in a place like Caddo Parish, which was widely considered one of the most violent counties in the country after the Civil War because of high rates of lynching. The Black Strikes study of its jury selection practices indicates that many of those practices were codified in the late 19th century in the same exact period that strange fruit swung from Parish trees on the regular. And to add insult to irony (and injury), a Confederate Memorial sits in front of the Caddo Parish courthouse. Perhaps this is what Hillary Clinton means when she assesses the concerns of the Movement for Black Lives as historically fair. And the latest data on the wealth gap certainly make clear that Black Lives Matter demands are economically fair. Another new study has found that “from 1992 to 2013, the median net worth of blacks who finished college dropped nearly 56 percent (adjusted for inflation). By comparison, the median net worth of whites with college degrees rose about 86 percent over the same period, which included three recessions.” So even when Black people go to college or try to do their civic duty and serve on juries, justice, whether social or economic, eludes them. At the same time, the mounting evidence of structural racism still has not managed to sway a significant swath of the white population. Candidates on the left are therefore going to have to find the sweet spot between calling for white people’s hearts and minds to change and doing the work of transforming systems. Bernie Sanders seems to have caught on, and has released a broad racial justice platform that talks about the need for system-wide transformation, an end to privatized prisons, re-enfranchisement of ex-felons, and sweeping policing reform. But none of these candidates on the left have yet managed to capture the hearts of young Black (potential) voters who keep shutting down their events. Many movement sympathizers of all races have expressed frustration with the strategy of the Movers, wondering what the point of challenging candidates is if they don’t believe in voting or don’t think the system can change. But I think we have to go back to the question of trust and changing hearts. The real question is “Can and will White people change?” It’s an uncomfortable question, because change means relinquishing power and privilege. Change means that white people have to stop thinking of the value of life as a zero-sum matter, as I heard one social media commenter put it recently. But Hillary Clinton only recently began to affirm that Black Lives Matter. Her initial, gut response was to proclaim that “All lives matter.” That she now says "Black lives" feels like equivocation to both supporters and detractors. And while her deflection about the necessity of legislation is not untrue, it is a convenient truth that allowed her to deflect from having to address the inconvenient truth about her own initial defensiveness to the proposition that Black Lives Matter. When White people say “All lives matter,” they betray a troubling belief that affirming the value of one group’s life diminishes the value of “all lives,” or more specifically white lives. This zero-sum calculus fails to acknowledge that white lives already have more value in the system. The way that juries are rigged to disproportionately convict Black defendants is just one example of how white lives are used to systematically disempower and devalue Black life. But more troublingly, we should all sit with the fact that white lives might actually have surplus value in the system -- by which I mean, they simply have more than their fair share of value. We could call it surfeit value (or excess value, if the Marxist terminology is off-putting). To be clear, every life is of inestimable value. But the point is, if some lives are overvalued, others are undervalued. So if white lives have surplus value, Black lives have depreciating value. Consider the way that pro-life advocates have taken to the cause of advocating for unborn Black children as their version of a racial justice program. Yet, when these children are born, they become victims of a set of anti-Black social structures predicated on the devaluing of Black life. Like cars, the value of Black lives depreciates as soon as you “drive them off the lot,” or birth them from the womb, as it were. Under a system of white supremacy, white people experience calls for social equality as a devaluing of white life, rather than as a necessary systematic recalibration of structures so that all lives matter equally. To do this, we don't make white lives matter less. We make Black lives matter more. Because the value of white life remains the measuring stick for the value of all lives, white people have to resolve not to see the rising value of other lives as a diminishing of their own value. And that requires a change of heart. The Movement is calling for a change of hearts and minds. Its call is rooted in the recognition that we don’t just live within systems; systems live within us, and those systems determine how we make meaning and value out of the world and people around us. Ultimately, those Movers who vote may vote for the candidate with the best articulated platform for racial justice. But until that time, they are going to be looking for leaders who honestly and sincerely get down to the heart of the matter.
