Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 971

The climate change fix we need: We’ll never solve the problem until we do this

Democracy has not been doing well. For this reason, now is an awkward time to argue that it must be the fulcrum of the Anthropocene. In the United States and Europe, democracies have rushed into foolish wars and stumbled in the face of economic crises—or created those crises. At the time of writing, the North Atlantic democracies are splitting into elite technocrats, who wish they could govern without consulting the masses, and angry populists, who would like to liquidate the technocrats. Nondemocratic governments openly disdain democratic pieties. Official Chinese voices even suggest that American failures prove the future does not belong to democracies. Democratic failures are often failures to impose self-restraint, and self-restraint is exactly what environmental politics needs. In the past fifteen years, democracies have failed to pay their burgeoning debts and have started wars that turned out to have little credible rationale and no decent ending. Climate change looks like another unsustainable deficit that is going to keep growing, a burden on future generations to pay for today’s convenience. The preferred responses to climate change, too, have an aspect of militarized fantasy: satellite mirrors to deflect solar energy from the earth, and other sci-fi technologies. These climate failures are part of a broader environmental failure. Although there have been important successes, notably anti-pollution laws, resource use and environmental impact continue to accelerate in the world’s richest democracies, and all the more in fast-growing poorer countries. Water shortage, soil health, toxicity, and loss of biodiversity are all looming sources of future crises. In recent decades, too, a basic change in the terms of government has narrowed the scope of democratic rule. Independent central banks, supra-national organizations like the World Trade Organization and the European Union, and constitutional limitations on taxation and spending have all taken economic governance out of the hands of popular majorities and placed it with technocrats and judges. The ideas behind these moves are twofold: first, that democracies are not to be trusted with their own most basic affairs, and, second, that there is one right way to organize economic life, which experts know and administer and everyone else must accept. These ideas coincide with a broader exhaustion in the rich modern tradition of political economy. In the last Gilded Age and in earlier economic crises, many alternative visions of economic life competed for popular attention: some of these influenced antitrust law, labor legislation, unionization, and the New Deal. In the past decade, economic crises and suffering, even widespread discontent with the way our market capitalism is working, have inspired mainly austerity in Europe and gridlock in the United States. Democratic citizens’ capacity to rework their own common lives has been hollowed out in overt and explicit ways, and eroded by a decline in political imagination. At the same time, the power of organized money in politics has only increased. It is a common—and fair— complaint that the U.S. government is distorted through and through by the political power of wealth. In environmental matters, the problem is even worse. Wealth is produced and sustained by an economy that effectively subsidizes fossil fuels (by treating greenhouse-gas emissions as costless) and industrial agriculture (through explicit subsidies to big producers and regulatory tolerance of massive feedlots and slaughter houses), along with every individual decision to buy from those industries. It’s as if the Constitution gave three votes to everyone who wants to keep things as they are, and only one vote to those who seek to change them. Real environmental reform is a matter of political economy. That is, it requires engaging the foundations of economic life: what kind of wealth an economy produces, how it distributes that wealth, what kind of freedom and equality it promotes, and what provision it makes for the future. These are political questions whose answers must be worked out through economic institutions. But the politics of modern democracies has become less able to engage such questions, even as the questions have become harder and more urgent. This is the crux of the difficulty. The problem is not entirely new. In the 1970s, some environmentalists took democratic failures as reason to hope that nondemocratic governments would save the natural world. Such arguments were motivated by the hope that state socialism could avoid capitalism’s demands for economic growth. The environmental record of the Soviet bloc established that, on the contrary, the pressure for economic growth was just as powerful there as in the West. Worse, those nondemocratic systems gave ordinary people no way to resist environmental destruction: while environmental politics was emerging in its modern form in the West, the heavy industry of the Eastern bloc created some of the worst disasters of the century, from the Chernobyl reactor meltdown to the death of the Aral Sea. Nonetheless, today there are resurgent fantasies of green authoritarianism, this time hung on China, with its state-led investment in solar cells. Where older hopes for an authoritarian savior expressed discontent with capitalism, today’s attraction to China is rooted in weariness of sclerotic democracy. China’s overall environmental record, though, is hardly better than the Soviet Union’s was, and its economic growth has massively increased the human impact on the planet. The lesson of the past fifty years is that humanity itself is the challenge. No political system has succeeded by contradicting the demand for more: more energy, more calories, more technology, and so more pressure on natural resources of all kinds. It is not surprising, then, that many people hope technology will save the world. The greatest optimism rests on clean and renewable energy sources, carbon-eating organisms, and other fixes that could reduce human pressure on natural systems as thoroughly as steam power and internal combustion lightened the economy’s demands on human muscles. Those technologies freed people from exhausting labor and early deaths. Mightn’t the next wave of technology free the planet from some of the more crushing human demands? A weaker form of optimism looks to technology as the key to managing a continuing crisis: geo-engineering will not free the planet, but it may make a carbon-dense atmosphere more livable by reducing its effect on temperature and climate. Maybe technological optimism will prove apt. Any environmentally responsible future would become much more likely if technology lessened the conflict between human flourishing and ecological health. There are, however, two reasons to doubt that technology alone could do the job. First, the environmental impact of innovation has always been a double-edged sword. With one edge, new technologies have made resource use much more efficient; for instance, the so-called carbon density of advanced economies, their carbon production per unit of economic activity, is much lower than in developing countries. This is a benefit of efficient energy production and use. The other edge of the sword, though, is a vast increase in overall resource use. As China has developed, for instance, its carbon density has dropped, but its overall carbon emissions have exploded, so that it in 2007 it surpassed the United States as the world’s largest emitter. This example captures the general pattern: as human powers increase, each individual puts more pressure on the natural world. The second limit on technology’s power to stem environmental crisis is that no technology can tell its users how to use it, or how to shape the earth with it. But those questions will need answers. Whatever innovation brings, people will continue to shape the earth by inhabiting it, changing everything from its atmospheric cycles to its soils and habitats. It is much too late to imagine that any technology could enable humanity to “stop disturbing” the earth. Instead, every technology will become part of the joint human-natural system in which we make and remake the world just by living here. Technology, then, brings efficiency, but it brings neither restraint nor purpose. People need both in engaging the planet. Understandably, then, many look for environmental hope in culture and consciousness. These, after all, are where individuals, families, and communities find both restraint and purpose. At some point, many meditations on environmental questions conclude that consciousness must change, or nothing will change. People must learn to make more modest choices, find satisfactions that exact a smaller toll on the natural world. After all, technology and democratic politics channel the values and priorities of individuals, families, and communities. In some way, these are always the local roots of a national failure of self-restraint and purpose. The emphasis on culture and consciousness, then, cannot be wrong. But is it helpful? History suggests that changes in consciousness are a necessary precondition for big and material changes in the human relation to the natural world, but also that they are not enough. By themselves, changes in personal values make differences on the margins of, say, buying decisions, or even choices of career, but they do little to change the larger systems that organize the relationship between humans and nature. Say that 60 percent of Americans come to value sustainably raised food and low-energy commutes enough to spend money on them. As most U.S. readers will realize on the basis of experience, the effect of this change will be to make sustainable food and urban housing into luxuries, inducing more production of these things, but also pushing the less wealthy into exurbs and utilitarian supermarkets. Some environmentally beneficial changes can follow from shifts in consciousness alone, but the biggest material changes happen through changes in the legal and economic infrastructure that guide human energies and activity. So long as the economy treats greenhouse-gas emissions and soil exhaustion as free and the legal system permits the mass feeding operations and slaughter houses of industrial agriculture, a good deal of changed consciousness will mean no more than shuffling furniture between the first-class and second-class cabins of the Titanic. Excerpted from "After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene" by Jedediah Purdy. Published by Harvard University Press. Copyright 2015 by Jedediah Purdy. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.Democracy has not been doing well. For this reason, now is an awkward time to argue that it must be the fulcrum of the Anthropocene. In the United States and Europe, democracies have rushed into foolish wars and stumbled in the face of economic crises—or created those crises. At the time of writing, the North Atlantic democracies are splitting into elite technocrats, who wish they could govern without consulting the masses, and angry populists, who would like to liquidate the technocrats. Nondemocratic governments openly disdain democratic pieties. Official Chinese voices even suggest that American failures prove the future does not belong to democracies. Democratic failures are often failures to impose self-restraint, and self-restraint is exactly what environmental politics needs. In the past fifteen years, democracies have failed to pay their burgeoning debts and have started wars that turned out to have little credible rationale and no decent ending. Climate change looks like another unsustainable deficit that is going to keep growing, a burden on future generations to pay for today’s convenience. The preferred responses to climate change, too, have an aspect of militarized fantasy: satellite mirrors to deflect solar energy from the earth, and other sci-fi technologies. These climate failures are part of a broader environmental failure. Although there have been important successes, notably anti-pollution laws, resource use and environmental impact continue to accelerate in the world’s richest democracies, and all the more in fast-growing poorer countries. Water shortage, soil health, toxicity, and loss of biodiversity are all looming sources of future crises. In recent decades, too, a basic change in the terms of government has narrowed the scope of democratic rule. Independent central banks, supra-national organizations like the World Trade Organization and the European Union, and constitutional limitations on taxation and spending have all taken economic governance out of the hands of popular majorities and placed it with technocrats and judges. The ideas behind these moves are twofold: first, that democracies are not to be trusted with their own most basic affairs, and, second, that there is one right way to organize economic life, which experts know and administer and everyone else must accept. These ideas coincide with a broader exhaustion in the rich modern tradition of political economy. In the last Gilded Age and in earlier economic crises, many alternative visions of economic life competed for popular attention: some of these influenced antitrust law, labor legislation, unionization, and the New Deal. In the past decade, economic crises and suffering, even widespread discontent with the way our market capitalism is working, have inspired mainly austerity in Europe and gridlock in the United States. Democratic citizens’ capacity to rework their own common lives has been hollowed out in overt and explicit ways, and eroded by a decline in political imagination. At the same time, the power of organized money in politics has only increased. It is a common—and fair— complaint that the U.S. government is distorted through and through by the political power of wealth. In environmental matters, the problem is even worse. Wealth is produced and sustained by an economy that effectively subsidizes fossil fuels (by treating greenhouse-gas emissions as costless) and industrial agriculture (through explicit subsidies to big producers and regulatory tolerance of massive feedlots and slaughter houses), along with every individual decision to buy from those industries. It’s as if the Constitution gave three votes to everyone who wants to keep things as they are, and only one vote to those who seek to change them. Real environmental reform is a matter of political economy. That is, it requires engaging the foundations of economic life: what kind of wealth an economy produces, how it distributes that wealth, what kind of freedom and equality it promotes, and what provision it makes for the future. These are political questions whose answers must be worked out through economic institutions. But the politics of modern democracies has become less able to engage such questions, even as the questions have become harder and more urgent. This is the crux of the difficulty. The problem is not entirely new. In the 1970s, some environmentalists took democratic failures as reason to hope that nondemocratic governments would save the natural world. Such arguments were motivated by the hope that state socialism could avoid capitalism’s demands for economic growth. The environmental record of the Soviet bloc established that, on the contrary, the pressure for economic growth was just as powerful there as in the West. Worse, those nondemocratic systems gave ordinary people no way to resist environmental destruction: while environmental politics was emerging in its modern form in the West, the heavy industry of the Eastern bloc created some of the worst disasters of the century, from the Chernobyl reactor meltdown to the death of the Aral Sea. Nonetheless, today there are resurgent fantasies of green authoritarianism, this time hung on China, with its state-led investment in solar cells. Where older hopes for an authoritarian savior expressed discontent with capitalism, today’s attraction to China is rooted in weariness of sclerotic democracy. China’s overall environmental record, though, is hardly better than the Soviet Union’s was, and its economic growth has massively increased the human impact on the planet. The lesson of the past fifty years is that humanity itself is the challenge. No political system has succeeded by contradicting the demand for more: more energy, more calories, more technology, and so more pressure on natural resources of all kinds. It is not surprising, then, that many people hope technology will save the world. The greatest optimism rests on clean and renewable energy sources, carbon-eating organisms, and other fixes that could reduce human pressure on natural systems as thoroughly as steam power and internal combustion lightened the economy’s demands on human muscles. Those technologies freed people from exhausting labor and early deaths. Mightn’t the next wave of technology free the planet from some of the more crushing human demands? A weaker form of optimism looks to technology as the key to managing a continuing crisis: geo-engineering will not free the planet, but it may make a carbon-dense atmosphere more livable by reducing its effect on temperature and climate. Maybe technological optimism will prove apt. Any environmentally responsible future would become much more likely if technology lessened the conflict between human flourishing and ecological health. There are, however, two reasons to doubt that technology alone could do the job. First, the environmental impact of innovation has always been a double-edged sword. With one edge, new technologies have made resource use much more efficient; for instance, the so-called carbon density of advanced economies, their carbon production per unit of economic activity, is much lower than in developing countries. This is a benefit of efficient energy production and use. The other edge of the sword, though, is a vast increase in overall resource use. As China has developed, for instance, its carbon density has dropped, but its overall carbon emissions have exploded, so that it in 2007 it surpassed the United States as the world’s largest emitter. This example captures the general pattern: as human powers increase, each individual puts more pressure on the natural world. The second limit on technology’s power to stem environmental crisis is that no technology can tell its users how to use it, or how to shape the earth with it. But those questions will need answers. Whatever innovation brings, people will continue to shape the earth by inhabiting it, changing everything from its atmospheric cycles to its soils and habitats. It is much too late to imagine that any technology could enable humanity to “stop disturbing” the earth. Instead, every technology will become part of the joint human-natural system in which we make and remake the world just by living here. Technology, then, brings efficiency, but it brings neither restraint nor purpose. People need both in engaging the planet. Understandably, then, many look for environmental hope in culture and consciousness. These, after all, are where individuals, families, and communities find both restraint and purpose. At some point, many meditations on environmental questions conclude that consciousness must change, or nothing will change. People must learn to make more modest choices, find satisfactions that exact a smaller toll on the natural world. After all, technology and democratic politics channel the values and priorities of individuals, families, and communities. In some way, these are always the local roots of a national failure of self-restraint and purpose. The emphasis on culture and consciousness, then, cannot be wrong. But is it helpful? History suggests that changes in consciousness are a necessary precondition for big and material changes in the human relation to the natural world, but also that they are not enough. By themselves, changes in personal values make differences on the margins of, say, buying decisions, or even choices of career, but they do little to change the larger systems that organize the relationship between humans and nature. Say that 60 percent of Americans come to value sustainably raised food and low-energy commutes enough to spend money on them. As most U.S. readers will realize on the basis of experience, the effect of this change will be to make sustainable food and urban housing into luxuries, inducing more production of these things, but also pushing the less wealthy into exurbs and utilitarian supermarkets. Some environmentally beneficial changes can follow from shifts in consciousness alone, but the biggest material changes happen through changes in the legal and economic infrastructure that guide human energies and activity. So long as the economy treats greenhouse-gas emissions and soil exhaustion as free and the legal system permits the mass feeding operations and slaughter houses of industrial agriculture, a good deal of changed consciousness will mean no more than shuffling furniture between the first-class and second-class cabins of the Titanic. Excerpted from "After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene" by Jedediah Purdy. Published by Harvard University Press. Copyright 2015 by Jedediah Purdy. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.

