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May 2014

Posted by New Neo on May 16, 2014 12 Comments
Or rather, on this woman:
New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson was abruptly fired from the paper Wednesday, sources familiar with the news informed POLITICO. Managing editor Dean Baquet will take over as executive editor, effective immediately... “I choose to appoint a new leader for our newsroom because I believe that new leadership will improve some aspects of the management of the newsroom,” Sulzberger said. “This is not about any disagreement between the newsroom and the business side.”... Throughout her tenure, Abramson suffered from perceptions among staff that she was condescending and combative... The New Yorker’s Ken Auletta reported that Sulzberger had grown frustrated with Abramson after she pushed for more pay upon learning that her salary was significantly lower than that of her male predecessors.
Abramson apparently alienated some of those with jobs above her and below her. The key figure above her appears to have been Sulzberger. Among the ones positioned below her was the man who has ended up replacing her, Dean Baquet, an African-American who is reported to have been well-liked at the Times and in his previous job. The Abramson firing has caused a big brouhaha and engendered many articles and much blog commentary. But perhaps the most informative is a piece that appeared in New York Magazine. It describes a situation in which Sulzberger never wanted Abramson anyway and gave her the job reluctantly at the outset, only to become more annoyed by her. Much of his annoyance seems to have stemmed from her bluntness in telling some people (one of them being Baquet, whom Sulzberger seemed quite tight with) that they weren't doing their jobs all that well:

Posted by A.F. Branco on May 16, 2014 4 Comments

Note: You may reprint this cartoon provided you link back to this source.  To see more Legal Insurrection Branco cartoons, click here. Branco’s page is Cartoonist A.F.Branco...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on May 15, 2014 31 Comments
NOTE: Literally seconds after this went live I received a message that Vassar had taken down the Wall of Truth which is the subject of this post after it was defaced by anti-Israel students.  The title and text of the post has been adjusted accordingly. Vassar College has been a hotbed of anti-Israel agitation by Students for Justice in Palestine and supporters, as documented in the following prior posts: The situation is so bad that a self-avowed left-wing Daily Kos Diarist and Vassar alumna/us wrote a stinging rebuke, Anti-Semitic Times at Vassar College:
I graduated from Vassar two years ago and I am a proud left winger, but I just can't be down with the Students for Justice in Palestine group at my alma mater. The group is full of filthy anti-Semites, who are spectacularly ignorant about everything from Nazi propaganda to Israel's defense of itself..... At Vassar, even for me, the unhinged left wingers could be too much.... Vassar has become a reactionary, ignorant, illiberal place full of unlettered bigots. No longer will I aid those values with donations.
The Vassar Conservative-Libertarian Union (VCLU), which sponsored my speech at Vassar, decided that it was time to protest before students left campus for the summer. VCLU erected a Wall of Truth to counter the many defamatory and false allegations made against Israel. [caption id="attachment_86233" align="alignnone" width="547"](Wall of Truth at Vassar College, May 2014, feat. Alec Ferretti and Julian Hassan) (Wall of Truth at Vassar College, May 2014, feat. Alec Ferretti and Julian Hassan)[/caption] The Wall of Truth specifically was placed in the same location that Vassar SJP puts its misnomered "Apartheid Wall" during Israeli Apartheid Week:

Posted by Leslie Eastman on May 15, 2014 19 Comments
Never let it be said that Legal Insurrection doesn't have the hottest news. Yesterday, I was having a business lunch in Temecula, north of San Diego by about an hour and just off of I-15. I went with the understanding that the Bernado Fire that had burned the day before was under control. When I stepped out of the restaurant, the sky was filling with smoke from several areas in my view, which were from three of the 9 wildfires that broke out around the county yesterday.
In all, nine fires in the county had burned more than 9,000 acres, Cal Fire Capt. Dave Allen said at a briefing late Wednesday held by fire and law-enforcement officials. That number included the Bernardo fire that began Tuesday near 4S Ranch. It was 50 percent contained Thursday and had burned 1,548 acres, officials said.
Racing to get home, I was stopped along the I-15 by firefighters handling the "Highway Fire". I got an up-close and personal view of the blaze, as well as the very effective and organized response by the firefighters and emergency crews. The worst of the fires was in the coastal community of Carlsbad.
Thousands were asked to evacuate their homes - including in Carlsbad - after the blaze erupted about 10:34 a.m. Wednesday and spread through rapidly heavy brush before jumping into residential areas. Despite a state fire report of 30 homes burned earlier in the day, Carlsbad Fire Chief Michael Davis said he knows of just three homes destroyed and about a dozen damaged, all of them in the same neighborhood. The wind-driven wildfire tossed embers onto roofs and trees, igniting them. Firefighters found themselves evacuating people and battling the blaze at the same time, Nick Schuler of Cal Fire said.
San Diego blogger Tim Daniel of LeftCoastRebel captured video of this blaze, which is now known as the "Poinsettia Fire":

