Month: September 2013

A reader sends the startling video seen above:

I know that natural disasters aren’t a natural fit with the Dish, but you should know that this isn’t your typical “flash flood out of the mountains”, where a few cars get washed away. What happened here on the Front Range of the Rockies was cataclysmic (some were saying “biblical”).

It really started a week ago Monday, when, as the weather folks say, a plume of tropical moisture from Mexico set up over the Front Range. Then, a cold front moved in and stalled. In Boulder, more than three inches of rain fell in three days, quite unusual at any time of year but just crazy for September, which is normally one of the driest months.

Then things got very interesting.

From Thursday-Friday, we got over 11 inches of rain – 9 inches in a 24-hour period. As a result, all of the roads in Boulder County leading into the mountains were washed out. Estes Park and Lyons were completely isolated because bridges had washed away. Longmont was cut in half by the St. Vrain creek, with nearly 6,000 households forced to evacuate. Many streets were closed in Boulder, and many remain closed nearly a week later.

And of course all that water must go somewhere, in this case the South Platte River. Over last weekend, every city and town along the river was flooded. In several towns, the wastewater treatment plants were beached, and as a consequence they now live in “no flush zones”: no water down any drain (including toilets of course), no washing dishes, no laundry.

Highway 34, which runs through Big Thompson River to Estes Park, had miles of the roadway completely destroyed. It will take months, maybe a year, to repair. Early reports note 1,500 homes destroyed, 17,500 damaged, and 12,000 people evacuated. Starting on Saturday, over 20 Blackhawk and Chinook helicopters started airlifting people out of the mountains.

Ok, I’ll wrap it up. I have a friend who lives about 6 miles west of Boulder, but 3,000 feet above town. He had to catch a ride on a Blackhawk, and he doesn’t know when he will be able to return. [Above] is a short video he uploaded before the flood got really bad. More here.

Denver Nicks flags a study indicating so:

In democratic countries with generally low levels of corruption, the study says, they are less likely to be corrupt and less likely to tolerate corruption than male politicos. The effect does not hold up in countries where corruption is endemic, however. … [Study author Justin Esarey] reportedly theorized that women may feel more bound by the political norms of the society in which they are operating. Simply recruiting more women into politics in deeply corrupt countries would thus not decrease corruption; but in less corrupt countries, recruiting more women into public service may indeed decrease overall corruption.

Kat Stoeffel welcomes the report:

It takes the overwhelming evidence that countries with more women involved in government are less prone to corruption out of a gender-essentialist context. It’s not that women are naturally purer and more honest than men. It’s that women, who are newer, as a class, to governing, make more risk-averse politicians. … “Women have stronger incentives to adapt to political norms because of the risks created by gender discrimination,” they write. In other words, it was hard enough for women to get into politics in the first place. They don’t expect to survive a campaign-financing scandal or an unpopular filibuster or a bad investment.

Chait’s article on Republican opposition to Obamacare is worth a read. What it clarifies for me is something quite simple. There’s absolutely a role for an aggressive opposition to any large new initiative like this. At the same time, we live in a constitutional system which requires adherence to some simple norms. The first is that a general election, especially when an issue is front-and-center in it, should count. Two general elections should count as well. Obama has been elected and re-elected on a specific pledge to bring both cost discipline to the healthcare sector (now hugely more inefficient compared with others in the world) and to expand coverage to as close to universal as is feasible. The legislative maneuvering for it was messy; and the roll-out of such a plan is bound to have glitches and surprises.

The opposition could use weaknesses in the law to propose fixes; it could urge for a more radical severing of employment with insurance; it could fight for more effective and competitive healthcare exchanges; it should keep an eagle eye on cost over-runs. But if it only controls the House, it should not stop already-passed legislation from being implemented out of partisan spite or ideological zeal. It should not threaten the very functioning of all government or a credit crisis to stop something that cannot – and should not – be constitutionally stopped. That’s not opposition; it’s sabotage – especially the campaign to get young people not to opt in. It is a form of nihilist vandalism, based, as Chait carefully explains, on a whole slew of contradictions, fantasies and alternative universes.

