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Sean Hannity Launches Islamophobic Attack Against Keith Ellison

By Igor Volsky on Feb 28, 2013 at 9:46 pm

Conservative talk show host Sean Hannity launched an Islampophobic attack against Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) during his Fox News show on Thursday night, implying that the Muslim Congressman is a racist and an anti-Semite. The segment came just days after Ellison and Hannity engaged in a confrontational interview on Tuesday night. “We decided to take a closer look at the man who called me immoral and a liar,” Hannity began. “Now it didn’t take long to prove his hypocrisy, as his past reveals a host of radical connections primarily to Louis Farrakhan and The Nation of Islam.”

The Fox host dug up attacks from Ellison’s 2006 Congressional campaign, criticizing the Minnesota lawmaker for defending Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam in his law school newspaper from charges of anti-Semitism and appearing on stage with Farrakhan aide Khalid Muhammad. Watch it:

In the late 1990s, Ellison worked with the group to organize the Million Man March, but apologized for failing to “adequately scrutinize the positions and statements” of the Nation of Islam and Farrakhan six years ago in a letter to the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas.

“I wrongly dismissed concerns that they were anti-Semitic,” he wrote, adding, “They were and are anti-Semitic and I should have come to that conclusion earlier than I did.” “I have long since distanced myself from and rejected the Nation of Islam due to its propagation of bigoted and anti-Semitic ideas and statements, as well as other issues.”

After the accusations first surfaced in 2006, Ellison’s Jewish law school colleagues said that “they never got the impression that Ellison himself was anti-Semitic” and American Jewish World, the newspaper for Minnesota’s Jewish community, endorsed him.

The Jewish Community Relations Council has since defended him from anti-Muslim attacks. “Representative Ellison is a friend to the Jewish community and we have enjoyed a strong working relationship with him since he assumed office in 2007,” the group said in a statement released last year.

Update

At one point during the segment, while discussing Khalid Muhammad, Hannity asked, “What is the difference, I mean, do we have somebody then in Congress that is the equivalent of one side of what the Klan is?”

Update

After Ellison was sworn in on the Quran in 2006, Hannity compared it to Mein Kampf: “[Y]ou know, would you have allowed him to choose, you know, Hitler’s Mein Kampf, which is the Nazi bible? In other words, where does this stop? Is there any limitations whatsoever?”

Update

Religious leaders are coming to Ellison’s defense. Here is Rabbi Marc Schneier, president and Co-founder of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding: “Congressman Ellison has been a valued friend to the American Jewish community. He has been a partner in strengthening Muslim Jewish relations. As an example, he was responsible for organizing the letter by Muslim Americans to Khaled Meshal, head of Hamas, in demanding the release of Gilad Shalit.”

Media

Bob Woodward Agrees With Hannity: Journalists Should Ask Obama About Bill Ayers

By Igor Volsky on Feb 28, 2013 at 9:43 pm

The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward appeared on Fox News’ Hannity on Thursday evening to complain about National Economic Council director Gene Sperling’s email disputing his characterization of the White House’s role in shaping the mechanism known as the sequester — the automatic across-the-board budget cuts that will go into effect on Friday.

Over the weekend Woodward claimed that the White House was trying “to move the goalposts” by replacing sequestration with a deficit reduction package that includes new revenues, a notion Sperling disputed in emails with the famed Watergate journalist. “I do truly believe you should rethink your comment about saying saying that Potus asking for revenues is moving the goal post,” Sperling wrote to Woodward. “I know you may not believe this, but as a friend, I think you will regret staking out that claim.”

During his interview with Sean Hannity, Woodward claimed that he had been “roughed up” by Sperling and agreed with the host’s characterization of the Washington journalists as liberals who are disinterested in challenging the president with Bill Ayers, an education advocate who was part of the group the Weather Underground:

HANNITY: The fact that the president was never asked a lot about the 6 trillion in debt that he accumulated prior to this election, in this first election wasn’t asked about his association with Bill Ayers was troublesome to me, I think we’ve got a media that’s not as critical as perhaps it once was in, for example, the days of Watergate.