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Thrown under the train: How the railroad industry systematically targets its whistleblowers

As both a veteran railroad worker and union official responsible for safety, Mike Elliott became alarmed when he learned of trouble-plagued train signals in his home state of Washington. Signals, he said, at times would inexplicably switch from red to yellow to green – potentially creating confusion that could lead to a crash. Elliott raised that and other signal issues repeatedly with his managers at BNSF Railway Co. But eventually, Elliott concluded that “these guys are running me around in circles.” So Elliott, 57, of Tacoma, Wash., pressed his concerns with the Federal Railroad Administration, summarizing the matter in a January 2011 letter. The FRA investigated, and discovered 357 safety violations, including 112 signal system defects. Speaking up for safety, though, only made matters worse for Elliott at BNSF, where he already had clashed with managers. Within weeks the company fired Elliott from his job as a locomotive engineer – an act that a federal jury this summer ruled was illegal retaliation by BNSF against a whistleblower. The June 30 decision by the Tacoma jury, which awarded Elliott $1.25 million but is being appealed, spotlights the unjust punishment that critics say sometimes is meted out to railroad workers who report injuries or safety problems. These critics, including plaintiff lawyers and union officials, along with others who have examined railroad practices, say the harsh treatment reflects old, hard-line management tactics that persist in corners of the industry. Under the 22 federal whistleblower laws administered by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, American workers who disclose hazards or engage in other “protected activity” are shielded against retaliation by their employers. The protected activities vary by industry, but include reporting injuries, disclosing the misuse of public funds and refusing to perform dangerous tasks that would violate safety rules. OSHA protection covers, among many others, truck drivers, public transit employees, nuclear plant operators and, since 2007, railroad workers. Yet despite the broad safeguards for railroaders – or perhaps partly because of them – complaints of illegal retaliation abound in the industry. From October 2007 through June 2015, OSHA figures show, railroad workers filed more than 2,000 retaliation complaints, although the pace has slowed lately. Among the top 10 targets of complaints over the nearly eight-year period, seven were railroads, led by the two largest U.S. railroads, BNSF (409 complaints) and Union Pacific (360). OSHA investigators and Labor Department administrative law judges repeatedly have upheld complaints against the railroads, more than half of which involve illegal retaliation against workers who report personal injuries. In one such case an administrative law judge in 2013 ruled against Union Pacific, declaring: “The actions by Union Pacific have been so egregious in this case, and Union Pacific has been so openly blatant in ignoring the provisions of [federal law], that I find punitive damages are necessary to ensure that this reprehensible conduct is not repeated.” In January of that year, BNSF, without admitting wrongdoing, signed an unprecedented accord with OSHA after the federal agency alleged that several of the company’s policies discriminated against injured employees. Among other things, the accord eliminated giving demerit points to workers who report injuries. At the time, OSHA’s chief, David Michaels, said in a statement that the accord “sets the tone for other railroad employers throughout the U.S. to take steps to ensure that their workers are not harassed, intimidated or terminated, in whole or part, for reporting workplace injuries.” Safety “a top priority” Officials of the Association of American Railroads, the leading industry group, declined to be interviewed for this story. Instead, the AAR issued a brief statement saying, “The safety of employees and communities along the nation’s 140,000-mile rail network remains a top priority for the entire industry and is taken very seriously.” Union Pacific also refused interview requests. So did BNSF, which was created by the 1995 merger of Burlington Northern Inc. and Santa Fe Pacific Corp., and is now a unit of investor Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. However, in a prepared statement after the jury decision in the Elliott case, BNSF said it “is proud of its safety culture and retaliation against safety complaints is contrary to how we operate and the training our people receive.” The company added that Elliott “was dismissed for unrelated rules violations.” (On Oct. 1, the federal judge who heard Elliott’s case, Ronald B. Leighton, a Republican appointed by George W. Bush, rejected BNSF’s motion for a new trial. He ruled that the disciplinary proceedings against the former employee were “seriously flawed” and that BNSF executives “displayed personal animosity against Mr. Elliott.”) The alleged violations defy a key intent of federal whistleblower laws: to encourage employees who discover possible hazards to come forward before an accident happens. The potential value of such an early warning system is underscored by the deadly passenger rail accidents and oil train wrecks in recent years. Joseph C. Szabo, who headed the FRA from 2009 until this January, said industry supervisors often are under “immense pressure” to curb costs by moving trains quickly out of rail yards. That, in turn, translates into pressure on rank-and-file workers “to ignore safety protocols and to just get the damn train out of town.” That’s why, Szabo said, it’s “critically important” that railroad workers are “very comfortable in doing the right thing without any fear of retribution.” Award is canceled Likewise, safety advocates say, the ability of workers to report injuries without jeopardizing their livelihoods is crucial in a field with many hazardous jobs. Railroads have relatively high rates of on-the-job fatalities – although the toll has fallen dramatically over the last three decades. What’s more, injury totals may be substantially higher than reported. In 2012, amid widespread suspicion that railroads were undercounting injuries, in part by pressuring workers not to report them, the industry dropped its 99-year-old annual Harriman safety award, which was largely based on employee injury reports. Norfolk Southern, which had won Harriman safety “gold award” 23 years in a row before the honor was scrapped, was the target of 247 whistleblower complaints during the nearly eight-year period tracked. That was the fifth-highest total among all U.S. employers. Railroad whistleblowers under federal law must first file complaints with OSHA; they can pursue their cases through conclusion with the agency or, if their issues haven’t been resolved, after 120 days they can opt out and take their cases to court. In fact, both OSHA and federal juries over the past year have issued a string of big decisions against railroads in cases brought by whistleblowers, although the companies have appealed many of the rulings. Those whistleblowers include: –Mike Koziara, 55, who in March won an award of $425,725 after a federal jury found that BNSF illegally fired him for reporting an on-the-job injury. In September 2010, Koziara, a 32-year veteran of the company, was a section foreman, a job that put him in charge of track maintenance for a 40-mile stretch of rail along the Mississippi River in Wisconsin. The day he was hurt, Koziara was leading a group of employees tasked with removing large, wooden planks from a road crossing in East Winona, Wis., when he was struck in the left ankle by a 1,200-pound plank. “It hurt,” Koziara said, but he didn’t think it was serious. Three days later, after the 72-hour period allowed for reporting injuries was over, he went to see his doctor for a physical. There, she took one look at his leg and sent him for an X-ray. The results showed Koziara had a cracked tibia, or shinbone. “I just don’t get the railroads” He reported the injury to BNSF the next day. A few days later, the company charged him with failing to be “alert and attentive.” As punishment, he was given a 30-day suspension and a one-year probation. But it didn’t stop there. While the railroad investigated Koziara’s injury, it learned that he recently had given about 20 used rail ties to a local farmer. Koziara maintains he had gotten permission to take some ties – and that it otherwise would have cost the railroad money to dispose of used ties – but BNSF charged him with theft. He was fired on Nov. 9, exactly two months after he was injured. “I don’t know why they’re so hard on their employees,” Osaid Koziara, who is now retired. “They’ll get more out of us if they were just better to us. I just don’t get the railroads at all.” –Steven Annucci, a coach cleaner for Metro-North Commuter Railroad. Last December OSHA found that he should receive $250,000 in punitive damages, the maximum permitted in a railroad retaliation case. Annucci hurt his knee in November 2011, when he tripped on a wooden board sticking up about six inches above a paved walkway in a train yard in Stamford, Conn. General Foreman Prena Beliveau drove Annucci to the hospital. On the way there, Annucci secretly recorded their conversation. According to OSHA, Beliveau told Annucci that if you have an injury on your record at Metro-North you’re not going to move up — you’re going to be a car cleaner for the rest of your career. Beliveau also said everybody at Metro-North who gets hurt is written up for safety. Animus is clear Annucci reported the injury anyway. A couple weeks later, Metro-North formally reprimanded him for safety violations, although he kept his job. A year later Annucci was charged with failing to properly clean vomit from a train car, and was reprimanded again. In its December ruling, OSHA found that “animus is clear in this case” and ordered Metro-North to pay Annucci attorney’s fees and $10,000 in compensatory damages, along with the punitive damages. –Union Pacific apprentice machinist Brian Petersen, 31, who was fired after a co-worker drove over his feet in the parking lot of a train yard in North Platte, Neb.. In a pair of rulings last November and February, the railroad was ordered to pay Petersen more than $400,000 in back pay, attorney fees and damages. In the spring, the two sides reached a confidential settlement. The case stemmed from a 2009 accident. Petersen claimed he was leaning against his car, checking his cell phone for messages, when a colleague roared into the space next to him. Union Pacific concluded that Petersen was inattentive and careless, then fired him a few days later when he was seen standing on some motors to write down their serial numbers when he should have been using a ladder. The administrative law judge who considered the case in 2013 – the one who condemned Union Pacific for “egregious” actions – said the rules the company charged Petersen with breaking “are written in such a manner that anyone who is injured and reports it will have violated at least a part of one or more of them.” Experts often trace railroad managers’ behavior to the way the industry emerged in the mid-19th century. Back then, many railroad officials came from the officer ranks of the Civil War armies. “It was traditionally an industry in which the boss is the absolute boss … all the way up the hierarchy. You don’t question the boss’ authority,” said historian Maury Klein, the author of a half-dozen books on railroads. Paramilitary structure Szabo, the former FRA chief, said railroads have embraced more enlightened practices over the past decade or so, but management still has elements of “a paramilitary structure, very much command and control.” To this day, railroads remain discipline-minded. Operating and safety manuals run hundreds of pages. Suspected violators, including workers who get hurt, face internal investigations. Critics still echo Congressional investigators who in 2007 found that railroad companies, along with federal regulators, are “more oriented toward assigning blame to a single individual, without a thorough examination of the underlying causes that led that single individual to commit an error.” In part, the hard-nosed culture reflects an effort to cope with the inherent dangers of rail transportation. “Small screw-ups can sometimes lead to somebody getting killed,” said Mark Aldrich, author of the 2006 book, “Death Rode the Rails.” Safety has improved substantially in recent decades, Aldrich and other experts say, but the pressure on middle-managers to move as quickly as possible while also holding injuries to a minimum still creates incentives to ignore or conceal mishaps. “I don’t think this is a problem that’s going to go away,” Aldrich said. Defenders of the industry say the volume of whistleblower cases isn’t a good barometer of actual wrongdoing because the discipline in dispute often stems from violations by the employees that are completely unrelated to their injuries. “In many cases, the [employee’s] argument is simply, ‘Well, the railroad managers didn’t like the fact that I reported my injury so they were looking for an excuse to get me,” said James Whitehead, a management lawyer who has represented railroads and who teaches employment law at the University of Chicago. Experts say much of the worker litigiousness stems from a 1908 law that excluded railroad employees from state workers compensation systems. Instead, it required them to go to court if they wanted to seek compensation for on-the-job injuries. That created a strong market for personal injury attorneys who specialize in railroad litigation. And those lawyers were quick to file whistleblower complaints after Congress in 2007 and 2008 modified the Federal Railroad Safety Act, adding anti-retaliation measures for rail workers. As a result of those measures, railroad employees often have a lighter burden of proof when they pursue retaliation claims than do workers in other fields. Likewise, railroad employees often have rights other workers lack, such as the ability to file complaints over alleged retaliation due to reporting personal injuries. They also can take claims to federal court if their cases aren’t resolved within 210 days – a prospect that railroads often dread. “There can be a lot of emotion in these cases, and they can be challenging cases to defend” when they go before a jury, Whitehead said. Tensions smolder Mike Elliott’s case reflects the workplace tensions that sometimes smolder in the railroad industry. The beginning of the end for Elliott at BNSF came in March 2011, when he was chairman of the Washington legislative board of his union, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen. Elliott, an ex-Marine, got into a parking lot scuffle with Dennis Kautzmann, a supervisor who Elliott claimed harassed him for several years due to his safety advocacy. The parking lot incident, Elliott’s lawyers argued in their successful federal lawsuit, was instigated as part of a scheme by BNSF managers to get Elliott fired because he triggered the federal safety investigation. They said Kautzmann had no other reason, after Elliott had clocked out for the day, for pursuing him from a BNSF building into the parking lot. (In his Oct. 1 ruling rejecting a new trial, Judge Leighton agreed that Kautzmann “staged” the conflict.) Kautzmann, in a memo describing the March 2011 confrontation, said he followed Elliott into the parking lot simply to make sure Elliott understood the details about an upcoming engineer recertification evaluation. He said he brought along another BNSF employee “to assist me in having Mr. Elliott stop.” Kautzmann said he then stepped in front of Elliott’s car, but Elliot didn’t stop and ran into him, throwing Kautzmann onto the car’s hood. After that, Kautzmann said, Elliott angrily got out of the car and punched him in the mouth. Kautzmann pressed charges after the parking lot incident, and Elliott was criminally prosecuted, but a jury acquitted him. Yet BNSF conducted two internal investigations, and issued decisions both times calling for Elliott’s firing. A federal arbitration board upheld the findings. At the federal trial challenging the firing, BNSF argued that Elliott’s firing couldn’t have been retaliation for reporting safety problems because it had little knowledge of Elliott’s recent contacts with federal regulators. But Elliott’s lawyers presented evidence that BNSF was well aware that their client was in touch with regulators in the months before his firing. For instance, the lawyers pointed to an email about train signal problems that Elliott sent to a government official, and “cc-d” to company officials, in September 2010, several months before the federal inspections. Despite winning the federal suit, Elliott expects a drawn-out appeals process, and he has decided against seeking reinstatement to his job at BNSF. Instead, he is working these days as a lobbyist and spokesman for the union. The role is crucial, he says, because his former co-workers at BNSF need someone to speak out about safety issues. “The culture and the workplace fear of reporting injuries or safety problems hasn’t changed,” Elliott said. “Our members are still afraid.”

