HENRY ROLLINS COMMENTS ON STEUBENVILLE RAPE VERDICT

03-17-13
http://henryrollins.com/dispatch/detail/dispatch_03-17-12_los_angeles/

For the last couple of hours, I have been thinking of the verdict that was reached in what is now known as the Steubenville rape case.

Since all involved are minors, I won’t use anyone’s name. Two juvenile males were found delinquent of the charges and will be, as far as I understand, incarcerated in a juvenile detention facility until they are twenty-one years of age.

There is, I guess, cell phone generated video content of parts of the crime. It went “viral” on the internet and brought attention to the events.

I got through a few minutes of it but was too disgusted to watch the rest.

The case, the verdict and the surrounding circumstances open up a huge conversation.

These are a few of the things that I have been thinking about.

After reading several posts online, I was not surprised at the vast range of sentiments expressed. Many of the postings were of outrage that the two found delinquent were not tried as adults so they would face much longer sentences. You might not know, but in some states, this sentence would be decades long. Many of the posts spoke of the damage done to the victim and the life she will have now. One person suggested caning the two young men. Many others were angered at the deification of high school football players and how they often receive special treatment. You can read this stuff all day if you want.

After reading posts for quite awhile, I thought first about the two young men. I wondered if the years in the facility will “help” them. What, exactly does one “learn” in one of these places? That is to say, after five years locked away, does the idea of assaulting a woman seem like the wrong thing to do, more than if you were incarcerated for one year? Would you be “more sorry” about what you did? Is that possible? Or, would you just be more sorry for yourself about where your actions landed you? At what point do you get “better”, how many years in one of these places does that take?

What made these young people think that that what they did was ok? What was in their upbringing, the information and morals instilled in them that allowed them to do what they did, minute after minute, laughing, joking, documenting it and then calling it a night and going home? Out of all the people who were witness to what happened, why wasn’t there someone putting a stop to it?

What I am attempting to get at, and I apologize if I am not being clear enough is that this is a failure on many levels. Parents, teachers, coaches, peers all come into play here. I am not trying to diffuse blame or lessen the awfulness of what happened but I want to address the complexity of the cause in an effort to assess the effect so it can be prevented.

Some might say that the two going to the youth facility are as much victims as the young women who was assaulted. I do not agree. The two are offenders. What they did was obviously wrong. That being said, we cannot end the discussion at that point and expect things to change.

I have yet to say anything about the damage done to the young woman involved. It is ironic and sad that the person who is going to do a life sentence is her.

As a testament to the horrific power of sexual assault, I encourage you to see, yet cannot recommend the documentary The Invisible War about sexual assault in the military. http://invisiblewarmovie.com/. The reason I say that I cannot recommend it is that it is so well done, so clear and devastating that it will put you through quite a wringer. I do hope you see it but damn, it’s hard. In the interviews with women who have been assaulted by fellow members, the damage that has been done to these good people is monumental.

Many people are angry that more time was not given to the offenders. This seems to be the prevailing sentiment. I understand the anger but don’t know if adding a decade onto their sentences would be of any benefit. To me, the problem that needs to be addressed is where in the information chain were the two offenders made to understand that what they did was not wrong on every possible level? You can execute them both tomorrow but still, there is a problem that needs to be dealt with.

It’s a situation where you would like to be able to point a finger and say, that’s the reason and be done. You have to be careful when you do this because it’s easy to miss.

I think to a great degree, we humans still divide ourselves into two species, even though we are monotypic. There are males and females. We see them as different and not equal. Things get better when women get more equality. That is a bit obvious but I think it leads to better results up the road. If it’s a man’s world as they say, then men, your world is a poorly run carnage fest.

It is obvious that the two offenders saw the victim as some one that could be treated as a thing. This is not about sex, it is about power and control. I guess that is what I am getting at. Sex was probably not the hardest thing for the two to get, so that wasn’t the objective. When you hear the jokes being made during the crime, it is the purest contempt.

So, how do you fix that? I’m just shooting rubber bands at the night sky but here are a few ideas: Put women’s studies in high school the curriculum from war heroes to politicians, writers, speakers, activists, revolutionaries and let young people understand that women have been kicking ass in high threat conditions for ages and they are worthy of respect.

Total sex ed in school. Learn how it all works. Learn what the definition of statutory rape is and that it is rape, that date rape is rape, that rape is rape.

In the spirit of equal time, sites like Huffington Post should have sections for male anatomy hanging out instead of just the idiotic celebrity “side boob” and “nip slip” camera ops. I have no idea what that would be like to have a camera in my face at every turn, looking for “the” shot. I know what some of you are saying. “Then why do they wear clothes like that unless they want those photos taken?” I don’t know what to tell ya. Perhaps just don’t take the fuckin picture? Evolve? I don’t know.

Education, truth, respect, equality—these are the things that can get you from a to b very efficiently.

It must be an awful time for the parents of all three of these people and their relatives and I hope they all get to a better place soon.

What else? That’s all I’ve got. Thanks for reading this. Henry

Reince Priebus gives GOP prescription for future

By Rachel Weiner, Updated: March 18, 2013, Washington Post

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus gave a blistering assessment of the GOP’s problems on Monday based on the results of a months-long review, and he called on the party to reinvent itself and officially endorse immigration reform.

Referring to the November election, Priebus said at a breakfast meeting: “There’s no one reason we lost. Our message was weak; our ground game was insufficient; we weren’t inclusive; we were behind in both data and digital; and our primary and debate process needed improvement.”

“So, there’s no one solution,” he said. “There’s a long list of them.”

Among the report’s 219 prescriptions: a $10 million marketing campaign, aimed in particular at women, minorities and gays; a shorter, more controlled primary season and earlier national convention; and creation of an open data platform and analytics institute to provide research for Republican candidates.

Mississippi Committeeman Henry Barbour, Florida strategist Sally Bradshaw, former White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, Puerto Rico Committewoman Zori Fonalledas and South Carolina Committeman Glenn McCall authored the report.

“When Republicans lost in November it was a wake-up call,” Priebus said Monday. “We know that we have problems. We’ve identified them, and we’re implementing the solutions to fix them.”

While the document, the result of a three-month listening tour, is intended to focus on strategy, the group made one major foray into policy. If Republicans want to reach Hispanic voters, the authors say, the party “must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform.”

Asked if some Republicans would balk at that recommendation, former White House spokesman Ari Fleischer — one of the report’s five co-chairmen — said the last election had brought many conservatives to the same position.

“It was such a clear two-by-four to the head in the 2012 election,” he told The Washington Post, referring to Mitt Romney’s 27 percent share of the Hispanic vote, “that not saying it would have been such a glaring omission. Republicans could never win again if that’s the status.”

Yet some conservative pundits have already voiced strong opposition to the call for immigration reform.

The $10 million outreach effort to includes hiring national political directors for Hispanic, Asian-Pacific and African American voters and elevating minorities within the party. “We’ve done a real lousy job sometimes of bragging about the success that we’ve had” with minorities, in particular Hispanic candidates, Priebus said. To target African Americans, he plans to launch a pilot project in 2013 mayoral races aimed at identifying and turning out potential supporters in urban areas.

“The way we communicate our principles isn’t resonating widely enough,” he said. “Focus groups described our party as ‘narrow-minded,’ ‘out of touch,’ and ‘stuffy old men.’ The perception that we’re the party of the rich continues to grow.”

In response, his report urges Republicans to “blow the whistle at corporate malfeasance and attack corporate welfare” as well as big CEO retirement packages. It also suggests that there should be less focus in the party on Ronald Reagan, saying that “Republicans have comfortably remained the Party of Reagan without figuring out what comes next.”

The party will make a concerted effort to elevate more women, Priebus said. He suggested that some “biologically stupid” remarks by Republican candidates turned off women voters. Female surrogates should be elevated, the report says, and women must be promoted within the RNC and included in messaging discussions ” to represent some of the unique concerns that female voters may have.”

The report tells Republicans they must “change our tone” on certain social issues to win over younger voters and reach out to gay Americans. But the authors do not offer a specific policy prescription on gay marriage as they did on immigration.

Asked about efforts to win over gay voters, Priebus said that Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio “made some pretty big inroads last week” when he came out in support of gay marriage. But Priebus did not comment on whether he supported Portman’s stance, saying only that he supported the senator’s freedom to take that stance. ”I think it’s about being decent. I think it’s about dignity and respect, that nobody deserves to have their dignity diminished,” he said.

“There’s more of a split on issues involving gays” than on immigration, Fleischer told The Post. “Ten years ago, there used to be no split. Now the younger generation of Republicans is leading that split, and that’s a healthy part of being a big tent,” he said.

The document calls for Republicans to embrace different points of view, “instead of driving around in circles on an ideological cul-de-sac.” Gay rights are singled out as a critical example.

“Already, there is a generational difference within the conservative movement about issues involving the treatment and the rights of gays — and for many younger voters, these issues are a gateway into whether the Party is a place they want to be,” the report reads. “If our Party is not welcoming and inclusive, young people and increasingly other voters will continue to tune us out.”

Also in hopes of attracting younger voters, the report calls for an ”RNC Celebrity Task Force” to host star-studded events and fundraisers.

