“Old Fashion Muscular Tough Guy’s”: Christie Scandal And A ‘Feminized Atmosphere’
It stands to reason that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s (R) admirers are going to defend him as the bridge scandal unfolds. There’s even a predictable defense: the governor wasn’t responsible since he wasn’t aware of his aides’ alleged misconduct.
But some of the arguments Christie’s allies have come up with are more striking than others. Fox News’ Brit Hume, for example, was asked yesterday about the governor’s reputation for bullying those who disagree with him. Hume responded:
“Well, I would have to say that in this sort of feminized atmosphere in which we exist today, guys who are masculine and muscular like that in their private conduct, kind of old fashion tough guys, run some risk. […]
“By which I mean that men today have learned the lesson the hard way that if you act like a kind of an old fashioned guy’s guy, you’re in constant danger of slipping out and saying something that’s going to get you in trouble and make you look like a sexist or make you look like you seem thuggish or whatever. That’s the atmosphere in which he operates. This guy [Christie] is very much an old fashioned masculine, muscular guy, and there are political risks associated with that. Maybe it shouldn’t be, but that’s how it is.”
Perhaps this is the best Republican media can do given the revelations?
I’ll confess I didn’t see that one coming. The Christie administration is accused of abusing its power, seeking petty political retribution against perceived enemies, using public resources as a weapon that endangered the public, and then lying about it.
Leave it to Fox’s senior political analyst to explain that the governor is the actually victim – he’s the muscular tough guy being treated unfairly because of his old fashioned masculinity. Team Christie isn’t “thuggish,” Hume assures us, it only appears that way because of the darned “feminized atmosphere.”
Apparently, we should feel bad for the terrible burdens the Republican governor must feel, being so tough and muscular in an environment that doesn’t fully appreciate a “guy’s guy.”
Elsewhere on the Sunday shows, the RNC’s Reince Priebus, Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), and Rudy Giuliani all equated Christie’s bridge scandal with the IRS story from last spring, apparently unaware that the comparison is remarkably stupid.
The RNC’s Sean Spicer added that last week’s developments in New Jersey are proof that Christie is “what America is yearning for,” a point echoed by Karl Rove, who said the governor blaming his staff is emblematic of “what we want in a leader.”
None of these folks, by the way, appeared to be kidding. These are their actual talking points.
Kathleen Parker, meanwhile, believes Christie may ultimately thrive because conservatives will think journalists and news organizations are being “mean” to him. “What is certain is that the only thing the Republican base hates more than a liar and a bully is a bullying media,” she wrote. “Once that common enemy is established, the perceived victim often becomes the victor.”
It would appear for many Republicans in media, efforts to address Christie’s controversy on the merits are over. Indeed, they never really started in the first place.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, January 13, 2014
“It Was All For Spite”: A Scandal We Can Sink Our Teeth Into
During the Lewinsky scandal, our nation’s brave pundits spent a good amount of time fluttering their hands in front of their faces and expressing dismay that they had to spend so much time talking about something so lurid. The truth was that they loved it like a labrador loves liverwurst, but some scandals are just more fun than others. Does it concern a lot of dull policy arcana, or something a little more human? Is there room for lots of speculation about people’s motivations? Are there interesting characters—your Gordon Liddys, your Linda Tripps—to liven up the proceedings? These are the things that make a scandal.
We haven’t yet met the people at the heart of the Chris Christie George Washington Bridge scandal, but since they’re people in New Jersey politics, I’m guessing that if we ever get them in front of the cameras, a new media star or two would be born. And what I find glorious about this story is that the action in question had no practical purpose whatsoever. It didn’t enrich anyone or give anyone an unfair political advantage. It was just for spite. Members of the Christie administration, it now appears, created monumental traffic tie-ups in the town of Fort Lee, which abuts the G.W. Bridge, simply because the mayor, a Democrat, didn’t endorse Christie in an election he would win by 22 points.