Posted by David Gerstman on May 15, 2014 8 Comments
On May 14, 1948 David Ben Gurion declared Israel's independence and the modern state of Israel was born. And every year at this time the Palestinians commemorate Nakba. Not surprisingly, Jodi Rudoren, Jerusalem bureau chief of the New York Times spent May 14, writing about the iNakba app which was launched by the Israeli NGO, Zochrot. In Rudoren's account:
Zochrot, Hebrew for “remembering,” has for 13 years been leading tours of destroyed villages, collecting testimony from aging Arabs, and advocating the right of return for millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants. But it preaches almost exclusively to the converted. Israel is a country where government-funded organizations can be fined for mourning on Independence Day, and where the foreign minister denounced as a “fifth column” thousands of Arab-Israeli citizens who marked the Nakba last week by marching in support of refugee return.
The disconnect in this paragraph is unbelievable. Rudoren writes blithely about the Palestinian "right of return" and suggests the lack of Israeli acceptance of the right of return is due to the close-mindedness of Israeli society. But there is nothing benign about the right of return. It means the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state. In fact a founder of Zochrot is rather explicit about his intent. (Strangely Rudoren hasn't reported that a Palestinian professor who took his student to Auschwitz was ostracized by the union at his university.) People aren't usually receptive to ideas that involve their own destruction. This is the New York Times so I hardly expect to read a corrective article. Maybe the paper will deign to publish a few dissents in the letters sections, but the case that Israel's war of independence is an ongoing disaster will remain the prevalent view at the New York Times.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on May 15, 2014 43 Comments
The annual White Privilege Conference, which we first covered in 2010, is in the news because of video posted at Progressives Today exposing the almost insane indoctrination of teachers to indoctrinate students in critical race theory and anti-capitalism, White Privilege Industrial Complex exposed. In segment two of its series, Progressives Today exposes more truly bizarre and troubling parts of the conference, White Privilege Conference speakers judge by skin color and claim rape is not intrinsically bad:
  • Speaker Adrien Wing: ‘You can’t just look at the face’ and goes on to slam Clarence Thomas and Barack Obama.
  • Wing: Obama is ‘the face of global White privilege.’
  • Wing: Obama is the ‘black face in the White House.’
  • Wing: Urges attendees to think about ways to rein in freedom of speech
  • Speaker Paul Kivel compares Christianity to ‘racism and sexism or other systems of oppression.’
  • Speaker Leonard Zeskind: ‘The longer you are in the Tea Party, the more racist you become.’
  • Zeskind: Parents put their kids in private schools because they’re racist
  • Speaker Stephanie Baran: capitalism perpetuates white supremacy and privilege, racism and sexism
  • So-called ‘White ally:’ ‘White people do not experience racism.’
  • Ally: Rape is not intrinsically bad.
Here are a couple of key screen caps:

Posted by Mandy Nagy on May 14, 2014 19 Comments
Glenn Greenwald's book on Edward Snowden and the NSA is apparently headed for the big screen. From the Hollywood Reporter:
Sony Pictures Entertainment has optioned film rights to Glenn Greenwald’s No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State. The book by Greenwald, whose reporting on the revelations contained in Snowden’s top-secret NSA documents won the Pulitzer Prize for The Guardian newspaper this year, was published May 13. James Bond producers Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli of EON Productions will produce the politically themed drama that is expected to be in the vein of other Sony true story films like The Social Network and Captain Phillips. Greenwald's highly anticipated book examines the journalist's personal involvement in working with Snowden to break numerous stories about the U.S. government's intelligence-gathering operations. The book is both a personal narrative of the events as they unfolded and a historical reflection on the broader implications of the NSA's activities. Greenwald and his family have been harassed throughout the process of bringing Snowden's story to the public.
Greenwald’s book, released this week, covers in part some of the background on his dealings with the former NSA contractor, according to the NY Times.

