Tag: news

The Advocate, a national
LGBT-interest magazine, followed Time‘s lead and named Pope
Francis as their “Person of the Year.” Although the pontiff’s
popular appeal has snowballed this year, the decision and its
reasoning still come as surprises.

Editorial Director Lucas Grindley explains
the magazine’s pick. He writes that we shouldn’t “underestimate any
pope’s capacity for persuading hearts and minds in opening to LGBT
people, and not only in the U.S. but globally.” He also details the
compassion Francis has demonstrated to individuals in the community
and in dialogue with LGBT groups.

Grindley suggests that Francis is “all the more daring” and
deserving because he has allegedly reversed the trend of past
popes. But, has he really? And, should that warrant him the
honorific title?

The Advocate contrasts Francis with Pope Emeritus
Benedict XVI, asserting that the latter was homophobic. This is the
same Benedict who
said, “It is deplorable that homosexual persons have been and
are the object of violent malice in speech or in action. Such
treatment deserves condemnation from the church’s pastors wherever
it occurs.” The emeritus pope’s statement was not
an isolated incident.

Oddly, but to Grindley’s credit, he doesn’t overlook the fact
that Francis, like Benedict and the
authoritative texts of the Catholic Church, has for religious
reasons in no way endorsed gay marriage. Grindley simply banks on
his hope that this will change, as if the views of a foreign
religious leader ought to have any impact on the democratic process
in the United States.

Pope Francis, who has
stated his commitment to promoting the dignity of “every man
and woman” regardless of their identity, is not necessarily a bad
pick on The Advocate‘s part. However, Grindley’s decision
to pick this pope – for ostensibly being different than
the last man to hold his role – is a shaky argument. The situation
recalls President Barack Obama’s reception of a Nobel Peace Prize
essentially for not being former-President George W. Bush.

Spiritual and social understanding are important, but it may
have made more sense had the magazine picked those who demonstrably
and favorably affected U.S. law for the LGBT community. Grindley
does dedicate deserved time to explaining the merits of those
involved in striking down the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA)
earlier this year. He lauds:

Edie Windsor… is a hero to LGBT Americans for taking the final
punch in the fight against the discriminatory Defense of Marriage
Act, and section 3 is no more.

[…]

Also at the Supreme Court that day, for example, were the four
plaintiffs in the related Proposition 8 case from California, and
they should be lauded. Or, any of their lawyers… Then there’s
attorney Roberta Kaplan, one of us, who eloquently refuted Chief
Justice John Roberts when he suggested times have changed and LGBT
people are no longer an oppressed minority.

Yet, that is apparently not enough to warrant “Person of the
Year” for any of them. The Advocate‘s choice can be seen
as goodwill extended from the LGBT community to the Catholic
community, an optimistic response to Francis’ own efforts. But,
that is difficult to do while pretending Francis is an advocate for
anything different than his predecessor, and sidelining the
America’s own LGBT advocates who triumphed over considerable legal
burdens this year.

The Advocate, a national
LGBT-interest magazine, followed Time‘s lead and named Pope
Francis as their “Person of the Year.” Although the pontiff’s
popular appeal has snowballed this year, the decision and its
reasoning still come as surprises.

Editorial Director Lucas Grindley explains
the magazine’s pick. He writes that we shouldn’t “underestimate any
pope’s capacity for persuading hearts and minds in opening to LGBT
people, and not only in the U.S. but globally.” He also details the
compassion Francis has demonstrated to individuals in the community
and in dialogue with LGBT groups.

Grindley suggests that Francis is “all the more daring” and
deserving because he has allegedly reversed the trend of past
popes. But, has he really? And, should that warrant him the
honorific title?

The Advocate contrasts Francis with Pope Emeritus
Benedict XVI, asserting that the latter was homophobic. This is the
same Benedict who
said, “It is deplorable that homosexual persons have been and
are the object of violent malice in speech or in action. Such
treatment deserves condemnation from the church’s pastors wherever
it occurs.” The emeritus pope’s statement was not
an isolated incident.

Oddly, but to Grindley’s credit, he doesn’t overlook the fact
that Francis, like Benedict and the
authoritative texts of the Catholic Church, has for religious
reasons in no way endorsed gay marriage. Grindley simply banks on
his hope that this will change, as if the views of a foreign
religious leader ought to have any impact on the democratic process
in the United States.

