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by seemslikeadream » Sat Nov 28, 2015 12:05 pm
by Luther Blissett » Sat Nov 28, 2015 12:23 pm
by seemslikeadream » Sat Nov 28, 2015 12:27 pm
by Luther Blissett » Sat Nov 28, 2015 12:46 pm
by backtoiam » Sat Nov 28, 2015 12:50 pm
by 82_28 » Sat Nov 28, 2015 12:55 pm
by elfismiles » Sat Nov 28, 2015 3:03 pm
ROBERT LEWIS DEAR, JR.
was born in 1958 and she registered to vote, giving her address as 809 OURAY CT, HARTSEL, PARK COUNTY, COLORADO 80449. Her voting status is: Active. She is unaffiliated.
Voter ID number 601010372
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VOTER DETAIL
VOTER_ID: 601010372
COUNTY_CODE: 47
COUNTY: Park
LAST_NAME: DEAR
FIRST_NAME: ROBERT
MIDDLE_NAME: LEWIS
NAME_SUFFIX: JR
VOTER_NAME: DEAR, ROBERT LEWIS JR
STATUS_CODE: A
PRECINCT_NAME: 5026047007
ADDRESS_LIBRARY_ID: 600889912
HOUSE_NUM: 809
HOUSE_SUFFIX:
PRE_DIR:
STREET_NAME: OURAY
STREET_TYPE: CT
POST_DIR:
UNIT_TYPE:
UNIT_NUM:
ADDRESS_NON_STD:
RESIDENTIAL_ADDRESS: 809 OURAY CT
RESIDENTIAL_CITY: HARTSEL
RESIDENTIAL_STATE: CO
RESIDENTIAL_ZIP_CODE: 80449
RESIDENTIAL_ZIP_PLUS:
EFFECTIVE_DATE: 10/17/2014
REGISTRATION_DATE: 10/17/2014
STATUS: Active
STATUS_REASON:
BIRTH_YEAR: 1958
GENDER: Female
PRECINCT: 5026047007
SPLIT: 007.044
VOTER_STATUS_ID: 1
PARTY: UAF
PARTY_AFFILIATION_DATE: 10/17/2014
PHONE_NUM:
MAILING_ADDRESS_1: PO BOX 101
MAILING_ADDRESS_2:
MAILING_ADDRESS_3:
MAILING_CITY: HARTSEL
MAILING_STATE: CO
MAILING_ZIP_CODE: 80449
MAILING_ZIP_PLUS:
MAILING_COUNTRY: UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
SPL_ID: 644
PERMANENT_MAIL_IN_VOTER: No
CONGRESSIONAL: CONGRESSIONAL 5
STATE_SENATE: STATE SENATE 2
STATE_HOUSE: STATE HOUSE 60
ID_REQUIRED: N
http://www.coloradovoters.info/by_numbe ... _dear.html
by General Patton » Sat Nov 28, 2015 3:08 pm
by backtoiam » Sat Nov 28, 2015 4:02 pm
General Patton wrote:
Oh come on elfismiles, give 'em some more time to double down on their racial and sexual stereotyping. There is seriously no better far right wing propaganda than left wing propaganda right now. You couldn't do better even if you were actively feeding them black propaganda directly. Polarization wins again.
by seemslikeadream » Sat Nov 28, 2015 4:25 pm
FRIDAY, NOV 1, 2013 02:59 PM CDT
Why is it always a white guy: The roots of modern, violent rage
The LAX shooter, once again, is reported to be a white male. Here's why they're always first to violence
MICHAEL KIMMEL
Why is it always a white guy: The roots of modern, violent rage
James Holmes, Timothy McVeigh, Adam Lanza (Credit: AP/RJ Sangosti/Ho)
Excerpted from "Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era"
Joe Stack had simply had enough. Every time this fifty-three-year-old independent engineer and software consultant from Austin, Texas, had set aside any money at all for retirement, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) seemed to change the tax laws or whittled away at his earnings with new restrictions. A change in the income-tax regulations in 1986 had removed an exemption for software consultants and engineers, effectively consigning them, in his eyes, to low-income wage work. He just couldn’t catch a break. He’d moved from Los Angeles to Austin, remarried, hoping to get better contract consulting work, but the wages in Texas were paltry compared with Southern California. Increasingly despairing that he would never get back on his feet, he began to see the IRS as an agent of discrimination against honest working people, while corporate fat cats got bailed out. Adding insult to injury, they’d recently initiated yet another audit against him.
On the morning of February 18, 2010, he snapped. Perhaps snap is the wrong word; it’s too sudden, too precipitous. From Joe’s perspective, he’d already bent far past the breaking point. He just couldn’t bend anymore, couldn’t accommodate all that weight. That Thursday morning, he set fire to his small house in North Austin. He then drove to a hangar that he rented at the Georgetown Municipal Airport and cleared his single-engine Piper airplane for takeoff. “Thanks for your help,” he told the control tower as he left the airfield at 9:45. “Have a great day!”
Ten minutes later, he flew the plane directly into Echelon I, the building in a near-downtown Austin office complex that housed the IRS. The fully fueled plane exploded into a fireball, killing the pilot and also IRS manager Vernon Hunter, a sixty-three-year-old father of six. Thirteen others were injured, two seriously.
