Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 925

December 12, 2015

The GOP’s chaotic last resort: Inside the calls for a brokered convention — and why it will never, ever happen

For the GOP, it just keeps getting worse: The news that top Republicans are “preparing” for a brokered convention should Donald Trump win the primary, and that the compromise candidate could actually be Mitt Romney, has spilled out into the open, and already, the party’s outsider candidates are raising hell. Ben Carson is threatening to leave the party should Republicans nominate a candidate who wasn’t even in the race; Ted Cruz is hedging his bets by calling Trump “terrific” after implying to a private group of donors that “gravity” would bring Trump and Carson’s campaigns down; and Trump, even before the most recent news, told CNN’s Don Lemon that “all options were open” if he felt the party’s leaders were disrespecting him. Carson and Trump, however, probably don’t have to worry about anything; if this plan were to actually come to fruition, it would result in the complete and utter fissure of the Republican Party, which is something the GOP’s leaders would never let happen. This has been a long time coming, and Republicans only have themselves to blame. Since 2010, when the Tea Party first helped the Republicans win back the House, hardline conservatives have sought to gain control of the party at the expense of a partnership with the establishment it swung into the majority. The culmination of this was the resignation of Speaker John Boehner to avoid the indignity of being tossed from his chair, followed by his second-in-command Kevin McCarthy dropping out of the race to replace him, after which time it threatened to elect a Freedom Caucus member as Speaker of the House before finally voting for Paul Ryan. All the while, Donald Trump has been absolutely crushing his competition in the Republican primary based upon his complete lack of government experience (a plus), a willingness to advocate for openly racist policies (ditto), and a tendency to blame everything on the great evil of our time, political correctness. The problem is that Trump, as a general election candidate, is utterly unelectable, and even if he weren't, he can't really expect to build an electoral coalition based solely on people who hate immigrants, Muslims, and politicians more than anything else. He’s not a traditional tax-hating conservative like Ryan; he’s not a neo-con like Rubio; nor is he even a Tea Partier like Ted Cruz. His rise in the polls is based solely upon his propensity to say stupid things and not apologize for them. His base of support is a Twitter egg. Because of that, he’s completely uncontrollable, which is why party elites are considering the brokered convention. This is not, however, the Republican primary of 1952, the last time there was a brokered convention; nor is it even the Republican primary of 1976, the last time a convention opened without a presumptive nominee. This is the 21st century, where most voters think that the (admittedly insane) presidential primary process is like any other actual election, like it should be, where the candidate with most votes wins. If Trump is somehow able to win a plurality of votes throughout the country and come into the convention with even half the lead he currently has over the other candidates in the polls, the Republicans have two choices: first, nominating Romney or another candidate from the floor and watching the party descend into complete and utter chaos on live television. Plan B is letting Trump win and sacrificing this election in order to possibly save the party going forward. If Republicans nominated someone that didn’t run in the primaries at all, it would still be controversial; nominating Romney would go over about as well as John Roberts closing the convention out with a three-hour speech about his Supreme Court vote on Obamacare. In the aftermath of the 2012 election, conservatives blamed Romney's lack of conservatism for his loss to President Obama, and given how various Republican candidates have been ganging up on Romney during this campaign, his reputation hasn’t regained much ground among the right-wing of his party. Because of this, Mitt Romney is not some great unifying figure in his party. He is not Dwight Eisenhower, who was able to win the nomination in 1952 through a brokered convention not only because he was a national hero, but because most states didn’t even have a primary process back then, and both Gov. Earl Warren of California and Gov. Thomas Dewey of New York preferred him to the much more conservative Robert Taft. Nor is he Ronald Reagan, the last candidate who was considered for nomination from the convention floor. Even disregarding their hatred of Romney as a candidate, the idea that the GOP establishment (often the biggest target of their criticisms) would essentially render the entire primary process meaningless would probably be the nail in the coffin of the coalition between Republicans and the Tea Party; as Carson himself said, if GOP Chairman Reince Priebus and others try to maneuver the nomination out of Trump’s hands, this could be the “last Republican convention.” If there’s major speculation that this could happen even as we’re in the middle of the primaries, Trump would most likely drop his Republican bid and run as a third party candidate. Clay Mulford, an adviser to the most successful third party run in the last hundred years— Ross Perot in 1992 — told CNN that this process would have to start “no later than probably the beginning of March.” And there’s indication that he’d be somewhat successful in bringing support with him; a recent poll shows that over two-thirds of Trump’s supporters would support him even if he left the Republican Party. That would give him at least 10 to 20 percent nationally, potentially more if Republicans nominate someone like Romney or Jeb Bush, a candidate that energizes the Tea Party even more to vote for an outsider. This would undeniably be good for the liberal side of the country, as Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan pointed out, because it would split the Republican vote and sweep whichever Democrat wins the nomination to an easy victory. Even further, it could result in a few third party candidates popping up all over the country to challenge traditional Republicans, which would hand over a few extra House, Senate and state and local-level seats to Democrats. The alternative to this three-way clowncar is much bleaker for the country, but much better for the party’s traditionalists like Ryan, Priebus, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell: simply letting Trump win. If Trump were to win with mostly Tea Party support, the Republican Party would be undeniably crushed in the general election. Trump may have a plurality of support in the Republican Party, but large swaths of traditional Republicans — the Religious Right, anti-tax people — would either stay home or swing to the Democratic side in order to avoid a Trump administration. This would effectively end the argument that Republicans just need to espouse more hardline conservative ideas regarding immigration, terrorism and government to win over the country. What could be a better asset for Ryan and McConnell to control unruly caucuses than a wholesale repudiation of the hardliners in their party? Either way, Democrats are benefitting from the systematic meltdown within the Republican party being given a national stage. Republican elites already look dismayed at the possibility that Trump could win this thing, and if either Trump or Carson decides to run a third-party campaign to derail the Republican nominee, it would give the Democratic nominee a broad mandate to shape policy for at least a few years. And after six long years of the GOP establishment placating and pandering to the most intolerant and uncompromising wing of their party, really: isn’t that what they deserve?

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Published on December 12, 2015 11:00

Robert Reich: The sharing economy will be our demise

In this holiday season it’s especially appropriate to acknowledge how many Americans don’t have steady work. The so-called “share economy” includes independent contractors, temporary workers, the self-employed, part-timers, freelancers, and free agents. Most file 1099s rather than W2s, for tax purposes. It’s estimated that in five years over 40 percent of the American labor force will be in such uncertain work; in a decade, most of us. Already two-thirds of American workers are living paycheck to paycheck. This trend shifts all economic risks onto workers. A downturn in demand, or sudden change in consumer needs, or a personal injury or sickness, can make it impossible to pay the bills. It eliminates labor protections such as the minimum wage, worker safety, family and medical leave, and overtime. And it ends employer-financed insurance – Social Security, workers’ compensation, unemployment benefits, and employer-provided health insurance under the Affordable Care Act. No wonder, according to polls, almost a quarter of American workers worry they won’t be earning enough in the future. That’s up from 15 percent a decade ago. Such uncertainty can be hard on families, too. Children of parents working unpredictable schedules or outside standard daytime working hours are likely to have lower cognitive skills and more behavioral problems, according to new research. What to do? Courts are overflowing with lawsuits over whether companies have misclassified “employees” as “independent contractors,” resulting in a profusion of criteria and definitions. We should aim instead for simplicity: Whoever pays more than half of someone’s income, or provides more than half their working hours should be responsible for all the labor protections and insurance an employee is entitled to. In addition, to restore some certainty to people’s lives, we need to move away from unemployment insurance and toward income insurance. Say, for example, your monthly income dips more than 50 percent below the average monthly income you’ve received from all the jobs you’ve taken over the preceding five years. With income insurance, you’d automatically receive half the difference for up to a year. It’s possible to have a flexible economy and also provide workers some minimal level of security. A decent society requires no less. In this holiday season it’s especially appropriate to acknowledge how many Americans don’t have steady work. The so-called “share economy” includes independent contractors, temporary workers, the self-employed, part-timers, freelancers, and free agents. Most file 1099s rather than W2s, for tax purposes. It’s estimated that in five years over 40 percent of the American labor force will be in such uncertain work; in a decade, most of us. Already two-thirds of American workers are living paycheck to paycheck. This trend shifts all economic risks onto workers. A downturn in demand, or sudden change in consumer needs, or a personal injury or sickness, can make it impossible to pay the bills. It eliminates labor protections such as the minimum wage, worker safety, family and medical leave, and overtime. And it ends employer-financed insurance – Social Security, workers’ compensation, unemployment benefits, and employer-provided health insurance under the Affordable Care Act. No wonder, according to polls, almost a quarter of American workers worry they won’t be earning enough in the future. That’s up from 15 percent a decade ago. Such uncertainty can be hard on families, too. Children of parents working unpredictable schedules or outside standard daytime working hours are likely to have lower cognitive skills and more behavioral problems, according to new research. What to do? Courts are overflowing with lawsuits over whether companies have misclassified “employees” as “independent contractors,” resulting in a profusion of criteria and definitions. We should aim instead for simplicity: Whoever pays more than half of someone’s income, or provides more than half their working hours should be responsible for all the labor protections and insurance an employee is entitled to. In addition, to restore some certainty to people’s lives, we need to move away from unemployment insurance and toward income insurance. Say, for example, your monthly income dips more than 50 percent below the average monthly income you’ve received from all the jobs you’ve taken over the preceding five years. With income insurance, you’d automatically receive half the difference for up to a year. It’s possible to have a flexible economy and also provide workers some minimal level of security. A decent society requires no less. In this holiday season it’s especially appropriate to acknowledge how many Americans don’t have steady work. The so-called “share economy” includes independent contractors, temporary workers, the self-employed, part-timers, freelancers, and free agents. Most file 1099s rather than W2s, for tax purposes. It’s estimated that in five years over 40 percent of the American labor force will be in such uncertain work; in a decade, most of us. Already two-thirds of American workers are living paycheck to paycheck. This trend shifts all economic risks onto workers. A downturn in demand, or sudden change in consumer needs, or a personal injury or sickness, can make it impossible to pay the bills. It eliminates labor protections such as the minimum wage, worker safety, family and medical leave, and overtime. And it ends employer-financed insurance – Social Security, workers’ compensation, unemployment benefits, and employer-provided health insurance under the Affordable Care Act. No wonder, according to polls, almost a quarter of American workers worry they won’t be earning enough in the future. That’s up from 15 percent a decade ago. Such uncertainty can be hard on families, too. Children of parents working unpredictable schedules or outside standard daytime working hours are likely to have lower cognitive skills and more behavioral problems, according to new research. What to do? Courts are overflowing with lawsuits over whether companies have misclassified “employees” as “independent contractors,” resulting in a profusion of criteria and definitions. We should aim instead for simplicity: Whoever pays more than half of someone’s income, or provides more than half their working hours should be responsible for all the labor protections and insurance an employee is entitled to. In addition, to restore some certainty to people’s lives, we need to move away from unemployment insurance and toward income insurance. Say, for example, your monthly income dips more than 50 percent below the average monthly income you’ve received from all the jobs you’ve taken over the preceding five years. With income insurance, you’d automatically receive half the difference for up to a year. It’s possible to have a flexible economy and also provide workers some minimal level of security. A decent society requires no less. In this holiday season it’s especially appropriate to acknowledge how many Americans don’t have steady work. The so-called “share economy” includes independent contractors, temporary workers, the self-employed, part-timers, freelancers, and free agents. Most file 1099s rather than W2s, for tax purposes. It’s estimated that in five years over 40 percent of the American labor force will be in such uncertain work; in a decade, most of us. Already two-thirds of American workers are living paycheck to paycheck. This trend shifts all economic risks onto workers. A downturn in demand, or sudden change in consumer needs, or a personal injury or sickness, can make it impossible to pay the bills. It eliminates labor protections such as the minimum wage, worker safety, family and medical leave, and overtime. And it ends employer-financed insurance – Social Security, workers’ compensation, unemployment benefits, and employer-provided health insurance under the Affordable Care Act. No wonder, according to polls, almost a quarter of American workers worry they won’t be earning enough in the future. That’s up from 15 percent a decade ago. Such uncertainty can be hard on families, too. Children of parents working unpredictable schedules or outside standard daytime working hours are likely to have lower cognitive skills and more behavioral problems, according to new research. What to do? Courts are overflowing with lawsuits over whether companies have misclassified “employees” as “independent contractors,” resulting in a profusion of criteria and definitions. We should aim instead for simplicity: Whoever pays more than half of someone’s income, or provides more than half their working hours should be responsible for all the labor protections and insurance an employee is entitled to. In addition, to restore some certainty to people’s lives, we need to move away from unemployment insurance and toward income insurance. Say, for example, your monthly income dips more than 50 percent below the average monthly income you’ve received from all the jobs you’ve taken over the preceding five years. With income insurance, you’d automatically receive half the difference for up to a year. It’s possible to have a flexible economy and also provide workers some minimal level of security. A decent society requires no less.