We now have some fabulous emails and texts, including the smokingest of smoking guns, where a top Christie aide emailed a Port Authority official and said, “Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee,” to which he replied, “Got it,” and it was made so. If it sounds like something out of an episode of “The Sopranos,” that isn’t just because it takes place in New Jersey. The only danger I see is the possibility that the cat has been let out of the bag too soon, and there won’t be even more juicy revelations to come. But we can hope.
In all likelihood, Governor Christie will say that he knew nothing of these nefarious doings, and nobody’s angrier about it than he is. Anyone whose name is on an incriminating email will be shown the door forthwith, having so brazenly subverted the tradition of integrity in public service for which the state has long been known. It may well be that Christie knew nothing about it; after all, he isn’t an idiot, and only an idiot would think screwing over a small-town mayor in so public a fashion, just before an election you’re going to win in a walk, would be a good idea.
But it does present a problem for him, because it’s the kind of scandal you’d dream up if you wanted to undermine the Christie ’16 bid. As Ezra Klein reminds us, Chris Christie doesn’t just have a reputation for being a bully, he’s actually a bully. And it would take a bully to say to a town of 35,000 people, “Your mayor didn’t endorse me? Well see how you like it when it takes you two hours to get over the Bridge, you worms.”
But what we need is to get everybody involved under oath, so we can get to know them and hear their stories. Maybe give them immunity; that’s what Congress did with Oliver North, and his testimony was riveting. Benghazi? Boring. IRS? Snoozeville. This is a scandal that could offer some real entertainment.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, January 8, 2014
“The Case For Gun Liability Laws”: Guns Are The Only Consumer Product In America With No Safety Oversight
Knives. Automobiles. Cold medicine. Alcohol. Cigarettes. Coffee.
What do these items have in common?
They’re all held to a higher safety standard than firearms.
Because of product-liability law, manufacturers must equip them with proper warnings, limitations and built-in designs that enhance their safety.
If they don’t, consumers can sue them for harm caused by the product. And all consumer products manufacturers are required to ensure that their products are free of design defects and don’t threaten public safety.
Guns, as Jonathan Lowy of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence’s Legal Action Project has said, are “the only consumer product in America with no federal safety oversight.”
Firearms haven’t always been a protected class; but as the industry lost millions in lawsuits over the years, liability protection became the NRA’s holy grail.
Before 2005, the Brady Center — named for President Reagan’s press secretary James Brady, who was shot and paralyzed in a failed assassination attempt on the president — had launched multiple lawsuits around the country. Los Angeles, New York and 30 other cities, counties and states had filed civil lawsuits against gun manufacturers — including a $100 million suit against the gun industry by Bridgeport, Connecticut in 1999. The pain inflicted on negligent manufacturers was real and it was expensive. In 2003, Bryco Arms declared bankruptcy after paying $24 million in the case of a 7-year-old boy who was paralyzed by a defective gun.
Then, in 2005, after a civil lawsuit brought after the Washington, D.C., sniper killings left the manufacturer Bushmaster with a $2 million bill, the NRA aggressively and successfully lobbied for the passage of the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act , which offered permanent protection to gun makers.
There is absolutely no reason that the manufacturers of deadly weapons should be given a free pass. Yet, after a week of carnage that included the Navy Yard shooting and a Chicago killing spree, Congress — a wholly owned subsidiary of the NRA — isn’t even bothering with gun-control legislation.
The public is expected to move on, with a weary shrug of the shoulders and a passive shake of the head, resigned to the inaction of our elected officials.
But the seventh mass shooting in a year combined with data predicting another one in February are not signs that we should give up.
They are a reminder that change takes time, patience and resolve, even when the moving images of tearful families are pushed to the back of our collective cultural memory.
Following the 1981 shooting of Brady, it took over five years for Congress to introduce meaningful gun legislation. The Brady Law requiring background checks wasn’t signed until 1993.
As gun violence increases, so too does the NRA’s stock — and the stock price of the publicly held gun manufacturers that fund it. In the wake of the December 2012 Newtown massacre, gun sales increased across the country. And the NRA gets a dollar for every gun or package of ammunition sold at participating stores.