In the immediate media flurry, Stack was portrayed as a deranged individual, which, no doubt, he was. But he had hardly acted spontaneously. Indeed, as with so many of these deranged lone wolves who seem to explode one day out of the blue, Stack’s explosion had been brewing for some time. Later that day, investigators found a lengthy suicide note, which Stack had written and revised over the previous three days. In this rambling diatribe against the forces that he believed had led him to this murderously suicidal rampage, Stack just couldn’t get past the injustice of it all, the fact that there seemed to be two sets of rules—which further widened following the economic meltdown of 2008—one for the rich and powerful and one for the rest of us.
“Why is it,” he asks rhetorically, “that a handful of thugs and plunderers can commit unthinkable atrocities (and in the case of the GM [General Motors] executives, for scores of years) and when it’s time for their gravy train to crash under the weight of their gluttony and overwhelming stupidity, the force of the full federal government has no difficulty coming to their aid within days if not hours?”
He described an eighty-year-old neighbor, a widow of a steelworker who worked in the mills in central Pennsylvania all his life, believing the promises from the mill owners and the unions that he would have a pension and medical care for a secure retirement. “Instead he was one of the thousands who got nothing because the incompetent mill management and corrupt union (not to mention the government) raided their pension funds and stole their retirement,” Stack wrote. “All she had was Social Security to live on.” She survives, he said, on cat food.
Like many other guys these days, Stack was mad as hell. Yes, he flipped out, and yes, he was probably clinically insane. But such arm-chair diagnoses miss the method in his madness, the logic of his psychotic break with reality. Stack considered himself a victim of the impersonal forces that wreak havoc with the lives and the futures of America’s middle and working classes—the labyrinthine impersonal governmental bureaucracies and the impenetrable corporations whose CEOs and shareholders were lavishly compensated. Joe Stack was Joe Sixpack, Joe Lunchbucket, Joe the Plumber. He was a New Economy Everyman. Everything piled up on him, and he just lost it.
So Joe Stack “went postal,” as that new phrase coined during the Reagan era put it, named after that spate of rampage murders in which US Postal Service (USPS) workers shot and killed managers, supervisors, and fellow workers. Between 1986 and 1997, forty people were murdered in at least twenty incidents involving postal workers. Before 1986—nary a one. What happened?
Reaganomics happened. Under a Reagan-era policy, the USPS stopped receiving federal tax moneys starting in the early 1980s and was pushed to streamline its operations to maximize efficiency, including cutting wages, firing staff, and slashing benefits. The workers who went postal were all post-office workers who had been laid off or downsized or had their benefits slashed.
One such worker was Patrick Sherrill, the postal worker who started the “trend” and launched that tragic neologism. On August 20, 1986, Sherrill walked through the post office in Edmond, Oklahoma, where he worked, targeting his supervisors and several coworkers. By the time he was done, fifteen postal employees lay dead, and another six were injured—at the time, the third-largest massacre in American history. The last bullet he reserved for himself. As the police arrived on the scene, they heard only one shot.
Yes, Stack and Sherrill were insane, but they were also familiar. They didn’t start out mad. No, they were driven crazy by the sense that the world had spun so far off its axis that there was no hope of righting it. Underneath that sense of victimhood, that sense that the corporations and the government were coconspirators in perpetrating the great fleecing of the American common man, lay a defining despair in making things right. And under that despair lay their tragic flaw, a deep and abiding faith in America, in its institutions and its ideals. Like Willy Loman, perhaps the quintessential true believer in the ideology of self-made American masculinity, they believed that if they worked hard and lived right, they, too, could share in the American Dream. When it is revealed that no matter what you do, no matter how hard you work, that dreams are for Disneyland, then they morph into a tragic American Everymen, defeated by circumstances instead of rising above them.
Stack and Sherrill believed in that America. They believed that there was a contract between themselves, and guys like them, and the government “of the people” that is supposed to represent us. They believed in the corporations that they worked for, confident in the knowledge that they could support a family, enjoy a secure retirement, and provide for their families. That contract was the stable foundation for several generations of America’s working men—an implied but inviolable understanding between businesses and workers, between government and employers. They had kept the faith, fulfilled their part of the bargain. And somehow their share had been snatched away by faceless, feckless hands. They had played by all the rules, only to find the game was rigged from the start.
It feels like even the unions have betrayed them. At their origin, the union movement established the baseline that enabled working- and middle-class American men to plant a stake in the American Dream. The relentless recent attacks on unions, both in the public sector and in private companies, and the self-serving corruption in many unions that legitimized those attacks have hit lower-middle-class and working-class men the hardest—the same group that is now most ardently antiunion. It’s a tragic irony of the American worker—they’ve been persuaded to put their trust in the very companies that betray them and shun the organizations that once protected them.
Generations of men had staked their claim for manhood on being good family providers, reliable breadwinners. It has been the defining feature of American manhood since the early nineteenth century. With neither a feudal aristocracy nor clerical indulgence, American manhood was defined in opposition to the European version, where rank and birth and blood determined your fate. Here, in the American Eden, all was new and naked, and a man could rise as high as his talents and aspirations and hard work could take him.
He could do that because he assumed the playing field was level. But all that has changed in America. The playing field is no longer level. Of course, it never was; it had always tilted decidedly in favor of middle-class white men. But what has changed is the angle of that tilt. On the one hand, it’s not quite so lopsided, as more of “them” seem to be catching up with “us.” On the other hand, it’s more dramatically lopsided than it has been since the Gilded Age—and perhaps even more than that. The gap between the middle class and the rich has never been as large as it now is in the United States. Today, the United States is coming to resemble prerevolutionary France, with teeming masses who have less and less and a noble few who tweet about twenty-five-dollar cupcakes. Although a higher percentage of white people now believe that they are the victims of discrimination than do black people, they fail to see the very rich white people who are doing massively better.
