Monday, September 25, 2017
Sunday, September 24, 2017
Five college football players charged in hazing, attempted sodomy of freshman
Will it never end? Five college football players charged in hazing, attempted sodomy of freshman
September 19, 2017
Five Wheaton College football players are facing felony charges for their alleged hazing attack on a freshman teammate in 2016.
Authorities signed arrest warrants Monday for football players James Cooksey, Kyler Kregel, Benjamin Pettway, Noah Spielman and Samuel TeBos. All five are charged with aggravated battery, mob action, and unlawful restraint. Wheaton College is located in the Chicago suburb of Wheaton, about 25 miles west of the city.
The victim gave a statement to the Chicago Tribune about what he said was a deeply traumatic assault.
“This has had a devastating effect on my life. What was done to me should never occur in connection with a football program or any other activity. … I am confident that the criminal prosecution will provide a fair and just punishment to the men who attacked me.”
The Wheaton Police Department refused to released any reports related to the incident, but the newspaper was able to obtain records of the victim’s statements to police.
The alleged incident occurred in March 2016 while the victim was watching the NCAA basketball tournament in his dorm room. Several of his older teammates burst into the room and allegedly began punching him. According to the victim’s statement, the players tied duct tape around his bare legs, put a pillow case over his head, and carried him out of the dorm and into a car.
While in the car, the victim reported that the men played Middle Eastern music and told the victim that he had been kidnapped by Muslims who wanted to have sex with goats. The teammates patted his foot and told him that he would be their “goat” for the evening before pulling down his shorts and attempting to insert an object into his rectum. When he resisted, they allegedly beat him.
The teammates took the victim to an off-campus park and, after taking his cell phone and throwing dirt on him, allegedly left him on a baseball diamond half-naked and tied up with duct tape in 45 degree weather.
The 19-year-old had just transferred to the conservative Christian school and had no idea where he was or how to get home. About 10 minutes later, another player was left at the baseball field with the victim, and the two were able to get home when friends came looking for the second victim.
After reaching his dorm and calling his mother, the freshman drove himself to the hospital where he was treated for two torn shoulders along with additional minor injuries.
The victim broke down in the emergency room and a nurse called police to collect evidence. His grandparents then picked him up from the hospital and took him to their home to stay with them for the night.
His father drove to the college the next day and moved him out of the dorm. He withdrew from the college not long after.
The victim reportedly needed two surgeries because of his injuries.
According to a statement released by the college Monday, school administrators learned about the alleged assault from coaches and other team members shortly after it happened. The school launched an investigation, and school officials claim to have punished the students involved.
But the school reportedly refused to release details about the “corrective action.” Sources with knowledge of the situation told the Tribune that some of the college’s football players were required to complete 50 hours of community service and write an eight-page essay to reflect on their behavior.
“Wheaton remains committed to providing Christ-centered development programs and training to all our students,” Campus spokeswoman LaTonya Taylor said in a statement.
All five of the accused men were on the school’s football team roster as of Monday. Three of them, Speilman, Kregel, and Pettway all played in a game Saturday.
Kregel, 21, is a center from Grand Rapids, Michigan and was a second-team All-American center for the Thunder in 2016. Pettway , also 21, is an offensive lineman from Lookout Mountain, Georgia. Cooksey, 22, is a defensive lineman from Jacksonville, Florida, and TeBos, 22, is a linebacker from Allendale, Michigan.
Spielman, 21, is a defensive lineman from Columbus, Ohio. He is the son of former NFL All-Pro linebacker Chris Spielman. Chris Spielman is currently working as a football analyst for Fox Sports.
Bonds are set at $50,000 for each man, and they are expected to turn themselves in to police this week.
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Reading the Far Right: Hillary Clinton's Book Brings Out Haters
https://www.advocate.com/media/2017/9/21/reading-far-right-hillary-clintons-book-brings-out-haters
BY TRUDY RING
SEPTEMBER 21 2017 2:30 PM EDT
Hillary Clinton’s new book, What Happened, is food for thought for many, but fuel for hate on the far right.
Not that some hate isn’t coming from the far left as well, but it’s the job of this column to monitor the far-right media so our readers don’t have to — and in the past week or so these outlets have been filled with attacks on and untruths about Clinton. They’re entitled to their opinion, of course, but the level of vitriol is mind-boggling. And they’re not entitled to their alternative facts.
Also in the latest news from the extreme right: lots of love for bigoted Senate candidate Roy Moore, regressive gender politics, and praise for Donald Trump’s bombastic United Nations speech.