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Published on December 12, 2015 10:00

Michael Bay’s “apolitical” Benghazi movie: Every kind of American delusion and stupidity in one package!

If we roll with Karl Marx’s famous dictum that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce, I guess the third time around it becomes a Michael Bay movie. Which is both things at once! In case you think that the main problem with the psychotronic 2016 presidential campaign, which seems to have slipped the gears of reality and entered an alternate dimension, is that it doesn’t have quite enough Benghazi juice, I have good news. Bay, the idiot-genius god-king of the “Transformers” franchise, the man who has singlehandedly pushed action movies to heretofore unknown levels of bombast and stupidity, has made a Benghazi movie. Or at any rate he has almost made one. I attended a strange press event in New York on Friday afternoon for Bay’s forthcoming “13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi,” along with a desultory crowd of perhaps two dozen other journalists, most of whom clearly showed up for the free lunch and a little holiday-season chitchat. Paramount Pictures served us the aforementioned lunch, which was delicious, in a barren second-story restaurant apparently made out of paving stones that looks like the “fine dining” establishment in a brand new exurban mall but in fact overlooks 42nd Street. Before the meal, we sat in a deserted multiplex across the street and watched about 25 minutes of footage from Bay’s film, which features many explosions, close-ups of muscular men crying and such snippets of dialogue as “You’re in my world now,” “Shit just got real” and “That’s not good.” Maybe the dazed and jaded atmosphere of this event was just about the sensory overload of midtown Manhattan in December, or maybe it reflected the general Trumpian mood of fear and delusion in a country that may finally have snapped the last tether of sanity. Consider Friday’s New York Times poll, with its all-time high numbers for Trump and its finding that Americans perceive terrorism as the No. 1 threat to the nation. Even after San Bernardino, terrorist attacks committed by Muslims have killed fewer than 50 people in the United States in the years since 9/11. Meanwhile, 35,000 people commit suicide every year, and close to 100,000 die from mistakes made by medical professionals. Several thousand people die every year by falling off ladders. It is more likely that you or I will die this year by drowning in the bath, being electrocuted by a home appliance or colliding with a deer than that Muslim fanatics will murder us. Have Americans’ powers of perception become totally distorted? That's a rhetorical question – you don’t need to think about it. Anyway, at Friday’s event three members of the “Annex Security Team” depicted in the film – the ex-military CIA contractors who tried to rescue United States ambassador J. Christopher Stevens after the diplomatic mission in Benghazi was overrun – joined us to eat shrimp-and-onion canapés and infinitesimal grilled cheese sandwiches in the paving-stone restaurant. For whatever reason, only a handful of my press colleagues even pretended to be interested in them. I asked Mark “Oz” Geist, a former Marine who was injured on the rooftop of the CIA complex in Benghazi, how he felt about the fact that “13 Hours” would inevitably become a talking point of the presidential campaign. “I think it’s as apolitical a story as it could possibly be,” he said. “We’ve tried to keep it focused on the facts of what actually happened that night, and I think it’s going to surprise some people.” What that means in English, I suspect, is that Geist and his colleagues avoid pointing fingers at either Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, because their perspective on the much-mythologized battle of Benghazi is entirely local and specific. Bay’s movie, which was written by Chuck Hogan, is based on the book “13 Hours: The Inside Account of What Really Happened in Benghazi” by Mitchell Zuckoff, which in turn was based on the testimony of Geist and his fellow team members about what they saw and experienced. What we’re going to see when “13 Hours” reaches theaters next month, or at least what I saw on Friday, is neither apolitical nor surprising. No retelling of the Benghazi story, or any aspect of it, can be either of those things. And just to slide sideways into cinema studies for a second, Bay’s bewildering brand of big-budget, value-free spectacle cinema, seemingly detached from all meaning and all ideology, actually makes him one of the signature political filmmakers of our age. He’s the Leni Riefenstahl of late capitalism. If the Republicans’ endless Benghazi investigation has been driven from the headlines by Paris and San Bernardino and Donald Trump, Benghazi as a symbol and signifier still holds a sanctified place in the right-wing American imagination, standing for everything that is so wrong but might someday be put right. Benghazi is not the same as Donald Trump, but it nourishes the climate of all-purpose paranoia that has allowed Trump to grow so big so fast, like some especially horrible tropical fungus. Talking to Mark Geist reminded me that even if I think Benghazi barely merits discussion in the history of American foreign-policy disasters or worldwide episodes of chaos and carnage, it is nonetheless something that really happened and can plausibly be linked to Islamic extremism. It is precious to the nationalistic right for those reasons, and because it seems to illustrate several important themes: the ubiquitous hostility of the Arab-Muslim world, the lonely courage of the American soldier (or, in this case, the American private-sector mercenary), and the feminized and corrupt nature of Big Government and its factotums. While I was talking to Geist, a beady-eyed cable TV person came creeping up on my right and began asking graduate-level Benghazi-ology questions about the road intersection outside the diplomatic compound and the demeanor of the militants who broke through the gate. (Even I know that Geist and the rest of his team were several miles away at the CIA base, and did not see that happen.) This movie might clarify many things about that night in September 2012 that seem mysterious, Basic Cable Man mused aloud; it might finally focus public attention on the underlying issues. I didn’t ask him what he thought those were and I probably don’t want to know. Nor did I point out that no work of fiction is likely to elucidate questions of fact, especially not a Hollywood movie. I would like to say that Geist looked a little uncomfortable during this encounter, right after telling me how apolitical the movie was and how the annex team had no interest in skewing their story “either to the right or to the left.” I don’t really know why I want to claim some fundamental decency for the guy; he answered my questions courteously, but I don't have any idea what's in his heart. No doubt Benghazi conspiracy buffs like Cable Guy have enabled Geist to earn a living since he got back from Libya, and when you consider that he nearly died on a rooftop thousands of miles from home for reasons no one will ever be able to explain, I don’t think we can begrudge him that. There’s an easy joke waiting right here about how watching 20 percent of a Michael Bay movie is a lot better than watching the whole thing, ha ha. When it’s a Michael Bay propaganda film about the cowardice and incompetence of the United States government, you might want to double or treble that. (After encountering yet another frustration, the ex-Navy SEAL played by John Krasinski in the movie acerbically observes, “That’s some dot-gov shit right there.”) But please remember that these people fed me tiny little steak pies, and tuna tartare on something that wasn’t quite a tortilla chip and wasn’t quite a Wheat Thin, and broiled red snapper with oven-roasted fennel. I am trying to be polite. Anyway, that joke is both true and not true. What we saw of “13 Hours” was enough to accelerate the pulse rate and activate the limbic system – Bay is really, really good at those things – without reaching the sick-making amphetamine overdrive of something like “Transformers: Dark of the Moon,” which left me feeling I had spent three hours inside a cement mixer. But it wasn’t enough to make clear which specific version of the Benghazi narrative Bay and Hogan are spinning here – other than, y’know, a story of red-blooded American heroes facing a scary world that hates us for our freedom, while being impeded by pantywaist bureaucrats. That may be as far as it goes, honestly. David Costabile, one of those character actors you’ve seen in dozens of TV shows, plays the CIA base chief in Benghazi, a guy known only as “Bob” who plays a notorious role in several of the narratives about what went wrong there in September of 2012. Even in a 25-minute series of clips, we saw an awful lot of Bob, throwing hissy fits and slamming his office door and referring to the annex team as the “hired help” and repeatedly telling them to “stand down,” even as panicky radio reports from the diplomatic compound make clear that militants have stormed the place with the ambassador trapped inside. (Stevens and his security aide ultimately died of smoke inhalation after militants torched the diplomatic residence.) Bob is partly the nebbishy dad from a family sitcom and partly the pompous high-school science teacher with bad sweaters who is tormented by the cool kids. He is the voice of rules and regulations and small-minded authority, attempting to crush the manly force of American manliness, which of course in the end he cannot do. In that sense “13 Hours,” like every movie Michael Bay has ever made, is a comic revenge fantasy aimed at teenage males (and for the post-teenage right-wing males for whom Benghazi has assumed the iconic significance of the JFK assassination). Bob finally gets his comeuppance in a scene meant to provoke explosive audience delight, when one of the team members tells him, “You’re not giving orders now. You’re taking them.” If Bay and Hogan cannot directly implicate Obama or Hillary Clinton, Bob serves as their henpecked stand-in, and is more effeminate and less effective than either. During my conversation with Mark Geist, he was joined by John “Tig” Tiegen, another former Marine who Geist says saved his life in Benghazi. “Worst thing he ever did for me,” Geist says. “Now I have to wash his truck all the time." Tiegen, who doesn’t talk much, chimes in: “Every Sunday.” You can tell they’ve been doing this for a while. Both guys laugh cheerfully when I invite them to discuss Donald Trump’s plan to bar Muslims from entering the country. They’re ready for that one: They’re not here to talk politics! Of course it's really easy to get them to talk politics. They are a couple of American guys in the year 2015, which means that for all their years of military experience and their Benghazi heroics (Geist has also been a county sheriff and police chief in Colorado), they appear to believe multiple contradictory things at once. Both Geist and Tiegen spent considerable time in Libya and other Arab countries, and both say they have no problem with Islam. “I mean, 99 percent of everybody in Libya was Muslim,” says Geist, “and for the most part they were just regular folks who went to work and lived their lives and tried to raise their kids.” A large majority of Libyans were friendly, Tiegen adds, and the country’s internal conflicts had little to do with religion. During the period after the overthrow of dictator Muammar Gadhafi, he adds, “If people saw [an American] on the street they’d come over, shake your hand and buy you a coffee. Unfortunately there was also that element that wanted power and was willing to use violence, but you could find that anywhere.” After Geist leaves the table, Tiegen turns reflective and his mood darkens. He hasn’t actually seen Bay’s movie, he tells me, and probably won’t until his twin children are old enough to watch it with him. “Maybe when they’re 10 or so?” he muses. No doubt I look appalled; I have twins too, and the only way they are ever seeing this movie is in the re-education camps of the Trump dictatorship. I do not say that. “It’s reality, you can’t hide from it,” Tiegen says. “We might have 10 more terrorist attacks, or a hundred, here in the homeland by that time.” I stop myself from saying that is not a logical assumption, since we have had very few so far. Instead I ask what he thinks we have to do to prevent that. “It would help if we were willing to stop calling a duck a chicken,” the Benghazi secret soldier says stoutly. “When it's duck season and you go out huntin', you’re not gonna get any if they're all chickens." I laugh at that and tell him it’s a good line, but it isn’t. It’s a line he has practiced in media training seminars, one that is meant to push a certain button with a certain audience but doesn’t really mean anything. The crowd in the paving-stone restaurant, which was not much of a crowd to begin with, is dwindling fast. So I