But these middle-class white men are right in one sense: the social contract that enabled self-made men to feel that they could make it, even if they somehow failed to realize their dreams, has, indeed, been shredded, abandoned for lavish profiteering by the rich, enabled by a government composed of foxes who have long ago abandoned their posts at the henhouse. That safety net, always thin, has been undone by decades of neglect since the establishment of the Great Society in 1960s. There’s a painful sense of betrayal from their government, from the companies to whom we give our lives, from the unions. There was a moral contract, that if we fulfill our duty to society, society will fulfill its duty to us in our retirement, taking care of those who served so loyally.
Although the contract may have been shredded by greedy companies driven by greedier financiers, the sense of entitlement on the part of white men remains intact. Many white men feel they have played by the rules and expected to reap the rewards of that obedient responsibility. It’s pretty infuriating not to get what you feel you deserve. That’s the aggrieved entitlement that lies underneath the anger of American white men.
They had played the game like real men—honorably, honestly. And if they were going to go down, they were going to go down like real men—making somebody pay. Even if they had to die trying.
MAD MEN
For decades, every single morning, guys like Joe Stack—middle-class corporate guys, office workers, salesmen, and independent professionals— have lined up to take the 7:23 from Anywhere, USA, to the big city. Every night they’ve returned, briefcase and hat in hand, to their suburban castles. Like characters on Mad Men, they assumed their place in the long line of American breadwinners, of family men. They worked in the city, but were successful enough to escape to the suburbs, where life was greener and safer, where the schools were better for their chilldren. They and their families shopped in malls, mowed their grass, and watched their children ride their bikes.
On the other side of the tracks, working-class guys like Patrick Sherrill have driven their pickup trucks to work in America’s factories, producing the cars we crave, the clothes we wear, the stuff we use. They have delivered America’s packages, paved America’s roads and built her bridges, and erected the skyscrapers in which corporate moguls reap their fortunes.
But all is not well. There’s a mounting anger underneath those perfectly manicured lawns, and it erupts like small volcanoes in our homes, in our corporate offices, and on those peaceful suburban streets themselves. Jim Anderson (of Father Knows Best) has been supplanted by Homer Simpson, the bumptious blowhard who’s neither a stable family man nor a reliable employee. In the near–ghost towns of America’s factory cities, white workers seethe into their beers, wondering where it all went wrong—and how it all went to hell so fast. Perhaps more menacingly, some of these obedient men have now been replaced by violent men, who lash out at their spouses, while their sons learn their lessons well, as they drive through suburban neighborhoods looking for immigrants to beat up, and even to kill.
Despite these enormous class differences, these different groups of white men are angry—angry at a system that has so let them down. The most passionate believers in the American Dream, “the Promised Land” Bruce Springsteen sings about, they’ve seen it gradually erode into a postindustrial nightmare, a world of corroding Rust Belt infrastructure and faceless cubicles that dull the senses and numb the soul. The white working class and the white middle class have rarely been so close emotionally as they are today; together they have drifted away from unions, from big government, from the Democratic Party, into the further reaches of the right wing. Together they listen to Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. And together they watched Brad Pitt initiate Ed Norton into “Fight Club,” searching for something— anything—that would feel authentic, that would feel real. Middle-and working-class white men—well, they just are beginning to actually understand each other.
Some non-post-office rampage murders were regular working guys who simply snapped. Take, for example, Joseph Wesbecker, who worked at the Standard Gravure plant in Louisville, Kentucky, a printing plant that exclusively printed the local newspaper, the Louisville Courier-Journal. For months, even years, managers had refused to listen to Wesbecker’s complaints that operating the folder press was too hard for him, that his workplace-induced stress made it hard for him to perform all the operations of heavy equipment. On September 14, 1989, Wesbecker roamed through the factory floor, purposefully toward the supervisors’ office, opening fire at anyone who had ever crossed him. By the time he put the gun to his own head, seven coworkers lay dead, and another twenty had been wounded.
Others were more corporate, like Gian Luigi Ferri, a chubby fifty-five-year-old businessman who, in 1993, slaughtered seven people and injured six others at the tony, white-shoe downtown San Francisco law firm that had represented him. As the police entered the building, he killed himself.
Some were more in between the have-mores and the have-nots. Matthew Beck was a socially awkward yet conscientious accountant at the Connecticut State Lottery, who had worked diligently for eight years, until, in the summer of 1997, he was unceremoniously passed over for promotion (despite flawless work). He became bitter, angry, and withdrawn, and he began to fall apart. After Beck returned from a two-month medical leave, one of his supervisors added to his workload a particularly demeaning task for a trained accountant, monitoring the use of state cars given to those who had been promoted—that is, those who received perks to which Beck thought he was entitled. He snapped. On March 6, 1998, Beck came to work on a “casual Friday” and stabbed his former supervisor (who was the first to deny his grievance over his nonpromotion), then walked to a staff meeting of several senior staff, and shot the company chief financial officer, his senior supervisor who had also turned down his promotion. He lowered his gun and walked out of the meeting room and through the executive suite where the vice president of operations poked his head out of his office and asked, “Is everything okay?” This VP had also rejected Beck’s promotion, and Beck shot and killed him.
