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Justice

Florida Man Invokes ‘Stand Your Ground’ Law After Shooting Fellow Pizza Customer

By Scott Keyes on Dec 19, 2012 at 4:00 pm

Accused shooter Michael Jock

A Florida man defended his decision to shoot an impatient pizza customer over the weekend, citing the state’s infamous “Stand Your Ground” law.

Michael Jock, a 52-year-old resident of St. Petersburg, was standing in line behind 49-year-old Randall White at a local Little Caesars on Sunday when Jock grew angry over White’s complaints about the speed of service. The two began to shove one another, prompting Jock to pull out a .38 Taurus Ultralight Special Revolver that had been concealed on his person and fire twice, hitting White both times in the lower torso.

The Tampa Bay Times has more:

After the shooting, both men went outside and waited for police. Jock told officers the shooting was justified under “stand your ground,” [police spokesman Mike] Puetz said.

“He felt he was in his rights,” Puetz said. “He brought it up specifically and cited it to the officer.”

He told officers he feared for his life. He mentioned that he thought White had an object in his hand, then backed off that when officers pressed him. Florida’s “stand your ground law” says people are not required to retreat before using deadly force.

Police, however, disagreed with Jock’s interpretation of the law and arrested him on charges of aggravated battery and firing a weapon within a building.

The Stand Your Ground law that Jock referenced came under intense scrutiny this year after George Zimmerman invoked it to justify his shooting of teenager Trayvon Martin. Multiple studies have found that Stand Your Ground laws increase the number of homicides in a state. Still, such laws are a crown jewel for the National Rifle Association, which has been working tirelessly for years to spread them from state to state.

Alyssa

My 65 Favorite Things From The Year In Popular Culture

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Dec 19, 2012 at 3:51 pm

I have my reservations about year-end lists—though I contributed to several, including HitFix’s TV Critics poll and Salon’s year in review, which will be out on Friday, this fall—because I have trouble distilling my pleasure in popular culture down to numerical rankings, much less picking ten of the things I liked in any category of entertainment out of the many things I loved this year. But I’ve had an awful lot of fun at the movies, in front of my television, and with my nose buried in books this year. So here are 65 of my favorite—not necessarily the best, but the things that gave me the most joy and food for thought—television shows, movies, books, documentaries, and people, places and things from 2012, with the caveat that I haven’t seen a number of things I expect to like very much, like Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty. If you’re looking for a fun way to while away the hours over the next week—I’m off until January 2—all of these things come highly recommended.

Television

Alphas: The most charming superhero show anywhere on television, with one of the smartest, insightful portrayals of a character on the autism spectrum anywhere on television.

Appropriate Adult: Dominic West is terrifying as British serial killer Fred West in this British mini about West and the woman assigned to be his Appropriate Adult, a figure present at police interviews with people who may not be ruled competent.

Avatar: The Legend of Korra: This time out, the Avatar gets to be a teenage girl named Korra, and Republic City became the setting for terrific explorations of political extremism, self-sacrifice, and the greater good.

Bent: Cancelled far too soon and a victim of NBC’s scheduling department, this charming look at a stressed-out lawyer, her contractor, his poser of a father, and her daughter was one of the nicest shows I’ve seen on television in a long time—and that’s a compliment.

Breaking Bad: If only for Jesse Pinkman desperately trying to complement Skyler White’s cooking, I would have put the best show on television on this list. But as Breaking Bad winds down, the show has only gotten more visually potent, and more emotionally and morally terrifying.

Community: It could have ended this season and been marvelous—the video game! The Law and Order parody!—but I’m glad the Greendale study group will be back in February.

Game of Thrones: Do I need to justify this one? HBO’s adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s novels is beginning to edit them in smart ways, and has just gotten more emotionally rich and visually ambitious as it’s gone on.

Girls: The most emotionally precise show on television, with Robyn and accurate women’s health information in the mix.

Happy Endings: Eliza Coupe is a demented genius, and so is the show she stars on, the best live-action cartoon anywhere on television.

Homeland: It danced a Saul-inspired Hora all over my soul in the back half of the season. But damn if I don’t love seeing this group of actors at work, even if I wish they were being given material more fitting their talents.