The open data platform is meant to help Republicans close a perceived digital communication gap with the Democratic Party. “Think of it like Apple and the App Store,” Priebus said. Priebus also called for putting a chief digital and technology officer in place, opening an RNC satellite office in San Francisco and holding hack-a-thons to bolster relationships with developers.

“Over and over, our co-chairs heard of the need for an environment of intellectual curiosity,” Priebus said.

The report also calls for reworking the presidential primary system so that the party picks its nominee earlier in the year, officially nominating him or her at a convention in June or July rather than late August or September. A regional primary system is suggested, and the report recommends discouraging delegate-selecting conventions or caucuses in favor of primaries.

Leaders may face opposition from non-establishment Republicans in trying to condense the primary calendar. One adviser to Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) predicted that the “move away from caucuses and conventions will be highly controversial for the Paul world, tea partiers and social conservatives.”

The RNC aims to rein in, as much as possible, the many deep-pocketed outside conservative groups. Despite spending tens of millions of dollars in the last cycle, few of these organizations found much electoral success. The report recommends that the RNC, “as much as is legally possible,” help outside groups rethink their ad spending and ground game investments, improve their data and technology and coordinate on resources and messaging. The report also calls for a push for looser campaign finance restrictions that would give federal campaigns the freedom to compete with super PACs.

Priebus said the report had to be “bold,” “raw,” and “real” — and public — to have the desired impact.

“This is an unprecedented thing, for a national party to put its cards on the table face up,” he said. “Maybe a few pieces of china needed to be broken.”

Sheryl Sandberg Gives American Women a Performance Review

The Atlantic  | 3/13/2013

Before there were second-wave feminists, there were women's professional associations. Sandberg is looking to combine the two models to help women lead.

A couple of years ago, I went to the opening of a photography exhibit in Washington's Penn Quarter organized by local news site DCist. It had been maintaining a popular Flickr feed of reader-submitted photos and in 2006 decided to launch an online contest, from which images would be curated for the show. At the time, I'd been dipping in and out of the local art world for around half a decade, first as a reporter and later as a silent observer of the scene, and so recognized many of its leading personages.

That night the room was packed. Beyond packed -- stuffed and sweltering. Yet I saw only one or two faces that I recognized. "Who are all these people?" I wondered. "Where did they come from? And why have I never met any of them before?"

What they were, it turned out, was a new community being born. Internet organizing, whether in the professional or the social arena, has a tremendous and by now well-documented capacity to create vibrant cultural networks where none existed before by knitting together people who have shared interests but no preexisting shared social geography. To be sure, online communities tend to arise around and overlay existing social networks (such as the DCist site, the central node around which a community swarmed that night, and whose 2013 show will hold two opening nights "limited to 500 per evening"). But organizing done through Facebook or Facebook-like efforts also has a tremendous capacity to call people up off the sidelines and create new leaders in the fresh space of a novel community as it emerges.

I've seen it over and over again in the past decade, from Howard Dean's Meetups to Barack Obama's Facebook-inspired social networking/community organizing/GOTV apparatus to reports on the Arab spring to even minor social events, like an Embassy of Sweden Innovation & Technology exhibit/cocktail party in 2008 that drew several thousand people more than could fit in the building, thanks to a Facebook notice that went viral.

It is in this dynamic that the true potential of the Lean In Circles proposed by Sheryl Sandberg can be found -- and why people should take them seriously as a potential force for change.

* * *

Sandberg is a chief operating officer, a near-billionaire, a Harvard-Radcliffe College and Harvard Business School Graduate, one of the most powerful women in business, the fifth most powerful in the world, according to Forbes. But the most important data point on her resume, the one that makes most of this possible and which also must be kept in mind when reading her book, is that she is someone who works at Facebook. Who leads Facebook. Who helped invent the Facebook we know today. Hers is a Facebook feminism, and what she's doing in concert with her book Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead is taking some of the basic principles that undergird the massive growth of that company under her tenure as second-in-command -- engagement, reach, relevance, and social context -- and applying them to promoting her book and launching an ambitious professional development project for women, the Lean In foundation, funded with her own money.

The biggest wave of critiques against Sandberg so far have come from more traditional and intersectional feminists, and from mommy bloggers. I could rehash the pre-publication backlash to Sandberg, as well as the backlash against the backlash, but the fact of the matter is that all the huffing and puffing about why she's not organizing janitors or home health-care aides or stay at home moms is largely beside the point -- because that's not what her project is about. Sandberg is an unapologetic capitalist and senior manager who began her career in Washington, D.C. She says she's interested in seeing more women in leadership posts in corporate America and in the highest ranks of government. That means more women at the top, more women in positions of power, and more women who have the training and experience to lead within institutions actually getting a shot at doing -- or daring to do -- it. Hers is not a conversation for opt-outs, except to the extent that it might call them back to the field; Sandberg's conversation is for women who have to or want to stay in the game, and to thrive there.

For the first time in American history, there are now more college-educated women than men -- more than a million more. The Sandberg conversation is for the vast swath of college-educated women who work full-time and would like this thing that they spend the majority of their waking hours doing to be (more) rewarding, and maybe need a little bit of a kick in the pants to remember why they got into their chosen field in the first place, and also little encouragement after years being in the gender minority at the office. It is, perhaps, for women who feel as personally stalled as the feminist movement itself is, but who recall a time when they were more ambitious and all the pathways seemed clearer and they were more hopeful about their own lives. It is less for the tiny but vocal community of professional feminists than for post-feminist women who, like Sandberg, came to feminism late or woke up one morning and realized the equal world they'd been promised since they were kids and thought they were entering when they were young does not actually exist. And as much as there is in Lean In about marrying smart and really going for it professionally before you have kids, it's not even necessarily a book for young women, given how many busy professionals don't marry until their mid-30s or have kids until they are pushing 40, or even older. The goal of the Lean In Community, as outlined in documents obtained by the New York Times, is to help women find "personal fulfillment" and "professional success." And, though it doesn't say this, to help them feel less isolated.

Lean In is, in short, a call to engagement for people who are not already part of the public conversation about women and power, but who can be brought into a new conversation through reading her book and through the Lean In Community, which "will be tightly integrated with Facebook." That community's planning documents cite the Young Presidents Organization, microlending collectives, and study groups as models, and lay out plans for a quarterly budget for Facebook advertising, which is to say, using the deep data of Facebook to target messages as with a political campaign. "Our goal is not to create another proprietary women's organization," the document says, adding later: "Lean In will combine practical education and focused discussion to give women the tools they need to realize their goals."

That makes the engagement part of Sandberg's project more of a piece with professional development programs targeted towards encouraging and training women to take more active roles in public life -- such as the Op-Ed Project and EMILY's List and Running Start -- than with 1970s feminist consciousness raising groups derived from Chinese women's speak bitterness sessions, which even at their peak drew maybe 100,000 women (a miniscule fraction of America's female population). People have suggested Sandberg's Lean In curriculum is perhaps overly focused on the positive. But what else should one expect? This is Facebook feminism, an outgrowth of the "like" economy in which the characteristic communication option is a positive one. And I happen to like the LeanIn.org collection of inspirational personal stories; Lord knows I'm deeply informed already about what the systemic and structural problems are. It's cool to hear about how other people have handled inflection points in their professional lives.

Think of it this way: Just because no nation has achieved anything near gender parity in national elective offices without national or political party quotas doesn't mean that groups like EMILY's List and the WISH List are useless in the United States. Women have made huge strides in public office over the past 20 years since private-sector efforts to train and encourage and fund individual women have come on the scene, more than quadrupling their numbers in the U.S. Congress. Are we there yet? No. But no one can propose a path forward that does not involve calling more women off the sidelines into public service -- the whole point of She Should Run, for example, is to get qualified women who might not think of themselves as political leaders to consider contending for office, where all the research shows they are just as likely to win as men. As well, no one will be able to solve the byline gap on the Op-Ed page unless there are also more individual women willing to own their expertise and pitch pieces, which report after report confirms women are more hesitant to do that men and do less often.

In her book, Sheryl Sandberg, manager, has effectively looked around and given American working women a performance review. And, like any good manager, she's made a pep talk about all the cool things you can do in the future a part of that. She's not shy about telling women what they can do better at the same time that she's sympathetic to their challenges. But she's also not afraid to lay out the opportunities that women already do have that they are leaving on the table and say, wait a minute, what about this, and this, and this? Some women have complained that Sandberg's call to lean in is making them feel guilty for not doing even more when they are already trying as hard as they can. But that griping feels a little bit like humble-bragging -- you know, of the "my greatest weakness is I work too hard" variety.

A book doesn't have to speak to everyone to launch a cultural moment. It just has to inspire enough women to make change and provoke a real national conversation. And, let's be real, even when feminism was a mass movement in the 1970s, the vast majority of American women took no part in its organized leadership or formal activities. There's a lot of room between opting out and maxing out; there are women who know they could be doing more if they felt more encouraged, and I suspect they will happily test out the Lean In Circles.

"Leaning in means pushing through the challenges and going down a path with an uncertain outcome...." the LeanIn.org document says in a section soliciting stories. "Leaning back means choosing to stay in a known or comfortable situation."