Posted by Bryan Jacoutot on May 14, 2014 4 Comments
Nebraska and West Virginia held their respective primaries last night. In Nebraska, Ben Sasse defeated a broad Republican field and secured the nomination for the general election. Interestingly, although Sasse outpaced his nearest rival by more than 25% of the vote, he still came in just shy of a majority. That said, Nebraska doesn't require a majority to avoid a runoff, so Sasse can now focus his efforts on his Democrat opponent, Dave Domina. In West Virginia, Republicans thrusted Rep. Shelley Moore Capito into the Senate general election to replace retiring Senator Jay Rockefeller where he has served since 1985 following the end of his stint as the Governor of West Virginia. In November, Capito will face off against Natalie Tennant, West Virginia's Secretary of State. As Mary Katharine Ham pointed out, this sets the stage for an all-female Senate battle. The eventual winner will be the first woman Senator out of West Virginia and, right now, Capito holds the edge.
Capito leads by double digits, and would be the first Republican senator since the ’50s from this quirky, rural, conservative state where a conservative Democratic Party retains a huge registration advantage and many state and national offices. The winner of the race would take retiring Sen. Jay Rockefeller’s seat.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on May 14, 2014 13 Comments
In February and March 2014, Vassar witnessed ugly and racialized taunting of professors and students regarding a class trip to Israel, Anti-Israel academic boycott turns ugly at Vassar.  The administration took a hands-off approach. Starting shortly after my appearance at Vassar on May 5, to speak against academic BDS, Students for Justice in Palestine began a social media campaign focused on the race of the crowd as a means of denigrating my appearance as an old white Zionist alumni intrusion onto campus. SJP's social media then devolved further, into tweeting and posting of white nationalist and neo-Nazi anti-Zionist material: [caption id="attachment_86121" align="alignnone" width="549"]Vassar SJP Twitter Nazi Poster Screen Shot 2014-05-12 at 12.03.51 AM (Image via Prof. Rebecca Lesses)[/caption] The tweets and postings were documented by Ithaca College Professor Rebecca Lesses at her blog, Mystical Politics.  SJP initially defended the conduct at its Facebook, WordPress, Tumblr and Twitter accounts, but then apologized on Sunday, May 11 and again on Tuesday, May 13:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on May 14, 2014 6 Comments
Remember when Michigan union members collapsed a tent on attendees at an Americans for Prosperity event supporting changes to Michigan union rules? We do, Most chilling Michigan video — “There are people under there, oh my God”:
As the union members attacked the Americans For Prosperity tent, a woman cried out “there are people under there, oh my God” (at 1:20). At 1:40, as union members start walking on top of the collapsed tent, a man shouted “hey, there are people in there” but again the crowd didn’t stop, and the union members continued walking on the collapsed tent defiantly as the crowd shouted obscenities and cheered. At 1:57 the woman cried out again “there’s people in there,” but to no avail. You can then see various people probing at large lumps under the tent, presumably checking if anyone was trapped. Yet the crowd continued with its profane taunts, as others lifted the edges of the tent and looked underneath, again presumably to see if anyone was trapped. Someone shouts “go home you bunch of parasites” as the crowd chanted “Go Home.” At 3:30 someone asks, “does someone want to help me lift this? I wonder if there are any people in there.” Then another person said, “there was, there was a bunch of women and older people.” Then another person yelled, “fuck these people.” Another yelled, “they want a war, they got it.”
(language warning) Now the proverbial tent has collapsed on one aspect of Michigan unions, the previously compelled unionization of home care workers. As The Wall Street Journal reports, when the law was changed to free up home care workers to choose, they overwhelmingly rejected unionization, Michigan Union Collapse:
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