Finally, he confronted the lottery president himself, Otho Brown, in the parking lot of the building. Brown had been the final top authority who had signed off on the rejection of Beck’s promotion. While most of the lottery employees huddled at the edge of the parking lot, in the apparent safety of a grove of trees, Brown stood alone in the lot. Beck’s fellow employees begged him to stop. He calmly shot Brown three times. As the police pulled up, Beck put the pistol to his own head and shot himself. “They were the people who had the power in the Lottery,” said one of the supervisors who was in that meeting room but was spared by Beck. “They were the ones who had turned down his promotion.”
It’s not just white guys, either. On August 2, 2010, Omar Thornton, a thirty-four-year-old black truck driver for a major Connecticut beer distributor, walked into the main office in Hartford and opened fire, killing eight people before turning the gun on himself. According to his girlfriend’s mother, Thornton was a “mellow” guy who had complained for a long time about racial harassment. He claimed to have pictures on his cell phone that he had taken at the distributor—pictures of the N word and hangman’s nooses graffitied on the bathroom walls. No one listened. So he began to take his revenge against a company that he felt was indifferent to his plight; he started stealing cases of beer. Caught on a company video, he was brought in for a disciplinary hearing with his union on that fateful day and offered the choice of being fired or quitting. He chose a horrifying, fatal, third path.
“It’s got nothing to do with race,” commented Teamster official Christopher Roos to a television journalist. “This is a disgruntled employee who shot a bunch of people.” He almost made it sound tame. But in one sense, Roos is right. Thornton may have complained about racial harassment and may have thought there was some racial bias at the distributor. But his actions that fateful day were those of a working man who had snapped. Not a black working man, but a working man.
He was not a working woman. In my research, I could find no cases of working women coming into their workplaces, packing assault weapons, and opening fire, seemingly indiscriminately. It’s not that they don’t get depressed and enraged when they get downsized, laid off, or mistreated, their wages cut, their pensions slashed, or their benefits reduced. Some had brought a handgun and often carried over a domestic-violence dispute into the workplace. They just don’t go postal.
Let’s be clear: just as we cannot understand rampage school shootings by focusing on the fact that they are always committed by boys, neither can we understand these cases simply by recognizing that they’re all men. Surely, too, recognizing that they’re all men doesn’t mean that all men are likely to become deranged mass murderers. Neither, however, can we explain it simply by the easy American access to guns or chalk it up to yet another deranged killer, the standard fare on CSI-like television.
But we can’t ignore it, either. There is no one single explanation. What is required is that we look inside the economic and social shifts inside America’s workplaces and the broader patterns of class in America. Just as we needed to profile the school shooters and their schools, we also need to profile these guys gone postal and the places where they made their living. We need to ask some questions about the changing conditions of work in America, the political economy in which these men became deranged enough to go postal.
THE RATIONALITY OF THE MAD GUNMAN
Most disgruntled male workers don’t go postal, of course. Indeed, it’s pretty obvious that well over 99 percent of us don’t bring assault weapons to work, ready to open fire on our coworkers or supervisors. It is telling, though, to listen to how regular folks respond when someone does embark on such a murderous spree. How different are the comments from those of neighbors of, say, serial killers or other mass murderers. When the media or police interview neighbors of serial killers, like Jeffrey Dahmer, the typical response is a surprised version of “He was very quiet,” “He kept to himself,” or “We had no idea we were living next door to a monster.”
Not so with the guys who go postal. “You could sorta see it coming” is by far the more likely response. Coworkers and workers in other companies mention the erosion of benefits, the capricious cuts in staff, the constant fears of layoffs and downsizing, the seething resentment at the bonuses the managers pay themselves. They can see it coming. Says one survivor, “There are a lot of people who are sort of on your side. There are people . . . who claim ‘I’m not going to say that he did the right thing, but I can understand where he came from, and maybe if I had been in his spot, I’d have done it too.’”
Over and over, this is what you hear: “I could see it coming,” “If it wasn’t him, it would have been someone else,” “What did you expect?” “They’ve been treating us so bad for so long, someone was going to snap.” (That the “someone” is always a man seems to escape everyone’s notice, as if it’s simply the most normal thing in the world for men—and not women—to react this way.)
When the story of Matthew Beck was posted recently to a website, comments were guarded but compassionate. “I can sorta understand why he did it,” wrote one. “I don’t agree with his actions either,” wrote another. “But on some level I understand him.” “You can’t put people down and expect them to take it with a smile,” wrote a third. “I can’t help but feel some sympathy for the shooter. His life must have been hell and I can’t blame him for hating them.”
But let’s be clear: these guys committed murder. Joe Stack flew his plane into the IRS building. This wasn’t just a minor case of road rage. This was an act of domestic terrorism. He attacked a government office, just as Timothy McVeigh had done. But in the aftermath, there was far more sympathy for him among ordinary Americans than there was for McVeigh in 1995. There are entire websites devoted to calling him “an American hero.” Why? For one thing, it wasn’t “political”—that is, Joe Stack wasn’t trying to start a revolution. He was just at the end of his rope, having been jerked around callously by those in charge.
“Oh, c’mon,” says Bill, a patron at a local coffee shop, on the afternoon after Stack’s death, as the news feeds come in over the Internet. He’s sitting at the table next to me. Bill has his laptop open; his cell phone sits next to it on the table. Both are plugged into the only electric outlets nearby, monopolizing them. “Fuck, no,” he says, loud enough for me to hear. I look at him, curious. I hadn’t been anticipating an interview just then. He says it again.