A lot of those dollars go directly into Congressional coffers. The Center for Public Integrity reported that the NRA, Gun Owners of America and other allied groups have poured nearly $81 million into House, Senate and presidential races since 2000. Of the 46 senators who blocked a federal background checks bill in April, 43 have received millions of dollars from pro-gun interests in the last decade. And if elected officials weren’t already scared of being unseated by NRA-funded ads and campaigns, they need only look to the two Colorado state legislators who were recently recalled for supporting gun-control legislation.
Yet, there may be an opening to once again revisit common-sense legislation, including changing liability laws. After all, those who voted against the background check bill saw their approval ratings in their states drop as a result. And as recalled Colorado Sen. Angela Giron recently wrote, there is, in fact, a growing counterbalance to the gun lobby, with more organizations standing up for those who favor sensible gun reform.
Before the gun lobby successfully killed all gun-control legislation, there were some key wins in the fight to hold gun manufacturers liable. Last year, the New York State appellate court ruled that a Buffalo man who was shot nearly a decade ago could sue the gun manufacturer, distributor and dealer. In August of this year, the Kansas Supreme Court ruled in favor of a plaintiff who filed a negligence lawsuit against the owners of a gun shop.
The NRA will paint product liability legislation as a threat to law-abiding gun owners. After all, guns are meant to injure and kill. But gun manufacturers could control distribution enough to prevent guns from entering the criminal market.
When the government is worried that you might use that second bottle of NyQuil to cook meth, it’s not unreasonable to ask why someone needs to buy 15 assault rifles in one sitting.
Washington’s shameful cowardice aside, there are leaders across the country who have courageously done the right thing, paying a political price so that innocent Americans don’t have to pay the ultimate price. As Sen. Giron said of her experience, “Today, Colorado is safer because of the laws we passed. I have no regrets about that.”
If more of our elected officials were inspired by her example, we might all have fewer regrets.
By: Katrina vanden Heuvel, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, September 24, 2013
“Too Complacent About American Bloodbaths”: Reasonable Laws Could Solve Shooting Rampages
Last week’s horror at the Washington Navy Yard barely interrupted the stale political chatter, the dueling poll-tested messages, the sensational reports on the latest celebrity divorce or stint in rehab. While the newest mass shooting did preoccupy reporters for a couple of days, its import — at least judged in headlines and cable hours — quickly faded.
It was just another day of horrifying gun violence in America. The public has grown inured to the death toll, complacent about the destruction. If 20 dead babies at Sandy Hook didn’t move us to act, well, what will? When will the United States recover from this insanity — this sense that we cannot or should not rein in guns?
The “rampage” shooting has become a feature of contemporary culture, a peculiarly American perversion. It occurs in a few other countries, but not with the frequency with which it strikes here. This sort of crime — this kind of atrocity — generally stars an angry and deranged man determined to take out his wrath on strangers before going out in a blaze of glory. And there has been a troubling uptick in bloodbaths like this over the last decade.
The gun lobby would no doubt point out that, overall, gun violence has declined over the last several years. That’s true. As crime of all kinds has decreased, so have murders and assaults with firearms. But the “rampage” mass shooting has become more deadly even as more routine gun violence, the sort associated with monetary gain or personal revenge, has decreased.
Earlier this year, the Congressional Research Service issued a report, “Public Mass Shootings in the United States,” that catalogued 78 mass shootings between 1983 and 2012. They accounted for 547 deaths and an additional 476 injuries. The Washington Post has pointed out that half of the deadliest of those — Virginia Tech, Aurora, Sandy Hook, Binghamton, Fort Hood and the Navy Yard — have occurred since 2007.
Experts have begun to focus, appropriately, on missed signals about the mental state of accused shooter Aaron Alexis, who told Rhode Island police officers that he was hearing voices. Certainly, the United States needs to do much better in providing mental health care to every citizen who needs it.
But it would be much more practical to focus on reining in guns. As any therapist would tell you, it’s very difficult to predict which patients may turn to violence. Alexis reportedly saw doctors at the Veterans Administration, but he told them he didn’t present a danger to anyone.