Chait’s worried – but not too worried – about the effects of this unprecedented and anti-constitutional campaign:

It is hard to imagine that the news about Obamacare over the next few months will be good. The rollout of Medicare, and the addition of prescription-drug coverage under George W. Bush, both provoked mass confusion and complaint, and those laws were not fighting off an angry rearguard insurgency. The question is whether the glitches and failures amount, in either reality or perception, to the sort of catastrophic failure that leads panicked insurance companies, potential customers, governors, and state legislatures to pull out.

Conservatives have portrayed their war against the exchanges as a desperate last stand against Obamacare and for freedom as we know it. History is replete with previous examples of last stands. Ronald Reagan warned conservatives in 1961 that if Medicare passed into law, “one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.” The conservative movement sustains itself by constantly disregarding its warnings of the last mortal threat to liberty and redirecting itself onto the next one. Yet it has made opposition to Obamacare completely central to its identity. If the Obamacare train does not wreck—or, to put it more accurately, if conservatives fail to wreck the train—it will be fascinating to see: What will they do next?

Drum sizes up the politics of Obamacare sabotage:

Given the tiny percentage of non-tea-partiers who approve of the deliberate sabotage strategy, a scorched-earth campaign by Republicans could backfire on them pretty badly. It all depends on how well the rollout of Obamacare goes, and how that affects public opinion. That makes the next few months pretty critical for both sides. If the rollout is relatively smooth, support for Obamacare will rise—especially among the people who benefit from it, many of whom are still skeptical that it’s for real. But if the Fox News crowd manages to convince the public that every minor problem represents an epic disaster unfolding in front of their eyes, then who knows? Maybe the sabotage strategy will pan out.

Waldman’s view:

[C]ome January, the ACA will be transformed. It will no longer be a big, abstract entity that would be possible to undo. Instead, it will be what it truly was all along: a large number of specific reforms and regulations that in practical terms are entirely separate from one another. What this means is that once it takes effect, “Obamacare” for all intents and purposes will cease to exist.

It’s always easier to oppose an abstraction than a reality. We saw that with marriage equality. Maybe the opposition to Obamacare will fade away as fast as opposition to gay equality. Because it is based on the same ignorance, panic and fear.

(Photo: Sen. Ted Cruz  speaks during a town hall meeting hosted by Heritage Action For America at the Hilton Anatole on August 20, 2013 in Dallas, Texas. Cruz is staging events across Texas sharing his plan to defund U.S. President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act. By Brandon Wade/Getty Images.)

In today’s video from Book Of Matt author Stephen Jimenez, he details how the hate-crime narrative of Shepard’s murder took hold as fast as it did, noting the easy symbolism, frequently inaccurate media reports and how at that moment in 1998, both the gay community and president Clinton were under siege:

Responding via our Facebook page, a reader points out that the reaction to Shepard’s murder was not without historical precedent:

As someone who’s researched historical tragedy, memory and memory construction, I can see how the accepted narrative of Matthew was created. Often when societies and communities are dealt blows like what happened in 1998, we collectively go through a process of grieving and attempt to form some sort of meaning. This meaning usually leads to the construction of a narrative of purpose.

Essentially, these are answers to the . The end part of this narrative is usually [about] what can we do to stop this from occurring again. These can be calls to action or denouncements of occurrences, and there are often many different and competing narratives. Usually one sticks though, and often it’s the one with the most mass appeal, and [this] is what I believe occurred [in the case of Shepard]. This has happened countless times through out our history. We over-simplify stories, often glossing over the actual facts in favor of an easier and [more] usable form of history. Pick an event or person and history, and you can see this process at play. The Revolutionary War and the various cults surrounding certain american presidents are prime examples.