Tig Notaro explains why she went topless for her new HBO special: “I was being heckled by my own brain”
Jeb’s Kasich jitters: Bush campaign getting increasingly nervous as Ohio governor picks up steam
A late entrant, Kasich is winning buzzed-about endorsements and has shot up in the polls here amid a multimillion-dollar ad campaign by his allied super PAC, New Day for America. Over the past week, two important members of Romney’s New Hampshire team — senior adviser Tom Rath and former state House speaker Doug Scamman — have signed on with Kasich. [...] Aides at Bush headquarters in Miami have been researching Kasich’s background, including the many votes he cast as a member of Congress, and are pitching reporters on negative stories about him. So-called opposition research is a staple of most campaigns, but it is telling that Kasich is now under the Bush team’s microscope. Some major Bush donors quietly have reached out to the Kasich team in recent days to learn more about the Ohio governor and express interest in possibly supporting him, according to Republicans familiar with the conversations.A spokesperson for New Day for America, the super PAC supporting Kasich, confirmed to Fox News that several Bush donors had been in contact with the organization in recent days but declined to elaborate. Kasich’s campaign manager, John Weaver, told Politico last week that "he received two calls from New Hampshire journalists who claimed they had received opposition research from the Bush camp," although the Bush campaign denies the allegation. Following the first debate in Kasich's backyard of Cleveland, Ohio, the Governor has seen his standing in the polls improve despite being one of the latest entrants in the crowded field while Bush has seen his second place standing hardly hold steadfast as political neophyte Ben Carson creeps ahead in many national polls. But it may more than Bush's troubling poll numbers that has some in his circle of support worried -- Bush's performance on the campaign trail is hardly inspiring. Take for example, this week's education summit in New Hampshire that put both moderates on the hot seat as the only two candidates who support the deeply unpopular (for the conservative Republican primary base) Common Core. Bush displayed a clear unease with an issue his campaign surely anticipated while Kasich effortlessly shrugged off criticism with confidence and ease:
Common Core. “What’s that?” former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush joked Wednesday. Appearing at an education summit in New Hampshire, Bush and fellow Republican presidential contender Ohio Gov. John Kasich were both asked about their support for the controversial K-12 standards. Kasich took a blunter tone than Bush, saying they were “pretty good” and “I’m not going to change my position because there are four people in the front row yelling at me. I just don’t operate that way.”A Boston Herald/Franklin Pierce University poll released earlier this month found Kasich in third place with 12 percent of the vote, just one percentage point behind Bush and six points behind frontrunner Trump, who pounded Bush at a dueling New Hampshire town hall last night.
Original “Straight Outta Compton” script included Dr. Dre’s assault of Dee Barnes
In the scene, the fictional Dre, “eyes glazed, drunk, with an edge of nastiness, contempt” (per noted from the script) spots Barnes at the party and approaches her. “Saw that [expletive] you did with Cube. Really had you under his spell, huh? Ate up everything he said. Let him diss us. Sell us out.” “I just let him tell his story,” Barnes’ character retorts, “That’s what I do. It’s my job.” “I thought we were cool, you and me,” Dre fires back. “But you don’t give a [expletive]. You just wanna laugh at N.W.A, make us all look like fools.” The conversation escalates, Barnes throws her drink in Dre’s face before he attacks her “flinging her around like a rag-doll, while she screams, cries, begs for him to stop.”Defending his choice not to include the scene in the film at a Q&A a few days ago, director F. Gary Gray said they "couldn't fit everything into the movie” and he wanted to focus on stories that "served the narrative.” Whether Dr. Dre’s producer credit also helped impact the direction of the narrative is, at this point, merely a source of speculation.
August 19, 2015
Shannen Doherty says insurance negligence allowed her invasive breast cancer to spread
In L.A. court Wednesday, "Beverly Hills 90201” star Shannen Doherty revealed that she has invasive breast cancer that she says went untreated due to a lack of insurance.
Doherty is suing Tanner Mainstain Glynn & Johnston, a business management firm who was tasked with paying out her Screen Actors Guild medical insurance premiums. According to the suit, the company neglected to pay her insurance premiums during 2014, so she was unable to visit a doctor during this time, as she normally would have done.
When she finally got her insurance back this year, the actress discovered that she had invasive breast cancer that had metastatized to her lymph nodes.
“Plaintiff was informed that her cancer had spread during 2014 (when she was not insured),” the lawsuit continues. "Plaintiff was also informed that, had she been insured and able to visit her doctor, the cancer could potentially have been stopped, thus obviating the need for future treatment (including mastectomy and chemotherapy) that Plaintiff will likely have to suffer through now.”