That's how movements get going. One person or group of people starts one thing and other people judge it inadequate and start their own thing and before you know it there's a whole set of things no one expected happening. But there has to be a catalyst. Someone has to get the ball rolling and to become the first public target -- because make no mistake, any one who advocates for and tries to lead on fundamental social change is signing up for years of being mocked or criticized or even hated, both by potential allies and by opponents. (Respect for movement leaders comes only after they win, if then -- that's something they don't teach in the history books.)

But the important part here is that Sandberg herself is leaning in with this book and with her project. She's already provoked a huge conversation about women and work and likability and ambition and whether we are really all personally flourishing or not, and the book has only been available for sale for a few days. I hope the conversation keeps going, and I'm looking forward to one day having that same feeling I had at that DCist show, walking into another room and having to ask myself, "Who are all these people?", thanks to a new social network that's sprung into being.

Codify the drone war

By Charles Krauthammer, March 14 2013
Washington Post

In choice of both topic and foil, Rand Paul’s now legendary Senate filibuster was a stroke of political genius. The topic was, ostensibly, very narrow: Does the president have the constitutional authority to put a drone-launched Hellfire missile through your kitchen — you, a good citizen of Topeka to whom POTUS might have taken a dislike — while you’re cooking up a pot roast?

The constituency of those who could not give this question a straight answer is exceedingly small. Unfortunately, among them is Attorney General Eric Holder. Enter the foil. He told a Senate hearing that such an execution would not be “appropriate.”

Appropriate being a bureaucratic word meaning nothing, Holder’s answer was a PR disaster. The correct response, of course, is: Absent an active civil war on U.S. soil (of the kind not seen in 150 years) or a jihadist invasion from Saskatchewan led by the Topeka pot roaster, the answer is no.

The hypothetical being inconceivable, Paul’s performance was both theatrically brilliant and substantively irrelevant. As for the principle at stake, Holder’s opinion carries no weight in any case. He is hardly a great attorney general whose words will ring through history. Nor would anything any attorney general says be binding on the next president, or for that matter on any Congress or court.

The vexing and pressing issue is the use of drones abroad. The filibuster pretended not to be about that. Which is testimony to Paul’s political adroitness. It was not until two days later that he showed his hand, writing in The Post, “No American should be killed by a drone without first being charged with a crime.” Note the absence of the restrictive clause: “on American soil.”

Now we’re talking about a larger, more controversial issue: the killing-by-drone in Yemen of al-Qaeda operative Anwar al-Awlaki. Outside American soil, the Constitution does not rule, no matter how much Paul would like it to. Yet Paul’s unease applies to non-American drone targets as well. His quarrel is with the very notion of the war on terror, though he is normally too smart to say that openly and unequivocally. Unlike his father, who implied that 9/11 was payback for our sins, Paul the Younger more gingerly expresses general skepticism about not just the efficacy but the legality of the entire war.

That skepticism is finding an audience as the war grinds into its 12th year, as our hapless attorney general vainly tries to define its terms and as the administration conducts a major drone war with defiant secrecy. Nor is this some minor adjunct to battle — an estimated 4,700 have been killed by drone.

George W. Bush was excoriated for waterboarding exactly three terrorists, all of whom are now enjoying an extensive retirement on a sunny Caribbean island (though strolls beyond Gitmo’s gates are prohibited). Whereas President Obama, with thousands of kills to his name, evokes little protest from yesterday’s touch-not-a-hair-on-their-head zealots. Of whom, of course, Sen. Obama was a leading propagandist.

Such hypocrisy is the homage Democrats pay to Republicans when the former take office, confront national security reality, feel the weight of their duty to protect the nation — and end up doing almost everything they had denounced their predecessors for doing. The beauty of such hypocrisy, however, is that the rotation of power creates a natural bipartisan consensus on the proper conduct of this war.

Which creates a unique opportunity to finally codify the rules. The war’s constitutional charter, the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), has proved quite serviceable. But the commander-in-chief’s authority is so broad — it leaves the limits of his power to be determined, often in secret memos, by the administration’s own in-house lawyers — that it has spawned suspicion, fear and now filibuster.

It is time to rethink. That means not repealing the original AUMF but, using the lessons of the past 12 years, rewriting it with particular attention to a new code governing drone warfare and the question of where, when and against whom it should be permitted.

Necessity having led the Bush and Obama administrations to the use of near-identical weapons and tactics, a national consensus has been forged. Let’s make it open. All we need now is a president willing to lead and a Congress willing to take responsibility for the conduct of a war that, however much Paul and his acolytes may wish it away, will long be with us.

COLORADO DEM TO RAPE SURVIVOR: A GUN WOULDN’T HAVE HELPED YOU AGAINST RAPIST BECAUSE ‘STATISTICS ARE NOT ON YOUR SIDE’

March 5, 2013 | The Blaze

Senator Evie Hudak's galling comments begin at minute 11:00




Rape survivor Amanda Collins bravely spoke about her horrific attack during a Monday legislative hearing concerning Colorado’s proposed ban on concealed firearms on college campuses. She explained how she wished she would’ve had a firearm to defend herself from her rapist, which could have possibly prevented the attack from occurring.

After calling her story “unsettling,” Democratic state Sen. Evie Hudak quickly went after Collins, saying “actually, statistics are not on your side, even if you had a gun.”

“You said that you were a martial arts student, I mean person, experienced in Tae Kwon Do, and yet because this individual was so large, was able to overcome you even with your skills, and chances are that if you had had a gun, then he would have been able to get that from you and possibly use it against you,” she added.

Hudak claimed that for every one woman who used a handgun to kill someone in self-defense, 83 were murdered by them.

“Respectfully senator, you weren’t there,” Collins said before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Monday. “Had I been carrying concealed, he wouldn’t have known I had my weapon; and I was there. I know without a doubt in my mind at some point I would’ve been able to stop my attack by using my firearm.”

Republican state Sen. Ted Harvey took a shot at Democrats’ gun control efforts, telling Collins that the point of Colorado’s proposed ban on firearms on campus is to make sure people aren’t “uncomfortable.”

A list of Mercer County fire district budgets, fire commissioner races

By Mike Davis/The Times
on February 14, 2013

Voters in Mercer County and the region will go the polls Saturday to vote on fire district budgets and fire commissioner races. All terms are three years unless specified otherwise. Polls will be open from 2 to 9 p.m.

HAMILTON/CHESTERFIELD FIRE DISTRICT NO. 1
Voters will be asked to approve a $597,196 budget, including a $488,238 tax levy, for the Union Fire Company. Tax rates would remain unchanged at 17 cents per $100 of assessed home value for Hamilton residents, and 9.9 cents for Chesterfield property owners, chairman Joe Dubell said. Commissioner Eric Campbell is running unopposed for reelection.

HAMILTON FIRE DISTRICT NO. 2
The Mercerville Fire Company has presented a $3.6 million budget, with $3.2 million to be raised by taxation, chairman Gene Argenti said. The tax rate will remain at 36.8 cents per $100 of assessed value, Argenti said. Commissioner Scott Fairfax is running for reelection.

HAMILTON FIRE DISTRICT NO. 3
The Rusling Hose Fire Company is asking to raise its tax rate 10 cents to 89 cents per $100 of assessed value, chairman Joseph Zalescik said. He attributed the increase to union contracts with increased health benefits, and a settlement between Trenton Water Works and its customer townships, which raised water rates. A referendum is not required because the district has a cap bank remaining from last year. The $3.8 million budget includes a $3.65 million tax levy, which Zalescik said is a smaller levy than last year. Zalescik and Commissioner James Gramigna are up for reelection.

HAMILTON FIRE DISTRICT NO 4
The proposed $2.4 million budget would raise $2.3 million by taxation, Commissioner John Newbon said, and raise the rate 5 cents, to 65 cents per $100 of assessed value. Voters are being asked to approve $71,024 in spending above the 2 percent cap on levy increases, Newbon said. The funds are needed to cover a water rate hike.“It’s basically because of the Trenton Water Works settlement, where we got hit with a 40 percent increase,” he said. “We also had some unforeseen health benefits increases. “Commissioners Keith Leslie and Richard Coleman are running unopposed for reelection.

HAMILTON FIRE DISTRICT NO. 5
The DeCou Hose Company has proposed a $1.5 million budget with $1.4 million to be raised by taxation. A 3-cent increase would set the tax rate at 80 cents per $100 of home value, commissioner Leonard Gadsby said. Newcomers Charles Michaels, Jonathan Tomko and Charles Stanley are vying for one open board seat, Gadsby said.

HAMILTON FIRE DISTRICT NO. 6
The $2.4 million budget proposed for the White Horse Volunteer Fire Company would draw $2.2 million from taxation. The company is asking for a 3-cent tax rate increase, to 25.9 cents per $100 of assessed value. Voter approval is needed to allow the district to exceed the 2 percent limit on tax levy increases by $143,100 to hire two employees, who would provide support for the volunteer staff. Commissioner David Barlow is running for reelection.