WOODWARD: Well, I agree with that. We need to be very aggressive and it’s one of the judges that said democracies die in darkness and I really think that’s true.

Watch it:

Obama’s alleged connections to Ayers were covered extensively throughout the 2008 presidential campaign. Obama was even asked about the story during the Democratic Party primary debate in Philadelphia on April 16, 2008 by moderator George Stephanopoulos. “This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who’s a professor of English in Chicago who I know and who I have not received some official endorsement from,” Obama said. “He’s not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis. And the notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was eight years old, somehow reflects on me and my values doesn’t make much sense, George.”

Hannity continues to tout Obama’s relationship with Ayers, which Woodward apparently sees as the mark of a real journalist. “I get calls and e-mails from people telling me I’m insane to come on your show,” Woodward said. “I say, now, wait a minute, you let me say what I want. You dig into things. You — there is no bleep out button.”

LGBT

BREAKING: Colorado House Judiciary Committee Advances Civil Unions

By Zack Ford on Feb 28, 2013 at 9:21 pm

After over five hours of testimony, the Colorado House Judiciary Committee voted 8-3 to advance SB 11, the civil unions bill. Last year, the legislation was killed by Republicans in the House, but Democrats won sweeping victories and even elected Rep. Mark Ferrandino (D), who is openly gay and previously sponsored civil unions, to be Speaker. The bill must advance to the Finance Committee yet, but it is expected to pass the House easily and Gov.  John Hickenlooper (D) has committed to signing it. A November poll showed that 70 percent of Coloradans support the legal recognition of same-sex couples either through civil unions or marriage, which is currently prohibited under the state constitution.

Justice

National Review: Victims Of Violent Military Rapes Struggle In Life Because Of ‘Their Own Bad Decision-Making’

By Adam Peck on Feb 28, 2013 at 6:15 pm

A victim of M.S.T. profiled by the New York Times.

In Thursday’s paper, the New York Times ran the harrowing story of Tiffany Jackson, a female veteran grappling with the effects of military sexual trauma. Jackson had been violently raped while deployed overseas at the Suwon Air Base in South Korea, and upon her return to the states had difficulty finding and keeping a job, struggled with drugs and alcohol and fought uphill battles to keep her anger at bay. All of which, according to a growing consensus of researchers and psychologists, are common manifestations of post-traumatic stress disorder brought about by M.S.T.

But expert opinion is not enough to convince the scribes at National Review Online, which issued its own rebuttal to the Times piece and proclaimed — without a shred of evidence — that the hardships befallen upon Jackson and as many as 1 in 5 of all female servicemembers are attributable to their upbringing in underprivileged communities and not to their sexual assaults. And they engage in an especially pernicious form of victim-blaming in the process:

Now here is a tentative alternative hypothesis: Some of these women come from environments that made their descent into street life overdetermined, whether or not they experienced alleged sexual assault in the military. To blame alleged sexual assault for their fate rather than their own bad decision-making is ideologically satisfying, but mystifying. Having children out of wedlock, as a huge proportion of them do, also does not help in avoiding poverty and homelessness…

But let’s say that for these homeless female vets, it really was their sexual experiences in the military that caused their downward spiral into, as the Times puts it, “alcohol and substance abuse, depression and domestic violence.” Why then have those same feminists who are now lamenting the life-destroying effects of “MST” insisted on putting women into combat units?

Writer Heather MacDonald fails to acknowledge once in her almost 1000-word post that there is a problem at all, preferring instead to leverage the horrific rate of sexual assault and violent rape against women in the military as a means to attack gender equality in the armed forces. Nastier still, she attacks the “feminists” who are fighting for greater accountability and protections for the thousands of women who enlist.