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Ronald Reagan stiff-armed the religious right: What today’s GOP must learn before wingnuts swallow it whole

“Reagan wins!” exclaimed the headlines across the media outlets of the Religious Right in 1980. It was hard to show humility—or patience—after such a huge election they had helped bring about, but religious conservatives quickly learned their agenda wouldn’t be the first priority of the Reagan White House. Instead, the White House explained Reagan first had to address the nation’s poor economy and tackle the tax burden. But once the president’s tax package passed, it became clear the Reagan administration would give little attention to the conservative moral issues the Religious Right had expected the new president to address. The journalist Lou Cannon, working on a biography of Reagan during his first administration, asked a presidential adviser what the White House planned to give the Religious Right. “Symbolism,” the staffer responded. Pointing to the blockbuster film, The Godfather, the adviser explained the Reagan White House intended to follow the mafia don’s philosophy, “Hold your friends close, hold your enemies closer.” He elaborated, “We want to keep the Moral Majority types so close to us they can’t move their arms.” The Washington Post quoted a more high-ranking Reagan staffer, Deputy Chief of Staff Michael Deaver, who said the only way any Religious Right leaders could enter the White House would be through “the back door.” Another journalist covering the Reagan White House, Sidney Blumenthal, found the president’s team practiced a tacit “containment strategy” whereby key Senate leaders and White House staffers were encouraged to meet regularly with Religious Right operatives to discuss pressing concerns so to give the appearance that work was being done on the issues without actually delivering on them in any substantive way. This would keep the Religious Right happy—or at least, distractedly busy—while not eliciting the concern of Reagan’s larger, more secular support. Small gestures could be extended, like proposing a bill on a tiny aspect of a larger social concern or delivering a speech to a key Religious Right organization, but less effort would be done to see that such a bill—let alone one with more political substance—would pass or that a speech’s promises would actually be carried out. Morton Blackwell, a presidential assistant, was responsible for looking after the Religious Right constituency and given the charge to keep them, as Blumenthal explains, “in a state of perpetual mobilization.” “The flaw in that strategy,” Blumenthal notes, “was that the White House served as an incubator for the movement it was trying to contain.” Of course, with Religious Right operatives, Blackwell presented a different explanation of the White House’s strategy. In a letter to a Moral Majority leader, Blackwell explained that the White House would approach the Religious Right’s agenda through a tactic of “incrementalism.” “The fact is that it works,” Blackwell contended. “It is unrealistic to expect to undo fifty years of bad increments in one year or even in one presidential term. . . . A foolish belief in the possibility of total, instant victory is a prescription for unrealistic hopes and early disillusionment at the grassroots.” The first disappointment the president’s evangelical supporters admitted concerned the administration’s lack of a sizeable evangelical presence, particularly since Reagan had made campaign promises that he would staff evangelicals within his administration in proportion to their representation in the American public. The idea that some 40 percent of the Reagan administration would be made up of evangelicals was preposterous, of course, but the paltry numbers of evangelicals who actually made it into the administration must have seemed even more ridiculous to those watching closely. Two scholars later counted only four evangelicals among Reagan’s thirty-one cabinet appointees, with Secretary of the Interior James Watt being the only evangelical appointed in Reagan’s first cabinet. Reagan did appoint Moral Majority executive director Robert Billings as his assistant secretary of education for non-public schools, but he was soon removed from the position because of protests from Catholic educators worried about a fundamentalist Protestant having so much power over the federal government’s relationship with parochial schools. While more evangelicals were scattered throughout the lower ranks of the White House and administration, it was no presence of note. But this hardly tempered evangelical expectations. One frustrated evangelical in the White House attracted controversy when she told a reporter Reagan’s close advisers should either “get saved or get out.” Evangelicals’ next disappointment came when Reagan nominated Sandra Day O’Connor to the Supreme Court in his first year in office. In running for the presidency, Reagan had courted key Religious Right operatives by vowing to nominate only committed pro-life jurists to the nation’s highest court. His winning of the National Right to Life Committee’s endorsement, in fact, had been secured in two private meetings with NRLC president Carolyn Gerster where he had promised her just that. O’Connor, then, was a startling choice. Pro-lifers dug up O’Connor’s voting records from her time as an Arizona state legislator and found a worrisome history of pro-choice votes. Reagan’s “shocking intention,” in the words of a Christian Action Council fundraising letter, to nominate O’Connor seemed an especially insulting move to pro-life activists, and anti-abortion newspapers and magazines decried the president’s move. At the White House, fifty leaders from various Religious Right organizations complained to Morton Blackwell of their growing sense that, given his actions, the president didn’t “think this coalition contributed significantly to his election.” Internally, the Religious Right faced challenges of its own making. Importantly, for all the talk of an ecumenical movement on behalf of conservative social issues, the Religious Right operated largely along denominational lines in its dealings with the Reagan White House. At the leadership ranks, Religious Right organizations sometimes coordinated with each other, but more often worked alone or in partnership, especially evangelical and fundamentalist groups, with like-minded believers. This had been the case in the run-up to the 1980 election, but divided operations in a campaign season seemed the most logical way to mobilize diverse constituencies. The conviction among conservative Catholics, Mormons, and evangelicals that Ronald Reagan was the man they needed in the White House to deliver on their goals had united their divided efforts. Once Reagan assumed the presidency, these disparate strands of conservative Christianity would come together as the bloc representing traditionalism and religious values—a moral majority, one might describe it—to make sure the president turned the nation back to God and delivered on their agenda. While there were moments of cooperation and common cause within the Religious Right during the Reagan years, far more often the various components of the network worked in isolation, opening up divisions even within shared issues and working in direct opposition on other issues they had never really discussed. The Religious Right foundered at what could have been its best moment, riven by theological disagreements that yielded political consequences and often divided by different political objectives reflecting their unique theological convictions. What emerged during the Reagan years was at best a loose coalition of religious conservatives, frequently fraught with dissension, disagreement, and the possibility of dispersion. For a White House that hesitated over aligning itself too closely with what often appeared a radioactive Religious Right, the divisions within the network proved a useful scapegoat. Rather than working to smooth over disagreements and broker compromises, Reagan officials largely sat back and allowed the infighting and disunity to continue, then pointed to the chaos as a way to avoid the responsibility of leadership or to explain away disappointing legislative setbacks. On the Religious Right’s two major objectives for the Reagan presidency—school prayer and abortion—the network’s fractured nature helped doom policy objectives that had always been a formidable prospect. And on other issues of national concern, including welfare reform and the nuclear arms race, evangelicals, Catholics, and Mormons took differing positions that demonstrated their political divergence and challenged the notion of a conservative ecumenism. Abortion and the Reagan Administration The White House quickly frustrated pro-life activists. Since Roe v. Wade, pro-life activists had worked to pass a right-to-life amendment to the Constitution. Two bills in the Senate in 1981 addressed this goal, one directly. The Hatch Amendment, a constitutional amendment proposed by the conservative Mormon and Utah Republican Senator Orrin Hatch, gave Congress and individual states the right to pass their own abortion laws. Hatch’s backers liked his amendment because they saw it as a good route to a quick victory at the state level and believed it could survive any court challenges. Others appreciated it as a defense of federalism and a reproach to what they believed was Roe’s overreaching power. But the amendment’s biggest drawback made it unworkable. Even Senator Hatch admitted his amendment could never receive the needed two-thirds support from Congress. Jesse Helms, the arch-conservative Southern Baptist Republican Senator from North Carolina, offered an alternative to the Hatch Amendment. Helms’s bill sidestepped the issue of congressional support by offering a statute rather than a constitutional amendment. The Human Life Bill, as Helms’s proposal became known, also directly addressed the important philosophical point that Hatch’s amendment had ignored by declaring life began at conception, thus equating abortion to murder. “This measure,” the Christian Action Council declared, “is centered upon the very principles that have drawn us together as a movement.” Helms’s bill also prohibited any federal dollars going to abortion and sought to avoid legal challenges by asserting that courts had no jurisdiction over the matter of abortion. Faced with two options, the pro-life community divided over which to support. As Congressional Quarterly pointed out, “translating the general rhetoric about abortion into stark legislative language” exposed the divisions in a movement that seemed united when the issue at hand merely involved voicing opposition to the horror of abortion. Evangelical groups and New Right leaders supported the Helms bill. Several major Catholic anti-abortion groups, like the National Pro-Life Political Action Committee led by Father Charles Fiore, backed the Hatch bill. The National Right to Life Committee, after pressure from the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB), threw its support to the Hatch Amendment. The NCCB had testified before Congress in support of the Hatch Amendment, declaring it an “achievable solution to the present situation of abortion on demand.” But many Catholics, including some inside the NRLC, criticized the bishops for choosing political expediency over principle and noted that their endorsement of the Hatch Amendment departed from their prior insistence on a constitutional amendment guaranteeing full personhood to the unborn child. This turnaround, one conservative Catholic publication noted, “lacks any proper moral foundation, and indeed exists in a metaphysical and moral vacuum.” But the bishops continued on with their efforts. As they had before, the bishops pushed the church to give its full support to the Hatch Amendment, directing priests in various archdioceses across the country to deliver messages supporting the Hatch Amendment at Mass and to ask parishioners to sign petitions in support of the amendment. Even those supportive of the bishops’ move recognized its play for power. The Catholic Church had created the pro-life movement and its most important organization in the National Right to Life Committee. Yet by 1981, evangelical anti-abortion organizations had begun to eclipse the Catholic Church’s hold on the movement, especially after the political victories they had helped secure for pro-life candidates in the 1980 election. Those evangelical organizations had been largely courted by the New Right that, apart from the abortion issue, supported political positions in contradiction to many of the Catholic Church’s concerns. Supporting the Hatch Amendment, then, when the majority of the pro-life community and the New Right supported Helms’s bill, allowed the Catholic Church and its affiliate organizations to stand outside the anti-abortion consensus and New Right coalition and reassert its independence. In pressuring the NRLC to support the Hatch Amendment while evangelical groups backed the Helms bill, the Catholic Church also revived the theological divisions in the pro-life movement. “Protestants are dismayed by the United States Catholic Conference approval of the Hatch amendment,” the executive director of the evangelical Christian Action Council stated after the bishops testified before Congress on behalf of the Hatch Amendment. Even Phyllis Schlafly displayed her greater allegiance to the New Right political agenda than the spiritual directives of her own church when she urged her Eagle Forum Newsletter readers to support the Helms bill, noting, “Catholics are not bound by any political statements made by a Bishops conference.” And the news media jumped on the chance to cover the widening divisions in the pro-life community. “Political reality has come home to the pro-life movement,” one prominent activist commented, “and it has been totally unpleasant.” The division, of course, only doomed both bills, allowing Reagan to remain above the fray. Falwell said in the summer of 1982 that though he retained “personal confidence” in Reagan’s commitment to ending abortion, he was also “a little anxious that we haven’t had some aggressive support.” For quite some time, Reagan refused to endorse either bill, insisting instead that the pro-life movement agree on which bill they wanted to get behind. Recognizing the Helms bill had vociferous support from the evangelical pro-life wing, the National Right to Life Committee and other pro-Hatch organizations finally announced their support for the Helms bill as a vote approached, but they intended to continue supporting the Hatch Amendment also. Still, pro-life forces expressed ongoing frustration with the paltry efforts the White House expended on either bill. Reagan eventually decided to back each bill as it came up for a vote, a move calculated in part to keep all the factions of the pro-life movement happy but also a strategy that ultimately communicated the White House’s indifference to either measure. Reagan endorsed the Helms bill that came up first and lobbied for its passage at the last minute, but he did little to bring about consensus on the measure from the Religious Right. Now up for a vote in the Senate before the close of the 1982 congressional session, the Helms bill had been altered to also include language restoring school prayer. It failed to pass the Senate. After the Hatch bill also failed early in 1983, pro-life activists fell into in-fighting, convinced the Helms-Hatch battle had weakened the effectiveness of a pro-life movement and distrustful they could ever act as a truly united force. Many shared Christianity Today’s fear that the president had hesitated to “endorse any particular initiative because pro-life groups failed to patch up their intramural differences.” Bickering inside the pro-life community reflected the tensions of a movement struggling to remain relevant. Polls showed an increasing numbers of Americans supported abortion rights, and the threat of a human life amendment had boosted the pro-choice movement. The National Abortion Rights Action League, for instance, reported membership grew by over 50 percent in just one year since the 1980 election, though its 125,000 members still paled in comparison to the millions who belonged to the NRLC and other pro-life groups. But the pro-life movement’s size provided room for the many disagreements that would challenge its success. Excerpted from "We Gather Together: The Religious Right and the Problem of Interfaith Politics" by Neil J. Young. Published by Oxford University Press. Copyright 2015 by Neil J. Young. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.

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Bring back the Jay Leno and David Letterman feuds: What’s lost in the nice, new late-night of Colbert, Fallon and Kimmel