HAMILTON FIRE DISTRICT NO. 7
The Nottingham Fire Company is asking voters to approve a $3.5 million budget with about $3.4 million to be raised by taxation, commissioner Fred Zauner said. The tax rate would go up 1.3 cents to 22.3 cents. Commissioners Adam Bendas and John Marcucci are running for reelection unopposed.

HAMILTON FIRE DISTRICT NO. 8
Voters are presented with a $1.6 million budget with a $1.4 million tax levy for the Colonial Fire Company. Included is a half-cent increase, raising the tax rate to 45 cents per $100 of assessed value, chairman George Lenhardt said.
Commissioners Patricia Willever and Brian Moss are running unopposed for reelection.

HAMILTON FIRE DISTRICT NO. 9
The $3.6 million budget for the Groveville Fire Company calls for $3.4 million to come from taxes, and for the rate to rise less than a cent to 49.9 cents per $100 of home value. Commissioner Bill DiMeo is running for reelection.

BORDENTOWN DISTRICT NO. 1
The district, home to the Mission Fire Company, proposes a $775,198 budget for 2013, with a $710,659 tax levy, board Secretary Tim Kinsley said. The budget calls for a 2.7-cent tax rate increase to 19.8 cents per $100 of assessed value. Since the increase would exceed the state-mandated 2 percent tax cap on levy increases, a separate referendum is needed for the additional $56,102, which is needed to cover normal operating conditions and expenses, Kinsley said.
Kinsley and his brother, John Kinsley, are running for reelection unopposed.

BORDENTOWN DISTRICT NO. 2
Voters will be asked to approve a $1.55 million budget, with $1.4 million to be raised by taxation, chairman Stephen Monson said. The tax rate for the district, serviced by the Derby Fire Company, would remain at 17.7 cents per $100 of assessed value. The budget includes a $900,000 decrease in debt service, with a ladder truck nearly paid off, Monson said.
Michael Danbury, George Gareis and Brian Schoen, all newcomers, are seeking election to two open spots on the board.

HOPEWELL BOROUGH FIRE DISTRICT NO. 1
The borough’s only fire district is proposing a $496,534 budget, of which $172,459 will be raised by taxation. The budget keeps a steady tax rate of 5 cents per $100 of assessed value.
Commissioner C. Schuyler Morehouse is running for reelection to a 3-year term and Melvin Myers is seeking reelection to a 1-year term.

HOPEWELL TOWNSHIP FIRE DISTRICT NO. 1
The district is asking voters to approve $3.2 million in spending with a tax levy of just less than $3 million. The budget calls for a tax rate of 7.3 cents per $100 of assessed value, an increase of less than 1 cent. Voters also are asked to approve an additional $175,000 bond to purchase a new ambulance. Two board seats are being contested; the candidates are incumbents Michael Cseremsak and Timothy Lynch, and newcomer Timothy Lang.

LAMBERTVILLE FIRE DISTRICT NO. 1
Up for vote is a $761,771 budget, of which $514,050 would be raised by taxation. The budget calls for a 7.1-cent tax rate per $100 of assessed value, an increase of one-tenth of a cent. Robert Brown and Christopher Kascik are seeking reelection.

MONTGOMERY DISTRICT NO. 1
Voters are asked to approve a $805,729 budget and a $750,450 tax levy. The tax raise would nudge up a tenth of a cent, to 4 cents per $100. Commissioners William Spohn and Jon Kessler are running for reelection.

MONTGOMERY DISTRICT NO. 2
The district has proposed an $860,079 budget for 2013, with $791,800 to be raised by taxation, chairman Toby Laughlin said. The budget has a tax rate of 4.3 cents per $100 of assessed value, an increase of one-tenth of a cent. Commissioner Claude Lewis and newcomer Stephen Weingart Jr. are running unopposed for two board positions.

PENNINGTON FIRE DISTRICT NO. 1
Voters will be asked to approve a $399,088 budget for 2013, all of which would be raised by taxation. Pennington taxpayers would account for $149,000 of the tax levy and Hopewell Township residents the remaining $250,088, chairman Mark Blackwell said. The tax rate remains at 2.9 cents.Blackwell said the adopted budget was significantly lower than last year’s plan, which included the purchase of new air packs for firefighters. Incumbent Tom Timperman and newcomers William Naylor and Katherine Chandler are in the running for two seats, Blackwell said.

PLAINSBORO
Voters are presented with a $2.2 million budget that includes a $1.8 million tax levy, chairman Ted Wagner said. The tax rate would stay at 5 cents per $100 of assessed value. Wagner and newcomer Justin Schwartz are running for two board spots.

SOTU Preview: The Alito Factor

By MATTHEW WALTHER on 2.12.13 AmericanSpectator

Tonight, if I even remember to turn on my television, my eyes will be on Samuel Alito, the most principled and civilized high court justice (see his dissenting opinions in United States v. Stevens and Snyder v. Phelps). Alito’s calmly uttered “That’s not true” proved a far more stinging rebuke to the president than any of Willard Romney’s managementese-ridden bloviations during last year’s debates. Of course, if Alito bothered to say “That’s not true” every time Obama pinocchioed, a transcript of the State of the Union would look something like this:

The Taliban’s momentum has been broken.
(That’s not true.)

Growing industries in science and technology have twice as many openings as we have workers who can do the job.
(That’s not true.)

Most teachers work tirelessly, with modest pay, sometimes digging into their own pocket for school supplies, just to make a difference.
(That’s not true.)

And so on and so on. Ad taedium.
If Alito doesn’t turn up, count me out.

Rising Voice of Gun Ownership Is Female

February 10, 2013 by ERICA GOODE NYT

PAINESVILLE, Ohio — Mary Ann Froebe stood feet apart with knees slightly bent and aimed the .22-caliber Ruger semiautomatic.

“You’ve got some adrenaline running through you right now,” said Esther Beris, the coordinator of the northeastern Ohio chapter of A Girl and a Gun Women’s Shooting League. “It’s O.K., just relax.”

Ms. Froebe, 42, a small-business owner who described herself as a “virgin gun shooter,” concentrated and pulled the trigger. “It was awesome,” she said, her face flushed, after emptying the 10-round magazine. “The sense of control, of being in charge of me.”

In the debate over firearms regulations, the voices of gun owners have largely been those of men. But at firing ranges across the country, a growing number of women are learning to use firearms and honing their skills.

Women’s participation in shooting sports has surged over the last decade, increasing by 51.5 percent for target shooting from 2001 to 2011, to just over 5 million women, and by 41.8 percent for hunting, according to the National Sporting Goods Association.

Gun sales to women have risen in concert. In a survey last year by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, 73 percent of gun dealers said the number of female customers had gone up in 2011, as had a majority of retailers surveyed in the two previous years.

Manufacturers have increasingly geared advertising toward women, marketing special firearms models with smaller frames, custom colors (pink is a favorite), and accessories like the “concealed carry” “salmon kiss” leather handbag offered by Cobra Firearms or the leopard shooting gloves and Bullet Rosette jewelry sold by Sweet Shot (“Look cute while you shoot!” is the company’s motto).

Women’s shooting clubs have also proliferated — not just in small towns like Painesville, but also in Atlanta, Houston, even Manhattan, where a women’s gun club meets regularly at a firing range in Chelsea, a neighborhood better known for art galleries.

On a recent Friday, Ms. Froebe and eight other women attended the Painesville shooting league’s inaugural Breakfast and Bullets gathering at Perkins Family Restaurant for brunch and then moved on to Atwell’s Shooting Range. There, Ms. Beris taught them how to hold and load a handgun safely and then coached them on the range.

Though they may share a fierce belief in the Second Amendment with their male counterparts, female gun owners often learn to shoot for different reasons, their interest in and proficiency with firearms not just a hobby or a means for self-defense, but a statement of independence and personal power.

Tina Wilson-Cohen, a former Secret Service agent who founded She Can Shoot, a women’s league with 10 chapters and 3,000 members across the country, said 90 percent of women who joined did so because “they’ve been a victim at one point of their life, of stalking or date rape or domestic violence, or they have just felt so vulnerable, and they want to feel competent and like they can protect themselves.”

Firearms also often carry a different meaning for women than for men, who grow up with Hollywood images of guns that tell them “this is what a real man looks like and that’s how a real man acts, and it’s kind of delusional, really,” Ms. Wilson-Cohen said.

“We don’t see women acting like this,” she said. “It doesn’t have that bad-ass mentality attached to it.”

Yet women who shoot recreationally often find themselves confronting the misconceptions of the non-gun-owning public, said Mary Stange, a professor of women’s studies and religion at Skidmore College and a co-author of “Gun Women: Firearms and Feminism in Contemporary America.”

She said that when Nancy Lanza was identified as the owner of the guns her son Adam used to kill 20 children and 6 adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in December, some seemed to blame her. Ms. Lanza, who owned at least five firearms, including a Bushmaster AR-15-style rifle used in the shooting, was labeled in a headline as a “gun-crazed mother” and was described in some accounts as “stockpiling an arsenal.”

“What strikes me is the way that, rather than really trying to understand what may have been going on, there is this tendency to want to latch on to conventional arguments and stereotypical images,” Professor Stange said. “There’s this idea that women are more affiliative, more peace loving, more pacifistic, which should then make women as a group gun averse.”