thank Tiegen and shake his hand and walk out onto 42nd Street, feeling sad about the whole thing.If we roll with Karl Marx’s famous dictum that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce, I guess the third time around it becomes a Michael Bay movie. Which is both things at once! In case you think that the main problem with the psychotronic 2016 presidential campaign, which seems to have slipped the gears of reality and entered an alternate dimension, is that it doesn’t have quite enough Benghazi juice, I have good news. Bay, the idiot-genius god-king of the “Transformers” franchise, the man who has singlehandedly pushed action movies to heretofore unknown levels of bombast and stupidity, has made a Benghazi movie. Or at any rate he has almost made one. I attended a strange press event in New York on Friday afternoon for Bay’s forthcoming “13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi,” along with a desultory crowd of perhaps two dozen other journalists, most of whom clearly showed up for the free lunch and a little holiday-season chitchat. Paramount Pictures served us the aforementioned lunch, which was delicious, in a barren second-story restaurant apparently made out of paving stones that looks like the “fine dining” establishment in a brand new exurban mall but in fact overlooks 42nd Street. Before the meal, we sat in a deserted multiplex across the street and watched about 25 minutes of footage from Bay’s film, which features many explosions, close-ups of muscular men crying and such snippets of dialogue as “You’re in my world now,” “Shit just got real” and “That’s not good.” Maybe the dazed and jaded atmosphere of this event was just about the sensory overload of midtown Manhattan in December, or maybe it reflected the general Trumpian mood of fear and delusion in a country that may finally have snapped the last tether of sanity. Consider Friday’s New York Times poll, with its all-time high numbers for Trump and its finding that Americans perceive terrorism as the No. 1 threat to the nation. Even after San Bernardino, terrorist attacks committed by Muslims have killed fewer than 50 people in the United States in the years since 9/11. Meanwhile, 35,000 people commit suicide every year, and close to 100,000 die from mistakes made by medical professionals. Several thousand people die every year by falling off ladders. It is more likely that you or I will die this year by drowning in the bath, being electrocuted by a home appliance or colliding with a deer than that Muslim fanatics will murder us. Have Americans’ powers of perception become totally distorted? That's a rhetorical question – you don’t need to think about it. Anyway, at Friday’s event three members of the “Annex Security Team” depicted in the film – the ex-military CIA contractors who tried to rescue United States ambassador J. Christopher Stevens after the diplomatic mission in Benghazi was overrun – joined us to eat shrimp-and-onion canapés and infinitesimal grilled cheese sandwiches in the paving-stone restaurant. For whatever reason, only a handful of my press colleagues even pretended to be interested in them. I asked Mark “Oz” Geist, a former Marine who was injured on the rooftop of the CIA complex in Benghazi, how he felt about the fact that “13 Hours” would inevitably become a talking point of the presidential campaign. “I think it’s as apolitical a story as it could possibly be,” he said. “We’ve tried to keep it focused on the facts of what actually happened that night, and I think it’s going to surprise some people.” What that means in English, I suspect, is that Geist and his colleagues avoid pointing fingers at either Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, because their perspective on the much-mythologized battle of Benghazi is entirely local and specific. Bay’s movie, which was written by Chuck Hogan, is based on the book “13 Hours: The Inside Account of What Really Happened in Benghazi” by Mitchell Zuckoff, which in turn was based on the testimony of Geist and his fellow team members about what they saw and experienced. What we’re going to see when “13 Hours” reaches theaters next month, or at least what I saw on Friday, is neither apolitical nor surprising. No retelling of the Benghazi story, or any aspect of it, can be either of those things. And just to slide sideways into cinema studies for a second, Bay’s bewildering brand of big-budget, value-free spectacle cinema, seemingly detached from all meaning and all ideology, actually makes him one of the signature political filmmakers of our age. He’s the Leni Riefenstahl of late capitalism. If the Republicans’ endless Benghazi investigation has been driven from the headlines by Paris and San Bernardino and Donald Trump, Benghazi as a symbol and signifier still holds a sanctified place in the right-wing American imagination, standing for everything that is so wrong but might someday be put right. Benghazi is not the same as Donald Trump, but it nourishes the climate of all-purpose paranoia that has allowed Trump to grow so big so fast, like some especially horrible tropical fungus. Talking to Mark Geist reminded me that even if I think Benghazi barely merits discussion in the history of American foreign-policy disasters or worldwide episodes of chaos and carnage, it is nonetheless something that really happened and can plausibly be linked to Islamic extremism. It is precious to the nationalistic right for those reasons, and because it seems to illustrate several important themes: the ubiquitous hostility of the Arab-Muslim world, the lonely courage of the American soldier (or, in this case, the American private-sector mercenary), and the feminized and corrupt nature of Big Government and its factotums. While I was talking to Geist, a beady-eyed cable TV person came creeping up on my right and began asking graduate-level Benghazi-ology questions about the road intersection outside the diplomatic compound and the demeanor of the militants who broke through the gate. (Even I know that Geist and the rest of his team were several miles away at the CIA base, and did not see that happen.) This movie might clarify many things about that night in September 2012 that seem mysterious, Basic Cable Man mused aloud; it might finally focus public attention on the underlying issues. I didn’t ask him what he thought those were and I probably don’t want to know. Nor did I point out that no work of fiction is likely to elucidate questions of fact, especially not a Hollywood movie. I would like to say that Geist looked a little uncomfortable during this encounter, right after telling me how apolitical the movie was and how the annex team had no interest in skewing their story “either to the right or to the left.” I don’t really know why I want to claim some fundamental decency for the guy; he answered my questions courteously, but I don't have any idea what's in his heart. No doubt Benghazi conspiracy buffs like Cable Guy have enabled Geist to earn a living since he got back from Libya, and when you consider that he nearly died on a rooftop thousands of miles from home for reasons no one will ever be able to explain, I don’t think we can begrudge him that. There’s an easy joke waiting right here about how watching 20 percent of a Michael Bay movie is a lot better than watching the whole thing, ha ha. When it’s a Michael Bay propaganda film about the cowardice and incompetence of the United States government, you might want to double or treble that. (After encountering yet another frustration, the ex-Navy SEAL played by John Krasinski in the movie acerbically observes, “That’s some dot-gov shit right there.”) But please remember that these people fed me tiny little steak pies, and tuna tartare on something that wasn’t quite a tortilla chip and wasn’t quite a Wheat Thin, and broiled red snapper with oven-roasted fennel. I am trying to be polite. Anyway, that joke is both true and not true. What we saw of “13 Hours” was enough to accelerate the pulse rate and activate the limbic system – Bay is really, really good at those things – without reaching the sick-making amphetamine overdrive of something like “Transformers: Dark of the Moon,” which left me feeling I had spent three hours inside a cement mixer. But it wasn’t enough to make clear which specific version of the Benghazi narrative Bay and Hogan are spinning here – other than, y’know, a story of red-blooded American heroes facing a scary world that hates us for our freedom, while being impeded by pantywaist bureaucrats. That may be as far as it goes, honestly. David Costabile, one of those character actors you’ve seen in dozens of TV shows, plays the CIA base chief in Benghazi, a guy known only as “Bob” who plays a notorious role in several of the narratives about what went wrong there in September of 2012. Even in a 25-minute series of clips, we saw an awful lot of Bob, throwing hissy fits and slamming his office door and referring to the annex team as the “hired help” and repeatedly telling them to “stand down,” even as panicky radio reports from the diplomatic compound make clear that militants have stormed the place with the ambassador trapped inside. (Stevens and his security aide ultimately died of smoke inhalation after militants torched the diplomatic residence.) Bob is partly the nebbishy dad from a family sitcom and partly the pompous high-school science teacher with bad sweaters who is tormented by the cool kids. He is the voice of rules and regulations and small-minded authority, attempting to crush the manly force of American manliness, which of course in the end he cannot do. In that sense “13 Hours,” like every movie Michael Bay has ever made, is a comic revenge fantasy aimed at teenage males (and for the post-teenage right-wing males for whom Benghazi has assumed the iconic significance of the JFK assassination). Bob finally gets his comeuppance in a scene meant to provoke explosive audience delight, when one of the team members tells him, “You’re not giving orders now. You’re taking them.” If Bay and Hogan cannot directly implicate Obama or Hillary Clinton, Bob serves as their henpecked stand-in, and is more effeminate and less effective than either. During my conversation with Mark Geist, he was joined by John “Tig” Tiegen, another former Marine who Geist says saved his life in Benghazi. “Worst thing he ever did for me,” Geist says. “Now I have to wash his truck all the time." Tiegen, who doesn’t talk much, chimes in: “Every Sunday.” You can tell they’ve been doing this for a while. Both guys laugh cheerfully when I invite them to discuss Donald Trump’s plan to bar Muslims from entering the country. They’re ready for that one: They’re not here to talk politics! Of course it's really easy to get them to talk politics. They are a couple of American guys in the year 2015, which means that for all their years of military experience and their Benghazi heroics (Geist has also been a county sheriff and police chief in Colorado), they appear to believe multiple contradictory things at once. Both Geist and Tiegen spent considerable time in Libya and other Arab countries, and both say they have no problem with Islam. “I mean, 99 percent of everybody in Libya was Muslim,” says Geist, “and for the most part they were just regular folks who went to work and lived their lives and tried to raise their kids.” A large majority of Libyans were friendly, Tiegen adds, and the country’s internal conflicts had little to do with religion. During the period after the overthrow of dictator Muammar Gadhafi, he adds, “If people saw [an American] on the street they’d come over, shake your hand and buy you a coffee. Unfortunately there was also that element that wanted power and was willing to use violence, but you could find that anywhere.” After Geist leaves the table, Tiegen turns reflective and his mood darkens. He hasn’t actually seen Bay’s movie, he tells me, and probably won’t until his twin children are old enough to watch it with him. “Maybe when they’re 10 or so?” he muses. No doubt I look appalled; I have twins too, and the only way they are ever seeing this movie is in the re-education camps of the Trump dictatorship. I do not say that. “It’s reality, you can’t hide from it,” Tiegen says. “We might have 10 more terrorist attacks, or a hundred, here in the homeland by that time.” I stop myself from saying that is not a logical assumption, since we have had very few so far. Instead I ask what he thinks we have to do to prevent that. “It would help if we were willing to stop calling a duck a chicken,” the Benghazi secret soldier says stoutly. “When it's duck season and you go out huntin', you’re not gonna get any if they're all chickens." I laugh at that and tell him it’s a good line, but it isn’t. It’s a line he has practiced in media training seminars, one that is meant to push a certain button with a certain audience but doesn’t really mean anything. The crowd in the paving-stone restaurant, which was not much of a crowd to begin with, is dwindling fast. So I thank Tiegen and shake his hand and walk out onto 42nd Street, feeling sad about the whole thing.