The Hour: The show The Newsroom desperately wanted to be, and the one we all need so badly about what it takes to do truly hard, ambitious reporting, and to get it on the air.

Justified: The best exploration, anywhere in pop culture, of what it means to be a Southern man. Also, the funniest drama on television. Also, Walton Goggins.

Key & Peele: The best Obama impression anywhere, and a great, nuanced exploration of race, faith, and gender.

The L.A. Complex: Andra Fuller should get an Emmy nomination for his performance of coming-out-rapper Kaldrick King. And everyone who wants to know how Hollywood works should be watching.

Lost Girl: The heir to Charmed in the best, cheesiest, bisexual-succubus-y way possible.

Nashville: Team Juliette all the way, in this fascinating exploration of how the process of making music actually works.

Parks and Recreation: Leslie’s road to City Council was smartly observed and beautifully acted, and writer Aisha Muharrar is crushing it in the episodes she’s written this fall.

Political Animals: A soapy female power fantasy, and prep for Hillary 2016.

Sons of Anarchy: There’s still too much plot in this FX drama, but it’s never felt more like the brutal update to Hamlet it was always meant to be, and the strong cast is hitting its stride.

Treme: This was the year I gave in to the profound sensual pleasures of David Simon’s meditation on integrity and kindness in post-Katrina New Orleans.
Read more

Justice

In Two Years, Immigration Officials Have Deported Hundreds Of Thousands Of Parents Whose Children Are U.S. Citizens

By Amanda Peterson Beadle on Dec 19, 2012 at 3:30 pm

Over two years, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have deported more than 200,000 undocumented immigrants whose children are U.S. citizens, according to data obtained by Colorlines. That number accounts for 23 percent of all deportations between July 1, 2010, and Sept. 31, 2012. And the number of parents who are deported has remained roughly the same since Congress required ICE to track the number of parental deportations, despite “prosecutorial discretion” guidelines from 2011 to prioritize the deportations of people with serious criminal convictions over mothers and fathers:

The guidelines, released on June 17, 2011, in a memo from ICE director John Morton, instructed ICE agents to focus deportation efforts on people with serious criminal convictions, those picked up crossing the border into the U.S., and those who had previously been deported from the country.

The memo also ordered agents making deportation decisions to weigh “the person’s ties and contributions to the community, including family relationships,” and “whether the person has a U.S. citizen or permanent resident spouse, child, or parent.”

In answer to questions about the parental deportation data, ICE officials told Colorlines.com the continued pace of deportations does not reflect a failure to implement prosecutorial discretion, because most deported parents have other factors weighing against them.

“Evaluation of this data in the past has repeatedly shown that the overwhelming majority of these individuals have significant criminal and/or immigration histories placing them within ICE’s enforcement priorities,” wrote agency spokesperson Gillian Christensen in an emailed statement, “therefore making them ineligible for an exercise of prosecutorial discretion.”

“We are in a crisis situation in which we need to start taking action immediately to prevent these needless and often-times permanent separations of American children from their families,” Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-CA) told Colorlines. Roybal-Allard introduced a bill last year to protect the parental rights of parents who have been detained and deported. According to a 2011 report by the Applied Research Center, at least 5,100 U.S. citizen children are stuck in the foster care after a parent was deported. Within five years, researchers estimate that number could triple to 15,000 at the current rate of deportations.

Health

Michigan Lawmaker Didn’t Read The Anti-Abortion Bill He Voted For, But He’s Confident It’s Not About Women

By Tara Culp-Ressler on Dec 19, 2012 at 3:30 pm

Michigan lawmakers moved quickly to push an omnibus abortion bill through their lame duck session last week. Despite the massive undertaking that House Bill 5711 represents — the measure combines several of the worst attacks on women’s reproductive freedom into one 45-page piece of legislation — some GOP legislators may not have even bothered to read its full contents before making up their minds about it.