It is difficult to pinpoint how many gun owners in the United States are women — the federal government does not break down background checks by demographic, and most manufacturers do not release information on sales. But Peggy Tartaro, the editor of Women and Guns magazine, a nonprofit publication of the Second Amendment Foundation, said she had found estimates varying from 12 million to 17 million.

They cross the political spectrum. Professor Stange, who hunts regularly and owns several rifles and shotguns, describes herself as a liberal Democrat.

Of those who attended the breakfast in Painesville, Ms. Froebe votes Republican. Terri Herbert, 57, a retired special education teacher who said the nephew of a close friend had been killed in a school shooting, is a registered Democrat. She favors background checks on private sales but opposes a ban on military-style semiautomatic rifles or high-capacity magazines. “I’m not sure gun control is the answer,” she said.

Tamara Wysocki, 52, a caterer, said she wanted a handgun for protection at her business, but would not keep a gun at home. “If you have a gun and they have a gun, somebody’s bound to get shot,” she said.

Ms. Tartaro, the magazine editor, said that women’s interest in guns began increasing in the 1980s, when women began moving into previously male-dominated professions like law enforcement and the military and began taking charge of their own finances and living arrangements. “It makes sense that as you think about your financial security and your kids’ security, the whole idea of personal protection and home defense comes in,” she said.

Smith & Wesson, which in 1989 introduced a LadySmith line of revolvers, was the first manufacturer to recognize the potential of the women’s market, Ms. Tartaro said, but other gun makers soon followed. And the attitudes of men gradually changed, she said.

“Maybe 25 years ago, if you put on your power suit with your floppy bow and marched yourself into a gun club and said, ‘Where do I sign up, boys?’ you might have gotten a couple of funny looks,” Ms. Tartaro said. “But now they might say: ‘Hey, sit down. What are you interested in? I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.’ ”

Advocates of tighter firearms regulations have argued in the past that advertising by gun manufacturers manipulates women into buying guns for protection. An advertisement by Colt in the 1990s showed a mother tucking a child into bed — “Self-protection is more than your right ... it’s your responsibility,” the ad said — and academics argued in 1991 in The Whittier Law Review that such ads were intended to trick women.

But Ms. Tartaro bridles at the idea that women are not smart enough to decide for themselves whether to buy a gun. After the article appeared, her publication went on the counterattack, running a cover line that said, “Are You Too Stupid to Read This Magazine?”

Yet even some of the most ardent female gun enthusiasts said the industry had made a misstep in concluding that all women shooters like pink.

Professor Stange called gun makers’ obsession with the color “infantilizing.” Ms. Wilson-Cohen said that “a large majority of females sort of feel like it’s a slap in the face” to assume that a pink gun will draw them in.

For her part, Ms. Tartaro said, “I don’t personally care for it.”

But she added that she knew a woman who had a different take, saying, “It’s not my favorite color, but I bought it because now my husband never touches it.”

The Fix’s first rankings of the 2016 Republican presidential field!

By Chris Cillizza February 8, 2013 Washington Post

One of the Fix’s favorite phrases is this: It’s never too soon. As in, it’s never too soon to be thinking about the next political campaign and the next set of candidates that will populate that campaign.

That goes double for a presidential campaign in which the jockeying for position begins years in advance of any actual voters paying attention. If you don’t think the candidates prominently mentioned as potential 2016ers aren’t already thinking about that race, well, you are wrong. They are. Trust us.

And, as it happens, so are we. (By “we”, we mean that legion of incurable political junkies who need this stuff like they need oxygen.) And so, it’s that time — the time for our first rankings of where the 2016 presidential field stands. (For the record, we aren’t the first person in the pool on this; Fix friend Christian Heinze has already opened Pandora’s Box here.)

Today we rank the 10 Republicans most likely to end up as the GOP nominee in 2016. Next Friday we take on Hillary Clinton — sorry, the Democrats.

You can assume all the usual caveats. Yes, it’s early 2013, so predicting what will happen in three years time is not — surprise! — foolproof. And, yes some of the people mentioned below won’t run. And some people not on the list will. But, we aren’t going to let a few hurdles get in our way. Onward!

The number one ranked candidate below is regarded as the person with the best chance of being the nominee. Who did we miss? Who’s ranked too high? Too low? The comments section awaits your opinions.

To the Line!

10. John Thune: The South Dakota senator looks the part of a presidential candidate — tall, dark, handsome — and has a record that conservatives love but isn’t scary to the party establishment. The issue for Thune is whether he wants it badly enough. He had a golden opportunity to get into the 2012 race as a major contender and, oddly, passed. As the Post’s Dan Balz wrote at the time, Thune’s “no” to 2012 could well have a lingering impact on his chances in 2016.

9. Rob Portman: He doesn’t bring the glitz and glamour of some of the other names of this list, but we’d be remiss if we didn’t include the Ohio senator. His experience as White House budget director makes him a credible voice on economic matters, and his current gig as National Republican Senatorial Committee vice chairman means he won’t be far away from the party’s most influential donors. Plus, did we mention he’s from Ohio? Long a presidential debate prep partner, Portman could well play the role of candidate in 2016.

8. John Kasich: The former congressman and current Ohio governor was a big deal in the Republican Party and even ran for president, briefly, in 2000. Provided he can win reelection in 2014, we should expect Kasich to at least consider a presidential bid. Kasich is a conservative favorite and comes from a swing state that is increasingly recovering economically. And at a press conference in November, he notably didn’t rule out a future presidential run.

7. Mike Pence: There was chatter that Pence was weighing a run for the nomination in 2012, but he opted instead to leave the U.S. House to make a successful bid for the Indiana governorship. Smart move. Pence, whose background prior to getting into politics was in talk radio, is an underrated communicator and is the sort of person who already has a significant following among the Republican activist base. If you are looking for a dark(ish) horse in the 2016 primary, Pence might be it. (Worth noting, though: He might have to give up his current office, which is up in 2016.)

6. Rand Paul: The first-term Kentucky senator looks more and more like a presidential candidate every day. During a foreign policy address at the Heritage Foundation this week, he took a more middle-of-the-road approach than his father, Ron Paul, while also sticking to his libertarian ideals. Paul has also been among the most outspoken conservatives in the Senate in recent weeks, which suggests he won’t let anybody get to his right in a presidential primary.

5. Jeb Bush: The stigma associated with his last name is fading, and by 2016 it will likely be even less of a factor. Republicans like Bush’s dual appeal to the conservative and establishment wings of the party, and he is seen as a leading figure on education and immigration reform. His recent Wall Street Journal op-ed on the latter issue suggests he wants to remain part of the conversation, but his reported effort to buy the Miami Marlins suggests a guy who isn’t banking on becoming the third Bush in the White House. We’ll find out in time just how big a role he wants to play. If Bush shows any sign of actually moving toward the race, he’d likely top this list.

4. Paul Ryan: The House budget committee chairman and former vice presidential nominee recently said that he’s “decided not to decide” about 2016. Well, OK. But let’s face it, it’ll be hard for Ryan to ignore the question, given his status as one of the party’s leading figures. Ryan’s message since the end of the 2012 campaign has been clear: We live in a world of divided government, and we need to find a way to make that work. If Congress can accomplish more in the next four years than it did in the previous four, look for Ryan to stake claim to some credit. One question remains: Is Ryan better positioned — temperamentally and in terms of his native strengths — to be the next House Republican leader rather than one of a field of GOP presidential candidates? That’s quite possible.

3. Bobby Jindal: The Louisiana governor is running — and running hard. His speech at the Republican National Committee’s winter meeting in Charlotte last month laid a marker for how Jindal will run for president: as an outside-the-Beltway reformer who has achieved results on conservative pet projects (education reform, tax reform) during his time as governor. While many in Washington know Jindal only by his flop of a Republican response to President Obama’s first congressional address, that seems more the exception than the rule when it comes to his potential on the national stage.

2. Chris Christie: The New Jersey governor is the most popular man on this list, in large part because he gets the approval of people from across the political spectrum. But in fact, some in conservative circles are starting to be suspect of Christie because of his willingness to criticize his party — see his John Boehner rant — and his praise of Obama related to Hurricane Sandy. Christie certainly wants to lock down his 2013 reelection campaign first, but if he wants to run for president, he’s at risk of making some enemies among conservatives right now.

1. Marco Rubio: The Florida senator has just been christened — by us and others — as the new de facto leader of the Republican Party. But with that opportunity comes peril — notably, if Rubio fails to shepherd a successful immigration bill to passage and/or alienates conservatives in the process. But Rubio is the most naturally gifted politician on this list and his party seems ready to put him forward as its face, as evidenced by his being chosen to give the Republican response to President Obama’s State of the Union address on Tuesday.

The Voter Fraud That ‘Never Happens’ Keeps Coming Back

By John Fund National Review February 8, 2013 

Critics of voter ID and other laws cracking down on voter fraud claim they’re unnecessary because fraud is nonexistent. For instance, Brennan Center attorneys Michael Waldman and Justin Levitt claimed last year: “A person casting two votes risks jail time and a fine for minimal gain. Proven voter fraud, statistically, happens about as often as death by lightning strike.”