Of course, the National Review Online has a strong lineage of sexist, misogynistic and racist remarks. In January, the conservative publication blamed the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting on the fact that women ran the school, and for years kept author John Derbyshire in their employ despite vocally questioning whether or not women should have the right to vote.

Economy

Democratic Senator Renews Call To Break Up Banks That Are ‘Surely Still Too Big To Fail’

By Travis Waldron on Feb 28, 2013 at 6:00 pm

Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown (D) took the Senate floor today to argue against Wall Street mega-banks that have been deemed “too big to fail” and thus receive the implicit backing of the federal government, arguing that lawmakers should act immediately to break up the big banks that now have assets worth more than three-fifths of the American economy.

Wall Street banks sparked the financial crisis in 2008 and were rescued by the federal government. Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act in 2010, but many of its rules have yet to take effect and banks are even bigger today than they were before the crisis. They are also just as scandalous, as financial institutions have faced lawsuits over mortgage and foreclosure fraud, money laundering, interest rate-rigging, and other practices. That, Brown said Thursday, should drive lawmakers to learn from past mistakes and break up the big banks to protect the health of the American economy:

BROWN: In the last five years alone we have seen faulty mortgage-related securities; foreclosure fraud; big losses from risky trading; money laundering; and Libor rate rigging. [...]

How many more scandals will it take before we acknowledge that we can’t rely on regulators to prevent subprime lending, dangerous derivatives, risky proprietary trading, and even fraud and manipulation?

Wall Street has been allowed to run wild for years. We simply cannot wait any longer for regulators to act. These institutions are too big to manage, they are too big to regulate, and they are surely still too big to fail.

Watch it:

Two decades ago, the six largest Wall Street banks held assets worth just 16 percent of the American economy, Brown said. They now hold assets worth more than 60 percent of the total economy:

Brown has emerged as a leading critic of Too Big To Fail in the Senate, and his efforts have attracted bipartisan support. Louisiana Sen. David Vitter (R) joined Brown’s call for action on the Senate floor today, and Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley (R) has ripped big banks for holding a “get out of jail free card” and, with Brown, has urged the Department of Justice to prosecute large banks for fraudulent practices.

Health

South Dakota Poised To Extend What’s Already The Longest Abortion Waiting Period In The Country

By Tara Culp-Ressler on Feb 28, 2013 at 5:42 pm

South Dakota already has the longest abortion waiting period in the country, forcing women to wait 72 hours before being able to access the legal medical procedure. But the Republicans in the state want to lengthen it even further — both chambers of the legislature have approved a measure to exclude weekends and holidays from that three-day waiting period, and the legislation now awaits Republican Gov. Dennis Daugaard’s signature.

No other state with this particular abortion restriction defines its waiting period by limiting it to business hours. Proponents of the measure claim that the state needs to extend the 72-hour wait to give women seeking abortions enough time to seek counseling at a “crisis pregnancy center” (CPC). In fact, CPCs are anti-choice organizations that have a long history of attempting to dissuade women from making their own reproductive choices, often by disseminating misleading medical information about abortions.

Although this type of emotional manipulation is a popular tactic among abortion opponents, forced counseling and waiting periods don’t actually change women’s minds about whether or not to terminate a pregnancy. Mandatory waiting periods are simply a method of limiting women’s reproductive rights by forcing them to overcome additional hurdles to having a voluntary medical procedure.

That’s why South Dakota’s stringent 72-hour waiting period has been tied up in court for the past year — but, since the local women’s health groups are being forced to focus their resources on combating other pressing attacks on reproductive rights, the legal challenge has been dropped and the law may soon take effect. And if Daugaard adds his signature to the bill to exclude weekends and holidays, the law that takes effect will be even more restrictive than the original one.