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Published on December 12, 2015 09:00

We’re destroying a generation of students: The disastrous effects of our student-debt blame game

After three years of law school, I have $150,000 in student debt, compounding at an interest rate of 7 percent. I don’t regret a penny of it and am in the fortunate position of being able to pay my loans as they come due. But not everyone has been so lucky. Many of my fellow borrowers have gotten piled on, first with debt and now with blame. Most recently, the debate about how best to manage the $1.2 trillion in national student debt has taken a disappointing turn—toward creating student eligibility standards for federal aid when we still lack basic institutional ones. In tone and character, this finger pointing resembles the blame heaped on mortgage borrowers at the start of the 2008 financial crisis. We would do well to remember what we learned during that period: not to blame hopeful homeowners but rather to question the banks who relinquished their lending oversight responsibilities while encouraging trading on speculative mortgage-backed securities. Similarly, instead of erecting hurdles for students deemed unfit to borrow, the government should aim its regulatory efforts at the predatory for-profit colleges that reap taxpayer dollars and hand out substandard degrees. Yet experts have recently begun dishing out proposals ranging from disbursing loans based on credit scores, high-school grades and test scores to, more disturbingly, predicating loans on the earnings potential of certain majors. At best, this approach is duplicative of efforts already being made by legitimate, nonprofit institutions that select students using admissions criteria presumably designed to ascertain who will succeed under their degree programs. At worst, it inappropriately puts the government in the position of admissions czar, threatens to systematically disadvantage students with high ambitions but bad credit, and rations the immeasurable benefits of a quality liberal arts education to only those who can prove their ability to finance the risk. Like encouraging homeownership, promoting education is more than a pragmatic national goal—our policies in this realm are weighted with symbolic significance about who is permitted to pursue the American Dream. Countless studies have shown not only that an educated population is the key to economic growth and national prosperity but also that education is the path out of poverty and that educational choice is critical to self-determination. Both our short- and long-term solutions to the current student loan crisis should be crafted with an awareness of these stakes. The short-term solution is to focus squarely on suffering students and bail out those who most need help. This is a solution we readily provided to big banks but are oddly reluctant to offer students hoodwinked by predatory for-profit “schools” on our watch. The Obama administration’s recent decision to forgive $28 million in loans for 1,312 former Corinthian Colleges students exploited by the now-defunct for-profit chain is a laudable start, but more must be done. Specifically, while federal loans offer employed graduates options like forbearance and income-based repayment, there is little sympathy or flexibility for those who, despite their best efforts, are unemployed. That must change. In the long term, we must zoom out on the problem, defunding—and punishing—institutions that promise students nothing but a future of debt. The best current proposal for financial oversight of non-profit educational institutions is the Students Before Profits Act of 2015, spearheaded by my state's senator, Chris Murphy, D-Conn., with the support of Senators Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Richard Blumenthal, D. Conn., among others. The good news: The bill aims to regulate non-profit institutions that act against student and taxpayer interests by holding institutions and their executives liable for misrepresentation, preventing institutions from persuading students to go into forbearance and artificially lowering their default rates, and cutting out repeat offenders by banning poor leaders from taking the helm at other institutions. The bad news: The bill is currently pending before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions—chaired by Lamar Alexander, R-Ten., an outspoken supporter of the for-profit schools owned by his biggest campaign donors. Bill or no bill, the most effective solution is the one not on the table: cutting off the steady stream of federal aid flowing into the pockets of for-profit colleges that reap 90 percent of their revenues from taxpayers. For-profit educational institutions are a quintessential example of the moral hazard problem: They take on federal-backed risk with the knowledge that students and taxpayers will be the ones to suffer while their own bottom lines swell. It’s time to accept that institutions that spend more on student recruiting than on student education and whose graduates overwhelmingly make less than high school dropouts are “schools” only in name, and that their loan-shark business model is inherently at odds with the goals of government educational subsidies. On a last note, irrespective of an institution’s for-profit or non-profit status, withholding or misrepresenting information that students need in order to make informed decisions should translate into enhanced civil penalties, for the institutions themselves as well as their handsomely compensated executives. By this measure, non-profit colleges and community colleges are among those failing on the job. One obvious way to increase their accountability is to extend to them oversight mechanisms of the kind enumerated in Senator Murphy’s bill. All institutions of higher learning should be required to provide students accurate information about their retention, graduation and student default rates, and full transparency about employment prospects. Correcting and deflating the student loan bubble is not the complex puzzle experts have made it out to be. To remediate our failed regime of educational oversight, we must focus on the defective products themselves and pull the plug on the for-profit fat cats peddling them. Anything less—in particular, blaming borrowers and brainstorming methods for disqualifying individual federal aid recipients—is a distraction masquerading as a solution. Joseph Pomianowski is a recent graduate of Yale Law School.After three years of law school, I have $150,000 in student debt, compounding at an interest rate of 7 percent. I don’t regret a penny of it and am in the fortunate position of being able to pay my loans as they come due. But not everyone has been so lucky. Many of my fellow borrowers have gotten piled on, first with debt and now with blame. Most recently, the debate about how best to manage the $1.2 trillion in national student debt has taken a disappointing turn—toward creating student eligibility standards for federal aid when we still lack basic institutional ones. In tone and character, this finger pointing resembles the blame heaped on mortgage borrowers at the start of the 2008 financial crisis. We would do well to remember what we learned during that period: not to blame hopeful homeowners but rather to question the banks who relinquished their lending oversight responsibilities while encouraging trading on speculative mortgage-backed securities. Similarly, instead of erecting hurdles for students deemed unfit to borrow, the government should aim its regulatory efforts at the predatory for-profit colleges that reap taxpayer dollars and hand out substandard degrees. Yet experts have recently begun dishing out proposals ranging from disbursing loans based on credit scores, high-school grades and test scores to, more disturbingly, predicating loans on the earnings potential of certain majors. At best, this approach is duplicative of efforts already being made by legitimate, nonprofit institutions that select students using admissions criteria presumably designed to ascertain who will succeed under their degree programs. At worst, it inappropriately puts the government in the position of admissions czar, threatens to systematically disadvantage students with high ambitions but bad credit, and rations the immeasurable benefits of a quality liberal arts education to only those who can prove their ability to finance the risk. Like encouraging homeownership, promoting education is more than a pragmatic national goal—our policies in this realm are weighted with symbolic significance about who is permitted to pursue the American Dream. Countless studies have shown not only that an educated population is the key to economic growth and national prosperity but also that education is the path out of poverty and that educational choice is critical to self-determination. Both our short- and long-term solutions to the current student loan crisis should be crafted with an awareness of these stakes. The short-term solution is to focus squarely on suffering students and bail out those who most need help. This is a solution we readily provided to big banks but are oddly reluctant to offer students hoodwinked by predatory for-profit “schools” on our watch. The Obama administration’s recent decision to forgive $28 million in loans for 1,312 former Corinthian Colleges students exploited by the now-defunct for-profit chain is a laudable start, but more must be done. Specifically, while federal loans offer employed graduates options like forbearance and income-based repayment, there is little sympathy or flexibility for those who, despite their best efforts, are unemployed. That must change. In the long term, we must zoom out on the problem, defunding—and punishing—institutions that promise students nothing but a future of debt. The best current proposal for financial oversight of non-profit educational institutions is the Students Before Profits Act of 2015, spearheaded by my state's senator, Chris Murphy, D-Conn., with the support of Senators Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Richard Blumenthal, D. Conn., among others. The good news: The bill aims to regulate non-profit institutions that act against student and taxpayer interests by holding institutions and their executives liable for misrepresentation, preventing institutions from persuading students to go into forbearance and artificially lowering their default rates, and cutting out repeat offenders by banning poor leaders from taking the helm at other institutions. The bad news: The bill is currently pending before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions—chaired by Lamar Alexander, R-Ten., an outspoken supporter of the for-profit schools owned by his biggest campaign donors. Bill or no bill, the most effective solution is the one not on the table: cutting off the steady stream of federal aid flowing into the pockets of for-profit colleges that reap 90 percent of their revenues from taxpayers. For-profit educational institutions are a quintessential example of the moral hazard problem: They take on federal-backed risk with the knowledge that students and taxpayers will be the ones to suffer while their own bottom lines swell. It’s time to accept that institutions that spend more on student recruiting than on student education and whose graduates overwhelmingly make less than high school dropouts are “schools” only in name, and that their loan-shark business model is inherently at odds with the goals of government educational subsidies. On a last note, irrespective of an institution’s for-profit or non-profit status, withholding or misrepresenting information that students need in order to make informed decisions should translate into enhanced civil penalties, for the institutions themselves as well as their handsomely compensated executives. By this measure, non-profit colleges and community colleges are among those failing on the job. One obvious way to increase their accountability is to extend to them oversight mechanisms of the kind enumerated in Senator Murphy’s bill. All institutions of higher learning should be required to provide students accurate information about their retention, graduation and student default rates, and full transparency about employment prospects. Correcting and deflating the student loan bubble is not the complex puzzle experts have made it out to be. To remediate our failed regime of educational oversight, we must focus on the defective products themselves and pull the plug on the for-profit fat cats peddling them. Anything less—in particular, blaming borrowers and brainstorming methods for disqualifying individual federal aid recipients—is a distraction masquerading as a solution. Joseph Pomianowski is a recent graduate of Yale Law School.

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Published on December 12, 2015 08:59

Banksy is at it again: The guerilla artist sends a message to xenophobes across the West

The Daily Dot World famous street artist Banksy has turned Apple co-founder and former CEO Steve Jobs into a painting on the wall of a French refugee camp. More from The Daily Dot: "Obama to clarify his stance on encryption by the holidays"

Banksy

More from The Daily Dot: "I got an ugly sweater from Uber" The painting, which depicts the late Apple boss carrying a bag and one of the very first Macintosh computers, is located in the migrant camp near Calais, France. The area is often referred to as the "Calais jungle" due to the haphazard nature with which refugees have settled in the area.

Banksy

More from The Daily Dot: "Anonymous warns Donald Trump, attacks his website" With the plight of Syrian refugees—and the ongoing battle over where they are and are not welcome—on everyone's minds, Banksy's choice of Steve Jobs, whose father was a Syrian immigrant, tells us all we need to know about the artist's stance on the crisis.

Banksy

In a somewhat surprising move, Banksy reportedly offered a statement on his latest work. “We’re often led to believe migration is a drain on the country’s resources but Steve Jobs was the son of a Syrian migrant," the artist explained. "Apple is the world’s most profitable company, it pays over $7 billion (£4.6 billion) a year in taxes – and it only exists because they allowed in a young man from Homs.” H/T The Verge | Photo via Banksy

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Published on December 12, 2015 08:00

December 11, 2015

Lindsey Graham knocks his party’s “irrational” birtherism: “There’s about 40 percent of the Republican primary voter who believes that Obama was born in Kenya!”

On MSNBC's "Morning Joe" Thursday, Republican host Joe Scarborough shared a hilariously candid moment with guest and Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol. "Do we have a problem with our party," Scarborough asked the prominent neocon. "Is it nativist," he earnestly asked, after noting that Republican support for Donald Trump's ban on Muslims entering the United States stood at a whooping 65 percent. Kristol argued that the polling was actually "misleading" because it gave "Trump too much credit," insisting that Republicans actually think the ban would only apply to Muslims like the San Bernardino shooters, not all Muslims. "I'm hoping to give our fellow Republicans the benefit of the doubt," Kristol told Scarborough. "Here is the problem," Scarborough interjected. "After explaining [Trump's proposal], instead of 66 percent of Republicans supporting the proposal, only 65 percent did." "Is that true," Kristol asked, throwing up his shoulders. "Yeah it is true," the host bluntly shot back. "Yeah, there is a little bit of Obama Derangement Syndrome," Kristol begrudgingly admitted about his own party's laser-focused disdain for the president, before blaming Obama for Trump's rise. It "leads to an excessive reaction because there is so much political correctness," Kristol argued. Now, it appears as though low polling presidential wannabe Lindsey Graham is joining Kristol and the slow-moving Republican awakening to the rabid nativism and Obama hatred that is at the center of the GOP base and is propelling Trump's rise. "There’s just a dislike for President Obama that is visceral. It’s almost irrational,” the South Carolina Republican admitted on Friday, attempting to explain Trump's popularity during an interview on Boston Herald Radio. "There’s about 40% of the Republican primary voter who believes that Obama was born in Kenya and is a Muslim,” Graham noted, ignoring that Trump is, of course, the "birther-in-chief" (sorry, Mitt Romney). As recently as July, Trump was still implying that Obama was not born in the United States. "I don’t know why he wouldn’t release his records,” he complained on CNN. Of course, Obama released his long-form birth certificate in April 2011 after years of hounding from the likes of Trump, who sent his crack team of investigators to Hawaii to dig through the president's birth records to no success. Listen to both Kristol and Graham admit to the hatred that fuels the GOP base: Lindsey Graham to Donald Trump: 'You're Gonna Go Out As A Loser'

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Published on December 11, 2015 13:13

“Dump Trump!”: Hundreds rally outside Trump Tower in NYC to slam his hate speech and welcome refugees

