Teacher Placed on Administrative Leave After Parents Report of 1st Grader's Mouth Being Taped Shut
SAN ANTONIO - Officials say a San Antonio elementary school teacher is on leave after being accused of putting transparent tape over a first-grader's mouth.
First grader Serenah Kelly said the teacher eventually removed the tape and told her to be quiet, but while it was on her mouth, she said she had trouble breathing.
She described the incident as frightening
Danny Kelly said his daughter was afraid to tell him about what happened the day before winter break.
But he said her classmates at Schertz Elementary told their parents, who called the principal.
School district spokeswoman Rebecca Villarreal said officials put the teacher on administrative leave as soon as the taping was reported.
An investigation is ongoing.
Villarreal said the district takes "all incidents like this very seriously
Saturday, January 22, 2011
Vegas tourist sues after 'tragic' lap dance encounter!
What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.
Unless you go home and file a federal lawsuit alleging the exotic dancer/hooker who came to your hotel room didn't live up to expectations. And when you complained to Las Vegas police, they threatened to arrest you (but didn't), instead helpfully suggesting you take your complaint to the Better Business Bureau.
And you want your $155 for the lap dance back, plus the 120 bucks you shelled out for the sex act, because, after all, you were drunk and unable to enter into a coherent business agreement. Oh, yes, and $1.8 million to make it all better.
Or that's what the Las Vegas Sun reports in one of those only-in-Vegas stories. The paper says Hubert Blackman, a student from New York City, filed a lawsuit earlier this month stemming from the Dec. 17 incident. He said he called Las Vegas Exclusive Personals to hire an exotic dancer to come to his room and strip. She offered to perform a sex act, which he paid for, but stayed only half of the hour he alleges they agreed on.
When the company wouldn't refund his money, Blackman called police, who reminded him prostitution is illegal and told him he could be arrested. Then they advised contacting the BBB to complain, Blackman told the Sun.
Upon returning home, Blackman filed suit (without the aid of an attorney), alleging the incident caused a mental condition for which he needs treatment.
In an interview, Blackman told the Sun that the dancer solicited him, but said he knew prostitution is illegal in Sin City.
The Sun reports the escort service said it notifies potential customers who say they're looking for sex that prostitution is illegal in Clark County.
Unless you go home and file a federal lawsuit alleging the exotic dancer/hooker who came to your hotel room didn't live up to expectations. And when you complained to Las Vegas police, they threatened to arrest you (but didn't), instead helpfully suggesting you take your complaint to the Better Business Bureau.
And you want your $155 for the lap dance back, plus the 120 bucks you shelled out for the sex act, because, after all, you were drunk and unable to enter into a coherent business agreement. Oh, yes, and $1.8 million to make it all better.
Or that's what the Las Vegas Sun reports in one of those only-in-Vegas stories. The paper says Hubert Blackman, a student from New York City, filed a lawsuit earlier this month stemming from the Dec. 17 incident. He said he called Las Vegas Exclusive Personals to hire an exotic dancer to come to his room and strip. She offered to perform a sex act, which he paid for, but stayed only half of the hour he alleges they agreed on.
When the company wouldn't refund his money, Blackman called police, who reminded him prostitution is illegal and told him he could be arrested. Then they advised contacting the BBB to complain, Blackman told the Sun.
Upon returning home, Blackman filed suit (without the aid of an attorney), alleging the incident caused a mental condition for which he needs treatment.
In an interview, Blackman told the Sun that the dancer solicited him, but said he knew prostitution is illegal in Sin City.
The Sun reports the escort service said it notifies potential customers who say they're looking for sex that prostitution is illegal in Clark County.
In the totally I DON'T GIVE A DAMN department!
Regis Quit Over Pay Cut
Now we get it: Regis Philbin is leaving Live With Regis and Kelly because ABC executives were planning to cut his salary. TMZ reports that Philbin makes nearly $20 million a year, but his show has not been performing well and he takes a lot of time off. Philbin was apparently angry about the new offer, and announced on air that he would leave the show.
Co-host Kelly Ripa found out 15 minutes before the two went on the air, and was reportedly "furious" with him because she felt he disrespected her. The show's entire production team is angry at Regis as well for "blindsiding" them, according to TMZ.