Alyssa

‘How To Survive A Plague’ May Become An ABC Miniseries

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Feb 28, 2013 at 5:40 pm

Sometimes, I get incredibly depressed about what it’s actually possible to do or put on the air in the mainstream entertainment environment. Then, something like this happens:

ABC Studios has acquired the rights to the Oscar-nominated documentary film How to Survive a Plague for a possible ABC miniseries, which would be executive produced by the docu’s writer-director David France and producers Howard Gertler and John Lyons. The documentary revolves around controversial AIDS activists who infiltrated the pharmaceutical industry and helped identify promising new drugs, moving them from experimental trials to patients in record time.

I don’t particularly expect this to get made. But that anyone would even consider making a mainstream television miniseries about AIDS activism is a sign of how far we’ve come from when you literally had to stage a die-in to get attention to a disease that was an obvious public health catastrophe. And maybe it’s a sign of what the apparent collapse of network television ratings will make possible. If networks (other than CBS) stop believing that they can pull mass audiences with bland fare, maybe they’ll go after narrow, passionate audiences instead. That development has kept alive shows like Parks and Recreation by accident, but I’d love to see what the networks come up with if they start thinking that way deliberately.

Justice

Rep. John Lewis: Scalia’s ‘Racial Entitlement’ Comment Is ‘Affront’ To Those Of Us Who Bled For Voting Rights

By Nicole Flatow on Feb 28, 2013 at 5:30 pm

John Lewis being beaten by state troopers, March 7, 1965

John Lewis being beaten by state troopers, March 7, 1965

Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), who shed his own blood fighting for the passage if the Voting Rights Act in 1965, said he almost cried when he heard Justice Antonin Scalia’s comment Tuesday that the landmark civil rights law is a “perpetuation of racial entitlement.” Scalia made the comment during oral argument on the constitutionality of a key section of the law, suggesting that the law would always be passed by lawmakers too afraid to vote against it unless the court halted it. The Nation’s Ari Berman tweets:

And Lewis explained his disbelief to Al Sharpton on MSNBC:

It was unreal, unbelievable, almost shocking for a member of the court to use that language. I can see politicians and even members of Congress. But it was just appalling to me. It is an affront to all of what the civil rights movement stood for, what people died for, what people bled for, and those of us who marched across that bridge 48 years ago, we didn’t march for some racial entitlement. We wanted to open up the political process, and let all of the people come in, and it didn’t matter whether they were black or white, Latino, Asian-American or Native American.

The right to vote is precious, almost sacred. It is the most powerful nonviolent instrument that we have in a democratic society. And if the courts come to that point where they declare this section, section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, unconstitutional, it would be a dagger in the heart of the democratic process.

WATCH IT:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Lewis was one among many court-watchers and commentators who were shocked and appalled by Scalia’s comment. And not just because he trivialized the civil rights movement. His suggestion that the court must intervene to overturn legislation with too much support is also anathema to his own rigid textualist approach to reading the Constitution. As Ian Millhiser recently pointed out, even if Scalia’s perverse racial entitlements theory had some merit, it is nowhere to be found in the text of the Constitution.

Climate Progress

The First Rule: Eat When You Can, Sleep When You Can, And Don’t Screw With The Climate!

By Joe Romm on Feb 28, 2013 at 5:30 pm

MY DIAGNOSIS AND PROGNOSIS

My prognosis is very likely to be very good, despite the ominous sounding diagnosis — a small well-defined pancreatic neuro-endocrine tumor (PNET). Today, Thursday, I had surgery at Johns Hopkins to remove it. It wasn’t causing symptoms (that I’m aware of).

A PNET may or may not be cancer depending on your definition of cancer. In any case, it’s not what people normally think of when they hear the word cancer, particularly pancreatic cancer. You can read a “layman’s guide” to PNETs by Matthew Dallek at Slate.