“Did you hear about this guy in Texas? Flew his plane into the IRS office. That’s not terrorism. Not like 9/11. I mean, the guy’d just had it. He was fed up, fucked. Probably thought he had no way out.”
“But why do you think he just snapped that way?” I ask.
“Look at what’s happening,” Bill says. “Everywhere you look, it’s downsizing, outsourcing, laying off. No more pension funds, no more health benefits, no more retirement. He was cornered, and he came out swinging.”
“But he flew his airplane into a building, killing an innocent man and injuring many others. He killed a guy who was probably as trapped as he was. How can you justify that?”
Bill sits for a moment. “I’m not justifying it. I’m not excusing it. But I’m trying to understand it. I think there are a lot of people who sorta feel like they’re at the end of their rope and don’t know what to do. They’re panicking, freaking out, you know? Back in the day, if you got screwed by your company, you could go to the government, get unemployment, get food stamps, whatever, get some help. Now there’s nowhere to go. The government does nothing; the corporations—well, they’re the problem. Nowhere to go.”
“You know,” I say, “you sound like a socialist. The government is in the pockets of the big corporations that are ruled by greed and intent on screwing the workers.”
“Hah!” says Bill. “A socialist! I’m as far from that as you could imagine. I’m an American. Heck, I’d even support the Tea Party if they could get the government out of my wallet. I don’t want to pay more taxes! And I don’t want a bigger government. I want a responsive one. I mean, just look at me, for Christ’s sake.”
Bill, I soon learn, is looking for work, a euphemism for the newly unemployed in the current “he-cession”—the economic recession that has hit men so hard. More than 80 percent of all the jobs lost between November 2008 and December 2010 had been jobs that had been held by men. Sure, most of those have been in manufacturing and especially construction, as the housing boom went south. But the ripples have been felt in midsize local businesses across the country. (Just as surely, there’s been a “he-covery,” as the overwhelming number of new jobs created since 2011 have been jobs that have gone to men, while public-sector jobs, like administrators and teachers and public-sector employees, mostly women, have been laid off by the thousands.)
Bill had been in sales. “But who the fuck is buying anything that anyone is selling?” He doesn’t wait for an answer. “I’ll tell you who. Nobody. That’s who. It feels like such a scam, the whole thing, a big Madoff Ponzi scheme where the rich get everything. And this . . . ,” he says, pointing to his technological arsenal on the small table, “well, it’s not helping. We’re all networked up the wazoo, we have every networking device known to man, and yet we can’t find a job. And when you do find one, it’s never as good as the one you had before. Working conditions, benefits, you name it. Always worse, always worse.”
He drifts back to the laptop. If we’d been in a bar, drowning our sorrows, instead of in a coffee shop, trying to stay pumped and focused, this would be the signal to look at his beer and mutter something over and over, under his breath.
Bill expressed so many of the concerns of today’s middle-class and working-class men—the constant downward pressure, a sense that they are no longer climbing the ladder of success but rather just trying to fight off being pushed down the ladder. They feel lucky if they are just holding on.
The deteriorating working conditions, the crap people have to put up with in their jobs, lead to some unlikely heroes. Enter Steven Slater, the Jet Blue flight attendant who became an instant celebrity after he exploded in a workplace tirade in early August 2010. Working a routine flight from Pittsburgh to New York City, Slater had, witnesses said, already been yelled at by abusive passengers when he had tried to intervene when two passengers were fighting over the overhead space. One of the passengers’ suitcase hit him in the head as it tumbled from the overstuffed overhead bin. As the plane landed and was taxiing to the gate, that same woman stood up and was furious that the gate-checked bag was not immediately available, and she began to curse at him. Slater snapped. He grabbed the intercom, cursed her out right back, grabbed a beer from the stowed service cart, and opened the door of the plane. “That’s it, I’m done,” he said. He inflated the emergency evacuation slide, slid down to the tarmac, and ran off. He was arrested a few hours later.
Immediately, people rallied to his defense. Although his workplace explosion was utterly unprofessional and was gradually revised by other passengers on the plane in a way that made him look a little less heroic, it was Slater’s version of the story that has stuck. He was hailed by Stephen Colbert as the “Alpha Dog of the Week” for his testicular fortitude—he slid down the evacuation slide “using his balls as a sled,” Colbert reported. Late-night hosts scrambled to book him, and his newly enlisted agent is fending off offers for books and television rights.
Whether Slater was “justified” is hardly the point. The public reaction to his antics reveals something important about how many people feel about their jobs. Slater’s classic “take this job and shove it” attitude expressed what millions of Americans seem to feel about their working conditions. People cheer him as a hero.
In that sense, Slater’s actions are understandable, if not justifiable, rational, if not reasonable—not as the flipping out of a madman, but as a desperate effort to draw attention to the miserable conditions that working people endure. More, it’s that conditions have become so much worse, that the social contract has been torn apart by corporate greed and government inaction. Instead of armchair psychologizing by a public tut-tutting their way to self-satisfied judgment, commentators reached for the business sections of the newspapers, reporting the gradual erosion of the friendly skies in today’s cut-throat business climate. Yes, it’s true that passengers have been nickeled and dimed by baggage fees, convenience fees, talk-to-a-real-agent fees, paying for food and beverages and entertainment, and every conceivable additional fee. But the working conditions of the airplane as a workplace have also steadily eroded—and not just because passengers are more irate and more entitled.