Hundreds of activists gathered outside of the Trump International Hotel and Tower in New York City's Columbus Circle on Thursday evening for a demonstration in solidarity with Syrian and Iraqi refugees. The protest was organized to coincide with International Human Rights Day. The organizers of the rally said protesters were there "to say no to the harmful racism, Islamophobia, Arabphobia, and xenophobia towards the refugee community." An enormous coalition of groups endorsed the demonstration, including civil rights, migrant rights, leftist, anti-war, LGBTQ, Latina/Latino, Black, Jewish, Palestinian, Iranian, Desi, Filipino, and Greek organizations. "Hate is not going to divide us," Linda Sarsour, executive director of the Arab American Association of New York, which co-sponsored the rally, told Salon. "People need to be held accountable for this hate speech. These are not just words; they are words that are inspiring actual violence against innocent people who have nothing to do with these terrorist attacks happening." Sarsour stressed that, in the past few weeks, as presidential candidates like Donald Trump and Ben Carson have ramped up their Islamophobic rhetoric and proposed explicitly anti-Muslim policies, there has been a rapid increase in the number of attacks and threats against Muslim Americans. Just in New York City in the past few weeks, there have been several hate crimes in recent weeks. A Muslim woman at a Brooklyn restaurant was assaulted by a customer who shouted "Muslim motherfu**er!" In another incident, a man in a Manhattan eatery screamed out hateful anti-Muslim rhetoric, hit a Muslim worker, and smashed two glass partitions at the food counter. In late November, a Muslim sixth-grader in the Bronx was attacked by her classmates, who called her "ISIS" and tore at her headscarf. Similar attacks have been reported throughout the country. In one of the most extreme, on Thanksgiving in Pittsburgh, a man ranting about ISIS shot a Muslim cab driver with a rifle. "This is not the first time people have done this in this country, and this is what scares American Muslims," Sarsour told Salon. "We've had the Chinese Exclusion Act; we've had Japanese internment camps. Tell that to young people in our community, who think that someone is going to come round us up. It's very traumatic." "But I'm happy to be in a place right now, in Columbus Circle, with people who say 'Nope, not our watch,'" she added. [caption id="attachment_14275250" align="aligncenter" width="620"](Credit: Salon/Ben Norton) (Credit: Salon/Ben Norton)[/caption] At the rally, New Yorkers from a wide array of backgrounds made a conscious attempt to connect their various struggles to those of Syrian and Iraqi refugees. One man had a sign reading, "Grandson of Jewish refugees says: Never again is now!" Members of the Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER) Coalition had signs in English and Spanish with a photo of Trump's face crossed out and the words "The face of racism." Other ANSWER Coalition activists held signs with Trump's faced crossed out and the message "Wall Street is the enemy, not Chinese or Mexican workers!" "Say it loud, say it clear, refugees are welcome here!" protesters chanted, interspersed with shouts of "Dump Trump!" Some Latina/Latino groups led chants in Spanish, including "El pueblo, unido, jamás será vencido!" ("The people, united, will never be defeated!") A few protesters came dressed in traditional Mexican clothing. One woman held a sign that read "'Welcome the stranger' -Basically the whole Bible. #RefugeesWelcome." Activists from Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), which is holding a week of protests against Islamophobia and racism during Hanukkah, lit a menorah at the demonstration, to commemorate the fifth night of the religious holiday. "Love has no borders," "Racism is a crime against humanity," "Can you hear the beating heart of every refugee?", and "They become refugees because we bomb their home" read other signs. [caption id="attachment_14275246" align="aligncenter" width="620"](Credit: Salon/Ben Norton) (Credit: Salon/Ben Norton)[/caption] On Nov. 19, the House of Representatives passed the American Security Against Foreign Enemies (SAFE) Act. Although President Obama has promised to veto the bill, if it passes the Senate with enough votes, it will make it even more difficult for refugees to enter the U.S. Numerous leading human rights organizations have said they are "deeply disturbed" at the "scapegoating of refugees" happening in the U.S. and Europe. "At present, the U.S. government has agreed to accept 10,000 Syrian refugees. This is not enough," the organizers of the protest said in a statement. " We demand that the U.S. government accept more refugees from Syria and Iraq without intense background checks and to provide adequate resources and social services to these newly resettled refugees." Many of the protesters emphasized that U.S. foreign policy has fueled the refugee crisis, and insisted the U.S. has not just a moral obligation to help the refugees, but also a political one that stems from its policies. "The Syrian and Iraqi refugee crisis is directly tied to our service overseas," Andrew Johnson, a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, an anti-war veterans group that co-sponsored the demonstration, told Salon. "We invaded, destabilized, and set off a sectarian in civil war in Iraq, from our invasion in 2003. And led to the foundation of ISIS." Johnson said that, as a veteran deployed to Iraq in 2005 and 2006, he felt particularly "disgusted" by the anti-refugee and xenophobia rhetoric employed by politicians. "I feel like a lot of it is just hateful pandering," Johnson said. "The fact that this is working is really disheartening." "It's disgusting and completely anti-American," he added. "The idea that we're discussing banning immigrants, especially banning immigrants based on religion, is horrifying and seems to completely go against what this country was supposed to be founded on." In a statement, the organizers of the demonstration said, "Further, we demand that the U.S. and all other governments cease their interventions in the Middle East and North Africa and their support of human rights abuses by repressive regimes." "As a community, we recognize that the United States is complicit in the human rights abuses across the Middle East and North Africa," they continued. "We also recognize that the United States bears primary responsibility for the deteriorating situation in Iraq dating back to the 1990s Gulf Wars and exacerbated by the global 'War on Terror.'  All of this has contributed to the recent influx of Syrian and Iraqi refugees that have entered and are trying to enter into the United States." "We also recognize that the Assad dictatorship is responsible for the vast majority of civilian deaths in Syria, and is engaged in documented torture and imprisonment of tens of thousands of its citizens," the organizers added. "We stand in solidarity with the popular movements which rise up against any repressive government." "We absolutely have to take responsibility for" the refugee crisis, Sarsour told Salon. "Our flawed foreign policy in the Middle East has created the fertile ground for groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda. We can't act like we have nothing to do with that." "We have helped to create the worst refugee crisis, but now we're saying, 'Nope, not in our country, we don't want you here,'" she added. "It's absolutely unfair, irresponsible, and unacceptable."Hundreds of activists gathered outside of the Trump International Hotel and Tower in New York City's Columbus Circle on Thursday evening for a demonstration in solidarity with Syrian and Iraqi refugees. The protest was organized to coincide with International Human Rights Day. The organizers of the rally said protesters were there "to say no to the harmful racism, Islamophobia, Arabphobia, and xenophobia towards the refugee community." An enormous coalition of groups endorsed the demonstration, including civil rights, migrant rights, leftist, anti-war, LGBTQ, Latina/Latino, Black, Jewish, Palestinian, Iranian, Desi, Filipino, and Greek organizations. "Hate is not going to divide us," Linda Sarsour, executive director of the Arab American Association of New York, which co-sponsored the rally, told Salon. "People need to be held accountable for this hate speech. These are not just words; they are words that are inspiring actual violence against innocent people who have nothing to do with these terrorist attacks happening." Sarsour stressed that, in the past few weeks, as presidential candidates like Donald Trump and Ben Carson have ramped up their Islamophobic rhetoric and proposed explicitly anti-Muslim policies, there has been a rapid increase in the number of attacks and threats against Muslim Americans. Just in New York City in the past few weeks, there have been several hate crimes in recent weeks. A Muslim woman at a Brooklyn restaurant was assaulted by a customer who shouted "Muslim motherfu**er!" In another incident, a man in a Manhattan eatery screamed out hateful anti-Muslim rhetoric, hit a Muslim worker, and smashed two glass partitions at the food counter. In late November, a Muslim sixth-grader in the Bronx was attacked by her classmates, who called her "ISIS" and tore at her headscarf. Similar attacks have been reported throughout the country. In one of the most extreme, on Thanksgiving in Pittsburgh, a man ranting about ISIS shot a Muslim cab driver with a rifle. "This is not the first time people have done this in this country, and this is what scares American Muslims," Sarsour told Salon. "We've had the Chinese Exclusion Act; we've had Japanese internment camps. Tell that to young people in our community, who think that someone is going to come round us up. It's very traumatic." "But I'm happy to be in a place right now, in Columbus Circle, with people who say 'Nope, not our watch,'" she added. [caption id="attachment_14275250" align="aligncenter" width="620"](Credit: Salon/Ben Norton) (Credit: Salon/Ben Norton)[/caption] At the rally, New Yorkers from a wide array of backgrounds made a conscious attempt to connect their various struggles to those of Syrian and Iraqi refugees. One man had a sign reading, "Grandson of Jewish refugees says: Never again is now!" Members of the Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER) Coalition had signs in English and Spanish with a photo of Trump's face crossed out and the words "The face of racism." Other ANSWER Coalition activists held signs with Trump's faced crossed out and the message "Wall Street is the enemy, not Chinese or Mexican workers!" "Say it loud, say it clear, refugees are welcome here!" protesters chanted, interspersed with shouts of "Dump Trump!" Some Latina/Latino groups led chants in Spanish, including "El pueblo, unido, jamás será vencido!" ("The people, united, will never be defeated!") A few protesters came dressed in traditional Mexican clothing. One woman held a sign that read "'Welcome the stranger' -Basically the whole Bible. #RefugeesWelcome." Activists from Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), which is holding a week of protests against Islamophobia and racism during Hanukkah, lit a menorah at the demonstration, to commemorate the fifth night of the religious holiday. "Love has no borders," "Racism is a crime against humanity," "Can you hear the beating heart of every refugee?", and "They become refugees because we bomb their home" read other signs. [caption id="attachment_14275246" align="aligncenter" width="620"](Credit: Salon/Ben Norton) (Credit: Salon/Ben Norton)[/caption] On Nov. 19, the House of Representatives passed the American Security Against Foreign Enemies (SAFE) Act. Although President Obama has promised to veto the bill, if it passes the Senate with enough votes, it will make it even more difficult for refugees to enter the U.S. Numerous leading human rights organizations have said they are "deeply disturbed" at the "scapegoating of refugees" happening in the U.S. and Europe. "At present, the U.S. government has agreed to accept 10,000 Syrian refugees. This is not enough," the organizers of the protest said in a statement. " We demand that the U.S. government accept more refugees from Syria and Iraq without intense background checks and to provide adequate resources and social services to these newly resettled refugees." Many of the protesters emphasized that U.S. foreign policy has fueled the refugee crisis, and insisted the U.S. has not just a moral obligation to help the refugees, but also a political one that stems from its policies. "The Syrian and Iraqi refugee crisis is directly tied to our service overseas," Andrew Johnson, a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, an anti-war veterans group that co-sponsored the demonstration, told Salon. "We invaded, destabilized, and set off a sectarian in civil war in Iraq, from our invasion in 2003. And led to the foundation of ISIS." Johnson said that, as a veteran deployed to Iraq in 2005 and 2006, he felt particularly "disgusted" by the anti-refugee and xenophobia rhetoric employed by politicians. "I feel like a lot of it is just hateful pandering," Johnson said. "The fact that this is working is really disheartening." "It's disgusting and completely anti-American," he added. "The idea that we're discussing banning immigrants, especially banning immigrants based on religion, is horrifying and seems to completely go against what this country was supposed to be founded on." In a statement, the organizers of the demonstration said, "Further, we demand that the U.S. and all other governments cease their interventions in the Middle East and North Africa and their support of human rights abuses by repressive regimes." "As a community, we recognize that the United States is complicit in the human rights abuses across the Middle East and North Africa," they continued. "We also recognize that the United States bears primary responsibility for the deteriorating situation in Iraq dating back to the 1990s Gulf Wars and exacerbated by the global 'War on Terror.'  All of this has contributed to the recent influx of Syrian and Iraqi refugees that have entered and are trying to enter into the United States." "We also recognize that the Assad dictatorship is responsible for the vast majority of civilian deaths in Syria, and is engaged in documented torture and imprisonment of tens of thousands of its citizens," the organizers added. "We stand in solidarity with the popular movements which rise up against any repressive government." "We absolutely have to take responsibility for" the refugee crisis, Sarsour told Salon. "Our flawed foreign policy in the Middle East has created the fertile ground for groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda. We can't act like we have nothing to do with that." "We have helped to create the worst refugee crisis, but now we're saying, 'Nope, not in our country, we don't want you here,'" she added. "It's absolutely unfair, irresponsible, and unacceptable."