When Stephen Colbert took over “The Late Show,” some wondered if he would now begin feuding with network rivals Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel. Given the historic feud between Jay Leno and David Letterman, then between Kimmel and Leno, late-night comedy had come to be defined, in part, by attention-getting fights rivalry. Leno once said that rivalry would make late night “more exciting.” Now over one month into Colbert’s new show, we can note a new era in late-night comedy: One that is more defined by bromance than feuds. What does this new vibe mean for late night?  And what should we make of it? The story of Colbert’s connection to Fallon is almost the direct opposite of the Leno-Letterman feud.   From the start the two seemed to truly enjoy joking about their competition. When Colbert hosted “The Colbert Report” he had a long history of pretending to be rivals with Jimmy Fallon. They pretended to fight over things like which host had a better flavor of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream and they actually raised money for charity during a "feud" that ended with Colbert and Fallon singing together on Fallon’s show. When Colbert was announced to replace Letterman, some wondered whether the playful connection could continue, given that they would now compete for the same viewers and guests. Those worries were allayed, though, when Fallon appeared on Colbert’s debut to wish him well. Until last week, when Kimmel was a guest on “The Late Show,” there had been no real interaction between Kimmel and Colbert. During Kimmel’s interview, the two comedians discussed the fact that everyone expects them to be at war. Kimmel dismissed the idea outright: "It's a weird thing. I think it was established with Letterman and Leno and people thought it would just continue like the Crusades.” He then went on to say that he might "might even love" Colbert: "If you died, I’d cry like a baby.” Then viewers learned an interesting fact that certainly affects the bromance story. Both Colbert and Kimmel share the same agent: James “Babydoll” Dixon, who also represents Jon Stewart, Adam Carolla and Carson Daly. As Colbert and Kimmel discussed Dixon, they referred to him as the true “king of late night.” This leads us to the real feature of the late night wars that has shifted since the Leno-Letterman era: the industry is different today. First, with consolidation of the media industry, we now have a case where the same agent works for two network hosts. Imagine if Leno and Letterman had had the same agent negotiating contracts for both of them. The story simply would not have been the same. The even bigger shift, though, was referenced by Colbert moments before Kimmel sat down for the interview.  Colbert told viewers they could watch Kimmel every night “at 12:35 on your DVRs.” When Letterman and Leno went at it in the 1990s, viewers literally had to choose which one to watch. That era is over. As Time reported last year, “fewer people than ever are watching TV.”  This is especially true of the millennial demographic, which prefers on-demand viewing over linear television. Less than half of millennials watch live TV at all. Shows that air during the same slot simply don’t have to compete, especially if many of their viewers will be watching them the next day over their morning coffee. The fight over guests is mostly a thing of the past too, especially in the realm of political guests. Late-night television has simply become a staple for politicians. Those appearances lead to social media bumps that far exceed an appearance on a news program. Research showed, too, that candidates that appeared on “The Colbert Report” got bumps not just in polls but also in donations. Nabbing a political guest is no longer a big deal. If anything, it is the opposite. Politicians vie to get airtime with as many shows as possible. Sure, the shows compete to get the most viral interview, but they aren’t in the same race against each other for the guests themselves. The good news for viewers is that the sense of loyalty that was ushered in by the linear TV era of the Leno-Letterman feud is a thing of the past. Viewers can sample their comedy and watch bits from a range of shows. It means that rather than be bogged down in personality disputes, viewers can benefit from the sharp sarcasm of Larry Wilmore and the goofy charm of Fallon. They can appreciate the long-form satire of John Oliver and the interview strategies of Colbert. They can have it all. The end of the late-night feuds is overall a good step in late-night comedy, but there is a downside as well. It is worth asking what happens when the comedians are no longer being critical of each other. Powerful comedy needs a baseline of critique for it to have impact. If everyone plays too nice, then the comedy lacks needed bite. We got a glimpse of this in a series of videos released by Vanity Fair and Conde Nast that focused on Colbert’s debut. In a companion piece, Vanity Fair highlighted the comedians they claimed were redefining the genre: Colbert, Fallon, Kimmel, Wilmore, Oliver, Conan O’Brien, Seth Meyers, James Corden, Trevor Noah and Bill Maher. The videos show the comedians giving Colbert advice, acting out impressions of one another, group texting and talking about pets. If they had really wanted to shake things up, they might have also included Lee Camp from RT America. But instead, the videos were silly and self-congratulatory, smacking of frat boy backslapping more than smart comedy. One even ends with Wilmore laughing at the “dick pic” he has sent to all of them. The point is that gathering all of these guys together in a love fest does actually lead to some pretty dumb comedy. The end of the feud era is great, but the bromance is a bit nauseating. And while feuds are no good, blind adoration is a problem too. When that blind adoration is part of a boys club, it is even worse. As Vanity Fair points out, “How gobsmackingly insane is it that no TV network has had the common sense — and that’s all we’re talking about in 2015, not courage, bravery, or even decency — to hand over the reins of an existing late-night comedy program to a female person?” The funny thing is that the same outlet that published that sentence also silenced the female comedians that could have been interviewed for their article or taped for their videos. Certainly they could have included female comedians that are making major public impact, even if they're not hosting a late-night comedy program. But they didn’t. While it is refreshing to consider an era when feuds are a thing of the past, it is worth questioning the impact of a comedy landscape that is too congenial — and too male.    When Stephen Colbert took over “The Late Show,” some wondered if he would now begin feuding with network rivals Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel. Given the historic feud between Jay Leno and David Letterman, then between Kimmel and Leno, late-night comedy had come to be defined, in part, by attention-getting fights rivalry. Leno once said that rivalry would make late night “more exciting.” Now over one month into Colbert’s new show, we can note a new era in late-night comedy: One that is more defined by bromance than feuds. What does this new vibe mean for late night?  And what should we make of it? The story of Colbert’s connection to Fallon is almost the direct opposite of the Leno-Letterman feud.   From the start the two seemed to truly enjoy joking about their competition. When Colbert hosted “The Colbert Report” he had a long history of pretending to be rivals with Jimmy Fallon. They pretended to fight over things like which host had a better flavor of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream and they actually raised money for charity during a "feud" that ended with Colbert and Fallon singing together on Fallon’s show. When Colbert was announced to replace Letterman, some wondered whether the playful connection could continue, given that they would now compete for the same viewers and guests. Those worries were allayed, though, when Fallon appeared on Colbert’s debut to wish him well. Until last week, when Kimmel was a guest on “The Late Show,” there had been no real interaction between Kimmel and Colbert. During Kimmel’s interview, the two comedians discussed the fact that everyone expects them to be at war. Kimmel dismissed the idea outright: "It's a weird thing. I think it was established with Letterman and Leno and people thought it would just continue like the Crusades.” He then went on to say that he might "might even love" Colbert: "If you died, I’d cry like a baby.” Then viewers learned an interesting fact that certainly affects the bromance story. Both Colbert and Kimmel share the same agent: James “Babydoll” Dixon, who also represents Jon Stewart, Adam Carolla and Carson Daly. As Colbert and Kimmel discussed Dixon, they referred to him as the true “king of late night.” This leads us to the real feature of the late night wars that has shifted since the Leno-Letterman era: the industry is different today. First, with consolidation of the media industry, we now have a case where the same agent works for two network hosts. Imagine if Leno and Letterman had had the same agent negotiating contracts for both of them. The story simply would not have been the same. The even bigger shift, though, was referenced by Colbert moments before Kimmel sat down for the interview.  Colbert told viewers they could watch Kimmel every night “at 12:35 on your DVRs.” When Letterman and Leno went at it in the 1990s, viewers literally had to choose which one to watch. That era is over. As Time reported last year, “fewer people than ever are watching TV.”  This is especially true of the millennial demographic, which prefers on-demand viewing over linear television. Less than half of millennials watch live TV at all. Shows that air during the same slot simply don’t have to compete, especially if many of their viewers will be watching them the next day over their morning coffee. The fight over guests is mostly a thing of the past too, especially in the realm of political guests. Late-night television has simply become a staple for politicians. Those appearances lead to social media bumps that far exceed an appearance on a news program. Research showed, too, that candidates that appeared on “The Colbert Report” got bumps not just in polls but also in donations. Nabbing a political guest is no longer a big deal. If anything, it is the opposite. Politicians vie to get airtime with as many shows as possible. Sure, the shows compete to get the most viral interview, but they aren’t in the same race against each other for the guests themselves. The good news for viewers is that the sense of loyalty that was ushered in by the linear TV era of the Leno-Letterman feud is a thing of the past. Viewers can sample their comedy and watch bits from a range of shows. It means that rather than be bogged down in personality disputes, viewers can benefit from the sharp sarcasm of Larry Wilmore and the goofy charm of Fallon. They can appreciate the long-form satire of John Oliver and the interview strategies of Colbert. They can have it all. The end of the late-night feuds is overall a good step in late-night comedy, but there is a downside as well. It is worth asking what happens when the comedians are no longer being critical of each other. Powerful comedy needs a baseline of critique for it to have impact. If everyone plays too nice, then the comedy lacks needed bite. We got a glimpse of this in a series of videos released by Vanity Fair and Conde Nast that focused on Colbert’s debut. In a companion piece, Vanity Fair highlighted the comedians they claimed were redefining the genre: Colbert, Fallon, Kimmel, Wilmore, Oliver, Conan O’Brien, Seth Meyers, James Corden, Trevor Noah and Bill Maher. The videos show the comedians giving Colbert advice, acting out impressions of one another, group texting and talking about pets. If they had really wanted to shake things up, they might have also included Lee Camp from RT America. But instead, the videos were silly and self-congratulatory, smacking of frat boy backslapping more than smart comedy. One even ends with Wilmore laughing at the “dick pic” he has sent to all of them. The point is that gathering all of these guys together in a love fest does actually lead to some pretty dumb comedy. The end of the feud era is great, but the bromance is a bit nauseating. And while feuds are no good, blind adoration is a problem too. When that blind adoration is part of a boys club, it is even worse. As Vanity Fair points out, “How gobsmackingly insane is it that no TV network has had the common sense — and that’s all we’re talking about in 2015, not courage, bravery, or even decency — to hand over the reins of an existing late-night comedy program to a female person?” The funny thing is that the same outlet that published that sentence also silenced the female comedians that could have been interviewed for their article or taped for their videos. Certainly they could have included female comedians that are making major public impact, even if they're not hosting a late-night comedy program. But they didn’t. While it is refreshing to consider an era when feuds are a thing of the past, it is worth questioning the impact of a comedy landscape that is too congenial — and too male.    

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The tragedy of the Barney Frank film: Watching Congress fall apart before our very eyes