RH Reality Check flags an account from Emily Magner, who brought a group of her social work students to Lansing to discuss HB 5711 with their state legislators in late November. Magner recounts the conversation she had with state Sen. Howard Walker (R) — who ended up voting for the measure in early December — in which he admitted he initially threw his support behind the bill without reading it first:

We went on to talk specifically about how this bill will harm Michigan women, disproportionately women living in rural areas like ours. After we brought up a few of these points he put up his hands and said that he couldn’t really speak to those topics … he had not read the bill.

In front of him was a one paragraph synopsis I assume was from the Right to Life special interest organization who drafted the bill. [...]

We spoke with him for 20 minutes, the whole time he was dismissive, misinformed, and rude. When his handler told him, “5 more minutes,” I told him that I would never ask him to change his beliefs on abortion, I would protect his right to believe whatever he wanted, but I did want him to consider the harmful implications that this legislation would have on women and consider his ethical obligation to his field to leave his personal views at the door.

Before I could finish my sentence, he waved his hand dismissively and interrupted, “THIS ISN’T ABOUT WOMEN! THIS IS ABOUT PROTECTING FETUSES!”

It’s unclear whether or not Walker did have a chance to read the bill in between his November meeting with Magner and his December vote — but if he had delved a bit deeper into the legislation, he would have discovered that enacting HB 5711 would have several detrimental effects on the women in Michigan.

HB 5711 seeks to impose a host of new restrictions — such as requiring doctors to prove that mentally competent women haven’t been “coerced” into having the elective procedure, limiting abortion access for women in rural areas, and imposing unnecessary, complicated rules to regulate abortion clinics out of existence — that will ultimately hamper women’s ability to receive the health care they need. That’s why female members of Michigan’s House opposed the bill when it first came up for consideration, although their male colleagues were quick to deride them.

The measure has passed both chambers of the state legislature and now awaits Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder’s (R) signature.

NEWS FLASH

Ugandan Anti-Gay Pastor Uses Fruit To Explain How Same-Sex Couples Have Sex | Ugandan evangelical Christian pastor Martin Ssempa is well known for his obsession with how he thinks same-sex couples have sex, notably his graphic description of how gay men engage in “anal licking”: “they eat the poo poo.” He has used these audacious presentations to advocate for the “Kill the Gays” Anti-Homosexuality bill since its introduction several years ago. Ssempa appeared this week on the Ugandan TV talk show Morning Breeze where he used various fruits and vegetables to describe how lesbians have sex, because “they don’t have the equipment.” LGBT activist Pepe Onziema, who identifies as a trans man, objected to having to appear on the same show as as a “hooligan.” Watch the inflammatory display: Read more

Economy

Norquist Unintentionally Throws His Support Behind Democrats’ Middle-Class Tax Cuts

By Josh Israel on Dec 19, 2012 at 3:05 pm

Americans for Tax Reform president Grover Norquist

Americans for Tax Reform president Grover Norquist

Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform announced Wednesday that Speaker John Boehner’s (R-OH) proposed “Plan B” to extend expiring tax cuts on the first $1 million in annual income would not really be a “tax increase,” and thus would not violate the ironclad oath nearly all Congressional Republicans have taken to never vote to raise taxes. In so doing, the group effectively also conceded that President Obama’s proposed extension of tax cuts for the first $250,000 of income would also not violate the Norquist pledge.

Throughout the presidential campaign and the recent fiscal negotiations, President Obama’s proposal has been clear: extend tax cuts on the first $250,000 in annual income and allow the rates on income above that amount to be taxed at the Clinton-era rates. While a few Republican lawmakers have embraced a plan that passed the Senate and has strong Democratic support in the House to do just that, many have been reluctant.

A key reason was their fealty to Norquist and the pledge; in an interview with ThinkProgress on Tuesday, Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-GA) demonstrated in 67 seconds how that pledge outweighs other considerations.

In the past, ATR has attacked the Obama’s tax cut proposal as a “small business tax hike..” In July 2011, it warned “ATR opposes all tax increases on the American people. Any failure to extend or make permanent the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, in whole or in part, would clearly increase taxes on the American people.” Norquist attacked pledge-signers who expressed a willingness to let rates go up as having “impure thoughts” and suggested that extending only some of the tax cuts would not pass the “laugh test.”