Pope Francis, who has
stated his commitment to promoting the dignity of “every man
and woman” regardless of their identity, is not necessarily a bad
pick on The Advocate‘s part. However, Grindley’s decision
to pick this pope – for ostensibly being different than
the last man to hold his role – is a shaky argument. The situation
recalls President Barack Obama’s reception of a Nobel Peace Prize
essentially for not being former-President George W. Bush.

Spiritual and social understanding are important, but it may
have made more sense had the magazine picked those who demonstrably
and favorably affected U.S. law for the LGBT community. Grindley
does dedicate deserved time to explaining the merits of those
involved in striking down the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA)
earlier this year. He lauds:

Edie Windsor… is a hero to LGBT Americans for taking the final
punch in the fight against the discriminatory Defense of Marriage
Act, and section 3 is no more.

[…]

Also at the Supreme Court that day, for example, were the four
plaintiffs in the related Proposition 8 case from California, and
they should be lauded. Or, any of their lawyers… Then there’s
attorney Roberta Kaplan, one of us, who eloquently refuted Chief
Justice John Roberts when he suggested times have changed and LGBT
people are no longer an oppressed minority.

Yet, that is apparently not enough to warrant “Person of the
Year” for any of them. The Advocate‘s choice can be seen
as goodwill extended from the LGBT community to the Catholic
community, an optimistic response to Francis’ own efforts. But,
that is difficult to do while pretending Francis is an advocate for
anything different than his predecessor, and sidelining the
America’s own LGBT advocates who triumphed over considerable legal
burdens this year.

You know cops are trying to
gloss over a bit of bad news when they write up an accidental fatal
shooting by their own in a passive voice and bury it at the end of
a press release. That’s what the Ross County, Ohio, Sheriff’s
Office did last week, when announcing a drug raid gone really,
really wrong. The press release talks up the discovery of “large
amounts of what is presumed to be heroin,” cash, and firearms. Oh.
And did we mention a woman got shot in the head? And died?

From the press
release’s very last paragraph (PDF):

During the execution of the search warrant, an adult female at
the residence suffered an apparent gunshot wound, and was
transported from the scene by medical helicopter. Pursuant to
policy, the Ross County Sheriff’s Office called BCI to the scene to
review the execution of the warrant.

Oh. That sounds unfortunate. The “bad guys” must have gone hog
wild, just blasting away, right.

Not so much. Buckeye Country 105.5
tells us:

A Ross County law enforcement official is on paid leave after
firing a shot that eventually killed a woman during a drug
raid.

Members of the U.S. 23 Task Force raided a known drug house
along U.S. 23 in southern Ross County late Wednesday night. As soon
as they got inside, they found a woman with a head wound on the
couch in the living room.

“It was discovered later that a bullet had accidentally
discharged from outside the door of the trailer and went through
the outside wall of the trailer and into the living room,” said
Ross County Sheriff George Lavender.

The bullet struck Krystal Barrows in the head. She was flown to
OSU Wexner Medical Center in Columbus, but she died from her
wounds.

Sgt. Brett McKnight (pictured) remains on administrative leave
while the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation exonerates investigates him
for letting off the shot and killing Krystal Barrows. He apparently
flinched when his buddies set off flash bang grenades in hopes of
startling everybody. They succeeded in spades, it would seem, with
special impact on police officers who haven’t mastered the whole
“keep your finger off the trigger until you’re ready to shoot”
rule.

The raid came as part of a Sheriff’s Office anti-drug effort
called
Stop Trafficking or Pay the Price. Sheriff George Lavender
tells the
Chillicothe Gazette:

“We started the STOPP initiative, and we’ve got to continue with
that. We have traffickers poisoning our children along with our
adults,” Lavender said. “So many families have family members
touched by drugs, and they’re not bad people. These users aren’t
bad people. They’re addicted. This is a sickness like people
(don’t) realize.”

If people aren’t willing to get over their “sickness,” Sheriff
Lavender is willing to make them pay a very high price, indeed.

Over the weekend, the Obama administration

said that as many as 15,000 Obamacare sign ups never actually
made it all the way to health insurers. As J.D. Tuccille
noted yesterday, these were people who had made it all the way
through the website gauntlet during the first two months, when the
system was practically impenetrable.