Now we get it: Regis Philbin is leaving Live With Regis and Kelly because ABC executives were planning to cut his salary. TMZ reports that Philbin makes nearly $20 million a year, but his show has not been performing well and he takes a lot of time off. Philbin was apparently angry about the new offer, and announced on air that he would leave the show.
Co-host Kelly Ripa found out 15 minutes before the two went on the air, and was reportedly "furious" with him because she felt he disrespected her. The show's entire production team is angry at Regis as well for "blindsiding" them, according to TMZ.
anesthetic used in executions is discontinuing
Maker of anesthetic used in executions is discontinuing drug
Death penalty states could face long-term complications after the move by the only U.S. manufacturer of sodium thiopental.
California may have to revise laws governing its three-injection protocol.
The sole U.S. maker of the anesthetic used in executions announced Friday it would stop manufacturing sodium thiopental to prevent its product from being used to put prisoners to death.
Discontinuance of the drug that has been in short supply nationwide for the past year portends long-term complications for death penalty states. Some, like California, might have to revise laws governing executions and those seeking supplies from foreign makers may be turned away by countries that condemn capital punishment.
In California, the legal guidance for carrying out executions was amended in August after three years of debate and deliberation. The state's new protocols specify use of sodium thiopental as the first drug in the three-injection sequence, and any substitution would require the state to again revise the protocols, said Elisabeth Semel, a UC Berkeley law professor and director of the law school's Death Penalty Clinic.
Legal challenges to lethal-injection procedures have kept executions on hold for five years in California, where 718 prisoners are on death row. Corrections officials' attempt to carry out the execution of murderer Albert Greenwood Brown in September was thwarted by the litigation, as well as by the expiration of the state's last few grams of sodium thiopental.
Hospira Inc., of Lake Forest, Ill., stopped making its brand of sodium thiopental, Pentothal, at a North Carolina plant early last year because of an unspecified raw material supply problem. When Hospira attempted to move production to a factory in Liscate, Italy, near Milan, Italian authorities demanded assurances that the drug wouldn't end up in the hands of executioners. Hospira spokesman Dan Rosenberg said company officers couldn't make that guarantee and decided instead to "exit the sodium thiopental market."
"We cannot take the risk that we will be held liable by the Italian authorities if the product is diverted for use in capital punishment," Rosenberg said.
Sodium thiopental is a powerful barbiturate that has "well-established medical benefits" for patients, the spokesman said, adding that Hospira has never condoned its use in executions.
As Pentothal supplies have run out, some of the 35 states that allow capital punishment have had to postpone executions or obtain supplies of the drug from abroad.
Both supporters and opponents of capital punishment predicted the drug discontinuance would place new legal hurdles to executions.
"Long-term, I expect that the states will follow the lead of Oklahoma and switch to another drug without a supply problem," said Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, which is in favor of the death penalty.
"Short-term, this requires going through the cumbersome regulation process with comment-spamming by the anti-death-penalty crowd," he said, urging the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, which carries out executions at San Quentin State Prison, to start the legal revision immediately "so as to have it completed before an actual supply problem delays and denies justice again."
Richard Dieter, director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit organization opposed to capital punishment that tracks death sentences, said states with the death penalty will now have to turn to a different anesthetic or seek sodium thiopental from a foreign supplier, "both of which have pitfalls."
Oklahoma has already executed two men using the anesthetic pentobarbital, commonly used to euthanize animals. But many states' statutes and protocols specify what drugs are to be used, and switching requires a lengthy legal review and submission for public comment, Dieter noted.
Importing sodium thiopental has raised questions about how to verify its purity and effectiveness, and the FDA has declined to take responsibility for vetting the imports, said Dieter.
California corrections officials imported a large quantity of sodium thiopental — enough for about 90 executions — from a British distributor in November, before a public outcry in Britain led to a ban on export of the drug to the United States. All European states have renounced the death penalty and many have legal restrictions against knowingly facilitating executions elsewhere.
U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel has been reviewing California's new lethal injection procedures and is expected to rule soon on whether they comply with the Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
LATimes
Death penalty states could face long-term complications after the move by the only U.S. manufacturer of sodium thiopental.
California may have to revise laws governing its three-injection protocol.
The sole U.S. maker of the anesthetic used in executions announced Friday it would stop manufacturing sodium thiopental to prevent its product from being used to put prisoners to death.
Discontinuance of the drug that has been in short supply nationwide for the past year portends long-term complications for death penalty states. Some, like California, might have to revise laws governing executions and those seeking supplies from foreign makers may be turned away by countries that condemn capital punishment.