The suit alleges another a series of other grievances, including "strange and unexplained" use of funds, overcharging of professional fees and negligence. "After gaining control of all of their clients' cash and assets, they find a way to lose it, sometimes by gross incompetence, sometimes by self-dealing and outright theft. Along the way, they habitually deceive their clients, going so far as to set up bogus transactions, to conceal their misdeeds, errors and omissions. The firm has hallmarks of a Ponzi scheme,” the suit claims. Doherty is seeking an unspecified amount in damages.
In L.A. court Wednesday, "Beverly Hills 90201” star Shannen Doherty revealed that she has invasive breast cancer that she says went untreated due to a lack of insurance.
Doherty is suing Tanner Mainstain Glynn & Johnston, a business management firm who was tasked with paying out her Screen Actors Guild medical insurance premiums. According to the suit, the company neglected to pay her insurance premiums during 2014, so she was unable to visit a doctor during this time, as she normally would have done.
When she finally got her insurance back this year, the actress discovered that she had invasive breast cancer that had metastatized to her lymph nodes.
“Plaintiff was informed that her cancer had spread during 2014 (when she was not insured),” the lawsuit continues. "Plaintiff was also informed that, had she been insured and able to visit her doctor, the cancer could potentially have been stopped, thus obviating the need for future treatment (including mastectomy and chemotherapy) that Plaintiff will likely have to suffer through now.”
The suit alleges another a series of other grievances, including "strange and unexplained" use of funds, overcharging of professional fees and negligence. "After gaining control of all of their clients' cash and assets, they find a way to lose it, sometimes by gross incompetence, sometimes by self-dealing and outright theft. Along the way, they habitually deceive their clients, going so far as to set up bogus transactions, to conceal their misdeeds, errors and omissions. The firm has hallmarks of a Ponzi scheme,” the suit claims. Doherty is seeking an unspecified amount in damages.
In L.A. court Wednesday, "Beverly Hills 90201” star Shannen Doherty revealed that she has invasive breast cancer that she says went untreated due to a lack of insurance.
Doherty is suing Tanner Mainstain Glynn & Johnston, a business management firm who was tasked with paying out her Screen Actors Guild medical insurance premiums. According to the suit, the company neglected to pay her insurance premiums during 2014, so she was unable to visit a doctor during this time, as she normally would have done.
When she finally got her insurance back this year, the actress discovered that she had invasive breast cancer that had metastatized to her lymph nodes.
“Plaintiff was informed that her cancer had spread during 2014 (when she was not insured),” the lawsuit continues. "Plaintiff was also informed that, had she been insured and able to visit her doctor, the cancer could potentially have been stopped, thus obviating the need for future treatment (including mastectomy and chemotherapy) that Plaintiff will likely have to suffer through now.”
The suit alleges another a series of other grievances, including "strange and unexplained" use of funds, overcharging of professional fees and negligence. "After gaining control of all of their clients' cash and assets, they find a way to lose it, sometimes by gross incompetence, sometimes by self-dealing and outright theft. Along the way, they habitually deceive their clients, going so far as to set up bogus transactions, to conceal their misdeeds, errors and omissions. The firm has hallmarks of a Ponzi scheme,” the suit claims. Doherty is seeking an unspecified amount in damages.