As a documentary, “Compared To What: The Improbable Journey Of Barney Frank” is not, frankly, amazing. It’s enlightening, but rarely serves as more than a rah-rah rally for Rep. Frank, who is the subject and source material for the film. It’s welcome cheerleading if you’re a fan of Frank as a politician — and there are times the documentary does some desperately needed truth-telling about the financial crisis of 2008 and the current intractable state of Congress. But the 90-minute documentary that premieres on Showtime tonight is too sweet and rosy to really be a work of journalism; if documentaries are supposed to be investigative, this is the filmic version of a puff piece. It’s still an engaging enough documentary for anyone interested in Frank, Congressional politics, or most of all, gay rights in the center of government. Frank came out while serving in the House of Representatives, and he managed to weather the homophobia of the era and a minor scandal to keep his seat in his home district of Newton, Taunton and New Bedford in Massachusetts. Frank served for 32 years, leaving office in 2013. The documentary follows his last days in office: from the first election in decades where he hasn’t been on the ballot, through his marriage — the first same-sex marriage of a sitting Congressperson — and finally to an uneasy retirement, where he still makes calls, argues politics and campaigns for fellow Democrats. Frank is a fantastic subject, because he is (seemingly) unable to be inauthentic. The congressman has a national profile because of his bluntness, humor and dogged determination — he would not back down either during questioning in his House subcommittee or during a televised interview. He’s constantly quotable, even just in the 90-minute documentary, quipping, “Vote Democratic. We're not perfect, but they're nuts” when campaigning for his replacement, Joe Kennedy III, in 2012. And it’s not just bluster and jokes — he tears up at grand occasions, including statements on the House floor, press conferences and his own wedding. Outside of chambers, his shoes are untied, he runs into walls, his hair and clothing are bound to be askew. On the floor, he’s in his element, engaging in the back-and-forth repartee of House debate with a rowdy, brash enthusiasm that is the epitome of politics in the lower house. “Compared To What” is particularly interested in Frank as a gay man, because of his openness about it so early in the conversation and his relentless support for gay rights, even when it was really not politically expedient. It offers a surprising and moving portrait of his experience, especially in the years before he would even admit he was gay to his closest friends. That Frank survived coming out in the House is a testament to how beloved he was, even by his political rivals; he was (and is) a consummate politician, able to build alliances across the aisle while holding firm to what mattered most to him. “Compared To What” reveres him for this, framing it as both integrity and pragmatism. But the focus comes at the expense of letting the viewer decide for themselves how well Frank’s approach succeeded in government. Indeed, even as someone who has no ideological faults with Frank, the framing of the documentary is at times rather suspicious. Unsavory details are glossed over, with just occasional lines of text explaining hiccups or digressions in Frank’s career. As is probably to be expected, the film is stacked with character witnesses; only one person dares to utter a cross word on Frank, and that is Oscar-winning writer Dustin Lance Black, who organized a national day for gay equality that Barney Frank wouldn’t endorse. Not because he didn’t agree, but because it was happening at a time when Congress was on holiday, and Frank didn’t see the point. As notes of dissension go, it’s a rather adorably crochety one. “Compared To What?” goes even further — it hauls in an expert on the financial crisis to defend Frank’s actions related to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And while Frank’s scandal — that a prostitute he hired, who eventually became his driver, ran a prostitution ring out of his apartment — is explained in lines of perfunctory text, Frank’s apology speech for the scandal is given its own scene. In the eyes of this film, the man could do no wrong. And perhaps he couldn’t, but 90 minutes of repeating the same thing is a bit tiresome. What’s more interesting in “Compared To What” than the Frank adulation is the history of federal government it offers over his career — specifically, a history of the House of Representatives, and its gradual inability to function in any meaningful fashion. The documentary lays the blame at the feet of Newt Gingrich, and whether or not that’s true, it offers compelling insight into how much the atmosphere of even Frank’s financial services committee turned acrimonious, even with legislators he’d worked with for 20 years. The film pieces together news coverage of Frank and Congress starting from the ‘70s, from black-and-white photography to color. Clips and excerpts from commentators as diverse as Rachel Maddow, Charles Krauthammer, Jon Stewart and Bill O’Reilly make it into the documentary, as well as one-on-one interviews with Frank’s political friends. It recalls an image of a Congress that used to at least occasionally do things, as opposed to our own. It’s certainly not a Congress that has a place for Frank anymore. The title of the documentary comes from a joke often repeated by Frank himself — from a Borscht Belt comedian cracking wise about the old ball-and-chain. The setup: "How’s the wife?" The answer: "Compared to what?" Frank explains that he used the semi-rhetorical question as a guiding principle for his politics — pushing him for solutions, not ideology; practicality, not principle. And though the documentary did frustrate, at times, with its feature-length heart-eyes-emoji directed at Frank, partly I think it’s because the filmmakers were caught up in the title of their own documentary. Sure, Barney Frank might not be perfect. But compared to almost everyone else in this Republican-controlled Congress, he seems like the last sensible man standing — and woe is us, because he just left the building.As a documentary, “Compared To What: The Improbable Journey Of Barney Frank” is not, frankly, amazing. It’s enlightening, but rarely serves as more than a rah-rah rally for Rep. Frank, who is the subject and source material for the film. It’s welcome cheerleading if you’re a fan of Frank as a politician — and there are times the documentary does some desperately needed truth-telling about the financial crisis of 2008 and the current intractable state of Congress. But the 90-minute documentary that premieres on Showtime tonight is too sweet and rosy to really be a work of journalism; if documentaries are supposed to be investigative, this is the filmic version of a puff piece. It’s still an engaging enough documentary for anyone interested in Frank, Congressional politics, or most of all, gay rights in the center of government. Frank came out while serving in the House of Representatives, and he managed to weather the homophobia of the era and a minor scandal to keep his seat in his home district of Newton, Taunton and New Bedford in Massachusetts. Frank served for 32 years, leaving office in 2013. The documentary follows his last days in office: from the first election in decades where he hasn’t been on the ballot, through his marriage — the first same-sex marriage of a sitting Congressperson — and finally to an uneasy retirement, where he still makes calls, argues politics and campaigns for fellow Democrats. Frank is a fantastic subject, because he is (seemingly) unable to be inauthentic. The congressman has a national profile because of his bluntness, humor and dogged determination — he would not back down either during questioning in his House subcommittee or during a televised interview. He’s constantly quotable, even just in the 90-minute documentary, quipping, “Vote Democratic. We're not perfect, but they're nuts” when campaigning for his replacement, Joe Kennedy III, in 2012. And it’s not just bluster and jokes — he tears up at grand occasions, including statements on the House floor, press conferences and his own wedding. Outside of chambers, his shoes are untied, he runs into walls, his hair and clothing are bound to be askew. On the floor, he’s in his element, engaging in the back-and-forth repartee of House debate with a rowdy, brash enthusiasm that is the epitome of politics in the lower house. “Compared To What” is particularly interested in Frank as a gay man, because of his openness about it so early in the conversation and his relentless support for gay rights, even when it was really not politically expedient. It offers a surprising and moving portrait of his experience, especially in the years before he would even admit he was gay to his closest friends. That Frank survived coming out in the House is a testament to how beloved he was, even by his political rivals; he was (and is) a consummate politician, able to build alliances across the aisle while holding firm to what mattered most to him. “Compared To What” reveres him for this, framing it as both integrity and pragmatism. But the focus comes at the expense of letting the viewer decide for themselves how well Frank’s approach succeeded in government. Indeed, even as someone who has no ideological faults with Frank, the framing of the documentary is at times rather suspicious. Unsavory details are glossed over, with just occasional lines of text explaining hiccups or digressions in Frank’s career. As is probably to be expected, the film is stacked with character witnesses; only one person dares to utter a cross word on Frank, and that is Oscar-winning writer Dustin Lance Black, who organized a national day for gay equality that Barney Frank wouldn’t endorse. Not because he didn’t agree, but because it was happening at a time when Congress was on holiday, and Frank didn’t see the point. As notes of dissension go, it’s a rather adorably crochety one. “Compared To What?” goes even further — it hauls in an expert on the financial crisis to defend Frank’s actions related to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And while Frank’s scandal — that a prostitute he hired, who eventually became his driver, ran a prostitution ring out of his apartment — is explained in lines of perfunctory text, Frank’s apology speech for the scandal is given its own scene. In the eyes of this film, the man could do no wrong. And perhaps he couldn’t, but 90 minutes of repeating the same thing is a bit tiresome. What’s more interesting in “Compared To What” than the Frank adulation is the history of federal government it offers over his career — specifically, a history of the House of Representatives, and its gradual inability to function in any meaningful fashion. The documentary lays the blame at the feet of Newt Gingrich, and whether or not that’s true, it offers compelling insight into how much the atmosphere of even Frank’s financial services committee turned acrimonious, even with legislators he’d worked with for 20 years. The film pieces together news coverage of Frank and Congress starting from the ‘70s, from black-and-white photography to color. Clips and excerpts from commentators as diverse as Rachel Maddow, Charles Krauthammer, Jon Stewart and Bill O’Reilly make it into the documentary, as well as one-on-one interviews with Frank’s political friends. It recalls an image of a Congress that used to at least occasionally do things, as opposed to our own. It’s certainly not a Congress that has a place for Frank anymore. The title of the documentary comes from a joke often repeated by Frank himself — from a Borscht Belt comedian cracking wise about the old ball-and-chain. The setup: "How’s the wife?" The answer: "Compared to what?" Frank explains that he used the semi-rhetorical question as a guiding principle for his politics — pushing him for solutions, not ideology; practicality, not principle. And though the documentary did frustrate, at times, with its feature-length heart-eyes-emoji directed at Frank, partly I think it’s because the filmmakers were caught up in the title of their own documentary. Sure, Barney Frank might not be perfect. But compared to almost everyone else in this Republican-controlled Congress, he seems like the last sensible man standing — and woe is us, because he just left the building.

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“Netflix and kill baby Hitler”: A massive Twitter pile-on mocks the New York Times’ time-travel vigilante poll

On this sunny Friday afternoon, The New York Times Magazine inexplicably decided to poll its readers on whether or not they would go back and kill Hitler as a baby, given the option (worst "Back to the Future" brand tie-in ever). Ultimately, 42 percent of readers said they would, 30 percent said they wouldn't, and 28 percent said they weren't sure. Meanwhile, a seeming 100 percent of Twitter users found the whole proposition ridiculous, and chimed in with droll 140-character rebuttals to that effect. Take a look! https://twitter.com/THEKIDMERO/status... https://twitter.com/joshgondelman/sta... https://twitter.com/samfbiddle/status... https://twitter.com/AdamWeinstein/sta... https://twitter.com/marmolheater/stat... https://twitter.com/IAmSpilly/status/... https://twitter.com/trillotto/status/... https://twitter.com/atotalmonet/statu... https://twitter.com/Olivianuzzi/statu... https://twitter.com/jaypugz/status/65... https://twitter.com/delrayser/status/... https://twitter.com/tut___/status/657... https://twitter.com/mariabustillos/st... https://twitter.com/lindsayism/status... https://twitter.com/poniewozik/status... https://twitter.com/jonathanchait/sta... https://twitter.com/SimonMaloy/status... https://twitter.com/pourmecoffee/stat... https://twitter.com/jbouie/status/657... https://twitter.com/bad_garrett/statu... https://twitter.com/davidfrum/status/... https://twitter.com/marklisanti/statu... https://twitter.com/the818/status/657... https://twitter.com/NickTavares/statu... https://twitter.com/Bencjacobs/status... https://twitter.com/Smorgasboredom/st... https://twitter.com/robdelaney/status... [image error]On this sunny Friday afternoon, The New York Times Magazine inexplicably decided to poll its readers on whether or not they would go back and kill Hitler as a baby, given the option (worst "Back to the Future" brand tie-in ever). Ultimately, 42 percent of readers said they would, 30 percent said they wouldn't, and 28 percent said they weren't sure. Meanwhile, a seeming 100 percent of Twitter users found the whole proposition ridiculous, and chimed in with droll 140-character rebuttals to that effect. Take a look! https://twitter.com/THEKIDMERO/status... https://twitter.com/joshgondelman/sta... https://twitter.com/samfbiddle/status... https://twitter.com/AdamWeinstein/sta... https://twitter.com/marmolheater/stat... https://twitter.com/IAmSpilly/status/... https://twitter.com/trillotto/status/... https://twitter.com/atotalmonet/statu... https://twitter.com/Olivianuzzi/statu... https://twitter.com/jaypugz/status/65... https://twitter.com/delrayser/status/... https://twitter.com/tut___/status/657... https://twitter.com/mariabustillos/st... https://twitter.com/lindsayism/status... https://twitter.com/poniewozik/status... https://twitter.com/jonathanchait/sta... https://twitter.com/SimonMaloy/status... https://twitter.com/pourmecoffee/stat... https://twitter.com/jbouie/status/657... https://twitter.com/bad_garrett/statu... https://twitter.com/davidfrum/status/... https://twitter.com/marklisanti/statu... https://twitter.com/the818/status/657... https://twitter.com/NickTavares/statu... https://twitter.com/Bencjacobs/status... https://twitter.com/Smorgasboredom/st... https://twitter.com/robdelaney/status... [image error]

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Mitt Romney takes credit for inspiring Obamacare — then “clarifies” that he still opposes it

A proper eulogy is honest in its reverence for the deceased. Today, while remarking on the passing of an old friend, Mitt Romney inadvertently admitted a simple truth that amounts to Republican heresy these days -- Romneycare is the foundation of Obamacare. When Mitt Romney lauded the lifetime accomplishments of Staples cofounder, Thomas Stemberg, in a Boston Globe obituary today, the former Massachusetts governor praised his close friend for advocating on behalf of the Massachusetts state initiative to provide affordable health insurance to all residents. It was Romney's Bain Capital that helped back the opening of Stemberg's Staples stores and Romney praised his friend as “an extraordinarily creative and dynamic visionary." “Without Tom pushing it, I don’t think we would have had Romneycare,” Romney explained. “Without Romneycare, I don’t think we would have Obamacare." "So, without Tom a lot of people wouldn’t have health insurance,” he honestly pronounced. Romney's admission is a far cry from his claims during the 2012 election against President Obama. "I … recognize that a lot of pundits around the nation are saying that I should say that was a bone-headed idea, and I presume folks would think that would be good for me politically,” Romney said of his signature health care law back in May 2011. “But there’s only one problem with that. It wouldn’t be honest.” Obviously catching wind of an oncoming backlash, Romney again changed his mind on what would be an honest assessment of his Romneycare, breathlessly rushing out this this nonsensical "correction": https://twitter.com/MittRomney/status...