In California, the legal guidance for carrying out executions was amended in August after three years of debate and deliberation. The state's new protocols specify use of sodium thiopental as the first drug in the three-injection sequence, and any substitution would require the state to again revise the protocols, said Elisabeth Semel, a UC Berkeley law professor and director of the law school's Death Penalty Clinic.
Legal challenges to lethal-injection procedures have kept executions on hold for five years in California, where 718 prisoners are on death row. Corrections officials' attempt to carry out the execution of murderer Albert Greenwood Brown in September was thwarted by the litigation, as well as by the expiration of the state's last few grams of sodium thiopental.
Hospira Inc., of Lake Forest, Ill., stopped making its brand of sodium thiopental, Pentothal, at a North Carolina plant early last year because of an unspecified raw material supply problem. When Hospira attempted to move production to a factory in Liscate, Italy, near Milan, Italian authorities demanded assurances that the drug wouldn't end up in the hands of executioners. Hospira spokesman Dan Rosenberg said company officers couldn't make that guarantee and decided instead to "exit the sodium thiopental market."
"We cannot take the risk that we will be held liable by the Italian authorities if the product is diverted for use in capital punishment," Rosenberg said.
Sodium thiopental is a powerful barbiturate that has "well-established medical benefits" for patients, the spokesman said, adding that Hospira has never condoned its use in executions.
As Pentothal supplies have run out, some of the 35 states that allow capital punishment have had to postpone executions or obtain supplies of the drug from abroad.
Both supporters and opponents of capital punishment predicted the drug discontinuance would place new legal hurdles to executions.
"Long-term, I expect that the states will follow the lead of Oklahoma and switch to another drug without a supply problem," said Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, which is in favor of the death penalty.
"Short-term, this requires going through the cumbersome regulation process with comment-spamming by the anti-death-penalty crowd," he said, urging the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, which carries out executions at San Quentin State Prison, to start the legal revision immediately "so as to have it completed before an actual supply problem delays and denies justice again."
Richard Dieter, director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit organization opposed to capital punishment that tracks death sentences, said states with the death penalty will now have to turn to a different anesthetic or seek sodium thiopental from a foreign supplier, "both of which have pitfalls."
Oklahoma has already executed two men using the anesthetic pentobarbital, commonly used to euthanize animals. But many states' statutes and protocols specify what drugs are to be used, and switching requires a lengthy legal review and submission for public comment, Dieter noted.
Importing sodium thiopental has raised questions about how to verify its purity and effectiveness, and the FDA has declined to take responsibility for vetting the imports, said Dieter.
California corrections officials imported a large quantity of sodium thiopental — enough for about 90 executions — from a British distributor in November, before a public outcry in Britain led to a ban on export of the drug to the United States. All European states have renounced the death penalty and many have legal restrictions against knowingly facilitating executions elsewhere.
U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel has been reviewing California's new lethal injection procedures and is expected to rule soon on whether they comply with the Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
LATimes
Olbermann, MSNBC part ways (Hate to see him go but he became too harsh and too self important thinking he was more important than the issues in fact becoming the same for the left as the extreme right in style and too absolute on issues)
Keith Olbermann took an unexpected bow from MSNBC on Friday, announcing on air in the last 10 minutes of his show that it would be his final episode of “Countdown.”
The departure was a stealth move, MSNBC insiders told POLITICO, with many top executives and on-air personalities kept out of the loop as the decision was made. It came, one insider said, “Out of the … blue!”
“This will be the last edition of ‘Countdown’,” Olbermann said at about 8:50 as he led into his final commercial break. “I will explain that, next.”
Neither MSNBC nor Olbermann offered a reason for the departure, but several sources close to the situation said its roots lay in Olbermann’s defiant reaction to being suspended after POLITICO discovered that he had donated to Democratic candidates without telling his bosses.
Although Olbermann’s political leanings were quite clear, the move violated NBC policy, and Olbermann’s response angered NBC News President Steve Capus in particular, according to former MSNBC anchor David Shuster.
“It’s no secret that Steve was particularly upset – justifiably so – with how he handled the suspension,” he said in an interview with Anderson Cooper.
On air, Olbermann hinted that he had just learned of the end of his show Friday, and suggested his departure was not voluntary. “I think the same fantasy popped into the head of everybody in my business who has ever been told what I have been told: this will be the last edition of your show,” he said.