Well, lightning is suddenly all over Cincinnati, Ohio. The Hamilton County Board of Elections is investigating 19 possible cases of alleged voter fraud that occurred when Ohio was a focal point of the 2012 presidential election. A total of 19 voters and nine witnesses are part of the probe.

Democrat Melowese Richardson has been an official poll worker for the last quarter century and registered thousands of people to vote last year. She candidly admitted to Cincinnati’s Channel 9 this week that she voted twice in the last election.

This is how Channel 9′s website summarized the case:

According to county documents, Richardson’s absentee ballot was accepted on Nov. 1, 2012 along with her signature. On Nov. 11, she told an official she also voted at a precinct because she was afraid her absentee ballot would not be counted in time.

“There’s absolutely no intent on my part to commit voter fraud,” said Richardson. . . .

The board’s documents also state that Richardson was allegedly disruptive and hid things from other poll workers on Election Day after another female worker reported she was intimidated by Richardson. . . .

During the investigation it was also discovered that her granddaughter, India Richardson, who was a first time voter in the 2012 election, cast two ballots in November.

Richardson insists she has done nothing wrong and promises to contest the charges: “I’ll fight it for Mr. Obama and for Mr. Obama’s right to sit as president of the United States.”

But, of course, as you know there is no voter fraud. Pay no attention to that lightning coming out of Ohio.

A Jersey Lesson in Voter Fraud

My grandmother died there in 1940. She voted Democratic for the next 10 years.
By THOMAS FLEMING | WSJ | 2.6.13

Some youthful memories were stirred by the news this week that the president plans to use his State of the Union speech next Tuesday to urge Congress to make voter registration and ballot-casting easier. Like Mr. Obama, I come from a city with a colorful history of political corruption and vote fraud.

The president's town is Chicago, mine is Jersey City. Both were solidly Democratic in the 1930s and '40s, and their mayors were close friends. At one point in the early '30s, Jersey City's Frank Hague called Chicago's Ed Kelly to say he needed $2 million as soon as possible to survive a coming election. According to my father—one of Boss Hague's right-hand men—a dapper fellow who had taken an overnight train arrived at Jersey City's City Hall the next morning, suitcase in hand, cash inside.

Those were the days when it was glorious to be a Democrat. As a historian, I give talks from time to time. In a recent one, called "Us Against Them," I said it was we Irish and our Italian, Polish and other ethnic allies against "the dirty rotten stinking WASP Protestant Republicans of New Jersey." By thus demeaning the opposition, we had clear consciences as we rolled up killer majorities using tactics that had little to do with the election laws.

My grandmother Mary Dolan died in 1940. But she voted Democratic for the next 10 years. An election bureau official came to our door one time and asked if Mrs. Dolan was still living in our house. "She's upstairs taking a nap," I replied. Satisfied, he left.

Thousands of other ghosts cast similar ballots every Election Day in Jersey City. Another technique was the use of "floaters," tough Irishmen imported from New York who voted five, six and even 10 times at various polling places.

Equally effective was cash-per-vote. On more than one Election Day, my father called the ward's chief bookmaker to tell him: "I need 10 grand by one o'clock." He always got it, and his ward had a formidable Democratic majority when the polls closed.

Other times, as the clock ticked into the wee hours, word would often arrive in the polling places that the dirty rotten stinking WASP Protestant Republicans had built up a commanding lead in South Jersey, where "Nucky" Johnson (currently being immortalized on TV in HBO's "Boardwalk Empire") had a small Republican machine in Atlantic City.

By dawn, tens of thousands of hitherto unknown Jersey City ballots would be counted and another Democratic governor or senator would be in office, and the Democratic presidential candidate would benefit as well. Things in Chicago were no different, Boss Hague would remark after returning from one of his frequent visits.

I have to laugh when I hear current-day Democrats not only lobbying against voter-identification laws but campaigning to make voting even easier than it already is. More laughable is the idea of dressing up the matter as a civil-rights issue.

My youthful outlook on life—that anything goes against the rotten stinking WASP Protestant Republicans—evaporated while I served in the U.S. Navy in World War II. In that conflict, millions of people like me acquired a new understanding of what it meant to be an American.

Later I became a historian of this nation's early years—and I can assure President Obama that no founding father would tolerate the idea of unidentified voters. These men understood the possibility and the reality of political corruption. They knew it might erupt at any time within a city or state.

The president's party—which is still my party—has inspired countless Americans by looking out for the less fortunate. No doubt that instinct motivated Mr. Obama in his years as a community organizer in Chicago. Such caring can still be a force, but that force, and the Democratic Party, will be constantly soiled and corrupted if the right and the privilege to vote becomes an easily manipulated joke.

Mr. Fleming is a former president of the Society of American Historians.

Senators ask Obama for legal opinions OKing drone strikes

By JOSH GERSTEIN | 2/4/13|Politico

A bipartisan group of 11 senators is appealing directly to President Barack Obama to give lawmakers his administration's legal justification for using armed drones or other counterterrorism operations to kill American citizens.

The eight Democrats and three Republicans are also making a not-so-veiled threat that the nominations of officials like CIA director-designate John Brennan and perhaps even Defense Secretary-designate Chuck Hagel could be held up if Obama doesn't fork over the classified memos.

"We ask that you direct the Justice Department to provide Congress, specifically the Judiciary and Intelligence Committees, with any and all legal opinions that lay out the executive branch's official understanding of the President's authority to deliberately kill American citizens," the 11 senators wrote in a letter sent to Obama Monday (and posted here). "The executive branch's cooperation on this matter will help avoid an unnecessary confrontation that could affect the Senate's consideration of nominees for national security positions."

The senators' missive notes that in a May 2009 speech, Obama seemed to endorse the idea that Congress should be permitted to get such information even if the public is denied it.

"Whenever we cannot release certain information to the public for valid national security reasons, I will insist that there is oversight of my actions—by Congress or the courts," Obama said in remarks at the National Archives.

The Justice Department and other government agencies have rebuffed lawmakers' prior requests for such opinions. Last month, a federal judge in New York rejected Freedom of Information Act lawsuits the New York Times and the American Civil Liberties Union brought trying to force disclosure of the same legal memoranda.

The Obama Administration has also argued strenuously against any role for the courts in overseeing the use of lethal force against Americans, even though wiretapping U.S. nationals anywhere in the world requires some authorization from the judiciary branch.

White House spokesmen had no immediate reply to a request for comment on the letter, which was signed by Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Mike Lee (R-Utah), Mark Udall (D-Colo.), Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Susan Collins (R-Maine), Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), Tom Udall (D-N.M.), Mark Begich (D-Alaska) and Al Franken (D- Minn.)

Wyden signaled a few weeks ago, in another letter, that he intends to make the legal issues surrounding the use of lethal force against Americans a central issue at Brennan's confirmation hearing. That hearing is now set for Thursday afternoon.

In September 2011, a drone strike in Yemen killed Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula leader Anwar Al-Awlaki, who was a U.S. citizen. The strike was reportedly carried out by the U.S. Other Americans, including Al-Awlaki's teenage son, have reportedly been killed in drone attacks executed by the U.S. However, the Americans killed in those strikes are believed to have been collateral casualties and not the intended targets

Exposing Fraud in New Jersey’s Broken Pension System

Mark Lagerkvist|Feb. 2, 2013|Reason

Timothy Carroll retired at age 33. He claimed he was “totally and permanently” disabled by the trauma of seeing dead bodies while working as a sheriff’s officer in Morris County, New Jersey.

“I suffer from crime scene flashbacks and hallucinations due to all the years I served as a crime scene detective,” stated Carroll in his disability application.

The real shock is Carroll then started a business that cleans up gory crime scenes, a New Jersey Watchdog investigation found. Yet the state continues to pay him a disability pension for life, a sum that could total $1 million or more.

Carroll’s company, Tragic Solutions LLC of Linden, N.J., specializes in removing human residue from “bloody and/or messy” scenes, including “murder, suicide, accidental, natural and decomposing deaths,” according to its website. He formed the business with Thomas Rohling, another former Morris sheriff’s officer who draws a state disability pension.

“I really don’t want to comment on this,” Carroll told NBC 4 New York, New Jersey Watchdog’s partner on the investigation.

“This says there is a problem with the whole pension system, the way the whole system is set up,” said John Sierchio, a trustee of the state Police and Firemen’s Retirement System (PFRS).

PFRS paid out $175 million to 5,067 disabled retirees in 2011—figures expected to rise when 2012 data are released.

Disability applications received by the PFRS have doubled in the past year—and 95 percent of those claims are questionable, according to Sierchio.

The supposedly career-ending incidents have included a fireman who fell out of bed while sleeping, an officer who fell off his chair while sitting down, cops who slipped on wet floors or icy sidewalks, and a patrolman who suffered emotional trauma because his lieutenant yelled at him during roll call.

“It’s people who don’t want to work anymore,” said Sierchio, a Bloomfield police sergeant who has served on the PFRS board since 2002. “The last two officers shot in New Jersey are back to work, but the guy who trips over a curb is sitting on a beach getting two-thirds (of salary) tax-free.”

In New Jersey, it’s relatively easy to fake or exaggerate an injury to get a disability pension. The PFRS has no staff to investigate fraud. Nor do any of the state’s five other retirement funds for public employees.