Sensible firearms measures would fill in the gap that our mental health system can’t straddle. Such limits would curb the bloodshed without infringing on the rights of any citizen who wants to hunt wild game or defend his home. Shouldn’t it be at least as difficult to get a firearm as it is for me to get a prescription for a sinus infection?
Take the simple matter of a waiting period. Alexis apparently purchased his pump-action shotgun two days before the massacre. With a few more days, various law enforcement and military entities may have pieced together his arrests for firearms violations and a report of his auditory hallucinations, which was apparently forwarded to naval authorities.
Other sensible measures — including a ban on high-capacity magazines — might not have deterred Alexis, but they would have curbed the violence from other shootings. And they would not infringe on the rights of the average gun owner. The Second Amendment does not espouse unlimited freedom to own the most dangerous firearms on the market.
Is the mass shooter the biggest crime problem remaining in America? By no means. But gun deaths are still a huge public health concern.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. will see more deaths from firearms than from car accidents by 2015.
Since the 1960s, we’ve made a series of law and policy changes that have reduced the carnage on our highways. We’ve done the opposite with firearms as various states have approved laws allowing guns in bars, parks and even churches.
That’s a recipe for more bloody rampages.
By: Cynthia Tucker, The National Memo, September 21, 2013
“More Guns, More Murder”: Largest Gun Study Ever, Household Gun Ownership Correlates With Firearm Homicide Rate
The largest study of gun violence in the United States, released Thursday afternoon, confirms a point that should be obvious: widespread American gun ownership is fueling America’s gun violence epidemic.
The study, by Professor Michael Siegel at Boston University and two coauthors, has been peer-reviewed and is forthcoming in the American Journal of Public Health. Siegel and his colleagues compiled data on firearm homicides from all 50 states from 1981-2010, the longest stretch of time ever studied in this fashion, and set about seeing whether they could find any relationship between changes in gun ownership and murder using guns over time.
Since we know that violent crime rates overall declined during that period of time, the authors used something called “fixed effect regression” to account for any national trend other than changes in gun ownership. They also employed the largest-ever number of statistical controls for other variables in this kind of gun study: “age, gender, race/ethnicity, urbanization, poverty, unemployment, income, education, income inequality, divorce rate, alcohol use, violent crime rate, nonviolent crime rate, hate crime rate, number of hunting licenses, age-adjusted nonfirearm homicide rate, incarceration rate,and suicide rate” were all accounted for.
No good data on national rates of gun ownership exist (partly because of the NRA’s stranglehold on Congress), so the authors used the percentage of suicides that involve a firearm (FS/S) as a proxy. The theory, backed up by a wealth of data, is that the more guns there are any in any one place, the higher the percentage of people who commit suicide with guns as opposed to other mechanisms will be.
With all this preliminary work in hand, the authors ran a series of regressions to see what effect the overall national decline in firearm ownership from 1981 to 2010 had on gun homicides. The result was staggering: “for each 1 percentage point increase in proportion of household gun ownership,” Siegel et al. found, “firearm homicide rate increased by 0.9″ percent. A one standard deviation change in firearm ownership shifted gun murders by a staggering 12.9 percent.
To put this in perspective, take the state of Mississippi. “All other factors being equal,” the authors write, “our model would predict that if the FS/S in Mississippi were 57.7% (the average for all states) instead of 76.8% (the highest of all states), its firearm homicide rate would be 17% lower.” Since 475 people were murdered with a gun in Mississippi in 2010, that drop in gun ownership would translate to 80 lives saved in that year alone.
Of course, the authors don’t find that rates of gun ownership explain all of America’s gun violence epidemic: race, economic inequality and generally violent areas all contribute to an area’s propensity for gun deaths, suggesting that broader social inequality, not gun ownership alone, contributes to the gun violence epidemic. Nevertheless, the fact that gun ownership mattered even when race and poverty were accounted for suggests that we can’t avoid talking about America’s fascination with guns when debating what to do about the roughly 11,000 Americans who are yearly murdered by gunfire.
By: Zack Beauchamp, Think Progress, September 13, 2013
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