But today, the group conceded that Boehner’s approach — and therefore Obama’s — would not really violate his pledge. They said:

This legislation—popularly known as “Plan B”–permanently prevents a tax increase on families making less than $1 million per year. Republicans supporting this bill are this week affirming to their constituents in writing that this bill—the sole purpose of which is to prevent tax increases—is consistent with the pledge they made to them. In ATR’s analysis, it is extremely difficult—if not impossible—to fault these Republicans’ assertion.

In particular, in this Congress the House has already voted twice to prevent any tax increases on any American. When viewed with this in mind, and considering this tax bill contains no tax increases of any kind — in fact, it permanently prevents them — matters become more clear. Having finally seen actual legislation in writing, ATR is now able to make its determination about a legislative proposal related to the fiscal cliff. ATR will not consider a vote for this measure a violation of the Taxpayer Protection Pledge.

But while the amounts in the Boehner proposal and the Democratic plan differ, if the Boehner proposal is neither a “tax increase” nor a violation of the anti-tax oath, the same would have to be true of the Obama plan.

Climate Progress

Heeding Public Outrage, Pfizer Drops Climate Denial And Tobacco Front Group Heartland Institute

By Brad Johnson, Guest Blogger on Dec 19, 2012 at 3:00 pm

by Brad Johnson

The pharmaceutical giant Pfizer (PFE) has confirmed that it will no longer support the Heartland Institute, a political advocacy group that questions the science of climate change and tobacco smoking. Forecast the Facts, which is leading the campaign calling on corporations to drop Heartland, was informed of the decision by Pfizer’s Corporate Secretary Matthew Lepore. Pfizer was a major donor to Heartland, giving $45,000 in 2012 alone.

Pfizer’s decision means that there are no longer any pharmaceutical companies known to support the Heartland Institute.

Pfizer’s last contribution to Heartland was in 2012. Pfizer’s decision follows a groundswell of public outrage over the corporate support for the Heartland Institute’s toxic behavior, including a billboard campaign that equated believers in climate change with serial killers such as the Unabomber. Over 150,000 people have signed petitions to corporate leaders to drop Heartland. Pfizer is the 21st company to end its support for Joseph Bast’s organization, joining its competitors Amgen (AMGN), Eli Lilly (LLY), Bayer (BAYRY), and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), as well as major companies like General Motors (GM), State Farm, and PepsiCo (PEP).

Records from tobacco industry lawsuits show that Pfizer had joined tobacco companies in supporting the Heartland Institute since at least 1994. Cigarette makers Altria (MO) and R.J. Reynolds (RAI) continue to fund the group.

Since Pfizer’s previously undisclosed funding of the Heartland Institute became public at the beginning of the year, Forecast the Facts has led increased public pressure on the pharmaceutical maker. At first, Pfizer defended its support for Heartland by claiming the company gets “significant benefits” from its association with the toxic front group.

In May, Forecast the Facts members flooded Pfizer’s phones and social media sites with calls for the company to pull their support. During Heartland’s climate change denial conference in Chicago, Forecast the Facts, SumOfUs.org and 350.org organized their members to “crowd-fund” bicycle-driven billboards featuring Pfizer that parodied the Heartland Institute’s Unabomber ads. Forecast the Facts also mobilized a rally and protest outside the conference against Pfizer’s support for the climate denial group.

In July, more than 2,000 health professionals demanded that Pfizer immediately end its support for the Heartland Institute. Citing Heartland’s longstanding relationship with major tobacco companies, as well as its fierce denial of climate science, the doctors, nurses, and other members of the public health community co-signed a letter to Pfizer CEO Ian Read, whose company has defended its financial support of the anti-science organization. The concerned members of the medical community were mobilized by Forecast the Facts and SumOfUs.org.

In August, Forecast the Facts distributed flyers at Pfizer’s New York City headquarters and at biomedical conferences in Boston, San Francisco, and Kansas City notifying Pfizer employees and customers of its support for the anti-science Heartland Institute. That month, additional pressure was placed on Pfizer by the Union of Concerned Scientists and a coalition of shareholder activists to abandon the front group.