Over the past decade, airline passengers have increased from 629 million to 770 million, an 8 percent increase. In 2010 domestic airlines employed about 463,000 full-time workers, compared with 607,307 a decade earlier—a decrease of roughly 8 percent. At the same time, fuel costs have doubled, operating costs have soared, and gate fees and landing fees charged by municipalities to airlines have all risen significantly. That means that profits have to come from the labor side of the economic equation, not the materials side. Sure enough, airline workers have been hit hard by cuts: their salaries have been cut, pensions slashed, health benefits reduced or even eliminated, and various unions abandoned by new airlines and undermined at the old ones.
Airline workers, like their passengers, are being required to do more and more for less and less. And no one, neither the passengers nor those who serve them their drinks, seems to be able to do anything about it. This isn’t just about little bags of pretzels. It’s about daily erosions of those feelings of pride in your work, the compromising of archaic feelings like honor and integrity, self-respect for a job well done. In that sense, Steven Slater did not show what balls he had, as Colbert reported, but rather illustrated just how impotent American workers really feel.
by seemslikeadream » Sat Nov 28, 2015 8:29 pm
Planned Parenthood Shooting Suspect Made Comment About 'No More Baby Parts': Sources
by PETE WILLIAMS and ANDREW BLANKSTEIN
Colo. Springs Mayor: Police Monitored Shooter Via Health Center's Cameras 1:08
The day after a gunman killed three people and shot nine others at a Colorado Planned Parenthood office, officials tell NBC News a motive remains unclear, but say the suspect talked about politics and abortion.
Robert Lewis Dear, a North Carolina native who was living in a trailer in Colorado, made statements to police Friday at the scene of the Colorado Springs clinic and in interviews that law enforcement sources described as rantings.
In one statement, made after the suspect was taken in for questioning, Dear said "no more baby parts" in reference to Planned Parenthood, according to two law enforcement sources with knowledge of the case.
Image: Colorado Springs Shooting Suspect Robert L. Dear
Colorado Springs Shooting Suspect Robert L. Dear Colorado Springs Police Department
But the sources stressed that Dear said many things to law enforcement and the extent to which the "baby parts" remark played into any decision to target the Planned Parenthood office was not yet clear. He also mentioned President Barack Obama in statements.
Related: Survivor: Planned Parenthood Gunman 'Was Aiming For My Head'
Dear is being held on no bond, and isn't expected to appear in court until Monday, according to jail booking records.
Law enforcement officials are looking into the background of the suspect. Police are interviewing people who knew Dear, including his girlfriend in Colorado. They are also examining his computer and any social media footprint.
Sources said there would have been nothing apparent in Dear's background — including a felony conviction or previous mental health issue — that would have disqualified him from buying an AK-47 style, high-powered rifle used in the shootings.
Related: Officer Slain in Colorado Planned Parenthood Attack Was Beloved Dad, Church Leader
But a look at Dear's criminal past shows a history of other arrests, including ones for domestic violence against his then-wife in 1997, and being a "Peeping Tom" in 2002 after a neighbor in South Carolina reported him watching her, according to documents obtained by NBC News.
Friday morning's shooting at the Colorado Springs clinic resulted in a five-hour standoff between the suspect and police. One of the three killed was a police officer, Garrett Swasey, 44; the other two, described as civilians, will be identified pending autopsies, officials said.
by seemslikeadream » Sat Nov 28, 2015 10:17 pm
Being a doctor who performs abortions means you always fear your life is in danger
Threats and violence are no way to disagree
By Diane J. Horvath-Cosper October 29
Diane J. Horvath-Cosper is a board-certified obstetrician-gynecologist and a family planning fellow in Washington, D.C.
The Planned Parenthood office in Thousand Oaks, Calif., one of several clinics that perform abortions where there has been fires or vandalism recently. (Rob Varela/The Ventura County Star via AP)
Every few months, I do an Internet search for my name, as recommended by a media-savvy colleague. In the past I’ve found myself in all the predictable places — among a list of doctors who graduated from my residency program, on my employer’s Web site, in various social-media posts. But in the stillness of a warm evening this past August, after putting my daughter to bed, I found myself in a new and terrifying place: an anti-choice Web site that claims I am part of an “abortion cartel.” In addition to my office address and links to find my medical license numbers, it features several photos of me. In one of the photos, taken from social media, I’m holding my then-15-month-old daughter.
Though the site claims to be “informational” in nature, the real purpose is clear. There is no better way to intimidate and incite fear than to target a family member, especially a child. The message is unambiguous: I’m being watched, and so is my daughter.
I am an obstetrician-gynecologist. Among the many medical services I provide my patients, I perform abortions for women who need them. That’s made me a target for harassment online and in person over the course of my career. Unfortunately, my experience is not the exception among my colleagues who perform what the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled is a legal medical procedure in all 50 states.
Before I moved my practice to D.C., I worked in a family-planning clinic in Minnesota, where security guards had to escort doctors, nurses and other employees from our cars while anti-choice extremists wrote down our license plate numbers and took photographs. After a while, I stopped hearing the wild accusations and prayers they shouted at staff and patients alike. When a new clinic building was constructed, it included an enormous locking gate, a tall perimeter fence and secure underground parking.
This extraordinary level of security is simply not necessary at any other kind of medical facility, because this kind of abusive behavior doesn’t happen in other fields.
