Monthly Archives: September 2018

Evangelical University loosens its ban on same sex relationships. Oh wait — No, It Didn’t.

“For Erin Green, who graduated from APU in May and is now co-executive director for Brave Commons, a national organization that looks to support LGBTQ students specifically at Christian universities, the reversal is a disappointment. Green, who participated in the discussions last year with university administrators that led to the policy’s removal, went so far as to describe it as a betrayal because the administrators were the ones who reached out to her and other students.

“We poured our hearts out, were vulnerable and relived our trauma telling our stories, telling stories of previous students who were damaged or hurt in some way by the institution, which had action taken against them for being gay or being in a same-sex relationship,” Green said.

“They looked us in the eye and said this policy is harmful, it’s discriminatory, it’s stigmatizing and we’re going to get rid of it,” she said. “And we trusted them.” But . . .

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Notes on a Terrible Day In Our History

So when the committee reconvened to hear Kavanaugh, the tactical plan had changed markedly. I don’t know if they consciously thought of it this way, but they clearly decided to do a remake of the Clarence Thomas triumph.

Kavanaugh insisted that no one but a few clerks had seen his opening statement before he made it. Perhaps so, but he had spent much time consulting at the White House and with others in prepping for the appearance. As he is known for his studies of precedents, my guess is he went over the Thomas hearings in the process.

The Thomas scenario is built on flipping the abuse script and making the wannabe rapist into the victim.

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Carolina farmworkers win a round in labor union struggle

For agriculture, the additional restrictions in the 2017 law meant that farms couldn’t directly help workers pay their union dues, even if both the farmer and the worker wanted to. It also meant that if a farm was accused of mistreating its workers and the owners wanted to avoid a lawsuit by settling with the union to enter into a union contract, they also wouldn’t be able to do that.

In 2017, Union County Republican Rep. Jimmy Dixon, who is a farmer himself, added the anti-union language to that year’s wider-ranging Farm Bill. But at the time Dixon told The N&O the intent was not to target FLOC specifically, but rather to help individual farmers who felt pressured by the union.

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Blue Wave? Red Wave? How about the Carolina Brown Wave (aka Big Poop)??

The hog industry’s PR agencies cultivate a wholesome, (white) family-friendly image. But most of the hogs and the farms are really owned by giant international corporations; and the biggest is Chinese. (That ginormous Smithfield plant? Chinese-owned.)
And Big Poop can also play hardball, in that vast battleground, the front lawn. The Republican NC legislature is comfortably stashed in the pocket of their newest jeans.

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Kavanaugh Wrap-Up: The Wheat from the Chaff

Too many media people around this past week’s supreme Court hearings wasted their energy doing horse race and atmosphere coverage. Political sportscasters, I call them; and pretty bush league at that.

Their frame was: the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh (hereafter “K”) is a done deal, so all that matters is the hullabaloo, that and the shadow horse race rehearsal for the 2020 presidential contest. Which meant excessive attention to whether aspirants Kamala Harris or Cory Booker managed to draw some blood and get a boost from a bombshell revelation.
But the pair didn’t really have any real ordnance, it was reported, and neither came out with a 2020 home run. That’s true enough, and for the media political sportscasters, this was all that mattered. And that’s utterly mistaken.

The New York Times’s Saturday postmortem reflected this outlook:

“Boorish. Rude. Disrespectful. Insulting. Grandstanding. Hyperventilating. Deranged. Ridiculous. Drivel.

Those were among the words angry Senate Republicans used this week to assail the conduct of Democrats at a Supreme Court hearing that was often tense and sometimes toxic. . . .

With little power to stop a nominee they saw as a conservative partisan, a Republican-imposed process they considered grossly unfair and a demanding political base spoiling for a fight, they decided it was time to sow disorder over the court.”
For me such reportage was mainly stale baloney. Its superficiality is a disgrace to their profession. It only reports one superficial level of the debate that went on there.

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