For more information on the status of the Heartland’s corporate funding, go to http://www.dropdeniers.org.

Brad Johnson is the campaign manager of Forecast the Facts.

Justice

Top Conservative Publication: Shooting Occurred Because Women Ran The School

By Zack Beauchamp on Dec 19, 2012 at 2:30 pm

Victoria Soto, 27-year-old teacher killed while protecting her students.

If there were fewer women and more “male aggression” in Sandy Hook Elementary School, the massacre there never would have taken place, according to a contribution to a leading conservative magazine.

National Review, whose in-house editorial suggested Newtown was the price of the Second Amendment, published a piece on Wednesday from anti-feminist Charlotte Allen suggesting the reason the shooter was able to kill so many students was because Newtown was a “feminized setting:”

There was not a single adult male on the school premises when the shooting occurred. In this school of 450 students, a sizeable number of whom were undoubtedly 11- and 12-year-old boys (it was a K–6 school), all the personnel — the teachers, the principal, the assistant principal, the school psychologist, the “reading specialist” — were female. There didn’t even seem to be a male janitor to heave his bucket at Adam Lanza’s knees. Women and small children are sitting ducks for mass-murderers. The principal, Dawn Hochsprung, seemed to have performed bravely. According to reports, she activated the school’s public-address system and also lunged at Lanza, before he shot her to death. Some of the teachers managed to save all or some of their charges by rushing them into closets or bathrooms. But in general, a feminized setting is a setting in which helpless passivity is the norm. Male aggression can be a good thing, as in protecting the weak — but it has been forced out of the culture of elementary schools and the education schools that train their personnel. Think of what Sandy Hook might have been like if a couple of male teachers who had played high-school football, or even some of the huskier 12-year-old boys, had converged on Lanza.

Via Jessica Valenti, who notes that this is extraordinarily “disrespectful to the female teachers and staff at Sandy Hook. Allen mentions their heroism as an anomalous aside rather than exceptional bravery that saved lives. The bravery of the women in Newtown – principal Dawn Hochsprung and psychologist Mary Sherlach who rushed the shooter before being killed, teacher Victoria Soto who died protecting her students, Kaitlin Roig and Abbey Clements who hid their students and calmed them – is remarkable.”

Allen went on to blame Lanza’s mother, saying “You simply can’t give a non-working, non-school-enrolled 20-year-old man free range of your home, much less your cache of weapons…Unfortunately, the idea of being an ‘adult’ and a ‘man’ once one has reached physical maturity seems to have faded out of our coddling culture.”

Related Posts

NEWS FLASH

POLL: Majority Oppose Openly Gay Boy Scout Leaders | Gallup was ranked as one of the least accurate polling firms in the 2012 election, but a new survey presents an astonishingly disappointing result even if it is skewed. According to the poll, only 42 percent of voters believe openly gay adults should be allowed to serve as leaders for the Boy Scouts of America, while 52 percent stand opposed. Even among Democrats, support only reached 60 percent. Other LGBT questions had more positive responses, including inheritance rights for gay couples (78 percent support), health insurance and employee benefits for gay couples (77 percent), and even adoption rights for gay couples (61 percent). It’s unclear what informs the bias against Scout leaders, but the result does not bode well for public awareness about the basics of LGBT identities.

Alyssa

Legendary College Basketball Coaches Jim Boeheim and Jim Calhoun Call For Gun Control After Newtown Massacre

By Travis Waldron on Dec 19, 2012 at 2:04 pm

Syracuse Coach Jim Boeheim

The sports world has been filled with tributes to the victims of the Sandy Hook school massacre, in which 27 people, including 20 children, were shot and killed. But while many athletes have chosen to honor the victims on their shoes and leagues have held moments of silence before games, two legendary men’s college basketball coaches took the opportunity to speak out about gun control.