On Twitter and Facebook, I’m not shy about the fact that I am an OB-GYN. I believe physicians must engage in public discourse wherever it is happening, and we must be voices for evidence-based medicine both in and out of the office. There is still an incredible amount of stigma surrounding abortion and other reproductive health issues, and I hope that doctors’ willingness to share their stories will help women feel empowered to share theirs. The people who harass me and other doctors tell me that I have blood on my hands, that “Satan awaits” me and that I will get what I “deserve” for providing a constitutionally protected, necessary medical service. The Internet makes it easy and virtually anonymous to issue these inflammatory and threatening statements.
As a mother, it is especially difficult to shoulder this risk as a cost of doing my job. When I am out in public, I remain intensely aware of my surroundings: Every time I turn the ignition key in my car, there’s a fraction of a second of panic that someone may have planted a bomb. On public transit, if strangers’ gazes linger for more than a few seconds, I wonder if they recognize me and if their intentions are sinister. I fear for the safety of my child. I worry that protesters may someday show up at her day care, focused on hurting her as a way to punish me. Seeing her face on the anti-choice Web site made me consider that maybe she would be safer living apart from me and that my presence in her life might cause her more harm than good. While I refuse to be intimidated from doing my job, this assault on my confidence as a mother has been particularly distressing.
Numerous colleagues have similar stories. On social media, I’ve witnessed friends and mentors called murderers, Nazis, racists and whores. The threats can be vague (“I hope someone does to you what you do to babies”) or terrifyingly specific (“I know where you live, and someday I might show up at your doorstep”).
Too often, these threats are not all talk: In the past two decades, 13 physicians or staff members at abortion-providing facilities have been killed or seriously injured.
In September, in picturesque Pullman, Wash., a city of 30,000, someone snuck up to a Planned Parenthood clinic in the middle of the night. The arsonist smashed a window, then tossed in what was later described as a firebomb. Thankfully, there were no injuries, but the health center now needs to be rebuilt, leaving patients without a place to get needed care. A federal terrorism task force is investigating.
In New Orleans, firefighters were called in August to respond to a car fire within the locked gates of a Planned Parenthood construction site. The intended target: a clinic that will provide abortions as well as other preventive and reproductive health services. This month, someone broke into a Planned Parenthood clinic in Claremont, N.H., and used a hatchet to destroy computers, phones and medical equipment.
We already know what abortion-provider violence looks like at its worst. In Kansas, physician George Tiller was subject to protests at his clinic for years. Eventually, the protesters also targeted his home and his church. His clinic was bombed. In 1993, he was shot in both arms; he courageously returned to work. In 2009, he was murdered while in the supposed safety of his place of worship, handing out the church bulletin. He was the fourth abortion provider killed since 1993.
Fortunately, attacks of this magnitude are rare. But they should not exist at all — especially not as a response to trained, committed health-care professionals providing a legal, essential service that (by some estimates) 1 in 3 women will obtain during their lifetimes.
Last year, a survey conducted for the Feminist Majority Foundation found that nearly 20 percent of clinics have been subject to the most severe types of anti-abortion violence, including stalking, facility invasions and blockades. More than half of the clinics surveyed reported some form of intimidation, one-quarter of them on a daily basis. A small minority of clinics, 12 percent, reported never experiencing anti-abortion activity.
Family planning is a specialty. In addition to medical school and OB-GYN residency, family-planning specialists have fellowship training that includes years of in-depth instruction on how to provide all methods of abortion care safely and effectively.
But family-planning specialists must also be trained in non-medical skills. National advocacy organizations have had to develop curricula to address security issues (the National Abortion Federation began offering seminars in risk management 35 years ago). Physicians, nurses and clinic staffers are taught to identify suspicious phone calls. We learn how to screen people who might be posing as patients but who are actually trying to infiltrate the safety of the clinic. We have protocols and run emergency drills to prepare for a bomb threat or a shooting.
As hard as it is for physicians and staff who work at these clinics, the impact isn’t just on providers. When patients are confronted by threats and intimidation, some of them are too frightened to enter the clinic to get the care they need. These women deserve empathetic, respectful care — which is what my colleagues and I have studied and practiced for years to give them — not judgement, and not violence. Targeting clinics also prevents women from getting other essential medical services, from cancer screenings to ultrasounds to sexually transmitted-infection testing and treatment.
I chose to become an abortion provider because I respect the autonomy of women, and I trust them to decide what’s best for themselves and their families. Because I understand why women want to finish school, to start careers. Because I believe every child should be cherished, and because I value the ability to plan whether and when to have a family. I chose to do this because of pregnancies that didn’t turn out as anticipated and because of women whose lives and health must be protected.
I stand by what I do. I know that it is contentious. But threats and violence are not the appropriate way to debate. Americans of good conscience can disagree about the morality of abortion, but we should all agree that no physicians ought to be terrorized for doing their jobs.
by seemslikeadream » Sun Nov 29, 2015 10:04 am
Domestic terrorism and the evil that men do
TBogg TBOGG
28 NOV 2015 AT 20:20 ET
What happened at the Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood on the Friday after Thanksgiving was inevitable. After the deceptively-named Center for Medical Progress released the equally deceptively-edited videos accusing Planned Parenthood of profiting from the sale of fetal parts, someone had to die in the end.
