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Breaking: Arrest & Protective Services Corroborate Report of 10 Year-Old Ohio Rape Pregnancy

July 13, 2022 Chuck Fager 2 Comments

NOTE: I saw earlier reports about this event, as well as the questions as to whether it actually happened; rightwing Ohio politicians called it a pro-abortion lie. I didn’t see credible reporting that corroborated it; so I held back on posting about it, to minimize the chance of contributing to mis- or disinformation.

But today brought multiple pieces of public corroboration, in the Columbus, Ohio Dispatch, an established credible paper.

Corroboration is not the same as proof of guilt. This story is ongoing. But here’s the report.

Columbus Dispatch: Arrest made in rape of Ohio girl that led to Indiana abortion drawing international attention

Bethany Bruner, Monroe Trombly, Tony Cook

The Columbus Dispatch — July 13, 2022

A Columbus man has been charged with impregnating a 10-year-old Ohio girl, whose travel to Indiana to seek an abortion led to international attention following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade and activation of Ohio’s abortion law.
Gerson Fuentes, 27, whose last known address was an apartment on Columbus’ Northwest Side, was arrested Tuesday after police say he confessed to raping the child on at least two occasions. He’s since been charged with rape, a felony of the first degree in Ohio.

Columbus police were made aware of the girl’s pregnancy through a referral by Franklin County Children Services that was made by her mother on June 22, Det. Jeffrey Huhn testified Wednesday morning at Fuentes’ arraignment. On June 30, the girl underwent a medical abortion in Indianapolis, Huhn said. Continue reading Breaking: Arrest & Protective Services Corroborate Report of 10 Year-Old Ohio Rape Pregnancy →

Current Affairs, Journalism/Media, Signs of the Times

A TWOFER: Putin Glows As Low-Blow BoJo’s Getting the Heave-Ho; Trying to Stay, Tho — But Now That’s a No-Go

July 7, 2022 Chuck Fager Leave a comment

#1-Boris Johnson lying like a sociopath right to the end

Gwynne Dyer — Jul 07 2022

A month ago, I wrote that “Johnson will be gone within the year.” I was wrong: he will probably be gone within the month, and what will finally bring him down is not the economy, or Brexit, or any of his other failures to perform as advertised. It is the incessant, instinctive, stupid lies.

The last straw was Johnson’s denial that he had knowingly appointed a political ally and alleged sex offender, Chris Pincher, to a series of senior government jobs despite being warned against it by other Conservative members of parliament.

Since 2017 Pincher has been repeatedly accused of physically molesting younger men, including Conservative members of parliament, but no action was taken against him and Johnson ignored the warnings.

After he made Pincher deputy chief whip in parliament in February, however, further complaints about Pincher’s behaviour were made – and Johnson immediately said that he had never been warned about him.

It was a typical Johnson lie, heedless of the fact that the people who actually had warned him were bound to speak up. And it turned out to be the last straw.

On Tuesday, a former senior civil servant said that he had personally warned Johnson about appointing Pincher. Suddenly, in a snap YouGov opinion poll on Tuesday evening, 69% of Britons were saying he should resign. Only 18% thought he should stay in office.

Even a majority of the people who voted Conservative in the last election thought Johnson should resign at once. He survived a confidence vote by his own Conservative MPs in June, but 41% of them voted to depose him as party leader (and therefore prime minister). They’ll be back at it again shortly, and this time they may succeed

The rules of the 1922 Committee, all the Conservative MPs in solemn conclave, say that if the leader survives a leadership challenge, there cannot be another one for a year. But there will be an election for the executive of the committee next week, and a new executive can change that rule if they wish. They probably will.

Johnson may have to be dragged out of Number 10 Downing Street kicking and screaming, but he is on his way out – so now it’s time to be charitable. When most people lie, they first do a swift mental calculation about whether it will work, because being caught out in a lie is generally worse than the cost of telling the truth.

Johnson doesn’t do that, or at least he doesn’t do it very well. He’s not even daunted by the fact that other people will know from personal experience that he is lying. In Chico Marx’s deathless words, “Who ya gonna believe? Me or your own eyes.”

This is the behaviour of a sociopath (or perhaps a psychopath – the words are used interchangeably in popular discourse). It refers to people who are usually male, intelligent and charming. They have serial relations with women and leave many children behind. They are solipsistic and manipulative – and frequent, persuasive liars.

Johnson ticks every box except one. He lies frequently, and he clearly has the sociopath’s ability to sincerely believe his own lie as soon as he says it. But his lies often fall apart within days, hours or even moments of being uttered; he just doesn’t bother to calculate the probability that they will believed. He is an incompetent liar.