“No one is watching,” said Sierchio.

The Tragic Solutions case illustrates how weak laws, red tape, and lack of enforcement contribute to the woes of a state pension system that faces a shortfall of nearly $42 billion. New Jersey Watchdog obtained the records through Open Public Records Act requests.

In 1999, Carroll told pension officials he was unable to work because of post-traumatic stress disorder and depression caused by what he witnessed while responding to a car accident and three suicides.

“I started having crime scene flashbacks and hallucinations in 1997,” wrote Carroll. “In September of 1998, I suffered a hallucination while working at the courthouse. I was removed from work and placed in a mental hospital.”
Carroll began receiving disability checks after the PFRS board approved his retirement effective May 1999. Five years later—in April 2004—Carroll and Rohling formed Tragic Solutions, according to state business records. For Carroll, the timing would prove crucial.

Tragic Solutions was featured later that year in an Associated Press story on businesses that clean up crimes scenes. It included a photo of Carroll and Rohling posing in biohazard protection suits they wore on the job. The AP article mentioned they were retired cops, but nothing about their disability pensions.

After the PFRS board learned of Tragic Solutions, it could not halt Carroll’s disability benefits, currently $25,284 a year plus health coverage.

“In the performance of your job responsibilities with Tragic Solutions, you are exposed to crime scenes similar to those you were subjected to during your employment with Morris County as a crime scene investigator and upon which you were found disabled,” a state official scolded Carroll in a 2005 letter.

“Although there will be no action taken at this time, the facts surrounding your post-retirement employment with Tragic Solutions will become part of your pension membership file,” the correspondence concluded.

The law prevented PFRS from doing anything more. Under pension rules, there is a five-year limit on the state’s right to re-examine disability retirees to determine if they are able to return to work. Time had run out on the Carroll case.

PFRS then turned its focus to Carroll’s partner in crime scenes, Thomas Rohling.

The PFRS board had approved Rohling’s disability retirement in 2003. Rohling claimed he was “totally and permanently” disabled from injuries caused when a window valance fell on him in a Morris County courtroom.

Despite conflicting reports from doctors on whether he could return to work, the PFRS board had ruled in Rohling’s favor.

Not only that, but the board had granted Rohling an “accidental disability” retirement—a more generous type of pension granted to law enforcement officers whose injuries are determined to be the result of line-of-duty accidents.

As a result, Rohling currently collects $65,904 a year, tax-free.

With knowledge of his role at Tragic Solutions, the PFRS board voted in 2006 to end Rohling’s disability retirement.

“If you’re totally and permanently disabled, in my honest opinion, you shouldn’t be able to work anymore,” Sierchio said.

Rohling appealed. In 2009, an administrative law judge overturned the PFRS board’s decision. Weighing conflicting testimony from doctors, the judge ruled that Rohling still qualified for disability—despite his employment with Tragic Solutions.

Both Carroll and Rohling will draw disability pensions for the rest of their lives.

So far, Rohling has received $582,000 in accidental disability pay—a figure that would grow to $2 million by his 70th birthday. Carroll has collected $310,000 in “ordinary disability” checks. At age 73, he should hit the $1 million mark.

Rohling could not be reached for comment. Carroll refused to be interviewed, saying he has not been part of Tragic Solutions for a “long time.”

Without elaborating, Carroll suggested he got a raw deal because he was only approved for ordinary disability, but not accidental disability benefits.

“Look at the people who get rubber-stamped,” Carroll told NBC 4′s Chris Glorioso. “I got denied (for accidental disability). There is a lot of information you don’t have, and you’re not going to get it from me.”

Meanwhile, Sierchio and other reform advocates are seeking legal solutions to help the pension system avoid future tragedies.

One promising bill stalled in the Legislature last year, despite bipartisan support and the sponsorship of Senate President Stephen Sweeney.

If enacted, S-1913 would create a disability fraud unit, give pension boards a right to re-examine disability retirees beyond five years, and set limits on the amount of disability pay a retiree can collect after taking another job.

Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg attacks gender stereotypes at work

Chief operating officer tells Davos women are less liked as they become more successful
Heather Stewart and Graeme Wearden in Davos
The Guardian, Friday 25 January 2013

Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, has launched a fierce attack on the gender stereotypes that hold back women at work at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Sandberg, who is publishing a book called Lean In on women in the workplace in March, singled out T-shirts sold in the US, with the boys' version emblazoned with the words "Smart Like Daddy", while the girls' version says "Pretty like Mommy".

"I would love to say that was 1951, but it was last year," she said. "As a woman becomes more successful, she is less liked, and as a man becomes more successful, he is more liked, and that starts with those T-shirts."

She blasted managers who unconsciously reflect stereotypes when they judge women's performance, saying: "She's great at her job but she's just not as well liked by her peers," or: "She's a bit aggressive."

"They say this with no understanding that this is the penalty women face because of gender stereotypes," she said.

Sandberg also criticised the fact that it is still assumed women will take on the majority of the caring responsibilities at home, even when both parents work. "Women still have two jobs in the most developed countries around the world; men have one."

She added: "From the moment they leave school, the messages for women are different: 'Don't you want to have kids one day?'"

Sandberg was appearing at a panel session in Davos, where five of six speakers were female – the opposite of the gender balance at many Davos events. Only 17% of delegates at the high-powered event are women and in an effort to increase female numbers the organisers now insist that the top 100 "strategic partner" companies that attend and which can bring five delegates must include one women. Many, however, choose to bring only four rather than include a female executive.

The International Monetary Fund managing director, Christine Lagarde, said her experiences of overcoming prejudice had helped her to be a better boss.

"I grew up with brothers; I grew up in a man's world, and you had to elbow your way in.

"I listen more; I'm more attentive to those in the back of the room that sit in the dark and don't want to talk but have a lot to contribute." She said women made better team players: "It's because of our history, it's because of our heritage, it's because of what we've had to face."

Viviene Reding, the European commissioner for justice, fundamental rights and citizenship, had earlier presented data showing that Europe's boardrooms were become more balanced. Last October women made up 15.8% of company boards, up from 13.7% a year ago.

Reding said companies had been forced to become more diverse by the European commission when it declared it would legislate to improve the situation.

"Since the moment that I threatened that if there was no progress then I would put up legislation, there has been real progress," Reding said. "Sometimes it needs a little push."

Reding added that it was crucial for workers to be provided with proper childcare. "This is an issue for men as well as women."

Reding also reminded the WEF that it had not always given gender issues a high profile. "This is the first year that the issue has been presented at a plenary session," she said. "It is a breakthrough for Davos too."

Reding remains committed to bringing in a law that would force companies to favour women over equally qualified men for boardroom positions. "There's not a rigid quota. No one will get a job because she's a woman, but no one will be denied a job because she's a woman."

Elsewhere in Davos, the European Central Bank president, Mario Draghi, told delegates that the optimism surging through the stock exchanges of Europe showed that normality was returning.

"2012 was, to say the least, an interesting year. It was the year of the relaunching of the euro." 2013 must be a year of implementation, he added.

However, Draghi does not expect the economic recovery to begin until the second half of this year.

"Financial markets are enjoying a new sense of relative tranquility," Draghi said, "but it has not fed through to the real economy."

With the eurozone still in recession and unemployment at record levels, Draghi insisted that the pain was "emphatically" worth it, saying the eurozone economy still had many strengths.

"The euro area economy in its entirety has performed better than anywhere in the last 15 years," he said.

Draghi also conceded that European countries had surrendered national sovereignty in the crisis, amid the bailouts and austerity plans. The solution, he added, was to create "supranational sovereignty, where sovereignty is shared".

Jordan's King Abdullah II warned Davos that the Assad regime in Syria would not fall soon, saying they "still have capacity" to hold on to power.

Any fragmentation of the country into small states would be "catastrophic and something that we would be reeling from for decades to come", he added.

Obama: Reagan of the Left

By Charles Krauthammer
January 24, 2013 8:00 P.M.

The media herd is stunned to discover that Barack Obama is a man of the Left. After 699 teleprompted presidential speeches, the commentariat was apparently still oblivious. Until Monday’s inaugural address, that is.

Where has everyone been these four years? The only surprise is that Obama chose his second inaugural, generally an occasion for ““malice toward none”“ ecumenism, to unveil so uncompromising a left-liberal manifesto.

But the substance was no surprise. After all, Obama had unveiled his transformational agenda in his very first address to Congress four years ago (February 24, 2009). It was, I wrote at the time, “the boldest social-democratic manifesto ever issued by a U.S. president.”

Nor was it mere talk. Obama went on to essentially nationalize health care, which is 18 percent of the U.S. economy — after passing an $833 billion stimulus that precipitated an unprecedented expansion of government spending. Washington now spends 24 percent of GDP, fully one-fifth higher than the postwar norm of 20 percent.

Obama’s ambitions were derailed by the 2010 midterm shellacking that cost him the House. But now that he’s won again, the revolution is back, as announced in Monday’s inaugural address.

It was a paean to big government. At its heart was Obama’s pledge to (1) defend unyieldingly the 20th-century welfare state and (2) expand it unrelentingly for the 21st.