Of all the phony attacks and accusations made against Planned Parenthood by a new generation of anti-choice activists like James O’ Keefe and Lila Grace Rose, the videos created by former O’Keefe confederate David Daleiden raised the bar — or lowered it depending on how you view them — on over the top accusations intended to fire up Christian conservatives and embolden lawmakers to do all they can to destroy Planned Parenthood.
Images of fetal tissue being sorted by technicians became a bloody flag to be waved by people who seem to believe that medical procedures are magically free of the kind of things most people are unfamiliar with because they’re not medical professionals who are undeterred by the sight of body fluids, viscera and bones. Those who view abortions as a repellent medical procedure became even more appalled by seeing people who deal with such matters on a daily basis act like … people who deal with such matters on a daily basis.
Where Daleiden really hit one out of the park for the anti-choice crowd was when he accused Planned Parenthood of selling fetal tissue — used by researchers looking for cures for Alzheimer’s, among other things — and making a profit off of it.
Which turned out to be a lie.
When interviewed, Daleiden carefully parsed his words and flagrantly misinterpreted the words of the people caught on tape, thereby filling his nothing-burger of an exposé — for which he received a nice budget that allowed him to work on the project for two years — with red meat for the anti-choice crowd.
On a certain level — with the aid of the media which uncritically ran with his narrative — Daleiden was more than modestly successful. Republican lawmakers in conservative states were able to cut some funding for Planned Parenthood, while GOP presidential candidates had yet something else to grandstand about in order to woo the evangelical base.
With so much heat thrown off by Daleiden’s anti-abortion project, it is no surprise — and it absolutely cannot be to him — that someone somewhere would take his lies to the extreme and try and do something about it. With extreme prejudice.
According to NBC, Robert Lewis Dear — who killed three people including a cop, making him a hero to these “pro-life” folks while shooting up a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood — reportedly told investigators “no more baby parts” after he was arrested.
As they say: Who could have predicted that?
To all appearances, Dear appears to be either mentally unstable or an anti-social kook who, despite a history of run-ins with the law including domestic violence, was able to easily obtain a gun or guns. For that you can thank the NRA later.
There is no indication that Dear was or is religious, but a predisposition to being either anti-choice or anti-woman certainly was a factor.
Unlike Scott Roeder, who murdered Dr. George Tiller in a Wichita church, one needn’t act as the hand of God taking holy vengeance to “save the children.” You just need a motive –imagined or not — to pull the trigger.
So it appears that Robert Lewis Dear shot up a Planned Parenthood because he was familiar with David Daleiden’s videotape lies. This is not to say that this is something that Daleiden was hoping for. But when Daleiden published his videos with great fanfare, he primed more than a few future domestic terrorists to take the law — God’s or their own — into their own hands.
David Dalieden didn’t pull the trigger — he just showed Robert Lewis Dear where he needed to aim the gun.
by seemslikeadream » Sun Nov 29, 2015 11:42 am
by seemslikeadream » Sun Nov 29, 2015 12:12 pm
Planned Parenthood Standoff 'Appears' to Be Domestic Terrorism, Colorado Springs Mayor Says
By EMILY SHAPIRO Nov 29, 2015, 10:20 AM ET
The mayor of Colorado Springs said it "certainly appears" the shooting and standoff at a Planned Parenthood clinic that left three dead Friday was an act of domestic terrorism.
Colorado Springs Mayor John Suthers would not comment on a motive for the shooting. Police haven't released a possible motive or said whether the clinic was the intended target.
"We have a person that’s pretty much off the grid and acting for whatever motivation," Suthers said on ABC's "This Week." "[It's] very hard to ferret out those folks."
The shooting suspect, 57-year-old Robert Dear, entered the clinic Friday, where he engaged in a standoff with police that lasted for hours, authorities said. Three people were killed and at least nine others were injured.
"All indications are this guy, as I say, was off the grid," Suthers said.
Law enforcement sources told ABC News that Dear made rambling comments during the incident, some of which suggested animosity toward the health care provider.
Colorado Springs Shooting Suspect's Ramblings Suggest Animosity Toward Planned Parenthood, Sources Say
Planned Parenthood Shooting Suspect Looked 'Real Mean,' Neighbor Says
Planned Parenthood Shooting Suspect Was Monitored by Security Cameras as Standoff Unfolded
Vicki Cowart, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Rocky Mountains, said it appears the clinic was targeted. She said she believed a "negative environment" around Planned Parenthood contributed to recent attacks on the health care provider.
"We’ve seen that across the country from all sorts of speakers in the last few months," Cowart said. "I can’t believe that this isn’t contributing to some folks, mentally unwell or not, thinking that it’s OK to -- to target Planned Parenthood or to target abortion providers."
"The airwaves are full of anti-abortion language, of anti-Planned Parenthood accusations, much of which is false in nature," she continued. "We at Planned Parenthood are first and foremost a health care provider. We provide life-saving services to all kinds of folks, men and women, across our communities, and the tirades against Planned Parenthood in the last few months have really been over the top."
Cowart said "Planned Parenthood holds the safety and the well-being of our patients and our staff at the very top of our list," adding that all of the staff at the Colorado Springs clinic escaped uninjured.
She also recognized how those in the building Friday "responded perfectly" to the shooting and standoff.
"They got away from the front of the building; they got into the back, locked portions of the building. They called 911 immediately," Cowart said. "They moved into locked office spaces, not one big space but different office spaces around the building, and they hunkered down. They quieted their cell phones, they didn’t talk, and they waited for the officials to rescue them."
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