That, more than any deed or misdeed, is what is now bringing him low. Even Conservative voters are sick of the lies, but he really can’t help it. So there’s no point in blaming him – but they really shouldn’t have voted for him, and now they understand that.

Most of Johnson’s remaining cabinet colleagues are just trying to figure out the best time to jump ship, and Conservative MP Andrew Bridgen had a word of advice for them all.

“Those who sit on their hands now [and stay in Johnson’s cabinet any longer] can rule themselves out for the coming leadership contest.”

#2 – Glee in Russia and sadness in Ukraine as Boris Johnson quits

The Guardian: Kremlin gloats as oligarch Oleg Deripaska welcomes end of ‘stupid clown’ but Zelenskiy pays tribute to ‘true friend’

Pjotr Sauer — Thursday, 07 July 2022

Boris Johnson’s downfall has been met with delight and ridicule in Moscow, while in Kyiv Volodymyr Zelenskiy expressed sadness at the resignation of his key ally.

Johnson, who championed weapons transfers to Ukraine in the early stages of the war and was the first leader of a G7 country to visit Kyiv in April, has emerged as a much-loved figure in Ukraine. “We all heard this news [of Johnson’s resignation] with sadness,” Zelenskiy said in a statement after the two leaders spoke by phone. “Not only me, but also the entire Ukrainian society, which is very sympathetic to you.

“We have no doubt that Great Britain’s support will be preserved, but your personal leadership and charisma made it special.”

In a separate Instagram post, Zelenskiy addressed Johnson as a “friend”, writing that “all Ukrainians were saddened by the news of the resignation of the leader of the Conservative party”.

In Russia Johnson’s support for Ukraine made him a frequent target for state media. The Kremlin described him as the “most active anti-Russian leader”.

“He doesn’t like us. We don’t like him either,” Vladimir Putin’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said on Thursday morning.

As news of Johnson’s looming resignation reached Moscow, other senior Russian officials and Kremlin-linked businesspeople used stronger words, saying he had finally got his reward for arming Ukraine against Russia.

“The moral of the story – do not seek to destroy Russia. Russia cannot be destroyed. You can break your teeth on it, and then choke on them,” the foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova wrote on Telegram.

The deputy chair of Russia’s security council, Dmitry Medvedev, gloated that Johnson’s resignation was “the logical result of British arrogance and mediocre policy”.

“Ukraine’s best friends are departing. We are waiting for news from Germany, Poland and the Baltic states,” the former Russian president wrote on Telegram.

Russia’s leading businessman, Oleg Deripaska, said it was an “inglorious end” for a “stupid clown” whose conscience would be plagued by “tens of thousands of lives in this senseless conflict in Ukraine”.

Others used the opportunity to mock Johnson’s recent statements. The Russian embassy in the UK tweeted a Bloomberg headline from last month, which quoted him as saying he planned to stay on as prime minister until the mid-2030s. “Something must have gone wrong,” the embassy’s caption above the headline said.

In Ukraine one adviser to the president, who requested anonymity because he was not authorised to speak on the subject, similarly said: “We believe that the UK will remain an important ally, but we are of course saddened. There was a genuine personal bond between the two leaders.”

Most of Johnson’s remaining cabinet colleagues are just trying to figure out the best time to jump ship, and Conservative MP Andrew Bridgen had a word of advice for them all.

“Those who sit on their hands now [and stay in Johnson’s cabinet any longer] can rule themselves out for the coming leadership contest.”

Black & White & Other Colors, Current Affairs, Fire This Time, Journalism/Media, Sedition Watch, Selma & Civil Rights, Signs of the Times

Juneteenth Feature: Rep. Bennie Thompson, “An Avid Hunter,” Closes In On The Biggest Target of All

June 20, 2022 Chuck Fager 1 Comment

NOTE: the Jan. 6 committee has announced two more dates and times for hearings:

> Tuesday, June 21: 10 a.m. Pacific

> Thursday, June 23: noon Pacific

Now York Times: ‘He Took Jan. 6 Personally’

Representative Bennie G. Thompson, chairman of the committee investigating the attack on the Capitol, has spent his career fighting to protect the right to vote.

Representative Bennie Thompson of Mississippi has spent nearly 30 years on Capitol Hill, but his leadership of the Jan. 6 committee represents his most significant turn in the national spotlight.