“You go to the scene from the movie ‘Network,’ complete with the pajamas and the raincoat, and go off on a verbal journey of unutterable vision and you insist upon Peter Finch’s gutteral resonance and you will the viewer to go to the window, open it, stick out his head and yell,” he continued. “You know the rest. In the mundane world of television goodbyes, reality is laughably uncooperative.”
“Good night and good luck,” he said, quoting Edward R. Murrow, as he signed off for a final time.
Olbermann had two years left on the four-year, $30 million contract he signed in 2008. Insiders said discussions about his departure had been going on for some time.
The end of Olbermann’s contract coincided with the departure of NBC Universal chief executive Jeff Zucker, three days after Comcast’s takeover of a majority share in the company was approved by the U.S. government.
Cooper opened his CNN show with the story, noting that the move was so sudden that some at MSNBC didn’t appear to get the memo as promos for this show were still airing after his final signoff.
He said his sources blamed the fallout from the merger and Zucker’s departure. Zucker was widely viewed as Olbermann’s “protector,” as Cooper put it.
Comcast distanced itself from any notion that it had something to do with the decision, releasing a midnight statement saying it had not yet closed its transaction with NBC Universal and so does not yet have operational control.
“We pledged from the day the deal was announced that we would not interfere with NBCU’s news operations. We have not and we will not.”
While sources within MSNBC pushed back against the speculation that Comcast wanted Olbermann to leave for ideological reasons, many who worked with the cable network said Olbermann’s fiery personality was likely to run afoul of his new corporate bosses sooner or later, anyway.
A former sports journalist who made his name on ESPN — from which he also made an abrupt departure — Olbermann began hosting “Countdown” in March 2003. He had a famously fraught relationship with MSNBC executives. As the earner of the networks’ highest ratings, he wielded great influence, and sometimes clashed with MSNBC President Phil Griffin.
Griffin, who has known Olbermann for three decades, told New York magazine that “it’s always complex because of management and Keith.”
Their relationship hit a particularly rough spot after POLITICO reported that Olbermann had made political donations to three Democratic candidates without alerting his bosses, a move that violated NBC policy. He was suspended briefly, but was somewhat defiant about the affair, apologizing to his viewers but not his employer.
“You should also know that I did not attempt to keep any of these political contributions secret; I knew they would be known to you and the rest of the public. I did not make them through a relative, friend, corporation, PAC, or any other intermediary, and I did not blame them on some kind of convenient ‘mistake’ by their recipients,” he said at the time. “When a website contacted NBC about one of the donations, I immediately volunteered that there were in fact three of them; and contrary to much of the subsequent reporting, I immediately volunteered to explain all this, on-air and off, in the fashion MSNBC desired.”
MSNBC confirmed Olbermann’s departure in a brief statement released just before 9 p.m. ET, as Olbermann wrapped up his on-air farewell. “MSNBC and Keith Olbermann have ended their contract,” the statement said. “The last broadcast of ‘Countdown with Keith Olbermann’ will be this evening.
The network said it “thanks Keith for his integral role in MSNBC’s success and we wish him well in his future endeavors.”
In a second statement, Griffin announced a reshaped primetime lineup that will begin Monday. “The Last Word With Laurence O’Donnell” will move two hours earlier to 8 p.m., “The Rachel Maddow Show” will continue to air at 9 p.m. and “The Ed Show” will move to 10 p.m. Cenk Ungur will fill in as the host of the 6 p.m. hour.
As the personality that led MSNBC into the progressive brand it recently embraced with its “Lean Forward” advertising campaign, Olbermann was the flagship liberal voice in the country, and the news of his departure was met with statements of support from the left.
“For nearly eight years, Countdown with Keith Olbermann led the charge against conservative misinformation in prime time. He was one of the few voices in the media willing to hold the Bush administration accountable and fight the right-wing smears against progressives and their policies,” said David Brock, the CEO of liberal watchdog Media Matters.
“Keith is an innovator and an extremely talented broadcaster who showed there was a market for progressive views on cable news. I’m sure we’ll be seeing more of him soon, and I eagerly await hearing of his next move. And on this evening, I wish him ‘good night and good luck’.”
Meanwhile, conservatives reveled in the moment. Andrew Breitbart responded with a one-word tweet: “OVERMANN.”