The administration isn’t exactly eager to focus on the fact that
thousands of people’s applications simply got lost in the shuffle.
But it is trying to highlight the improvements it says it has made
to the system. When the exchanges launched in October, roughly 10
percent of completed sign-ups got lost. Now the administration says
that figure is less than 1 percent.

That’s an improvement, of course. But if the administration is
still expecting to enroll millions of people in private coverage
through the law, a 1 percent error rate will still leave a
non-trivial number of individuals lost in transmission.

Missing files aren’t the only problem to plague the data
transfer process either. Many of the applications are being
transmitted, but with inaccurate data. Insurance industry sources

tell The New York Times that those problems still
remain—and that the administration is overstating the progress
that’s been made:

Insurers said that they had found many discrepancies and errors
and that the government was overstating the improvements
in HealthCare.gov.

In some instances, they said, the federal government reported
that the home address for a new policyholder was outside an
insurer’s service area. In other cases, a child was listed as the
main subscriber — the person responsible for paying premiums — and
parents were listed as dependents.

In some cases, children were enrolled in a policy by the federal
government and parents were left off, or vice versa. In other
cases, the government mixed up the members of a family: A child or
spouse was listed two or three times in the same application in
late November. Such errors can have financial implications,
increasing the amount of premiums that a family is required to
pay.

While some of the problems were discovered in the last few days,
insurers said that they had previously reported many of the errors
to the “help desk” at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid
Services, and that the problems remained unresolved.

 The help desk doesn’t sound all that helpful. 

On Thursday, I’ll be a guest (along with David Boaz of the
Cato Institute and Sabrina Schaeffer
of the Independent Women’s Forum)
on John Stossel’s eponymous Fox Business show, which airs
at 9PM ET.

We’ll be talking about the gains and losses for freedom over the
course of the year, so please tune in. Here’s a web exclusive clip
from the show, in which Stossel asks whether the media was in the
tank for Obama during 2013, which saw not just a variety of
scandals but the disastrous rollout of the Obamacare website. My
basic take? Sure, the press has mostly got Obama’s back, but it’s
also true that there’s never been a time as thick with alternative
outlets and news sources as right now.

Click to watch; about 2.30 minutes. Catch the whole show on
Thursday.

When U.S. District Judge
Richard Leon
issued his preliminary injunction against the NSA’s phone
record database yesterday, part of his
analysis (which I will discuss in my column tomorrow) concerned
whether the collection of telephone metadata counts as a “search”
under the Fourth Amendment. But Leon also considered whether such a
search might be “reasonable,” even without an individualized
warrant, because of its usefulness in preventing terrorist attacks.
That part of the analysis was pretty straightforward, since the
government had presented no evidence that the database has been
useful in preventing terrorist attacks:

The Government does not cite a single instance in which
analysis of the NSA’s bulk metadata collection actually stopped an
imminent attack, or otherwise aided the Government in achieving any
objective that was time-sensitive in nature. In fact, none of the
three “recent episodes” cited by the Government that supposedly
“illustrate the role that telephony metadata analysis can play in
preventing and protecting against terrorist attack” involved any
apparent urgency….

Given the limited record before me at this point in the
litigation—most notably, the utter lack of evidence that a
terrorist attack has ever been prevented because searching the NSA
database was faster than other investigative tactics—I have serious
doubts about the efficacy of the metadata collection program as a
means of conducting time-sensitive investigations in cases
involving imminent threats of terrorism.

Leon’s conclusion on this question is striking, since you’d
think the Obama administration would be highly motivated to show
that the database has been crucial in saving lives. If the
government cannot muster a single plausible example, how can such a
massive invasion of privacy possibly be justified?

The administration has been
struggling with this problem since news reports based on leaks
from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden first revealed the
existence of the phone record database last June. At first
intelligence officials and their allies in Congress suggested that
the program had been instrumental in foiling more than 50 terrorist
plots. But those claims—which were immediately questioned
by Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.), who as
members of the Senate Intelligence Committee ought to
know—dissolved upon close examination. Last October a ProPublica
analysis
concluded “there’s no evidence that the oft-cited figure
is accurate.”

The crucial question, usually dodged by the NSA and its
defenders, is whether routinely collecting everyone’s phone
records, as opposed to seeking specific, evidence-based court
orders aimed at particular targets, has been decisive in stopping
terrorist attacks. If the government has been unable to offer any
examples in the last six months, it seems unlikely it ever
will.