BOLTON, Miss.— It was here, in this majority-Black town of 441 people, that Representative Bennie G. Thompson attended a segregated junior high school. It was where his father spent a lifetime working as a mechanic and paying taxes, but never enjoying the right to vote. And it was where the future congressman, in the early 1970s, campaigned for mayor while packing a gun, after receiving threats from white people loath to give up their political power.

So it came as little surprise, to those who know Mr. Thompson well, that he was quick to mention Bolton, Miss., after gaveling to order the first hearing of the committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

“I’m from a part of the country where people justify the actions of slavery, the Ku Klux Klan and lynching,” said Mr. Thompson, the committee chair. “I’m reminded of that dark history as I hear voices today try and justify the actions of the insurrectionists on Jan. 6, 2021.”

Moments later, Mr. Thompson accused former President Donald J. Trump of having “spurred a mob of domestic enemies of the Constitution to march down the Capitol and subvert American democracy.”

Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times

Credit…Oliver Contreras for The New York Times

Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times

Mr. Thompson, who is also chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, has spent nearly 30 years on Capitol Hill, but his leadership of the Jan. 6 committee represents his most significant turn in the national spotlight. And it is thematically consistent with a public life that was forged in Mississippi when disenfranchisement was achieved by chicanery, intimidation and violence.

“I think that he took Jan. 6 personally, based upon his body of work and what he’s stood for regarding making sure people have a voice through the ballot box,” said State Senator Derrick T. Simmons, a fellow Democrat.

In an interview on Friday, Mr. Thompson said as much. For some people, he said, the slogan “Make America Great Again” seemed like a “dog whistle” evoking a world like the white-dominated Mississippi he grew up in. He said he was disturbed by the gallows that protesters brought for Vice President Mike Pence on Jan. 6 and by the Confederate flags in the crowd.

“We are supposed to be a democracy,” he said. “And when we see people carrying Confederate battle flags in the group, that’s the symbol of slavery and absolute resistance to the rule of law. So for me, it was bringing back a part of our history that none of us should be proud of.”

With his avuncular white beard and commanding voice, Mr. Thompson, 74, has established the committee’s serious, and almost solemn, tone. He has also ceded much of the spotlight to Representative Liz Cheney, the Wyoming Republican and vice chair of the committee.

Mr. Thompson and other Democrats surely recognize that a withering critique of Mr. Trump is more powerful coming from a Republican. At the same time, the close alliance that Mr. Thompson appears to have forged with Ms. Cheney has softened his reputation as a fierce partisan reluctant to work with Republicans.

In Mississippi, this reluctance is often attributed to the emotional scars Mr. Thompson carries from his years battling for basic civil rights against white Mississippians who migrated to the Republican Party after President Lyndon B. Johnson secured passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

Mr. Thompson “is all about partisanship,” the reporter Adam Lynch wrote in 2006 in The Jackson Free Press, a liberal newspaper. “He’s very much a liberal Democrat with no predilection for smiling tolerantly at the other side.”

Credit…Maureen Keating/CQ Roll Call, via Associated Press

When he was running for Congress for the first time, in 1993, Mr. Thompson told The New York Times that a strategy of confrontation, for Black people in Mississippi, “has been one of the main means of survival.”

His activist record dates to his time in junior high, when he was arrested for participating in a demonstration in Jackson after hearing speeches by Medgar Evers, the civil rights leader who was assassinated by a white supremacist in 1963.

“He was talking stuff that many people felt, but didn’t have the nerve enough to talk,” Mr. Thompson recalled in a 1974 interview. “It was basically about why are Black folks the ones that don’t have good jobs, why are Black folks the ones that don’t have decent housing?”

He enrolled at Tougaloo College, in Jackson, then a hotbed of antiracist organizing, joining the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which was focused on registering Black voters. At Tougaloo, he also met Fannie Lou Hamer, the prominent civil rights activist, and volunteered on her unsuccessful congressional campaign.

Credit…Rory Doyle for The New York Times

He worked briefly after college as a public-school teacher but said his contract was not renewed after he assigned an essay on the topic, “What’s Wrong With Mississippi?” In 1969, he was elected alderman in Bolton, part of a wave of Black officials who were filling local elected office across the South in the wake of the Voting Rights Act.

Two other Black candidates had also won alderman races in Bolton that year. The town clerk, Mr. Thompson said, initially refused to work with them, addressing them with a racist slur. In 1973, white residents challenged Mr. Thompson’s election as mayor, accusing him of illegally registering out-of-town voters. The election, he said, generated eight lawsuits.

Once in office, he inundated federal agencies with letters seeking funding and other support for programs that he hoped would transform the city. He helped found the state’s association of Black mayors, then co-founded its first association of Black county supervisors, building networks and helping others get elected to small local posts along the way.