But first, the reaction to Clinton’s bestselling memoir on the 2016 campaign and her public appearances around it. Jeffrey Lord, the political commentator fired by CNN for tweeting “Sieg Heil!” at Media Matters president Angelo Carusone, made his debut as a Breitbart columnist by likening Clinton to white supremacist David Duke. Yes. Really.
“In an interview with Jane Pauley on CBS Sunday Morning, in which the failed 2016 Democratic Party nominee was promoting her new book What Happened, Clinton actually sounded exactly like former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, blaming her loss on race,” Lord wrote. He opened the column with a fake quote from Duke blaming his various electoral losses on “millions of black people,” then revealed it was actually Clinton blaming her loss, in response to a question from Pauley, on “millions of white people.”
Well, Clinton’s not wrong — exit polls did reveal that a majority of white voters supported Trump, while other racial groups favored Clinton by wide margins. But Lord said that by “playing the race card,” something anyone who points out racism is accused of doing, Clinton shows she’s just as bad as Duke. A statement like that, of course, totally ignores the differences in the way blacks and whites have been treated over the course of American history.
Lord went on to claim that those fighting racism ignore the racist actions of past generations of Democrats, such as President Woodrow Wilson. Actually, a large group of Princeton University students had called for the removal of Wilson’s name from its School of Public and International Affairs and from a residential college (Wilson was president of Princeton before he was president of the U.S.). Princeton trustees last year decided to keep his name on the institutions but also announced a renewed commitment to diversity and inclusion at the university.
Lord also took President Franklin D. Roosevelt to task for appointing former Klan member Hugo Black to the Supreme Court. The columnist called Black a “lifetime member” of the Klan, which is not true — he resigned after two years, long before he sat on the court. Lord further pointed out Black’s support for FDR’s internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, but far from ignoring this act of persecution, many progressives have denounced it for years. Black, by the way, became a great supporter of equal rights for people of all races in such decisions as Brown v. Board of Education, which declared that segregated public schools violate the Constitution. People can and do change.
But back to Clinton. World Net Daily contributor Patrice Lewis had this to say: “Hillary, dear, I have a simple explanation for why you lost: NOBODY LIKES YOU. You’re a shrill, foul-mouthed harridan. You lie like a rug and loathe half of America’s population (‘deplorables’). You throw violent, childish temper tantrums and have the dignity of a drunken sot. The thought of you with a finger on the proverbial button is terrifying. The visual of you representing us on the world stage in your ever-present pants suits was enough to turn even the most ardent progressives toward Bernie Sanders.”
Wow. Along with sexist insults coming from another woman, there are some passages in there that would be an apt description of another presidential candidate, the one who got 3 million fewer votes than the woman “nobody” liked but now occupies the White House because of the vagaries of the Electoral College and, perhaps, Russian meddling.
On Townhall, John Hawkins called Clinton’s book a “monstrosity” and offered a “short, handy list explaining reasons why so many people hate Hillary Clinton that go beyond her socialistic political beliefs.” These include, according to Hawkins, that “her whole campaign could have been boiled down to ‘Vote for me because I’m a woman’” and “Hillary’s entire claim to fame is being married to Bill.” So much wrong with so many statements in one column. But Clinton seems to exemplify everything the far right despises.
A politician who exemplifies everything the right-wingers love is Roy Moore, the ousted Alabama Supreme Court chief justice turned U.S. Senate candidate. Moore will face current Sen. Luther Strange (appointed to fill the vacancy left when Jeff Sessions joined Trump’s Cabinet) in a runoff Tuesday to choose the Republican candidate, who will face Democrat Doug Jones in December. Breitbart and similar sites are filled with effusive support for Moore and hyperbolic hatred for Strange, even though he shares Moore’s far-right ideology and has the support of Trump. But Strange has committed the cardinal sin of being too cozy with mainstream Republicans like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, not trusted by the extreme right to realize the conservative vision for America.
“It’s not an exaggeration to suggest that the Alabama Senate primary is the most important Senate election of our generation,” wrote Moore supporter Daniel Horowitz at a site called Conservative Review. “That is because this is not just about filling one conservative Senate seat; this is about the future of the Republican Party and perhaps the opening shot that will create momentum for a new political party in America — one that will challenge the uniparty of Republicrats and Democans. We don’t have two parties in America. We have one unibrow party that serves various sectors of the special interest cartels, which both lead to the growth of government and the furtherance of cultural Marxism.”
Well, there’s ample reason to criticize the power that lobbying groups hold over our government, but last we checked there were some big, big differences between the two major parties. Not big enough, though, for people like Horowitz, who also said Trump hasn’t done enough to promote conservative values. “A Moore win could either open the floodgates for successful primary challenges or serve as the impetus for a new party built upon the true outsider agenda Trump campaigned on but ultimately betrayed,” he wrote.