© 2011 Capitol News
The departure was a stealth move, MSNBC insiders told POLITICO, with many top executives and on-air personalities kept out of the loop as the decision was made. It came, one insider said, “Out of the … blue!”
“This will be the last edition of ‘Countdown’,” Olbermann said at about 8:50 as he led into his final commercial break. “I will explain that, next.”
Neither MSNBC nor Olbermann offered a reason for the departure, but several sources close to the situation said its roots lay in Olbermann’s defiant reaction to being suspended after POLITICO discovered that he had donated to Democratic candidates without telling his bosses.
Although Olbermann’s political leanings were quite clear, the move violated NBC policy, and Olbermann’s response angered NBC News President Steve Capus in particular, according to former MSNBC anchor David Shuster.
“It’s no secret that Steve was particularly upset – justifiably so – with how he handled the suspension,” he said in an interview with Anderson Cooper.
On air, Olbermann hinted that he had just learned of the end of his show Friday, and suggested his departure was not voluntary. “I think the same fantasy popped into the head of everybody in my business who has ever been told what I have been told: this will be the last edition of your show,” he said.
“You go to the scene from the movie ‘Network,’ complete with the pajamas and the raincoat, and go off on a verbal journey of unutterable vision and you insist upon Peter Finch’s gutteral resonance and you will the viewer to go to the window, open it, stick out his head and yell,” he continued. “You know the rest. In the mundane world of television goodbyes, reality is laughably uncooperative.”
“Good night and good luck,” he said, quoting Edward R. Murrow, as he signed off for a final time.
Olbermann had two years left on the four-year, $30 million contract he signed in 2008. Insiders said discussions about his departure had been going on for some time.
The end of Olbermann’s contract coincided with the departure of NBC Universal chief executive Jeff Zucker, three days after Comcast’s takeover of a majority share in the company was approved by the U.S. government.
Cooper opened his CNN show with the story, noting that the move was so sudden that some at MSNBC didn’t appear to get the memo as promos for this show were still airing after his final signoff.
He said his sources blamed the fallout from the merger and Zucker’s departure. Zucker was widely viewed as Olbermann’s “protector,” as Cooper put it.
Comcast distanced itself from any notion that it had something to do with the decision, releasing a midnight statement saying it had not yet closed its transaction with NBC Universal and so does not yet have operational control.
“We pledged from the day the deal was announced that we would not interfere with NBCU’s news operations. We have not and we will not.”
While sources within MSNBC pushed back against the speculation that Comcast wanted Olbermann to leave for ideological reasons, many who worked with the cable network said Olbermann’s fiery personality was likely to run afoul of his new corporate bosses sooner or later, anyway.
A former sports journalist who made his name on ESPN — from which he also made an abrupt departure — Olbermann began hosting “Countdown” in March 2003. He had a famously fraught relationship with MSNBC executives. As the earner of the networks’ highest ratings, he wielded great influence, and sometimes clashed with MSNBC President Phil Griffin.
Griffin, who has known Olbermann for three decades, told New York magazine that “it’s always complex because of management and Keith.”
Their relationship hit a particularly rough spot after POLITICO reported that Olbermann had made political donations to three Democratic candidates without alerting his bosses, a move that violated NBC policy. He was suspended briefly, but was somewhat defiant about the affair, apologizing to his viewers but not his employer.
“You should also know that I did not attempt to keep any of these political contributions secret; I knew they would be known to you and the rest of the public. I did not make them through a relative, friend, corporation, PAC, or any other intermediary, and I did not blame them on some kind of convenient ‘mistake’ by their recipients,” he said at the time. “When a website contacted NBC about one of the donations, I immediately volunteered that there were in fact three of them; and contrary to much of the subsequent reporting, I immediately volunteered to explain all this, on-air and off, in the fashion MSNBC desired.”
MSNBC confirmed Olbermann’s departure in a brief statement released just before 9 p.m. ET, as Olbermann wrapped up his on-air farewell. “MSNBC and Keith Olbermann have ended their contract,” the statement said. “The last broadcast of ‘Countdown with Keith Olbermann’ will be this evening.
The network said it “thanks Keith for his integral role in MSNBC’s success and we wish him well in his future endeavors.”
In a second statement, Griffin announced a reshaped primetime lineup that will begin Monday. “The Last Word With Laurence O’Donnell” will move two hours earlier to 8 p.m., “The Rachel Maddow Show” will continue to air at 9 p.m. and “The Ed Show” will move to 10 p.m. Cenk Ungur will fill in as the host of the 6 p.m. hour.