The first part of that agenda — clinging zealously to the increasingly obsolete structures of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid — is the very definition of reactionary liberalism. Social Security was created when life expectancy was 62. Medicare was created when modern medical technology was in its infancy. Today’s radically different demographics and technology have rendered these programs, as structured, unsustainable. Everyone knows that, unless reformed, they will swallow up the rest of the budget.

As for the second part — enlargement — Obama had already begun that in his first term with Obamacare. Monday’s inaugural address reinstated yet another grand Obama project — healing the planet. It promised a state-created green-energy sector, massively subsidized (even as the state’s regulatory apparatus systematically squeezes fossil fuels, killing coal today, shale gas tomorrow).

The playbook is well known. As Czech president (and economist) Václav Klaus once explained, environmentalism is the successor to failed socialism as justification for all-pervasive rule by a politburo of experts. Only now, it acts in the name of not the proletariat but the planet.

Monday’s address also served to disabuse the fantasists of any Obama interest in fiscal reform or debt reduction. This speech was spectacularly devoid of any acknowledgment of the central threat to the post-industrial democracies (as already seen in Europe) — the crisis of an increasingly insolvent entitlement state.

On the contrary. Obama is the apostle of the ever-expanding state. His speech was an ode to the collectivity. But by that he means only government, not the myriad of voluntary associations — religious, cultural, charitable, artistic, advocacy, ad infinitum — that are the glory of the American system.

For Obama, nothing lies between citizen and state. It is a desert, within which the isolated citizen finds protection only in the shadow of Leviathan. Put another way, this speech is the perfect homily for the marriage of Julia — the Obama campaign’s atomized citizen, coddled from cradle to grave — and the state.

In the eye of history, Obama’s second inaugural is a direct response to Ronald Reagan’s first. On January 20, 1981, Reagan had proclaimed: “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” And then succeeded in bending the national consensus to his ideology — as confirmed 15 years later when the next Democratic president declared “the era of big government is over.” So said Bill Clinton, who then proceeded to abolish welfare.

Obama is no Clinton. He doesn’t abolish entitlements; he preserves the old ones and creates new ones in pursuit of a vision of a more just social order where fighting inequality and leveling social differences are the great task of government.

Obama said in 2008 that Reagan “changed the trajectory of America” in a way that Clinton did not. He meant that Reagan had transformed the political zeitgeist, while Clinton accepted and thus validated the new Reaganite norm.

Not Obama. His mission is to redeem and resurrect the 50-year pre-Reagan liberal ascendancy. Accordingly, his second inaugural address, ideologically unapologetic and aggressive, is his historical marker, his self-proclamation as the Reagan of the Left. If he succeeds in these next four years, he will have earned the title.

— Charles Krauthammer is a nationally syndicated columnist. © 2013 the Washington Post Writers Group.

Combat Ban for Women to End

By JULIAN E. BARNES And DION NISSENBAUM WSJ 1.24.2013

Getty Images

Pentagon Chief Leon Panetta has removed the ban on women serving combat roles.

The Pentagon is dropping the last vestiges of rules barring American women from serving in combat, paving the way for the largest expansion ever of their role on the front lines.

The Pentagon is dropping the last vestiges of rules barring American women from serving in combat, paving the way for the largest expansion ever of their role on the front lines. Lt. Col. Juanita Chang and Lt. Col. Kareem P. Montague join The News Hub to discuss. Photo: AP.

Women in the military already are allowed to serve on most Navy ships, as combat pilots and in hundreds of support jobs, including those in war zones. But they have been historically excluded from direct combat roles, by federal law in earlier times and more recently by military policy.

That will change Thursday when Defense Secretary Leon Panetta rescinds the 1994 Pentagon policy that bans women, who now make up about 14% of active-duty military personnel, from combat. The new measure will allow women to serve in combat roles—but, importantly, allow the military services to establish exceptions.

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• Gen. Dempsey's Letter to Defense Secretary Panetta

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The change is an acknowledgment that women on modern battlefields already are in the fight—152 women have died in Iraq and Afghanistan—and that military rules need to be updated to reflect realities of the current-day war zones. At the same time, the shift establishes a process that could take years to complete.

The new policy should allow women to serve alongside infantry troops as battlefield medics, special-operations pilots and in other dangerous roles, officials said. But officials are divided about whether women will ultimately serve as infantry troops or in elite special-operations units. Some military officials, citing the difficulty of completing infantry training courses, believe that most women would be unable to meet the physical requirements.

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said Thursday that President Barack Obama believes the move to end the combat exclusion is "appropriate." He discussed the plan with Mr. Panetta and supports removing "unnecessary gender-based barriers," Mr. Carney said.

Army Staff Sgt. Jennifer Hunt, who was injured in 2007 by a roadside bomb in Iraq, said in an interview Wednesday that the current ban on women in combat is "a legal fiction." She said women have long faced the same front-line dangers from militants and improvised explosive devises as men.

"Right before the IED went off, it didn't ask me how many push-ups or sit-ups I could do," said Ms. Hunt, one of the women who filed a lawsuit last year to challenge the ban. "Right now the women who are serving are being engaged in combat, so their physical restrictions aren't a barrier."

Adek Berry/AFP/Getty Images

A female Marine and members of the Navy Hospital Corpsman walked at Forward Operating Base Jackson in Sangin, Helmand province, Afghanistan, on June 7, 2012.

U.S. military services over the next two years will examine all 230,000 positions women currently are excluded from. They also will be required to establish gender-neutral requirements for admission and decide whether women can serve alongside men. "The goal is to make all roles available so long as we can meet the standards of the war fighter," said a defense official.

The policy shift follows a study by the Joint Chiefs of Staff that determined the military could become much more aggressive at allowing women into excluded roles. "The time has come to rescind the direct combat exclusion rule for women and eliminate all unnecessary gender-based barriers to service," Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote in a Jan. 9 memo to Mr. Panetta.

"Does that mean that women are going to be full-up Navy SEALs? Probably not," said Maren Leed, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who served until last year as a senior adviser to the U.S. Army chief of staff. "It probably means there will be sub-specialties within the SEALs for which they are eligible."

Women regularly have found themselves in battle in Iraq and Afghanistan, whether in supply convoys or in military police units.

A number of other countries allow women in some combat roles, including Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Last February, Mr. Panetta ordered U.S. military service chiefs to find ways to expand the role of women. Under that decision, approximately 14,300 new positions were opened to women.

The shift was hailed by both Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill. Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R., N.H.) said she was pleased by the announcement and Sen. Jack Reed (D., R.I.) said that on the current battlefield "all who serve are in combat."

Rep. Tammy Duckworth (D., Ill.), a former Army pilot who lost both her legs in Iraq when her helicopter was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade, said the decision will allow the "best man or woman on the front line."

Added Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D., Hawaii), an Army National Guard member who deployed to Iraq as a medical specialist and was elected to Congress in November: "Female service members have contributed on the battlefield as far back as the Civil War, when some disguised themselves as men just to have the opportunity to serve their nation." She said the decision "is an overdue, yet welcome change, which I strongly support."

But some lawmakers criticized the Pentagon's move and questioned whether physical requirements would permit women to enter combat duty in large numbers.

"The focus of our military needs to be maximizing combat effectiveness," said Rep. Duncan Hunter (R., Calif.). "The question here is whether this change will actually make our military better at operating in combat and killing the enemy, since that will be their job, too."

Last year, two women tried to complete the Marine Corps' 13-week infantry officer's training course at Quantico, Va. One did well, but eventually had to drop out because of stress fractures. Marine Corps officials plan to try again this year.

Under the new rules, the services must establish the gender-neutral standards for all military specialties by September 2015. In his memo, Gen. Dempsey also ordered U.S. Special Operations Command, along with the military services, to examine a "responsible way to assign women to currently closed" military specialties.

Beginning later this year, under Gen. Dempsey's memo, the service chiefs must provide regular progress reports on their efforts to expand the positions women may hold. A defense official said that after Thursday, any restriction sought by the services on women's service roles must be approved by the secretary of defense.

Twenty years ago, Congress lifted the ban on women flying in attack aircraft, and now the Army, Marines, Navy and Air Force all have women pilots—although women don't serve as special-operations pilots.

Female officers now serve on large submarines, and the Navy has plans to add female enlisted personnel on those vessels. The Navy also will allow women to serve on smaller classes of submarines. As the military considers sweeping changes for women, a senior Air Force leader told a House panel examining a sexual-abuse scandal at a Texas base on Wednesday that his branch of the military needs to improve its culture to root out problems, such as binge drinking and vulgar images, that can be conducive to sexual harassment.

Obscene images, songs and stories "will not be accepted as part of our culture," Gen. Mark Welsh III, the Air Force chief of staff, told the House Armed Services Committee, which is investigating allegations of widespread sexual misconduct at the Air Force's facility for basic military training in San Antonio, where enlisted members begin their service.

—Nathan Koppel and Peter Nicholas contributed to this article.

Write to Julian E. Barnes at julian.barnes@wsj.com and Dion Nissenbaum at dion.nissenbaum@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared January 24, 2013, on page A1 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Combat Ban for Women To End.