The Death of Writing, and Its Impact on Our Politics

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Photo Credit: Real Clear Politics For four months before the battle of Gettysburg, Pvt. Myron A. Clark, a 21-year-old clerk in Company I of the 14th Vermont Infantry, wrote every day in a leather-bound diary he’d bought in Washington, D.C.

He filled it with descriptions of camp life’s boredom and tedium and flashes of news. His prose, marked with spelling errors, was spare, yet lively and informative, and an entry often said more than its words. On March, 19, for instance, Clark noted: “Peter Berges on Knapsack Drill for laziness & Frank Pasno in the Guard house for drunkenness.” Four days later, he complained of “a miserable straggling march of about 7 miles.” The 14th Vermont, in the middle of a nine-month enlistment, was having discipline problems.

By July 1, Clark was camped in a wheat field south of Gettysburg, Pa., ready for a fight after a 12-mile march. “I washed myself, changed my shirt, threw away my old one so it makes my load only a Rubber & Fly tent and pr. Socks, but it is enough. This P.M. marched for Gettysburgh & saw the smoke — guess the village is burnt.”

Then, two days later, different handwriting recorded that Clark had been killed at 4 a.m. by a 12-pound cannon ball that took off “all the back part of his head.” He was one of the first casualties of the battle’s final, bloody day.

“He was a good boy and soldier,” the anonymous writer scrawled. “The whole Co. mourns his loss & Especially his Capt. Such are the fortunes of War and they are deplorable.”

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Everything You Know about Matthew Shepard is Wrong

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Photo Credit: Weekly Standard Stephen Jimenez sounds remarkably chipper on the phone when he calls in from Portland, his thirteenth city on a seemingly endless book tour. He’s plugging The Book of Matt, and the reason he’s chipper is that he hasn’t been burned in effigy, yet, or heckled mercilessly, yet, or denounced, at least by anybody that really matters, as a traitor to the cause. Yet.

The “cause” in this case would be gay rights, in all of its astounding exfoliations. Jimenez’s book threatens to uproot a foundational myth of the movement: that the murder of a University of Wyoming student named Matthew Shepard, in 1998, was a “hate crime.”

The approved account, received for 15 years now as both a horror and an inspiration, tells us that Shepard was approached in a bar one night by two strangers, who drove him to the outskirts of Laramie and then beat him nearly to death with the butt of a .357 Magnum pistol, for the simple reason that he was homosexual. One of the blows fell so hard it pushed Shepard’s brain into his brain stem, cracking it. He was found the next morning tied to a rail fence crucifixion-style, after 18 hours in near-freezing temperatures, comatose.

Even before his death five days later, Shepard had been made a symbol, thanks to quick work by mainchancers from national gay rights organizations and by compliant reporters from back East, who found in the story a ready-made example of the intolerance, cruelty, violence, and raging homophobia of America’s flyover country, Western States Division.

Well, no, says Stephen Jimenez. Beginning as a self-described amateur journalist (the best kind), he studied Shepard’s murder off and on for 13 years, conducted hundreds of interviews with sources on and off the record, and pored over a public record many thousands of pages long. His comprehensive account corrects the approved version in small matters and large. Shepard was not tied to the rail fence as if crucified, for example, and it’s still not clear, even after Jimenez’s exhaustive reporting, how this piece of misinformation became common knowledge—beyond the obvious explanation that reporters thought the detail was, as the saying goes, too good to check.

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Right Wing’s Surge in Europe Has the Establishment Rattled

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Photo Credit: Laerke Posselt for NYTAs right-wing populists surge across Europe, rattling established political parties with their hostility toward immigration, austerity and the European Union, Mikkel Dencker of the Danish People’s Party has found yet another cause to stir public anger: pork meatballs missing from kindergartens.

A member of Denmark’s Parliament and, he hopes, mayor of this commuter-belt town west of Copenhagen, Mr. Dencker is furious that some day care centers have removed meatballs, a staple of traditional Danish cuisine, from their cafeterias in deference to Islamic dietary rules. No matter that only a handful of kindergartens have actually done so. The missing meatballs, he said, are an example of how “Denmark is losing its identity” under pressure from outsiders.