Breitbart radio host Alex Marlow interviewed former Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin, a homophobe who’s now with the Family Research Council’s political action arm, about why conservatives should support Moore. Praising Moore’s “courage” and knowledge of the Constitution, Boykin said, “When the [U.S.] Supreme Court ruled that same-sex marriage was a right, a constitutional right, Roy Moore said to his judges there in the state of Alabama, ‘The Supreme Court can’t tell us in the state of Alabama what to do on this issue, and unlike what most people think, all federal rulings don’t supersede or overtake all state rulings.’ He stood up and said, ‘You don’t have to obey this.’” Actually, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling did supersede state laws, and Moore’s resistance eventually got him booted from his job.
There are many more articles in this vein in the right-wing cyberworld. The view from the other side is that Strange and Moore amount to bad and worse, and it’s encouraging that Jones is receiving enough support to assure that either one will face stiff competition in the general election.
Regressive gender ideology is common among the far right, but a couple of recent examples really stand out. One came in response to a rather dumb column published by Glamourmagazine, which really is generally much smarter. The Glamour column by Korey Lane, a liberal woman, was titled “Help, I Can't Stop Hooking Up With Trump Supporters.” Apparently political arguments excite her.
But Kurt Schlicter, in a Townhall column, mansplained that the real reason is that conservatives are just, well, more manly than liberals. “Look, it’s pretty clear that women naturally respond to men whose idea of initiating a romantic encounter doesn’t involve crying or abject, craven apologies for bearing the biological hallmarks of manhood,” he wrote. “But that’s what liberal women have sculpted out of the already soft clay of liberal males. Their coastal elitist mommies and daddies, or other mommies, plop them down in some leftist college where the pierced and piercing fascist feminists get to work on them.”
Oh, he also called feminists “shrill harridans.” The right wing just loves to use that term. And ironically, his thoroughly heterocentric column was illustrated with the cover of an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog. Townhall’s editors apparently don’t realize who A&F’s biggest fans are.
Another Townhall contributor, Bill Murchison, endorsed Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s plan to scrap Obama-era guidelines on how colleges and universities should investigate sexual assault allegations, as he believes those “seem strongly to favor alleged victims over alleged perpetrators.” As part of his argument, he claimed things were so much better 50 years or so ago, when parental influence and school rules helped young people avoid temptation. This didn’t work perfectly, he said, but “at least we never heard back then about a national sexual assault crisis.”
No, Mr. Murchison, we didn’t hear about it because a lot of people were unwilling to admit that assault was assault. If a woman was raped by a man she knew, maybe even dated, it was because she “led him on” and “asked for it.” If she became pregnant as a result, her options included back-alley abortion and marrying her rapist. Yes, those good old days were really good. And then there was the shaming of women who had consensual sex and the persecution of LGBT people — please, let’s not go back there.
Before we wrap up, a little on the man who remains pretty much far-rightists’ favorite president ever, even though he’s disappointed them at times. His bombastic speech at the United Nations this week, vowing to “totally destroy” North Korea and to scrap the Iran nuclear deal, appalled many liberals and centrists, along with many world leaders. But the right wing loved it.
Cal Thomas, a longtime conservative syndicated columnist who’s not always a fan of Trump, called said it “may have been Trump's finest speech as president” in a piece posted at Townhall.“Clearly, the president was trying to mobilize a lethargic world body to act in its own and the world's best interests,” Thomas continued.
On BarbWire, Timothy Buchanan said the address “will undoubtedly be remembered as one of the best speeches in President Trump’s political career.” He further contended, “True American patriots and freedom-loving people the world over were cheering at the prospect of a coming end to the failures of previous U.S. administrations.” OK — those who dislike Trump’s approach hate freedom!
And Breitbart, Infowars, and more are gloating that revelations about the FBI wiretapping of onetime Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort have vindicated Trump’s claim that President Obama had his “wires tapped.” That is an overstatement at the very least, according to such respected sources as The Washington Post and The Atlantic (not respected by the far right, but respected by pretty much everyone else). The situation is complicated, but there is nothing to suggest Trump was the target of the wiretapping or that Obama was personally involved, the publications noted.
That’s it for now. We’ll be back next week with more insights into right-wingers' mind-set, gained from reading their sites so you don’t have to.
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Saturday, September 23, 2017
Friday, September 22, 2017
Thursday, September 21, 2017
Wednesday, September 20, 2017
Wednesday PM
Continuing our impromptu survey of interesting blogs, here are some samples from Natural Naked Pics. All different kinds of people, not all naked, some just showing dangly bits. And for some reason lots of bikes -- the cycles, not the jockstraps . . .
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