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Published on December 11, 2015 12:42

“Xenophobic sweet potato Donald Trump”: The ultimate supercut of the best Trump insults

BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith made news this week when he told his staff how they should address Donald Trump when he outright lies about issues. According to Smith's email, the staff is required to be more bipartisan in social media, particularly for the news staff who need to create the image of fairness for the site. But when it comes to Trump, it seems all bets are off. "Trump is operating far outside the political campaigns to which those guidelines usually apply," Smith wrote. buzzfeed "It is, for instance, entirely fair to call him a mendacious racist, as the politics team and others here have reported clearly and aggressively," Smith continued. "He’s out there saying things that are false and running an overtly anti-Muslim campaign. BuzzFeed News’s reporting is rooted in facts, not opinion; these are facts." So what's a columnist, blogger, reporter or talk show host to do? Well, here's what @Midnight host Chris Hardwick has done to help give reporters and journalists an idea of what to call Trump. Some ideas include but are not limited to: Xenophobic sweet potato and wispy human queef Douchebag invested hair-piece Orangatang and casino miss-manager Presidential candidate and cranky planetoid The orange condom filled with rancid stew The Jersey Shore ventriloquist dummy Check it out - and feel free to tweet @Midnight and @Salon with your additional suggestions:
Some publications are grappling with what exactly to call Trump. Well, here's some of our favorite suggestions. Posted by @midnight on Thursday, December 10, 2015

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Published on December 11, 2015 12:35

“Serial” wades into political firestorm: Sarah Koenig could raise right’s ire by taking on Bowe Bergdahl mystery