Getting people health insurance is a good thing, and that’s what Tom Stemberg fought for. I oppose Obamacare and believe... Posted by Mitt Romney on Friday, October 23, 2015

Meanwhile, Mitt's son, Matt, is busy quipping that Katy Perry's skintight dresses caused his father's 2012 downfall: https://twitter.com/DonMarkRVA/status... https://twitter.com/Matt_Romney/statu... proper eulogy is honest in its reverence for the deceased. Today, while remarking on the passing of an old friend, Mitt Romney inadvertently admitted a simple truth that amounts to Republican heresy these days -- Romneycare is the foundation of Obamacare. When Mitt Romney lauded the lifetime accomplishments of Staples cofounder, Thomas Stemberg, in a Boston Globe obituary today, the former Massachusetts governor praised his close friend for advocating on behalf of the Massachusetts state initiative to provide affordable health insurance to all residents. It was Romney's Bain Capital that helped back the opening of Stemberg's Staples stores and Romney praised his friend as “an extraordinarily creative and dynamic visionary." “Without Tom pushing it, I don’t think we would have had Romneycare,” Romney explained. “Without Romneycare, I don’t think we would have Obamacare." "So, without Tom a lot of people wouldn’t have health insurance,” he honestly pronounced. Romney's admission is a far cry from his claims during the 2012 election against President Obama. "I … recognize that a lot of pundits around the nation are saying that I should say that was a bone-headed idea, and I presume folks would think that would be good for me politically,” Romney said of his signature health care law back in May 2011. “But there’s only one problem with that. It wouldn’t be honest.” Obviously catching wind of an oncoming backlash, Romney again changed his mind on what would be an honest assessment of his Romneycare, breathlessly rushing out this this nonsensical "correction": https://twitter.com/MittRomney/status...

Getting people health insurance is a good thing, and that’s what Tom Stemberg fought for. I oppose Obamacare and believe... Posted by Mitt Romney on Friday, October 23, 2015

Meanwhile, Mitt's son, Matt, is busy quipping that Katy Perry's skintight dresses caused his father's 2012 downfall: https://twitter.com/DonMarkRVA/status... https://twitter.com/Matt_Romney/statu... proper eulogy is honest in its reverence for the deceased. Today, while remarking on the passing of an old friend, Mitt Romney inadvertently admitted a simple truth that amounts to Republican heresy these days -- Romneycare is the foundation of Obamacare. When Mitt Romney lauded the lifetime accomplishments of Staples cofounder, Thomas Stemberg, in a Boston Globe obituary today, the former Massachusetts governor praised his close friend for advocating on behalf of the Massachusetts state initiative to provide affordable health insurance to all residents. It was Romney's Bain Capital that helped back the opening of Stemberg's Staples stores and Romney praised his friend as “an extraordinarily creative and dynamic visionary." “Without Tom pushing it, I don’t think we would have had Romneycare,” Romney explained. “Without Romneycare, I don’t think we would have Obamacare." "So, without Tom a lot of people wouldn’t have health insurance,” he honestly pronounced. Romney's admission is a far cry from his claims during the 2012 election against President Obama. "I … recognize that a lot of pundits around the nation are saying that I should say that was a bone-headed idea, and I presume folks would think that would be good for me politically,” Romney said of his signature health care law back in May 2011. “But there’s only one problem with that. It wouldn’t be honest.” Obviously catching wind of an oncoming backlash, Romney again changed his mind on what would be an honest assessment of his Romneycare, breathlessly rushing out this this nonsensical "correction": https://twitter.com/MittRomney/status...

Getting people health insurance is a good thing, and that’s what Tom Stemberg fought for. I oppose Obamacare and believe... Posted by Mitt Romney on Friday, October 23, 2015

Meanwhile, Mitt's son, Matt, is busy quipping that Katy Perry's skintight dresses caused his father's 2012 downfall: https://twitter.com/DonMarkRVA/status... https://twitter.com/Matt_Romney/statu... proper eulogy is honest in its reverence for the deceased. Today, while remarking on the passing of an old friend, Mitt Romney inadvertently admitted a simple truth that amounts to Republican heresy these days -- Romneycare is the foundation of Obamacare. When Mitt Romney lauded the lifetime accomplishments of Staples cofounder, Thomas Stemberg, in a Boston Globe obituary today, the former Massachusetts governor praised his close friend for advocating on behalf of the Massachusetts state initiative to provide affordable health insurance to all residents. It was Romney's Bain Capital that helped back the opening of Stemberg's Staples stores and Romney praised his friend as “an extraordinarily creative and dynamic visionary." “Without Tom pushing it, I don’t think we would have had Romneycare,” Romney explained. “Without Romneycare, I don’t think we would have Obamacare." "So, without Tom a lot of people wouldn’t have health insurance,” he honestly pronounced. Romney's admission is a far cry from his claims during the 2012 election against President Obama. "I … recognize that a lot of pundits around the nation are saying that I should say that was a bone-headed idea, and I presume folks would think that would be good for me politically,” Romney said of his signature health care law back in May 2011. “But there’s only one problem with that. It wouldn’t be honest.” Obviously catching wind of an oncoming backlash, Romney again changed his mind on what would be an honest assessment of his Romneycare, breathlessly rushing out this this nonsensical "correction": https://twitter.com/MittRomney/status...

Getting people health insurance is a good thing, and that’s what Tom Stemberg fought for. I oppose Obamacare and believe... Posted by Mitt Romney on Friday, October 23, 2015

Meanwhile, Mitt's son, Matt, is busy quipping that Katy Perry's skintight dresses caused his father's 2012 downfall: https://twitter.com/DonMarkRVA/status... https://twitter.com/Matt_Romney/statu...

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Do you really want to end the “Mommy Wars?” Stop buying into what these commercials are selling

When a brand is going to do what brands do — try to sell you a product — it's terrific when the company attempts to do it in a way that's at least smart and sensitive to its customers. But to quote Mindy Kaling, "I just sometimes get the sneaking suspicion that corporations are co-opting 'girl confidence' language to rally girls into buying body wash." Or plus-sized clothing. Or maybe in this case, baby formula. Last winter, formula maker Similac made a splash with a spot entitled "Mother 'Hood," a sendup of extreme baby mama clichés — power suit-wearing working moms, yoga moms, dolphin-assisted water birth moms, and of course, "nipple police" and "too lazy to breastfeed" moms — ready to come to blows until they unite together over the idea that "Whatever our beliefs, we are parents first. Welcome to the sisterhood of motherhood." The ad received immediate acclaim as "perfect" and "honest." Now, Similac brand director Misha Pardubicka-Jenkins says that "We knew that we wanted to continue the conversation and nail down what was really going on with moms," so the company enlisted Cynthia Wade — the Oscar winning documentary maker behind "Freeheld" — to create a seven and a half minute film to "#EndMommyWars." The unscripted short claims that "95% of moms say they feel judged," which suggests to me that 5 percent of moms are just not paying attention. Good for you, Gwyneths! And the film does a perfectly fine job of depicting the struggles and trade-offs of real world motherhood. Of course, 16 seconds in, the first mother to talk about breastfeeding chimes in, saying, "I think I'm desensitized, almost, because people talk about whether I breast feed or bottle feed so much." As it progresses, one working mom is shown breastfeeding at home and pumping at work. Another mother, whose twins were preemies, talks about how people will see her feeding with a bottle and say, "That's breast milk, right?" She admits, "It's almost a conversation that you have to have with a stranger." There's a working single mother. A mother who has gone through multiple pregnancy losses and a lumpectomy. There's one who "had my little girl in tutus" and put her son in little bow ties. There's another who "wanted to raise a gender neutral child." In the end, the women meet and confess their preconceptions about each other — sometimes tearfully — before bonding with each other and their babies. Pardubicka-Jenkins tells AdWeek, "How parents feed their babies is a very personal decision, but the mommy wars have opened the topic up for public debate. We want to transform mommy wars into mommy support by changing the conversation." To be fair, a lot of that comes from a well-intentioned and well-executed place. The moms in the film clearly represent a diverse array of experiences and circumstances. And any woman who has children will likely relate to the endless parade of judgment that we're constantly subject to — and yes, sometimes also participate in. Yet the film is a cautious work. There don't appear to be any adoptive moms, let alone adoptive dads. Both of the moms shown working outside the home express obvious guilt and a sense of obligation. "If not going back to work were something I could do, absolutely do it. I'd stay home with her," says mom Shyrelle. (Psst, some moms like working.) There are zero men depicted at all. Instead, the subtle message underlying the story is that women make hard choices — including, have we mentioned? using formula. I get that this campaign is aimed at a particular audience — the concerned mom who's very aware of the scrutiny she faces. But what if we could now move from a place of not using baby talk like "Mommy wars" when we as adults are discussing the lives of our fellow adults? Can we say that if you did not come out of a particular woman's birth canal, calling her "Mommy" can actually sound belittling? Can we go further, and admit that enduring previous surgeries, or having preemies, or crying in the elevator as you drop your baby off on your way to work should not be what's required of women to justify how they feed their babies? And can we also, anywhere in this entire conversation, note that fathers — both gay and straight, both partnered and single — also participate in nourishing their babies and that process can involve bottles? I am obviously not in the advertising business, because no one wants to green-light my ad campaign that runs on the motto, "Because mind your own f__king business, that's why." And it's cool to see brands moving away from the perfect fuzzy ideal that having babies is some lullaby-themed perfect dream. But let's not forget that Similac is still in the business of selling you baby formula. (You can see one of the moms from the film elsewhere on Similac's YouTube channel, doing a more straightforward endorsement of the product.) And if you really want to end the vomitously named "mommy wars," you could start by not perpetuating the concept. [image error]

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Christian fundamentalists’ plot against the Constitution: What Kim Davis’s newly unearthed emails reveal

Thanks to Kentucky’s open records law, the Associated Press has obtained the emails county clerk Kim Davis sent just before she went to jail late this summer. And yes, they are every bit as unhinged as you imagined they’d be. In case you forgot, Davis is the God-loving homophobe who courageously denied marriage licenses to same-sex couples in Kentucky two months ago. The emails are interesting if only because they show just how crazy (and dangerous) fanatics like Davis are, particularly if they happen to work as public servants. Here’s Davis in her own words:

The battle has just begun…It has truly been a firestorm here and the days are pretty much a blur, but I am confident that God is in control of all of this!! I desire your prayers, I will need strength that only God can supply and I need a backbone like a saw log!!...They are going to try and make a whipping post out of me!! I know it, but God is still alive and on the throne!!! He IS in control and knows exactly where I am!!...September 1 will be the day to prepare for, if the Lord doesn’t return before then. I have weighted the cost, and will stay the course.