I don’t generally blog about my health, in part since it takes a lot to stop me from blogging, but this is blogworthy, I think for a few reasons:

  1. There are many analogies between dealing with early stage climate change and dealing with early stage diseases, analogies I’ve often made myself. As you can imagine, I’ve thought of a few more in the last several weeks.
  2. Steve Jobs had a PNET, too, so there is a lot written about them for a general audience — and a lot written about Jobs’ 9-month delay in seeking conventional treatment (i.e. surgery).
  3. It is Rare Disease Day. No seriously, click here. If you can’t write about a rare disease today, when can you? [And yes, my surgery was scheduled today purely coincidentally.]

Analogy-wise or coincidentally (take your pick), Hopkins uses a consensus-based approach for cases like mine. So every Tuesday night, one of the doctors presents the case to the entire multi-disciplinary pancreatic cyst team — a big group of gastroenterologists, surgeons, pathologists, researchers, radiologists, and others — and they come up with a recommended course of treatment. [A key reason this team exists is that CAT scans and the like are so good now they pick up a lot of cysts and tumors at an early stage incidentally -- as in my case and Dallek's -- and folks need to figure out what to do with them.]

The doctors say my prognosis is very probably very good — won’t know for sure until they remove and examine it. But then the prognosis was apparently quite good if I didn’t do anything — but there was chance it would metastasize, so the recommendation is to take it out. Can’t argue with the consensus, can you?

So one big difference between this PNET and global warming is that global warming is highly likely to be fatal to a livable climate and modern civilization if left untreated. Still, I think it safe to say  that most people would take it out, but then most people act considerably more risk averse toward worst-case scenarios in their own life than society is acting towards the business-as-usual scenario of  unrestricted emissions of greenhouse gas.

The other reason most folks would take this out is that Steve Jobs delayed removing his. Jobs had a PNET, too, though his may have been symptomatic and functioning (i.e. releasing hormones) and mine does not appear to be (it was discovered incidentally). His was at the head of the pancreas, which required far more extensive surgery. Also, he put off surgery for 9 months doing alternative medicine, which may or may not  have contributed to his death — there is huge controversy over that.

Read more

LGBT

LGBT People Will Receive First-Ever Domestic Violence Protections Under VAWA

By Katie Miller, Guest Blogger on Feb 28, 2013 at 5:20 pm

Today, Congress finally voted to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act, or VAWA, a traditionally bipartisan bill which provides assistance to victims of domestic violence.  For the first time since the bill was first introduced in 1994, Congress allowed the Violence Against Women Act to expire at the end of 2012 because House Republicans opposed new provisions which would improve care and access to services for LGBT people and Native American women.

Their resistance is especially ironic, given that the whole purpose of the Violence Against Women Act is to ensure that no victim of sexual assault or domestic violence be denied access to the support, assistance, and protection that they need, especially among underserved communities. It has also become increasingly clear that LGBT people fall into the category of “underserved.”

LGBT Americans face the roughly the same rate of domestic violence as their straight counterparts — one out of four to one out of three same-sex relationships has experienced domestic violence compared to one in every four heterosexual woman who will experience sexual violence  in her lifetime. Moreover,  nearly 62 percent of LGBT and HIV-positive victims were denied access to shelters in 2011, due in part to the unwillingness to accept gay men in these facilities. Additionally, authorities often lack the knowledge of how to handle domestic violence cases involving two people of the same gender. The current system fails to adequately address domestic violence in the LGBT community.

Here is how the progressive, newly improved Violence Against Women Act better protects LGBT people:

  • VAWA now contains a nondiscrimination clause that prohibits LGBT victims from being turned away from services like traditional shelters on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.
  • VAWA now explicitly names LGBT people as an underserved population, which allows organizations serving LGBT victims of domestic violence to receive funding from a grant program that focuses specifically on underserved populations.
  • VAWA now allows states, at their discretion, to use certain grant funds to improve responses to incidents of domestic violence among LGBT people. This bolsters law enforcement, prosecution, and victim service efforts within states.

Our guest bloggers are Christopher Frost, Intern, and Katie Miller, Special Assistant, with the LGBT Research and Communications Project at the Center for American Progress.

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