The issue has become a headache for Mayor Helle Adelborg, whose center-left Social Democratic Party has controlled the town council since the 1920s but now faces an uphill struggle before municipal elections on Nov. 19. “It is very easy to exploit such themes to get votes,” she said. “They take a lot of votes from my party. It is unfair.”

It is also Europe’s new reality. All over, established political forces are losing ground to politicians whom they scorn as fear-mongering populists. In France, according to a recent opinion poll, the far-right National Front has become the country’s most popular party. In other countries — Austria, Britain, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Finland and the Netherlands — disruptive upstart groups are on a roll.

This phenomenon alarms not just national leaders but also officials in Brussels who fear that European Parliament elections next May could substantially tip the balance of power toward nationalists and forces intent on halting or reversing integration within the European Union.

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Iran Nuclear Talks End with No Agreement after France Balks at Deal

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Photo Credit: Fox News Negotiations among world powers to temporarily curb Iran’s nuclear program ended with no deal Saturday after France objected that proposals did not go far enough.

French foreign minister Laurent Fabius said that the talks, which ended early Sunday, managed to narrow differences without eliminating them, saying there are “still questions to be dealt with” in future rounds. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said “significant progress” had been made on the differences that remain.

A Western diplomat said a new round would be needed to agree on all points of a temporary deal that would to lead to a comprehensive agreement ensuring that Tehran’s nuclear work remains peaceful.

European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, who coordinated the talks, said Iran and the five permanent U.N. Security Council members plus Germany would meet again on Nov. 20.

Fabius said there were “several points” in the initial deal with which his country is not satisfied and told France-Inter Radio France does not want to be part of a “con game.”

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Berkeley Bans Term ‘Illegal Immigrant’

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Photo Credit: thecollegefix.comThe UC Berkeley student government has banned the term “illegal immigrant” from its discourse, deeming the phrase racist, offensive, unfair and derogatory.

In an unanimous vote, student senators passed a resolution that stated the word “illegal” is “racially charged,” “dehumanizes” people, and contributes to “punitive and discriminatory actions aimed primarily at immigrants and communities of color.”

The “resolution in support of drop the I-word campaign” was approved 18 to 0 with one abstention on Oct. 30, according to a copy of the meeting’s minutes obtained by The College Fix.

Its approval marks at least the second time this semester that a public university’s student government has voted to eradicate the phrase. UCLA passed a nearly identical measure in late August.

There are an estimated 900 students in the country illegally who are currently enrolled in the 10-campus, University of California system, according to UC officials. These students live in “fear” because former Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano is now president of the UC system, according to the resolution, which aims to “create a safe campus environment for all students.”

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Executions Stall as States Seek Different Drugs

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Photo Credit: wootomFlorida ran out of its primary lethal-injection drug last month and relied on a new drug that no state had ever used for an execution. At Ohio’s next scheduled execution, the state is planning to use a two-drug combination for the first time. Last month in Texas, Michael Yowell became that state’s first inmate executed using a drug made by a lightly regulated pharmacy that usually produces customized medications for individual patients.

The decision by manufacturers to cut off supplies of drugs, some of which had been widely used in executions for decades, has left many of the nation’s 32 death penalty states scrambling to come up with new drugs and protocols. Some states have already changed their laws to keep the names of lethal-drug suppliers private as a way to encourage them to provide drugs.

The uncertainty is leading to delays in executions because of legal challenges, raising concerns that condemned inmates are being inadequately anesthetized before being executed and leading the often-macabre process of state-sanctioned executions into a continually shifting legal, bureaucratic and procedural terrain.

In the Florida execution, which used the new drug midazolam as part of a three-drug mix, The Associated Press reported that the inmate, William Happ, appeared to remain conscious longer and made more body movements after losing consciousness than those executed with the old formula.

“We have seen more changes in lethal injection protocols in the last five years than we have seen in the last three decades,” said Deborah W. Denno, a professor at Fordham Law School and a death penalty expert. “These states are just scrambling for drugs, and they’re changing their protocols rapidly and carelessly.”