Nobody would have faulted Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim for turning his post-game press conference into a celebration Monday, after he became just the third men’s Division I coach to win 900 games in a career. Instead, he chose to take on a topic that he knew would “offend some people” and called for tough restrictions on assault weapons:

“This will probably offend some people. If we in this country as Americans cannot get the people that represent us to do something about firearms, we are a sad, sad society. I’m a hunter. I’ve hunted. I’m not talking about rifles. That’s fine. If one person in this world — the NRA president, anybody — can tell me why we need assault weapons with 30 shots in the thing. This is our fault. This is my fault and your fault. All of your faults if we don’t get out and do something about this.”

“If we can’t get this thing done — I’m with the mayor of New York City [Michael Bloomberg] — if we can’t get this thing done, I don’t know what kind of country we have. This is about us. This isn’t about the president or those other people down there [in DC]. We have to make them understand somehow that this needs to get figured out. Real quick. Not six months from now.”

Tuesday, Boeheim was echoed by Jim Calhoun, the retired University of Connecticut head coach who won three national championships and still lives in Storrs, just 70 miles from the Newtown school where the massacre took place:

“I don’t think there’s any politics about gun control,” the former UConn coach said. “In my opinion, nobody should have an automatic weapon unless they’re…protecting the country. The idea that children would be faced with that, or teachers that were trying to help them…there are other things in my lifetime that I can explain — a distraught kid, a fired employee. But this is so nonsensical.

We’re not asking to take away people’s rights. The right to bear arms was put in there for tyranny, the fact that the government could come back and abuse us…As a former American history teacher, I can tell you it wasn’t put in for us to shoot each other.”

Boeheim and Calhoun have always been known as frank, outspoken coaches, but they’ve been joined by coaches who don’t all come with that brand. Villanova’s Jay Wright spoke out against assault weapons on Twitter, and Winthrop coach Pat Kelsey delivered a heartfelt post-game speech after his team’s loss to Ohio State on Tuesday, saying now was “a time for change,” though he wasn’t sure if it was a “gun issue,” a “mental illness issue,” or something else.

But the prevalence of assault weapons shouldn’t be the only focus of coaches in college basketball and football. Not given the deep-seeded relationship between guns and athletes. “The sports world is filled with athletes at every level of competition who have been wounded, killed, lost loved ones, or otherwise been victimized by guns – or who have had their lives changed forever by turning to guns themselves,” the Brady Campaign to End Gun Violence wrote in a report on guns in sports. “Entire rosters could be filled with star players who have been adversely affected by guns in some way.”

If coaches want to be real “agents of change,” as Kelsey said he would be, they won’t just speak out against gun violence when it is in the news or when the cameras are on them (though they are of course welcome to). They should also embrace their role as educators and role models for the 18- to 22-year-old young men they coach every day, and educate them of the dangers firearms pose not just to themselves but to their families and friends, and push them to avoid the trappings of the gun culture that is so prevalent in sports at the collegiate and especially the professional level, where many of their players hope to be one day. And perhaps they can take a page from Charlie Strong, the University of Louisville football coach who has not spoken out about the Newtown tragedy but has a “NO GUNS” policy for members of his team and preaches the policy as a core value of his program.

It’s great that coaches want to speak out on important issues. Here’s hoping they also take action on those issues in the areas where they can.

Update

University of Louisville basketball coach Rick Pitino joined Boeheim and Calhoun in calling for gun control at his press conference today. Asked what he thought of Boeheim’s comments, Pitino called for “immediate gun control” and rebuked the National Rifle Association:

PITINO: The fact that every single person would not want it (gun control) would be a mystery. This is not the beginning of American civilization where we need guns ’cause it’s the wild, wild west. We’re not talking about a hunting license. There should not be guns in our society. We all know that. [...] There can be no good that comes out of that (Sandy Hook) except immediate gun control. There can be no good. ‘Cause all of us who are not even related to those children shed a tear even thinking about it.

On the NRA, Pitino added, “I don’t care about those people. Those people have their own agendas. They’ll give you the excuses that this is just an insane person. That’s not the way it is. We don’t need guns in our society. Bob Costas took a lot of heat for what he said. What was he caring about? People not getting killed.

“No one’s going to take away your hunting license. This is not Wyatt Earp going down the street.”

Watch it, via the Louisville Courier-Journal:

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