Apart from her apparent love of exclamation points, this message is truly disturbing. As Mark Joseph Stern observed, “These are not the words of a rational public servant attempting to do her taxpayer-funded job to the best of her abilities…These are the words of a religious fanatic who views herself as the protagonist in an epic, possibly biblical battle between good and evil – a millennialist zealot who hopes the rapture, rather than mere earthly courts, will intervene to save her.” It’s easy to dismiss all of this as the fevered ramblings of an obscure county clerk – and clearly that’s what they are. Davis, after all, doesn’t really matter. She’s a thrice-married legacy hire in Kentucky who won a few minutes of fame but accomplished nothing in the long run. What’s scary, however, is that Davis isn’t alone. Since the 1970s, when conservative Protestants became politically active, Christians have sought to blur the boundary between secular law and religious doctrine. The idea, as evangelical scholar Lynn Buzzard wrote, was to “reject the division of human affairs into the secular and the sacred and insist, instead, that there is no arena of human activity, including law and politics, which is outside of God’s lordship.” There’s also the Christian dominionist movement, the primary goal of which is to implant religious zealots in public office in order to Christianize the laws, the courts and all public institutions. Dominionists are operative today across the country and in the South particularly, and their theo-political philosophy animates political figures like Ted Cruz and Bobby Jindal. I’ve no idea if Davis self-identifies as a Christian dominionist, but her belief that religious laws trump secular laws in the public space is consistent with dominionist thinking. Davis may be a footnote to a news cycle, but there are plenty of people with more influence who share her worldview, and they’re a legitimate threat insofar as they actively seek to undermine the Constitution. Davis is likely more deranged than your average dominionist, and her persecution mania was surely amplified by all the attention she received, but she’s a product of an ascendant and genuinely theocratic movement. I doubt Ben Carson thinks Jesus will return next Tuesday, as Davis evidently does, but, like Huckabee and Jindal and Cruz, he’s fighting the same battle as Davis. Carson has said, in effect, that America is a Christian nation and that we should have something like a religious test for office. What Carson and other Republicans defend under the guise of “religious liberty” is often just an attempt to elevate God’s law over secular law. This is what Davis tried to do in Kentucky, and it’s what Hobby Lobby more or less did in 2014. So sure, Davis is an afterthought, but the religious fanaticism she represents isn’t. There will be more Kim Davises. The difference is that they won’t all be so obviously insane, and that’s what makes them so dangerous. [image error]Thanks to Kentucky’s open records law, the Associated Press has obtained the emails county clerk Kim Davis sent just before she went to jail late this summer. And yes, they are every bit as unhinged as you imagined they’d be. In case you forgot, Davis is the God-loving homophobe who courageously denied marriage licenses to same-sex couples in Kentucky two months ago. The emails are interesting if only because they show just how crazy (and dangerous) fanatics like Davis are, particularly if they happen to work as public servants. Here’s Davis in her own words:

The battle has just begun…It has truly been a firestorm here and the days are pretty much a blur, but I am confident that God is in control of all of this!! I desire your prayers, I will need strength that only God can supply and I need a backbone like a saw log!!...They are going to try and make a whipping post out of me!! I know it, but God is still alive and on the throne!!! He IS in control and knows exactly where I am!!...September 1 will be the day to prepare for, if the Lord doesn’t return before then. I have weighted the cost, and will stay the course.

Apart from her apparent love of exclamation points, this message is truly disturbing. As Mark Joseph Stern observed, “These are not the words of a rational public servant attempting to do her taxpayer-funded job to the best of her abilities…These are the words of a religious fanatic who views herself as the protagonist in an epic, possibly biblical battle between good and evil – a millennialist zealot who hopes the rapture, rather than mere earthly courts, will intervene to save her.” It’s easy to dismiss all of this as the fevered ramblings of an obscure county clerk – and clearly that’s what they are. Davis, after all, doesn’t really matter. She’s a thrice-married legacy hire in Kentucky who won a few minutes of fame but accomplished nothing in the long run. What’s scary, however, is that Davis isn’t alone. Since the 1970s, when conservative Protestants became politically active, Christians have sought to blur the boundary between secular law and religious doctrine. The idea, as evangelical scholar Lynn Buzzard wrote, was to “reject the division of human affairs into the secular and the sacred and insist, instead, that there is no arena of human activity, including law and politics, which is outside of God’s lordship.” There’s also the Christian dominionist movement, the primary goal of which is to implant religious zealots in public office in order to Christianize the laws, the courts and all public institutions. Dominionists are operative today across the country and in the South particularly, and their theo-political philosophy animates political figures like Ted Cruz and Bobby Jindal. I’ve no idea if Davis self-identifies as a Christian dominionist, but her belief that religious laws trump secular laws in the public space is consistent with dominionist thinking. Davis may be a footnote to a news cycle, but there are plenty of people with more influence who share her worldview, and they’re a legitimate threat insofar as they actively seek to undermine the Constitution. Davis is likely more deranged than your average dominionist, and her persecution mania was surely amplified by all the attention she received, but she’s a product of an ascendant and genuinely theocratic movement. I doubt Ben Carson thinks Jesus will return next Tuesday, as Davis evidently does, but, like Huckabee and Jindal and Cruz, he’s fighting the same battle as Davis. Carson has said, in effect, that America is a Christian nation and that we should have something like a religious test for office. What Carson and other Republicans defend under the guise of “religious liberty” is often just an attempt to elevate God’s law over secular law. This is what Davis tried to do in Kentucky, and it’s what Hobby Lobby more or less did in 2014. So sure, Davis is an afterthought, but the religious fanaticism she represents isn’t. There will be more Kim Davises. The difference is that they won’t all be so obviously insane, and that’s what makes them so dangerous. [image error]Thanks to Kentucky’s open records law, the Associated Press has obtained the emails county clerk Kim Davis sent just before she went to jail late this summer. And yes, they are every bit as unhinged as you imagined they’d be. In case you forgot, Davis is the God-loving homophobe who courageously denied marriage licenses to same-sex couples in Kentucky two months ago. The emails are interesting if only because they show just how crazy (and dangerous) fanatics like Davis are, particularly if they happen to work as public servants. Here’s Davis in her own words:

The battle has just begun…It has truly been a firestorm here and the days are pretty much a blur, but I am confident that God is in control of all of this!! I desire your prayers, I will need strength that only God can supply and I need a backbone like a saw log!!...They are going to try and make a whipping post out of me!! I know it, but God is still alive and on the throne!!! He IS in control and knows exactly where I am!!...September 1 will be the day to prepare for, if the Lord doesn’t return before then. I have weighted the cost, and will stay the course.

Apart from her apparent love of exclamation points, this message is truly disturbing. As Mark Joseph Stern observed, “These are not the words of a rational public servant attempting to do her taxpayer-funded job to the best of her abilities…These are the words of a religious fanatic who views herself as the protagonist in an epic, possibly biblical battle between good and evil – a millennialist zealot who hopes the rapture, rather than mere earthly courts, will intervene to save her.” It’s easy to dismiss all of this as the fevered ramblings of an obscure county clerk – and clearly that’s what they are. Davis, after all, doesn’t really matter. She’s a thrice-married legacy hire in Kentucky who won a few minutes of fame but accomplished nothing in the long run. What’s scary, however, is that Davis isn’t alone. Since the 1970s, when conservative Protestants became politically active, Christians have sought to blur the boundary between secular law and religious doctrine. The idea, as evangelical scholar Lynn Buzzard wrote, was to “reject the division of human affairs into the secular and the sacred and insist, instead, that there is no arena of human activity, including law and politics, which is outside of God’s lordship.” There’s also the Christian dominionist movement, the primary goal of which is to implant religious zealots in public office in order to Christianize the laws, the courts and all public institutions. Dominionists are operative today across the country and in the South particularly, and their theo-political philosophy animates political figures like Ted Cruz and Bobby Jindal. I’ve no idea if Davis self-identifies as a Christian dominionist, but her belief that religious laws trump secular laws in the public space is consistent with dominionist thinking. Davis may be a footnote to a news cycle, but there are plenty of people with more influence who share her worldview, and they’re a legitimate threat insofar as they actively seek to undermine the Constitution. Davis is likely more deranged than your average dominionist, and her persecution mania was surely amplified by all the attention she received, but she’s a product of an ascendant and genuinely theocratic movement. I doubt Ben Carson thinks Jesus will return next Tuesday, as Davis evidently does, but, like Huckabee and Jindal and Cruz, he’s fighting the same battle as Davis. Carson has said, in effect, that America is a Christian nation and that we should have something like a religious test for office. What Carson and other Republicans defend under the guise of “religious liberty” is often just an attempt to elevate God’s law over secular law. This is what Davis tried to do in Kentucky, and it’s what Hobby Lobby more or less did in 2014. So sure, Davis is an afterthought, but the religious fanaticism she represents isn’t. There will be more Kim Davises. The difference is that they won’t all be so obviously insane, and that’s what makes them so dangerous. [image error]

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Ouch! Megyn Kelly has no time for Jeb Bush: Fox News anchor dismisses him on 9/11 and Trump

Jeb Bush has evidently never seen the memo given to George W. Bush in August 2001 about Osama bin Laden's determination to attack the United States and perhaps hijack airplanes. He went on Fox News last night to criticize Hillary Clinton over #Benghazi, but Megyn Kelly wanted to know why it was right to criticize Clinton for the deaths in Libya, but not his brother for the deaths on September 11. He insisted there was no double standard.

"Not at all because if someone had evidence that there was a pending attack, there was -- a lot of investigations after 9/11, if there was evidence that there was an attack that was pending and no one acted, of course there were have been criticism, but that's not the case."

Let's pick up the transcript:

KELLY: You know they're arguing that there was. Trump argues George Tenet, offered a warning that the attack.

BUSH: Trump doesn't know what he's talking about. Trump doesn't know what he is talking about. He doesn't know anything about this. And he doesn't know what he's talking about. There were massive investigations of this, there were hearings. And where we -- did we let our safeguards down? Sure, we did. I mean under the Clinton administration, it was the law enforcement operation. But -- in the case of Benghazi, there were clear signs that this consulate was at risk. It had already been attacked. It was 9/11, there wasn't the security. And I think the investigation -- the testimony today bears that out.

KELLY: What did you make of Hillary's testimony today?

BUSH: She is not accepting responsibility. Two weeks ago in the debate, she said that Libya was a great example of smart power. Well, I think it's in total chaos now. And leading from behind was not the best way to deal with this problem and the security problems that exist, created a tragedy for American lives lost. And so, this was not a great day for the Clinton department of state, for sure.

Later, they talk about Donald Trump's success and Kelly suggests he has no plan for how to deal with Donald Trump's chiding. Bush fires back that the two of them are in the same boat -- but Kelly reminds the former governor she is not the one running for president.

Watch the video below -- and wait for the amazing "Mm-hmm" when she asks Bush about how he'll win the nomination near the end: Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com [image error]Jeb Bush has evidently never seen the memo given to George W. Bush in August 2001 about Osama bin Laden's determination to attack the United States and perhaps hijack airplanes. He went on Fox News last night to criticize Hillary Clinton over #Benghazi, but Megyn Kelly wanted to know why it was right to criticize Clinton for the deaths in Libya, but not his brother for the deaths on September 11. He insisted there was no double standard.

"Not at all because if someone had evidence that there was a pending attack, there was -- a lot of investigations after 9/11, if there was evidence that there was an attack that was pending and no one acted, of course there were have been criticism, but that's not the case."

Let's pick up the transcript:

KELLY: You know they're arguing that there was. Trump argues George Tenet, offered a warning that the attack.

BUSH: Trump doesn't know what he's talking about. Trump doesn't know what he is talking about. He doesn't know anything about this. And he doesn't know what he's talking about. There were massive investigations of this, there were hearings. And where we -- did we let our safeguards down? Sure, we did. I mean under the Clinton administration, it was the law enforcement operation. But -- in the case of Benghazi, there were clear signs that this consulate was at risk. It had already been attacked. It was 9/11, there wasn't the security. And I think the investigation -- the testimony today bears that out.

KELLY: What did you make of Hillary's testimony today?

BUSH: She is not accepting responsibility. Two weeks ago in the debate, she said that Libya was a great example of smart power. Well, I think it's in total chaos now. And leading from behind was not the best way to deal with this problem and the security problems that exist, created a tragedy for American lives lost. And so, this was not a great day for the Clinton department of state, for sure.

Later, they talk about Donald Trump's success and Kelly suggests he has no plan for how to deal with Donald Trump's chiding. Bush fires back that the two of them are in the same boat -- but Kelly reminds the former governor she is not the one running for president.

Watch the video below -- and wait for the amazing "Mm-hmm" when she asks Bush about how he'll win the nomination near the end: Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com [image error]

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