Rise & fall of the anti-Trumps: Why these GOP pretenders don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell
She has had to warn repeatedly of disappointing results. In the nine months to July, HP saw its net profit fall by 82%, to $506m. The company has slashed costs and asked staff to volunteer for a temporary 10% pay cut.(3) The merger was only approved by a razor-thin margin, as a result of unethical dealings by Fiorina to pressure shareholders for support. Sonnenfeld provides a succinct summary of the messier details collected at Political Correction, including how Fiorina used Deutsche Bank’s commercial bankers to pressure the purportedly independent Deutsche Bank fund managers to reverse their vote of 17 million shares against the deal. One thing Sonnenfeld leaves out: the SEC imposed a $750,000 fine on Deutsche Bank’s investment unit “for failing to disclose a material conflict of interest in its voting of client proxies for the 2002 merger.” (4) HP kept billions in profits overseas, to avoid paying US taxes:
By the end of its 2003 fiscal year, Hewlett-Packard Co. had "indefinitely" deferred taxation on $14.4 billion of foreign earnings, according to SEC filings, a move that helped lower its effective tax rate from the statutory corporate income tax rate of 35 percent to 12 percent.Other companies did this, too, but HP went even farther, joining a smaller group of companies who knowingly circumvent US law (via Dubai, and other cut-out nests) to sell its products into Iran. Yes, Iran! Although HP began the practice before Fiorina took over, it flourished under her. In short, there’s more than enough in Fiorina’s record to sink three or four “anti-Hillary” dream candidates. But there’s so much wrong with her, it can be challenging to organize it coherently. Fortunately, there’s a cure for that. A deeply thoughtful, focused critique of Fiorina’s leadership tenure at HP, which should be required reading for any journalist covering her, comes from Craig Johnson's article in the Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies, “The Rise and Fall of Carly Fiorina: An Ethical Case Study.” Johnson uses a framework known as the ethical leadership construct, and finds fault with HP’s board as well as Fiorina—a clear signal of a serious study, not a hit job. The ethical leadership construct has two main aspects: first, “the demonstration of normatively appropriate conduct through personal actions and interpersonal relationships,” and second, “the promotion of such conduct to followers through two-way communication, reinforcement, and decision-making.” Fiorina’s clash with “The HP Way” figures prominently in Johnson’s account, so it’s worth noting that while Fiorina arrived during trying times for HP, which became her pretext for the attack, this was not the first time HP had known hard times. The concluding passage of a contemporary account in the Palo Alto Weekly, began thus:
Some have argued it is easier for a company to promote a strong corporate culture when times are good. And, conversely, that in rough times, companies don't have the luxury of adhering to core values. But those who lived through decades of the HP Way would disagree, pointing out that some of the most trying times in the company's history were also the times when the HP Way was demonstrated most clearly. In fact, Stanford emeritus professor Jerry Porras wrote in his book, "Built to Last," that a strong, almost "cult-like" culture is one of the factors contributing to the overall financial success of visionary companies.Johnson describes Fiorina as an “ethically neutral” leader, according to the dictates of the construct, but in the end he questions whether this category is really valid. Fiorina’s focus on results, regardless of how they were achieved, had a truly toxic effect. They lead to billing practices at Lucent sales, where she served before HP, which included financing purchases by customers with no clear ability to pay—a variation on the subprime mortgage theme. When customers went under as the dot-com bubble burst, the results proved catastrophic for the company Fiorina had left behind:
Unethical sales practices were a major contributor to Lucent’s financial woes. By late 2002, 100,000 employees were laid off and its stock sank to $1. The SEC accused Lucent of improperly booking $1.1 billion in revenue in 2002.In short, disastrous as Fiorina’s tenure at HP was, she’s fortunate that it distracts people from her even more destructive record at Lucent. But the broader point is that such a results-only focus is deeply damaging to a whole corporate culture, even when less overtly toxic. He explains:
The experience of Carly Fiorina demonstrates that, when it comes to moral management, there is no neutral ground. Unethical leaders actively promote immoral behavior; ethically neutral leaders foster unethical organizational climates through neglect.This was Fiorina’s legacy. In the discussion section, he summarizes:
Fiorina acted as an ethically neutral leader who gained a reputation for being self-centered. She was perceived as lacking compassion, integrity, and humility. Her focus on the bottom line and individual rewards weakened the firm’s ethical culture.It’s ironic that “character” used to be the conservative’s favorite club for bashing progressives, and crafting an individualistic narrative that downplayed or ignored systemic factors. Nowadays, its conservatives whose character defects are most glaring, and most directly related to the larger social problems we face as a nation. Compared to Fiorina, the problems with Ben Carson are relatively easy to grasp: He’s yet another example of a “black conservative” superstar who’s dramatically out-of-touch with the vast majority of black America—and thus the perfect vehicle for white conservatives to diss African-Americans as an entire people, while at the same time pretending not to be racist. What’s particularly notable about the “black conservative” superstar is his denial of racism, a central example of how his thinking reflects the white conservative audience he plays to, and how alien he is to the actual black conservative tradition, dating back to its origins with Booker T. Washington. While white conservatives seeking a “some of my best friends are black people” figure find this deeply appealing, everyone else should not: The fact that Carson is profoundly out of touch with the vast majority of people whose lives, concerns, hopes, fears, and aspirations he should be most in tune with makes him even more ill-suited to lead any broader polity. It's true that unlike others, such as Hermain Cain or Allen Keyes, Carson’s distinguished career as a neurosurgeon has earned him broad respect in the black community. But that only makes his recent emergence as a darling of white conservatives all the more painful in many quarters. In May, Pulitzer Prize-winner Cynthia Tucker Haynes analyzed the situation expertly in a piece bluntly titled, “Ben Carson Is In Danger Of Losing All Respect.” She began by noting that Carson has a diverse legion of admirers over his decades-long career as a brain surgeon, and rightly so:
His story is the stuff of legend, the awe-inspiring tale of a poor black boy in Detroit who overcame daunting obstacles and vaulted to the very top of his profession. Given that his profession was pediatric neurosurgery, black Americans were particularly proud. Carson, who was the first surgeon to successfully separate conjoined twins attached at the head, stood as stark repudiation of invidious stereotypes about black intellectual capacity. His memoir, Gifted Hands, has been passed through countless black households.But then she warns that Carson’s presidential run puts all of this at risk, threatening "to become his epitaph,” overshadowing all that he has achieved:
He will likely be remembered as the GOP’s latest black mascot, a court jester, a minstrel show. He’ll be the Herman Cain of 2016.She notes that Carson has no chance of winning the GOP nomination, but is a darling of hardcore conservatives. It may be unfathomable why Carson is running, but it’s painfully clear where his popularity with the white conservative base comes from:
Carson catapulted to stardom in the ultraconservative firmament in 2013, when he addressed the National Prayer Breakfast with a speech in which he lashed out at the Affordable Care Act as President Obama sat nearby. Though the breakfast has a long history of nonpartisanship, Carson chose to criticize many of the policies that the president supports, including progressive taxation. That was enough to cause conservatives to swoon. Since Obama’s election, Republicans have been sensitive to charges that their small tent of aging voters has become a bastion of white resentment, a cauldron of bigotry, nativism and fear of the other. They want to show that their fierce resistance to all things Obama has nothing to do with race. That promotes a special affection for black conservatives who are willing to viciously criticize the president. As with Cain before him, Carson garners the most enthusiastic cheers from conservative audiences when he’s excoriating Obama, the most rapturous applause when he seems to absolve them of charges of bigotry. Why would Carson trade on his reputation to become their token?There really is no good answer to this. “He grew up Seventh-Day Adventist, a conservative religious tradition,” Haynes writes, and he has adopted the white conservative view “that black Democrats give short shrift to traditional values such as thrift, hard work and sacrifice.” But then she points out that “Carson hardly represents the long and honorable tradition of black conservatism in America,” which has always “had a healthy appreciation for the reality of racism in America,” whereas Carson has compared Obamacare to slavery. More generally, she notes, “black conservatism has promoted self-reliance, but it hasn’t been a font of right-wing intolerance and know-nothingism.” And so we are ultimately left with an enigma. There is no clear logic as to why Carson would put his reputation so at risk. But the reason he’s as competitive in the race as he is? That much is crystal clear: It’s a powerful way for today’s crop of racists to portray themselves as totally free of racism. The more fervently they embrace him, the more they prove their claim is a lie. It is worth noting that before he became a conservative icon, Carson had some distinctly heretical views. In a 2009 interview with Mega Diversities, Carson said:
"The first thing that we have to recognize is that in the US we spend twice as much per capita for health care as the next closest nation…. The entire thing is completely out of control. The entire concept of for profits for the insurance companies makes absolutely no sense. 'I deny that you need care and I will make more money.' This is totally ridiculous. The first thing we need to do is get rid of for profit insurance companies. We have a lack of policies and we need to make the government responsible for catastrophic health care. We have to make the insurance companies responsible only for routine health care.If this doesn’t quite put him in Bernie Sanders territory, it surely puts him to the left of Obama. Now, of course, he’s compared Obamacare to slavery. And conservative plaudits have followed. The day after the Prayer Breakfast speech in 2013, the Wall Street Journal ran an editorial, “Ben Carson for President,” Two weeks after the Prayer Breakfast speech in 2013, a Media Matters post, “Ben Carson's Moment,” marked the unfolding dynamic:
Dr. Benjamin Carson is the latest in a long line of black conservatives -- from Clarence Thomas to Herman Cain -- relentlessly promoted and propped up by right-wing voices in the media. After Carson used a speech at the National Prayer Breakfast in front of President Obama to trumpet conservative arguments about economics and health care, News Corp. properties rushed to anoint him as the newest political "star." Fox News and Fox Business hosted Carson eight times in the days following his speech, and he has been praised by Fox personalities as a courageous leader who is "saving America" and by the Wall Street Journal in an editorial headlined, "Ben Carson For President."What made Carson “presidential” were two 1990s-era ideas Carson trotted out: medical savings accounts, and a flat tax. A year later, in April 2014, a Media Matters post by Oliver Willis ran down “6 Things You Should Know About Conservative Media Darling Dr. Ben Carson,” which remains a good introductory guide. Two tendencies appeared in these examples: First, Carson’s sweeping acts of moral judgment, reducing complex, contentious issues to simplistic matters of good versus evil. Second, his reflexive tendency to blame-shift, a key underpinning of all conservative victimhood narratives, also present in his invocation of slavery (as in “Obamacare, worse than”), a common thread in conservative blame-shifting narratives around race and claims of moral authority. Over time, Carson has absorbed more and more of conventional rightwing narratives, and repeatedly boiled them down into these two formulas. Good-vs-evil narratives are commonly focused around abortion, as seen most recently in the deceitful videos used to try to defund Planned Parenthood. Carson’s recent involvement produced a deep unexpected contradiction, when Dr. Jen Gunter, an OB/GYN and a pain medicine physician, revealed on her blog that despite his categorical condemnations of fetal tissue research, Carson had actually done such research himself, citing a paper he published in 1992 (“Ben Carson did research on 17 week fetal tissue”). The contrast between Carson’s sweeping dogmatic certitude and Gunter’s detail-oriented, nuanced view of complex issues can be vividly illustrated by quoting the first three paragraphs of her post:
Dr. Ben Carson, GOP nominee hopeful, told Fox’s Megyn Kelly that “There’s nothing that can’t be done without fetal tissue” and that the benefits of fetal tissue have been “over promised” and the results have “very much under-delivered.” Carson also said, “At 17 weeks, you’ve got a nice little nose and little fingers and hands and the heart’s beating. It can respond to environmental stimulus. How can you believe that that’s just a[n] irrelevant mass of cells? That’s what they want you to believe, when in fact it is a human being.” Dr. Carson, like everyone, is entitled to an opinion no matter how wrong, What he says doesn’t change the fact that fetal tissue plays a vital role in medical research. For example it is being used to develop a vaccine against Ebola. Many researchers depend on fetal tissue to understand and hopefully develop treatment for a myriad of conditions from blindness to HIV. Without fetal tissue neurosciences research, something essential for the development of neurosurgical techniques, would be far less developed. Dr. Carson should be intimately aware of this fact.When the Washington Post interviewed Carson about his research the next day, Gunter posted a followup, "Ben Carson has still not answered the right questions about his fetal tissue research," in which she wrote:
Defending his work, he told David Weigel, “If you’re killing babies and taking the tissue, that’s a very different thing than taking a dead specimen and keeping a record of it.” But the tissue he used was from an abortion. That is what the Materials section says. It doesn’t say when but it says what. That abortion might have happened 10 years before and it is true the tissue could have been retrieved from a tissue bank and so not obtained for his specific study, but how exactly does Dr. Carson think it got into the tissue bank in the first place? His response makes no sense at all.The incoherence of Carson’s response was noted here at Salon by Simon Maloy:
I’ve read through Carson’s statement several times and I’m still not entirely sure what he is trying to say. Thankfully, I don’t seem to be the only person who is baffled by his attempt at explaining this. The Post’s Amber Phillips writes that Carson seems to be alleging that Planned Parenthood is performing abortions specifically so that fetal tissue will be available for medical research, but that’s an allegation that “Planned Parenthood has flatly rejected and isn’t proven by the videos.” At the very least, Carson is trapped in an inconsistency and he’s having a great deal of difficulty explaining it. And while that doesn’t make Carson look particularly good, his involvement with fetal tissue research and his tortured defense of it also cause problems for the other candidates and conservatives who are trying to demagogue the issue.The problem with trying to pretend science is on your side when it isn’t—which is part of Carson’s over-all appeal—is that it inadvertently makes your ridiculous anti-science claims subject to a stickier kind of scrutiny than anti-science liars are accustomed to dealing with. As Maloy goes on to observe, “It’s tough to make the political case that the donation of fetal tissue for medical research is un-American and potentially criminal when celebrated physician and conservative hero Ben Carson is complicit in the act.” But then it gets even worse, Maloy notes, as “Carson’s defense of his involvement with that research ended up turning into a broader defense of fetal tissue research and the role it has played in advancing medical science,” ultimately articulating “a compelling moral case for fetal tissue research, and it’s coming from a Republican presidential candidate.” Ouch! To misquote Talking Heads, “This is not my beautiful black conservative superstar.” No, not at all. In contrast to Fiorina and Carson, Kaisich is a tried-and-tested politician. His number one problem is that—contrary to the popular “base vs donor” narrative—his style of practical, let’s-get-something-done conservatism is no more popular with the donor class than it is with the activist conservative base. The signature—but by no means sole—example of this was reported by Politico:
Kasich’s temper has made it harder to endear himself to the GOP’s wealthy benefactors. Last year, he traveled to Southern California to appear on a panel at a conference sponsored by the Republican mega-donors Charles and David Koch. At one point, according to accounts provided by two sources present, Randy Kendrick, a major contributor and the wife of Ken Kendrick, the owner of the Arizona Diamondbacks, rose to say she disagreed with Kasich’s decision to expand Medicaid coverage, and questioned why he’d expressed the view it was what God wanted. The governor’s response was fiery. “I don’t know about you, lady,” he said as he pointed at Kendrick, his voice rising. “But when I get to the pearly gates, I’m going to have an answer for what I’ve done for the poor.” The exchange left many stunned. About 20 audience members walked out of the room, and two governors also on the panel, Nikki Haley of South Carolina and Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, told Kasich they disagreed with him. The Ohio governor has not been invited back to a Koch seminar — opportunities for presidential aspirants to mingle with the party’s rich and powerful — in the months since.While Politico framed this in terms of temper, it’s hard to imagine any tone Kasich could have taken to get that crowd to swallow his serving of “compassionate conservatism.” Conservatives today simply don’t believe in that anymore—well, except for Donald, perhaps. But he’s not a “real conservative” after all. But even if Kasich could somehow jump that impossibly high hurdle, there’s another problem he’ll have to face sooner or later, and that’s his decidedly mediocre economic record as governor. In June, the Columbus Dispatch reported, "Ohio’s economy strongest among Great Lakes states but lags U.S." Specifically, Ohio’s economy grew by 2.1% compared to 2.2% for the US as a whole last year. “Ohio’s growth rate was the 18th best in the country last year,” meaning a third of the nation’s governors can claim a better record than Kasich. But it gets worse. When it comes to jobs, Ohio is still well below its pre-recession high. As of May 2015, Ohio had just 96.4% of the jobs it had pre-recession, while the Midwest as a whole stood at 99%, and the national total topped 102.2%. Looked at another way, since Kasich took office, jobs are up 3.86% compared to 4.61% in the Midwest as a whole and 6.23% nationwide. As I’ve written about before Ohio under Kasich is mired in cronyism just like many other GOP-run states on the economic development front:
Months after after winning his gubernatorial bid in 2010, Ohio Gov. John Kasich signed his very first bill into law, replacing the state’s development department with a 501(c)(3) nonprofit called JobsOhio that would “move at the speed of business.” Critics slam JobsOhio for a lack of transparency. Although nearly all of its revenue comes from state liquor profits, JobsOhio is exempt from public records laws, its annual disclosures to the Ohio Ethics Commission are confidential, and state ethics laws do not apply to it…. In its first year, JobsOhio also pocketed nearly $7 million from five private donors, but the Ohio supreme court later ruled the group didn’t have to release emails or records detailing the sources of those donations. JobsOhio has faced charges of political favoritism and pay-to-play. Its board of directors,