Credit…Rory Doyle for The New York Times

“He probably did more to bring about the election of Blacks to local political office than anybody,” said Danny E. Cupit, a trial lawyer and longtime friend of Mr. Thompson’s.

Mr. Thompson became a Hinds County commissioner after challenging the makeup of the commission districts in court. In 1993 he won a special election to fill the congressional seat being vacated by Mike Espy, who was selected as agriculture secretary under President Bill Clinton.

The year before he went to Congress, an incident unfolded that recently prompted Representative Matt Gaetz, the hard-right Trump supporter from Florida, to falsely claim that Mr. Thompson “actively cheer-led riots in the ’90s.”

A few months after the riots that followed the 1992 acquittal of four Los Angeles police officers in the beating of Rodney King, the head of the Hinds County Bar Association, Harold D. Miller Jr., wrote to Mr. Thompson asking him to “take a stand in favor of the principle of law and against the philosophy that unwarranted criticism and riots are acceptable responses to displeasure with a judicial decision.” Mr. Miller was worried that riots would ensue if a jury acquitted Byron De La Beckwith, the white racist who had killed Mr. Evers and was facing a new murder trial after two juries in the 1960s failed to reach verdicts. (He was eventually convicted in 1994.)

Mr. Thompson’s response letter contained no support for rioters, but it did give a taste of his uncompromising style. He wrote of the “unrestrained violence” that white people had inflicted on Black Americans during slavery and beyond. He mentioned the violence of the Ku Klux Klan and the white “murder mobs” that flared in cities like New Orleans and Vicksburg, Miss., during Reconstruction.

“Before 1968 there were no African elected officials in Hinds County,” he wrote. “What did the Hinds County Bar do to address this injustice?”

In Congress, Mr. Thompson has worked on higher education equity issues, opposed Mr. Trump’s border wall and successfully brought large federal spending projects to his district, which includes the poverty-stricken Mississippi Delta and the majority-Black city of Jackson.

Credit…Rory Doyle for The New York Times

The congressman, an avid hunter, is back in his district most weekends, taking meetings in his storefront office in Bolton. It is decorated with images of civil rights heroes, photos of Mr. Thompson on hog and rabbit hunts and the stuffed heads of animals he has shot.

His governing philosophy is spelled out on a prominently displayed poster that shows a lifeless varmint on a stretch of asphalt. “The only thing in the middle of the road,” it says, “is yellow paint and a dead armadillo.”

Willie Earl Robinson, the town’s volunteer fire chief and a longtime ally of the congressman, gave a tour of the town this week, pointing out the City Hall, expanded fire station and 40-unit public housing complex that Mr. Thompson helped get built.

“I don’t consider him being angry,” Mr. Robinson said. “The point is that he’s just trying to get things done.”

A number of “Re-elect Bennie Thompson” signs were scattered around, but they are most likely a formality. Mr. Thompson’s district has been engineered to be safe for a Black Democrat, leaving Mississippi’s other three districts generally safe for Republicans.

Mr. Thompson said that the committee’s work was among the most important he had engaged in as a politician.

“I want it to benefit this country and the world,” he said. “Because we still, in my humble opinion, are still the greatest country in the world. We just had a hiccup on Jan. 6. And we have to fix it.”

Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times

Richard Fausset reported from Bolton, and Luke Broadwater from Washington.

Agni ad Bellum/ The Lamb's War, Current Affairs, Domestic Violence & Abuse, Fire This Time, Journalism/Media, Sedition Watch, Signs of the Times

A Pre-Autopsy of the Senate Gun Package: Not half a loaf; not half a slice; a few crumbs at best. So pass it already.

June 12, 2022 Chuck Fager Leave a comment

COMMENT: The restrained Associated Press headline on its story reads “Senate negotiators announce a deal on guns, breaking logjam.”

The Raleigh NC News & Observer called it (more accurately, I think) an “OUTLINE of [a] gun violence agreement.” The story’s lead paragraph dubbed it a “FRAMEWORK.” [Emphasis added.]
The AP article, by Alan Fram, ASSOCIATED PRESS, Updated June 12, 2022, also acknowledged that:

> “The proposal falls far short of tougher steps long sought by President Joe Biden . . . .” And it was at best a
> “limited breakthrough offering modest gun curbs . . . .” Further,
> Leaders HOPE to push any agreement into law rapidly — they HOPE this month — before the political momentum fades that has been stirred by the recent mass shootings . . . .” [Emphasis added.] But

> “Participants cautioned that FINAL DETAILS and LEGISLATIVE LANGUAGE REMAIN TO BE COMPLETED, meaning FRESH DISPUTES AND DELAYS might emerge.” [Emphasis added.]

