‘Alcatraz’ Open Thread: Nerd Honey Traps And Federal Jerks

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Jan 17, 2012 at 5:22 pm

This post contains spoilers for the pilot of Alcatraz.

By David Liss

Here’s the premise of J. J. Abrams’s new show, Alcatraz: when the eponymous prison shut down in 1963, the prisoners were not transferred to other facilities, as everyone seems to think. They disappeared off the face of the earth, and now they are reappearing – having not aged since their initial disappearance. Upon returning, they immediately get back to committing crimes, seemingly programmed to do so by whomever orchestrated their disappearance. As I write this, it all sounds much more interesting than it actually is.

Unfortunately, based on the first two hours of the series, Alcatraz has not yet found its stride. It fails for a few reasons, but the most important one is the lack of integration between the plot and the characters. Leading the show is maverick cop (ugh) Rebecca Madsen (played by workmanlike Sarah Jones), a babe with a T. J. Hooker swagger. Yeah, she’s a hot chick, but she’s a food snarfing, whiskey-chugging tough gal who isn’t about to let those pencil-pushers make her do things by the book. Madsen has been off her game since her partner was killed while chasing a bad guy they still haven’t caught or identified. Then Federal Agent Emerson Hauser (Sam Neill) assholishly kicks her off a crime scene when she’s investigating the murder of a former Alcatraz deputy warden. Madsen, of course, isn’t about to let something like jurisdiction get in the way of her doing what is in no way her job, so she recruits Diego Soto (Jorge Garcia) a comic-book-writing, comic-book-store-owning, video-game-playing Alcatraz expert with four books and two Ph.D.s under his belt. I guess a second Ph.D. wouldn’t be that hard after you figure out how to complete the first one, but still. This is overkill, no? But I’ll just take it as nerd honey-trap #1.

Evidence Madsen lifts from the crime scene point them to a former Alcatraz inmate long believed to be dead, but alive and no older than he was in 1963, so they head over to the Rock, start digging around in a secret archive that Soto just happens to know about. Then they’re gassed and abducted, taken to a secret facility under Alcatraz, run dickishly by Hauser and Lucy (Parminder Nagra), his hot and super-smart assistant (nerd honey-trap #2!) — and promptly recruited to catch the Alcatraz inmates returning from somewhere in time. Soto tries to get us excited about this (“Is anyone else’s head exploding?”), but really, they all take the situation in stride. Madison wants to catch bad guys, and the time travel component remains secondary to the characters because it is secondary to the show.

Over the course of the two hours we learn a couple of things — but mostly about what we don’t know or care much about. Hauser has got more info than he is sharing. He is transferring the recaptured prisoners to a new facility, whose seriousness is indicated by its stationary military guards and its excess of florescent light. Then there’s Lucy, who is shot during the apprehension of the second criminal they come across, and who turns out — as we learn a the end of the second hour — was involved with these inmates back in 1963, during the federal government’s concentrated push to bring more South Asian female doctors into the corrections system. Then there is the facility under Alcatraz itself. Someone has invested millions of dollars into infrastructure in preparation for the prisoners returning, which means someone knew they would someday return. That suggests the disappearance and ultimate return are part of a predictable pattern — or maybe I’m overthinking it. Maybe it doesn’t go beyond cryptic guys in suits doing things they don’t want you to know about.
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NEWS FLASH

Dutch Health Minister Condemns Government Subsidy Of Ex-Gay Therapy | Dutch health minister Edith Schippers spoke out today against Different, a mental health provider that offers ex-gay therapy. Because Different is officially recognized, health insurers are legally required to cover the treatment, but Schippers acknowledged that “homosexuality is not an illness” and subsidies for ex-gay therapy are “not to be tolerated.” Different claims that homosexuality is the result of childhood psychological trauma and boasts a 30 percent success rate at changing people’s orientations.

NEWS FLASH

Fourth Circuit Upholds Decision Keeping Perry, Gingrich, And Santorum Off The Virginia Primary Ballot | Late last week, a federal district court rejected several GOP presidential candidates’ challenge to the Virginia law that allegedly prevented them from being listed on the state’s GOP primary ballot on the grounds that the candidates delayed too long before challenging the law. This decision has now been upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. As election law scholar Rick Hasen points out, this decision is unlikely to be reversed on appeal.