I understand – but I’m not so forgiving of the journalists and activists involved. The utter lack of curiosity, the damning of those (like yours truly) who raised some flags about the incident, the lock-step identity politics mantra about “hate-crimes”, and the simply shameless exploitation of the event for fund-raising to pass redundant hate crime laws truly made me sick to my stomach.

One part of the context is that the biggest gay rights lobby, the Human Rights Campaign, was fiercely opposed to dealing with marriage equality at the time, committed to a paradigm of gay victimhood, and was still living with the rank failure to pass federal employment non-discrimination laws (still not passed!). The federal hate crime law package was a product shaped and designed by pollsters and marketers to raise money, and make HRC seem relevant. Nothing was allowed to get in the way of the countless direct mail pitches urging gays to give money to HRC – or somehow be complicit in a brutal murder of a gay man. It is not good enough, I believe, simply to say: we were wrong but it served the purpose of advancing hate crime laws, so the truth is pretty much irrelevant. No civil rights movement based on untruth deserves to win.

In Kenneth S. Stern’s response to the Book Of Matt, he makes a similar point:

Five years before the Shepard murder, I wrote a report on the Academy Award-nominated film “Liberators.” The film’s premise was that a segregated military unit — the all-African American 761st Tank Battalion — had liberated both the Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps. The film came out when Black-Jewish relations were particularly strained, in the aftermath of the Crown Heights riots. This was a healing story, and leaders from both communities saw the value in promoting it. Except that it wasn’t true.

While this unit was heroic and deserved to be celebrated for what it accomplished during the Second World War (despite the raw bigotry its members suffered), it was nowhere near either camp. The film’s producers were interested in a good story, not a correct one. And when the film was pulled from PBS because of concerns about its factual inaccuracies, some supporters of the film complained that the facts didn’t really matter.

But the facts did matter, even though Holocaust deniers exploited the film’s problems for their own purposes. Most insistent on the truth were the members of the 761st — they had their history denied first by prejudice, and then by political distortion. They only wanted to be acknowledged and remembered for what they did, not what they didn’t do.

The Book Of Matt: Hidden Truths About the Murder of Matthew Shepard comes out next week (pre-order it here). From Kirkus’ summary of the book:

An award-winning journalist uncovers the suppressed story behind the death of Matthew Shepard, the gay University of Wyoming student whose 1998 murder rocked the nation. Jimenez was a media “Johnny-come-lately” when he arrived in Laramie in 2000 to begin work on the Shepard story. His fascination with the intricate web of secrets surrounding Shepard’s murder and eventual elevation to the status of homosexual martyr developed into a 13-year investigative obsession. The tragedy was “enshrined…as passion play and folktale, but hardly ever for the truth of what it was”: the story of a troubled young man who had died because he had been involved with Laramie’s drug underworld rather than because he was gay.

Drawing on both in-depth research and exhaustive interviews with more than 100 individuals around the United States, Jimenez meticulously re-examines both old and new information about the murder and those involved with it. Everyone had something to hide. For Aaron McKinney, one of the two men convicted of Shepard’s murder, it was the fact that he was Shepard’s part-time bisexual lover and fellow drug dealer. For Shepard, it was that he was an HIV-positive substance abuser with a fondness for crystal meth and history of sexual trauma. Even the city of Laramie had its share of dark secrets that included murky entanglements involving law enforcement officials and the Laramie drug world.

So when McKinney and his accomplices claimed that it had been unwanted sexual advances that had driven him to brutalize Shepard, investigators, journalists and even lawyers involved in the murder trial seized upon the story as an example of hate crime at its most heinous. As Jimenez deconstructs an event that has since passed into the realm of mythology, he humanizes it. The result is a book that is fearless, frank and compelling. Investigative journalism at its relentless and compassionate best.

Steve’s previous videos are here. Our full video archive is here.