Senate bargainers announced a bipartisan framework Sunday responding to last month’s mass shootings, a noteworthy though limited breakthrough offering modest gun curbs and bolstered efforts to improve school safety and mental health programs.

The proposal falls far short of tougher steps long sought by President Joe Biden and many Democrats. Even so, the accord was embraced by Biden and enactment would signal a significant turnabout after years of gun massacres that have yielded little but stalemate in Congress.

Leaders hope to push any agreement into law rapidly — they hope this month — before the political momentum fades that has been stirred by the recent mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas. Participants cautioned that final details and legislative language remain to be completed, meaning fresh disputes and delays might emerge.

Participants cautioned that final details and legislative language remain to be completed, meaning fresh disputes and delays might emerge.

North Carolina’s Republican senators, Thom Tillis and Richard Burr, were among 20 senators, including 10 Republicans, who released a statement calling for passage. That is potentially crucial because the biggest obstacle to enacting the measure is probably in the 50-50 Senate, where at least 10 GOP votes will be needed to attain the usual 60-vote threshold for approval.

“Families are scared, and it is our duty to come together and get something done that will help restore their sense of safety and security in their communities,” the lawmakers said.

The group, led by Sens. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., John Cornyn, R-Texas, Krysten Sinema, D-Ariz., and North Carolina’s Tillis produced the agreement after two weeks of closed-door talks.

WHAT THE AGREEMENT WOULD DO ON GUNS
COMMENT: A MORE ACCURATE SUBHEADING: WHAT the “framework” MIGHT Do; Further comments follow the AP article’s summary of the “outlined” potential provisions:

AP: – The compromise would make the juvenile records of gun buyers under age 21 available when they undergo background checks. The suspects who killed 10 Black people at a grocery store in Buffalo and 19 students and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde were both 18, and many perpetrators of recent years’ mass shootings have been young.

— The agreement would offer money to states to enact and put in place “red flag” laws that make it easier to temporarily take guns from people considered potentially violent, plus funds to bolster school safety and mental health programs.

— Some people who informally sell guns for profit would be required to obtain federal dealers’ licenses, which means they would have to conduct background checks of buyers.

“Right now we have people who are practically dealers, but they’re kind of viewed as hobbyists or various other categories,” Tillis told McClatchy last week as he disclosed details of the package he was negotiating with Murphy, Sinema and Cornyn.

— Convicted domestic abusers who do not live with a former partner, such as estranged ex-boyfriends, would be barred from buying firearms, and it would be a crime for a person to legally purchase a weapon for someone who would not qualify for ownership.

Congressional aides said billions of dollars would be spent expanding the number of community mental health centers and suicide prevention programs.

Continue reading A Pre-Autopsy of the Senate Gun Package: Not half a loaf; not half a slice; a few crumbs at best. So pass it already. →

Current Affairs, Fire This Time, Journalism/Media, Sedition Watch, Signs of the Times

Fox News Vs. the January 6 Hearing

June 10, 2022 Chuck Fager Leave a comment

Washington Post: Fox News didn’t just ignore the Jan. 6 hearing. It did something worse.   

By Philip Bump  — June 10, 2022

Fox News didn’t need to announce that it wasn’t going to cover Thursday night’s prime-time hearing from the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. The network has been all-but-completely ignoring the subject for 17 months; skipping this hearing was a continuation of a pattern, not a break from one. . . .

When 8 p.m. Eastern rolled around, though, it became clear that the network wasn’t simply going to not cover the hearing. Instead, it began more than two hours of commercial-free rebuttal. It didn’t simply cover other things, it focused almost entirely on the hearing as though it was former president Donald Trump’s defense team — without, of course, showing its audience the prosecution’s case. Continue reading Fox News Vs. the January 6 Hearing →

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Chuck Fager — Writer, Editor

Category Archives: Journalism/Media

Breaking: Arrest & Protective Services Corroborate Report of 10 Year-Old Ohio Rape Pregnancy

A TWOFER: Putin Glows As Low-Blow BoJo’s Getting the Heave-Ho; Trying to Stay, Tho — But Now That’s a No-Go

Juneteenth Feature: Rep. Bennie Thompson, “An Avid Hunter,” Closes In On The Biggest Target of All

A Pre-Autopsy of the Senate Gun Package: Not half a loaf; not half a slice; a few crumbs at best. So pass it already.

Fox News Vs. the January 6 Hearing