Security

Gingrich Would Support Muslim Presidential Candidates If They ‘Would Commit In Public To Give Up Sharia’

By Ben Armbruster on Jan 17, 2012 at 4:57 pm

Today at a town hall event in South Carolina, a voter asked Newt Gingrich if he would ever consider supporting a Muslim-American for president. The former House speaker said he would, but under one condition:

Q: Would you as Newt Gingrich support a Muslim-American running for president. Would you endorse at one point in the future in American history that a Muslim-American could possibly be running for president given that we had a woman running for president in Hillary Clinton and we had a Jewish-American in Joe Lieberman for vice president.

GINGRICH: I think it would depend entirely on whether they would commit in public to give up Sharia. I am totally opposed to Sharia law being accepted by any court in the United States. In fact I favor a federal law that preempts it and says Sharia law will not be used in any court in the United States.

Watch the clip:

So it would appear that for Gingrich, every Muslim-American is potentially a proponent of Sharia law. Would Gingrich apply this condition to others? Would a candidate from another religion have to publicly denounce extremists that claim to adhere to that particular faith?

The so-called Sharia threat or “creeping Sharia” is a canard trumped up by Islamophobes who are trying to cast suspicion on the presence of all Muslims in America. As the ACLU noted, “there is no evidence that Islamic law is encroaching on our courts.” And Newt might have some problems with that federal law banning Sharia law. Just last week, a federal court struck down Oklahoma’s ban on Sharia law, declaring that the state’s move violated the United States Constitution.

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Economy

Report: Low Wages And Lack Of Benefits Plague Retail Industry

By Guest Blogger on Jan 17, 2012 at 4:55 pm

Our guest blogger is Sarah Jane Glynn, a policy analyst at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Understandably, in today’s economic climate any job is often perceived as better than no job at all. After all, unemployment remains at 8.5 percent, and 8.1 million people are involuntarily working part-time because their hours have been cut or they cannot find full-time work.

But while getting people back to work is an important goal, it is also important that workers be employed in positions where they can earn a living wage and receive benefits.

Case in point, nearly a quarter of a million jobs were added in the retail trade in 2011, and retail is projected to be one of the fastest growing industries though 2018. According to the National Retail Federation, “Retail Means Jobs,” as the industry supports 1 in 4 jobs in America.

On the surface this looks very promising. But a new report released by City University of New York and the Retail Action Project illustrates how the wages and working conditions of retail workers in New York City are often less than ideal — especially for women and people of color.

They surveyed retail workers in New York City — a major retail hub in the United States — and the findings of their study are stark. While about one-third of the survey respondents were economically supporting at least one family member, the median wage was only $9.50 an hour, with about 12 percent earning only the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.

More than half of the retail workers surveyed were employed part-time, with only 29 percent receiving health benefits, and only 44 percent were entitled to paid sick days. Of those workers who did not receive health benefits from their employer, a quarter had no health insurance and slightly more than a third depended on government programs like Medicaid.

The findings were even more disheartening for women and people of color employed in retail, particularly given the fact that they comprise the majority of the workforce. Women earned less money, were more likely to be employed part-time, were less likely to have health coverage, and were less likely to be offered promotions than men. Read more

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Climate Progress

Californians Ask Salazar: Will President Obama Help Us Make Fort Ord America’s Next National Monument?

By Public Lands Team on Jan 17, 2012 at 4:44 pm

By Jessica Goad, Manager of Research and Outreach, Center for American Progress Action Fund.

At the invitation of veterans, businesses, and the local community, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar last Friday paid a visit to Fort Ord, a former military base located on the Monterey Peninsula near Salinas, California. At a listening session to discuss the future of the site, local activists called on the secretary and President Obama to designate the Bureau of Land Management-managed lands at Fort Ord as a new national monument using the president’s executive authority under the Antiquities Act.

Local support for a new Fort Ord national monument is undisputed. As the Monterey Herald reported:

Before he left to catch a plane, Salazar asked how many in the room wanted ‘this land protected and preserved in perpetuity.’

He was met with resounding applause.

Speakers at Friday’s public hearing discussed in detail how the former Fort Ord Military Installation played a key role in our country’s history. From its founding in 1917 until its formal closure in 1994, the fort served as a training center and staging area for troops, and thus was home to 1.5 million soldiers fighting in every war from World War I to Desert Storm. The Vet Voice Foundation and a group of California veterans noted in a letter to Secretary Salazar that:

A National Monument designation will serve as a reminder of the triumphs and sacrifices that have shaped the United States and honor the legacy of the millions of soldiers who trained on these lands.