The second season of the wildly popular podcast "Serial" dropped Thursday with little fanfare, but it's already raising the volume on a fascinating case that's poised to raise the ire of right-wingers. Like the first season, in which Sarah Koenig and her crew investigated whether or not a man named Adnan Syed was guilty of the murder he's doing time for, this season is taking an in-depth look at a situation with many conflicting stories on it, a story whose ultimate truth may also end up being impossible to know. The question at hand: What happened to Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, a soldier who walked off his base in Afghanistan in 2009, was captured by the Taliban and held captive for five years before the Obama administration bargained for his release. He's now in legal hot water for deserting his post, which he doesn't deny doing. It's easy to see why "Serial" would be interested in the Bergdahl story. Like Adnan Syed, Bergdahl is a man whose testimony you can never be quite sure of, and the first episode already sucks the listener in with the confounding question of whether he's lying, telling the truth, or something in between. And, as with Syed's case, there are a lot of other people involved, many with contradictory ideas about what happened and their own agendas that might make their testimony suspect. But there is one major difference these two stories. While the Syed season riffed on issues of racism and criminal justice, ultimately the story was still a small, personal one. The question of whether Syed killed his girlfriend in a jealous rage doesn't have a larger political impact. But Bergdahl's story is already a major culture war touchstone, especially for conservatives. What "Serial" turns up in their investigation could have major political ramifications, especially in a time of heightened sensitivity about the "war on terror" and an already contentious presidential race that's only now beginning to head into the primary season. The first round of pieces pegged to "Serial" at various media oulets has come out, and they are surprisingly light on politics, mostly focusing on explainer-type articles laying out the known facts about the Bergdahl case. There's an acknowledgement of partisan controversy around his case,  but that's being downplayed over excitement over digging deeper into what is, by any measure, a downright weird story. This all makes a certain amount of sense. The NPR-listening, liberal-leaning audience for "Serial" probably only has a vague awareness of the Bergdahl case and the controversy around it. To anyone outside the right-wing bubble, Bergdahl's story is little more than an intriguing mystery. But within conservative circles, Bergdahl is second only to ¡Bënghazi! in generating right-wing hysteria and conspiracy theories about the Obama administration's handling of the "war on terror" and foreign policy in Muslim-dominated countries generally. To understand the right-wing obsession with Bergdahl, it's important to understand how much the Obama administration has disturbed the conservative conviction that Democrats are inherently "weak" and "soft," as well as their belief that the only people who can keep us safe from foreign threats are Daddy Republicans. This belief has never had much evidence going for it, but all the way through the 2004 election, this knee-jerk assumption that Republicans will do a better job of protecting Americans because they puff their chests out bigger was an immoveable myth, believed not just by diehard conservatives, but a lot of centrists and low information voters, as well. But then the country endured the Bush administration's multiple failures, including getting the U.S. into an unnecessary and unwinnable war in Iraq. After Bush came Obama, who hasn't de-escalated tensions as much as most liberals would like, but is absolutely a lot better than his predecessor. In no small part, this is because the Obama administration actually takes terrorism seriously, instead of seeing it mostly for its propaganda value in justifying cowboy antics and adventure wars. That's why it was Obama's administration that finally got Osama Bin Laden, not Bush's, a victory that still stings on the right. Enter Bowe Bergdahl. The Obama administration was able to secure Bergdahl's release in exchange for the release of five Taliban prisoners, who are currently being held under government surveillance in Qatar. Initially, Bergdahl's release was treated like a good thing among those who love to fly the POW/MIA flag, but the unwillingness to allow the Obama administration yet another victory quickly kicked in. Accusations began to fly that the Obama administration erred in exchanging five prisoners for just one. Then suspicions set in that Bergdahl himself had some shady reason for wandering off base where he could be captured. The entire thing developed a life of its own and now many on the right are calling for Bergdahl's execution and regularly insinuating that Bergdahl's reason for deserting his post was that he turned traitor. As Koenig makes clear in the first episode of "Serial," the facts of the case are pretty thin on the ground right now. Bergdahl admits he left of his own accord, but it doesn't necessarily follow that he's a traitor or evil or working for the Taliban. It's entirely possible that Bergdhal is just an idiot who did an idiot thing. (The first episode of "Serial" already suggests this reading, albeit lightly, but who knows where this is headed.) But it's easy to see why so many conservatives need to believe the worst about Bergdahl. He has become, like "Benghazi," a symbol for them of their unwavering faith in the idea that Obama is a failure on the foreign policy front. Their faith has been sorely tested, over and over again, strengthening their need for some evidence of Obama's secret incompetence. Deep in their souls, they need to believe that Obama failed in some irredeemable way by getting Bergdahl back home. That's why conservatives need Bergdahl to be a bad guy. Getting all worked up because the president negotiated for the release of a man whose main crime is being stupid makes you look petty. But getting mad at the president for securing the release of a traitor? Now you're talking! Suggesting that Obama got a guy released who is a secret Taliban sympathizer? Why now you're getting into Obama-is-a-secret-Muslim territory. All of which is why it is wise for "Serial" fans to gird their loins now. While it may not matter much to liberals whether this guy is evil or just someone who made a bad decision, for conservatives, the answer to that question matters a whole lot. Their paranoia towards Obama hinges largely on the answer, after all, and they won't be too happy if the evidence starts to stack up against the "evil" theory. And we all know how conservatives tend to react in the face of evidence undermining their world view: Tantrums, lies, conspiracy theories, you name it. Right now, things are relatively quiet. The first episode is pleasantly vague about where all this is going. Hell, it might turn out that the conservative masses are right and Bergdahl has some dark secret he's not sharing. But then again, Bergdahl might end up coming across less as a traitorous mastermind and more like a doofus who made a bad decision one night. If it's the latter, don't be surprised if what started off as a pleasant little mystery podcast explodes into a massive political battle in the coming weeks. Everything We Know About the Man Behind 'Serial' Season 2The second season of the wildly popular podcast "Serial" dropped Thursday with little fanfare, but it's already raising the volume on a fascinating case that's poised to raise the ire of right-wingers. Like the first season, in which Sarah Koenig and her crew investigated whether or not a man named Adnan Syed was guilty of the murder he's doing time for, this season is taking an in-depth look at a situation with many conflicting stories on it, a story whose ultimate truth may also end up being impossible to know. The question at hand: What happened to Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, a soldier who walked off his base in Afghanistan in 2009, was captured by the Taliban and held captive for five years before the Obama administration bargained for his release. He's now in legal hot water for deserting his post, which he doesn't deny doing. It's easy to see why "Serial" would be interested in the Bergdahl story. Like Adnan Syed, Bergdahl is a man whose testimony you can never be quite sure of, and the first episode already sucks the listener in with the confounding question of whether he's lying, telling the truth, or something in between. And, as with Syed's case, there are a lot of other people involved, many with contradictory ideas about what happened and their own agendas that might make their testimony suspect. But there is one major difference these two stories. While the Syed season riffed on issues of racism and criminal justice, ultimately the story was still a small, personal one. The question of whether Syed killed his girlfriend in a jealous rage doesn't have a larger political impact. But Bergdahl's story is already a major culture war touchstone, especially for conservatives. What "Serial" turns up in their investigation could have major political ramifications, especially in a time of heightened sensitivity about the "war on terror" and an already contentious presidential race that's only now beginning to head into the primary season. The first round of pieces pegged to "Serial" at various media oulets has come out, and they are