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DMV Employee Pleads Guilty to Giving At Least 300 Illegals State ID’s or Licenses

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Photo Credit: APThree people in Virginia, including a DMV employee, pleaded guilty this week to conspiring to get state IDs or driver’s licenses for at least 300 illegal immigrants.

Noemi Barboza pleaded guilty on Thursday to “a bribery conspiracy charge, admitting that she often drove illegal immigrants to the Fairfax DMV location where an employee would approve their applications for driver’s licenses, learner’s permits, and identification cards knowing they could not prove legal presence in the United States.” Four people engaged in the scheme from 2007 to 2011. The fourth person has not yet been charged.

The illegal immigrants paid Barboza’s husband or another person, who then reportedly “split the money with” Maria Cavallaro, a 45-year-old DMV employee…

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Analysis: Over 40 Million May Lose Their Employer Based Health Plans

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Photo Credit: LOUIS DELUCA — Dallas Morning News/MCTEven as President Barack Obama sold a new health care law in part by assuring Americans they would be able to keep their insurance plans, his administration knew that tens of millions of people actually could lose those their policies.

“If you like your private health insurance plan, you can keep your plan. Period,” Obama said as he pitched the plan, the unqualified promise he made repeatedly.

Yet advisers did say in 2010 that there were large caveats and that anyone whose insurance plan changed would lose the promised protection of being able to keep existing plans. And a report in 2010 said that as many as 69 percent of certain employer-based insurance plans would lose that protection, meaning as many as 41 million people could lose their plans even if they wanted to keep them and would be forced into other plans. Another 11 million who bought their own insurance also could lose their plans. Combined, as many as 52 million Americans could lose or have lost old insurance plans.

Some or much of that loss of favored insurance is driven by normal year-to-year changes such as employers changing plans to save money. And many people could end up with better plans. But it is not what the president pledged.

Caught in the firestorm of his broken promise, Obama on Thursday apologized.

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CNN Blames Christians for Obamacare Problems

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Photo Credit: Breitbart CNN has blamed Christians for the problem of Americans without health insurance, calling it “The Obamacare ‘scandal’ you haven’t heard about.” In an article on CNN.com’s Belief Blog, CNN writer John Blake says that, while famous pastors “preach in states where crosses and church steeples dot the skyline,” they do nothing about “the poor who can’t get the health insurance they would receive if they lived elsewhere.”

That refers, in turn, to the decision of twenty-five states not to participate in Obamacare’s expanded Medicaid funding. The states were allowed to opt out following last year’s controversial Supreme Court decision on Obamacare, which upheld the law as a whole but struck down the mandatory state participation in Medicaid expansion, citing the protection provided to state powers under the Tenth Amendment.

Some Republican states took the funding anyway, which provides health insurance subsidies for households with incomes up to 138% of the poverty level. Though the federal government will initially cover almost all of the cost, many Republican governors are wary of potential future costs, and are also worried about the effect on the federal budget itself. Many are also opposed to participating in the Obamacare program on principle.

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Obama’s Secret Iran Détente

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Photo Credit: APThe Obama administration began softening sanctions on Iran after the election of Iran’s new president in June, months before the current round of nuclear talks in Geneva or the historic phone call between the two leaders in September.

While those negotiations now appear on the verge of a breakthrough the key condition for Iran—relief from crippling sanctions—began quietly and modestly five months ago.

A review of Treasury Department notices reveals that the U.S. government has all but stopped the financial blacklisting of entities and people that help Iran evade international sanctions since the election of its president, Hassan Rouhani, in June.

On Wednesday Obama said in an interview with NBC News the negotiations in Geneva “are not about easing sanctions.” “The negotiations taking place are about how Iran begins to meet its international obligations and provide assurances not just to us but to the entire world,” the president said.

But it has also long been Obama’s strategy to squeeze Iran’s economy until Iran would be willing to trade relief from sanctions for abandoning key elements of its nuclear program.

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