In addition to its place in military history, the public lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management around Fort Ord are some of the finest for outdoor recreation in the area. The fort’s 86 miles of hiking, biking, and horseback trails on more than 7,000 acres are enjoyed by 100,000 visitors every year, who spend money in and around the area creating economic impacts. National monument status would likely increase visitation and associated economic impacts; a case study on protecting Fort Ord’s public lands authored by economic consulting group Headwaters Economics found that:

The counties in the West with protected public lands, like national monuments, have been more successful at attracting fast-growing economic sectors and as a result grow more quickly, on average, than counties without protected public lands.

The president has the authority under the 1906 Antiquities Act to designate places of “historic or scientific interest” as national monuments. Unfortunately, the 112th Congress has thus far failed to pass any legislation that would protect public lands and provide more recreation and economic opportunities. Local supporters of a national monument at Fort Ord made it clear last week that the president can’t wait for Congress—now is the time to make sure that Fort Ord and its surrounding public lands are protected for all Americans to enjoy.

As Salazar said Friday: “Our best places in the United States…are those where you have the kind of united community support that I see here today.”

LGBT

German Soccer President And Captain Clash On Players Coming Out

By Zack Ford on Jan 17, 2012 at 4:30 pm

Theo Zwanziger

The outgoing president of the German soccer federation, Theo Zwanziger, called on gay players today “to have the courage to declare themselves” by coming out. The captain of Germany’s team, Philipp Lahm, responded by doubling down on comments he made in August discouraging players from making such disclosures:

LAHM: Football is like being the gladiators in the old times. The politicians can come out these days, for sure, but they don’t have to play in front of 60,000 people every week. I don’t think that the society is that far ahead that it can accept homosexual players as something normal as in other areas.

By humoring the perceived homophobia, Lahm is reinforcing the very stigma that might make it difficult for players to come out in the first place. Much as the U.S. military policy of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell required gay troops to lie to keep this jobs, Lahm’s negative message is a strain on the trust and teamwork he should be promoting as captain. If he is the team’s leader, he should take the initiative of promoting a more welcoming lockerroom instead of catering to the homophobic status quo.

Zwanziger, however, believes that Lahm is tolerant, saying, “If that’s how he sees the situation, I am not going to be the one to criticize him.”

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Alyssa

What ‘When Mitt Romney Came to Town’ Can Teach Us About Political Documentaries

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Jan 17, 2012 at 4:07 pm

When Mitt Romney Came to Town, the short documentary about Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital being touted by the Newt Gingrich-backing and Sheldon Adelson-funded Winning Our Future Super PAC, has raised questions about everything from the clout of those organizations to the accuracy of the charges of job-cutting against Romney, the Republican frontrunner. But it’s also a good example of the tension between good political ad-making and good documentary-making. And as Super PACs and well-funded candidates increasingly make and release long specials, whether for the web or television, as President Obama and Vice President Biden’s campaign did in 2008, it’s worth examining this odd marriage, to see what works as argument and what works as art.

It’s disappointing how heavily When Mitt Romney Came to Town relies on dog-whistles. The documentary fans flames of elitism, noting of Romney that “he had a Harvard pedigree and he was on a tear,” and closing out with footage of him speaking French as if it’s an indication of something sinister. There are stock images of bearded men gleefully smoking cigars that don’t land nearly as hard as Romney and his Bain colleagues posing jokily with bills. When it comes to its section on the fate of Kay-Bee toys, there are even scenes of sad-eyed children staring mournfully at televisions.

That lack of specificity is a larger problem with the movie. One of the earliest segments is the most interesting, in part because the workers talk in some detail about the changes Bain made to their work processes. “One of the first things that they did when they started, when we became part of the corporation, was to start cheapening the product,” one of the interviewees complained. “You’d have to hurry faster through your work,” Tommy Jones says, explaining that the rushed production times meant that the company sometimes shipped out equipment without parts. Those kinds of details make the case against corporate raiding even more damning. It would be one thing if companies were just finding inefficiencies and improving production with layoffs and reorganizations. But it’s worth making clear that layoffs are part of a larger philosophy of stripping down companies to their constituent parts and extracting the value from them. And it might have helped to identify the people interviewed for the movie more clearly by their job function, providing a sense that they had more expertise than the people who took their companies out from under them.

Slogans are powerful, of course, and the documentary relies heavily on them. But sometimes reaching for rhetorical force means the movie gives up a chance to explain how systems work, as when the movie declares that a tech start-up was “helped by a favorable rating from Bain’s Wall Street friends,” but doesn’t bother exploring those connections and processes. When a worker named Shannon explains that “I was pregnant at the time, and at the meeting they told us we were all fired, that we had to reapply for our jobs,” it’s incidentally powerful, but it might have been more so if the movie could demonstrate a pattern of terminations of people whose insurance was about to get expensive.