surprisingly light on politics, mostly focusing on explainer-type articles laying out the known facts about the Bergdahl case. There's an acknowledgement of partisan controversy around his case,  but that's being downplayed over excitement over digging deeper into what is, by any measure, a downright weird story. This all makes a certain amount of sense. The NPR-listening, liberal-leaning audience for "Serial" probably only has a vague awareness of the Bergdahl case and the controversy around it. To anyone outside the right-wing bubble, Bergdahl's story is little more than an intriguing mystery. But within conservative circles, Bergdahl is second only to ¡Bënghazi! in generating right-wing hysteria and conspiracy theories about the Obama administration's handling of the "war on terror" and foreign policy in Muslim-dominated countries generally. To understand the right-wing obsession with Bergdahl, it's important to understand how much the Obama administration has disturbed the conservative conviction that Democrats are inherently "weak" and "soft," as well as their belief that the only people who can keep us safe from foreign threats are Daddy Republicans. This belief has never had much evidence going for it, but all the way through the 2004 election, this knee-jerk assumption that Republicans will do a better job of protecting Americans because they puff their chests out bigger was an immoveable myth, believed not just by diehard conservatives, but a lot of centrists and low information voters, as well. But then the country endured the Bush administration's multiple failures, including getting the U.S. into an unnecessary and unwinnable war in Iraq. After Bush came Obama, who hasn't de-escalated tensions as much as most liberals would like, but is absolutely a lot better than his predecessor. In no small part, this is because the Obama administration actually takes terrorism seriously, instead of seeing it mostly for its propaganda value in justifying cowboy antics and adventure wars. That's why it was Obama's administration that finally got Osama Bin Laden, not Bush's, a victory that still stings on the right. Enter Bowe Bergdahl. The Obama administration was able to secure Bergdahl's release in exchange for the release of five Taliban prisoners, who are currently being held under government surveillance in Qatar. Initially, Bergdahl's release was treated like a good thing among those who love to fly the POW/MIA flag, but the unwillingness to allow the Obama administration yet another victory quickly kicked in. Accusations began to fly that the Obama administration erred in exchanging five prisoners for just one. Then suspicions set in that Bergdahl himself had some shady reason for wandering off base where he could be captured. The entire thing developed a life of its own and now many on the right are calling for Bergdahl's execution and regularly insinuating that Bergdahl's reason for deserting his post was that he turned traitor. As Koenig makes clear in the first episode of "Serial," the facts of the case are pretty thin on the ground right now. Bergdahl admits he left of his own accord, but it doesn't necessarily follow that he's a traitor or evil or working for the Taliban. It's entirely possible that Bergdhal is just an idiot who did an idiot thing. (The first episode of "Serial" already suggests this reading, albeit lightly, but who knows where this is headed.) But it's easy to see why so many conservatives need to believe the worst about Bergdahl. He has become, like "Benghazi," a symbol for them of their unwavering faith in the idea that Obama is a failure on the foreign policy front. Their faith has been sorely tested, over and over again, strengthening their need for some evidence of Obama's secret incompetence. Deep in their souls, they need to believe that Obama failed in some irredeemable way by getting Bergdahl back home. That's why conservatives need Bergdahl to be a bad guy. Getting all worked up because the president negotiated for the release of a man whose main crime is being stupid makes you look petty. But getting mad at the president for securing the release of a traitor? Now you're talking! Suggesting that Obama got a guy released who is a secret Taliban sympathizer? Why now you're getting into Obama-is-a-secret-Muslim territory. All of which is why it is wise for "Serial" fans to gird their loins now. While it may not matter much to liberals whether this guy is evil or just someone who made a bad decision, for conservatives, the answer to that question matters a whole lot. Their paranoia towards Obama hinges largely on the answer, after all, and they won't be too happy if the evidence starts to stack up against the "evil" theory. And we all know how conservatives tend to react in the face of evidence undermining their world view: Tantrums, lies, conspiracy theories, you name it. Right now, things are relatively quiet. The first episode is pleasantly vague about where all this is going. Hell, it might turn out that the conservative masses are right and Bergdahl has some dark secret he's not sharing. But then again, Bergdahl might end up coming across less as a traitorous mastermind and more like a doofus who made a bad decision one night. If it's the latter, don't be surprised if what started off as a pleasant little mystery podcast explodes into a massive political battle in the coming weeks. Everything We Know About the Man Behind 'Serial' Season 2

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Published on December 11, 2015 12:20

Grow up, America: Kids need real sex education in schools — including proper condom use

America, we are bombing out on how we're educating our kids. And this isn't just about standardized testing or charter school messes. It's about sex ed. According to a CDC report issued this week, "In most of the United States, fewer than half of high schools and only a fifth of middle schools teach all 16 topics recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as essential components of sexual health education." As the CDC explains, it "selects these age-appropriate topics for middle and high schools based on the scientific evidence for what helps young people avoid risk. The topics range from basic information on how HIV and other STDs are transmitted -- and how to prevent infection -- to critical communication and decision-making skills." Those are good things. And what's the price of ignorance? Guess what, it's not a nation of unsullied youth. It's a rise in risky behavior — the CDC says "Teens today are less likely than they were a decade ago to say they used a condom the last time they had sex (today about 59 percent say they did versus 63 percent in 2003). And nearly a quarter (22 percent) drank alcohol or used drugs the last time they had sex – reflecting no progress in more than two decades." Unshockingly, the choice of which 16 CDC recommended topics do get any coverage at all in school has a lot to do with whether or not they relate to actual sexual behavior. As NPR explains, the most widely taught topic is "Benefits of being sexually abstinent," followed by "How to create and sustain healthy and respectful relationships." Way down at the very bottom of the list? "How to correctly use a condom." I wonder if that's why the Office of Adolescent Health notes that "Adolescents ages 15-24 account for nearly half of the 20 million new cases of STD's each year," and says that "Today, four in 10 sexually active teen girls have had an STD that can cause infertility and even death." Relatedly, as has been repeatedly pointed out over the past few years, states with no sex education or abstinence only curriculums have the highest rate of teen pregnancies, while "teenagers who received some type of comprehensive sex education were 60 percent less likely to get pregnant or get someone else pregnant." I have two daughters, the elder of whom is a high school sophomore. This year, she and her classmates lobbied for the school to work on a student sexual harassment policy. Because they have a receptive school administration, the kids themselves began work on drafting it. They also get together to talk about relationships and gender and identity and no doubt a whole lot of things they save for when parents aren't around. And as long as that info is based in reality, I'm glad, because I want all of them to be be getting information that's accurate, inclusive and nonjudgmental. We're fortunate to live in New York — one of only three states, along with New Jersey and New Hampshire — that teaches all 16 CDC recommended sex ed topics. And at my children's school last month, the students began a several weeks long course of sexual education workshops offered via Planned Parenthood. (My middle schooler, meanwhile, will begin sex ed later in the year.) So far, in the same class in which one boy admitted he didn't know what a vulva was, a girl immediately and accurately replied to the question, "What are some possible consequences of sexting?" with the tart reply that "If you're under 18, you can be charged with distributing or receiving child pornography." This is the world they live in. Isn't it better they know about it? My kids — and yours, if you have or will have them — won't stay kids forever. We are failing them if we're not preparing early them to have healthy, respectful, responsible relationships. And it's delusional -- and dangerous -- to perpetuate the notion that keeping them ignorant will keep them innocent. Why Are Teens Taking the #CondomChallenge?

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Published on December 11, 2015 12:19