When Mitt Romney Came to Town may founder on its factual errors before it truly takes off. There’s no question that there’s a story to be told about Mitt Romney’s time at Bain Capital, and that story may well damn his presidential ambitions. The only thing at issue is how to tell it in every format from 30 seconds to two hours. Fact-checking and specificity to back up the sound bites seem like they’d be good places to start.

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Economy

Have Banks Been Robo-Signing Credit Card Documents Too?

By Pat Garofalo on Jan 17, 2012 at 3:50 pm

Several months ago, the nation’s biggest banks became embroiled in the “robo-signing” scandal, when it became clear that they had been approving thousands of foreclosures without verifying the proper documents or guaranteeing borrowers due process. The banks submitted fraudulent documents to courts and were forced to halt their foreclosures processes entirely as they sorted out what happened. “I had no idea what I was signing,” said one Bank of America employee. “We had no knowledge of whether the foreclosure could proceed or couldn’t, but regardless, we signed the documents to get these foreclosures out of the way.”

Robo-signing people into foreclosure is bad enough. But as it turns out, the practice may not have been limited to residential mortgages. American Banker, in fact, notes that JP Morgan Chase may also have been robo-signing credit card deals:

JPMorgan Chase & Co. has quietly ceased filing lawsuits to collect consumer debts around the nation, dismissing in-house attorneys and virtually shutting down a collections machine that as recently as nine months ago was racking up hundreds of millions of dollars in monthly judgments…It is unclear whether Chase has stopped pursuing collection on many claims nationwide, or if intends to pursue the debts in some other fashion. The bank has not explained its apparent moratorium and declined comment.

Chase’s halt does, however, follow scattered defeats in state courts and a whistle-blower’s allegation that it falsely overstated the balances of thousands of delinquent accounts it sold to a third party. Former Chase employees and debt collection experts insist that the bank would not have abruptly retreated from its collections efforts in the absence of trouble. [...]

Robo-signing, or the high-volume production of signed legal documents, has been a key element of the governmental and media foreclosure reviews. Chase’s current pullback raises at least the possibility that at least some banks may have documentation problems in other business lines…”If sloppy record keeping and problems with false affidavits is a problem with mortgages, it’s 100 times bigger in credit card accounts,” says Michelle Weinberg of the Legal Assistance Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago.

As one finance blogger put it, “When a bank leaves money on the table for no obvious reason, you know that something’s not quite right.” It seems that JP Morgan, and who knows how many other banks, were attempting to collect on debts without being certain that the amount they were asking for was accurate. One whistle blower looked at $200 million in JP Morgan customer accounts and claims to have found that “half the accounts lacked adequate documentation of judgment and one-sixth listed the wrong amounts owed.”

Banks have been robo-signing documents since as least 1998, as an Associated Press investigation found, and its not all that surprising that a practice that worked so well for so long (at least in the eyes of the banks) would have migrated to other areas.

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Security

British Deputy PM Nick Clegg Says Israeli Settlements Jeopardize Two-State Solution

By Eli Clifton on Jan 17, 2012 at 3:50 pm

British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg rebuked Israel for its settlement policies, warning that continued settlement construction undermines the Middle East peace process. Clegg, speaking alongside Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, yesterday in London, warned Israel that:

The continued existence of illegal settlements risks making facts on the ground such that a two-state solution becomes unviable. And that in turn will do absolutely nothing, nothing to safeguard the security of Israel itself and of Israeli citizens. [...] It’s an act of deliberate vandalism to the basic premise upon which negotiations have taken place for years and years and years.

Watch it:

Clegg’s boss, British Prime Minister David Cameron echoed his deputy’s comments after a meeting with Abbas yesterday, saying:

We think that time, in some ways, is running out for the two-state solution unless we can push forward now, because otherwise the facts on the ground will make it more and more difficult, which is why the settlement issue remains so important.

Indeed, the Obama administration also supports a settlement freeze but ended efforts to pressure the Israelis to do so just over a year ago. The White House and State Department criticize Israeli settlement expansion in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

The Palestinian Authority refuses to return to formal peace talks until Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s imposes a freeze on settlement construction. But Netanyahu maintains that Abbas’ request for a halt to settlement construction is an example of Palestinians “thinking they [can] impose preconditions upon us,” before resuming formal negotiations. West Bank settlements have grown dramatically over the past decade. Between 1999 and 2010, settler populations in the West Bank nearly doubled, ballooning from 177,411 to 314,132.

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