As the personality that led MSNBC into the progressive brand it recently embraced with its “Lean Forward” advertising campaign, Olbermann was the flagship liberal voice in the country, and the news of his departure was met with statements of support from the left.
“For nearly eight years, Countdown with Keith Olbermann led the charge against conservative misinformation in prime time. He was one of the few voices in the media willing to hold the Bush administration accountable and fight the right-wing smears against progressives and their policies,” said David Brock, the CEO of liberal watchdog Media Matters.
“Keith is an innovator and an extremely talented broadcaster who showed there was a market for progressive views on cable news. I’m sure we’ll be seeing more of him soon, and I eagerly await hearing of his next move. And on this evening, I wish him ‘good night and good luck’.”
Meanwhile, conservatives reveled in the moment. Andrew Breitbart responded with a one-word tweet: “OVERMANN.”
© 2011 Capitol News
Glenn Beck Brings a CUNY Professor Threats
On his daily radio and television shows, Glenn Beck has elevated once-obscure conservative thinkers onto best-seller lists. Recently, he has elevated a 78-year-old liberal academic to celebrity of a different sort, in a way that some say is endangering her life.
Frances Fox Piven, a City University of New York professor, has been a primary character in Mr. Beck’s warnings about a progressive take-down of America. Ms. Piven, Mr. Beck says, is responsible for a plan to “intentionally collapse our economic system.”
Her name has become a kind of shorthand for “enemy” on Mr. Beck’s Fox News Channel program, which is watched by more than 2 million people, and on one of his Web sites, The Blaze. This week, Mr. Beck suggested on television that she was an enemy of the Constitution.
Never mind that Ms. Piven’s radical plan to help poor people was published 45 years ago, when Mr. Beck was a toddler. Anonymous visitors to his Web site have called for her death, and some, she said, have contacted her directly via e-mail.
In response, a liberal nonprofit group, the Center for Constitutional Rights, wrote to the chairman of Fox News, Roger Ailes, on Thursday to ask him to put a stop to Mr. Beck’s “false accusations” about Ms. Piven.
“Mr. Beck is putting Professor Piven in actual physical danger of a violent response,” the group wrote.
Fox News disagrees. Joel Cheatwood, a senior vice president, said Friday that Mr. Beck would not be ordered to stop talking about Ms. Piven on television. He said Mr. Beck had quoted her accurately and had never threatened her.
“ ‘The Glenn Beck Program,’ probably above and beyond any on television, has denounced violence repeatedly,” Mr. Cheatwood said.
He said he had no knowledge of the threats against Ms. Piven, and noted that The Blaze was operated independently of Fox News.
Ms. Piven said in an interview that she had informed local law enforcement authorities of the anonymous electronic threats. But she added, “I don’t want to give anybody the satisfaction of thinking they’ve got me trembling.”
The interest in Ms. Piven is rooted in an article she wrote with her husband, Richard Cloward, in 1966. The article, “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty,” proposed that if people overwhelmed the welfare rolls, fiscal and political stress on the system could force reform and give rise to changes like a guaranteed income. By drawing attention to the topic, the proposal “had a big impact” even though it was not enacted, Ms. Piven said. “A lot of people got the money that they desperately needed to survive,” she said.
In Mr. Beck’s telling on a Fox broadcast on Jan. 5, 2010, Ms. Piven and Mr. Cloward (who died in 2001) planned “to overwhelm the system and bring about the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with impossible demands and bring on economic collapse.” Mr. Beck observed that the number of welfare recipients soared in the years after the article, and said the article was like “economic sabotage.”
He linked what he termed the Cloward-Piven Strategy to President Obama’s statement late in the 2008 presidential campaign that “we are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”
Mr. Beck has invoked Ms. Piven dozens of times since. Conservative Web sites, like the ones operated by Andrew Breitbart, have also spent time dissecting her articles and speeches.
Ms. Piven came under additional scrutiny when she wrote in the liberal magazine The Nation this month that unemployed people should be staging mass protests.
Her assertions that “an effective movement of the unemployed will have to look something like the strikes and riots that have spread across Greece,” and that “protesters need targets, preferably local and accessible ones,” led Mr. Beck to ask on Fox this week, “Is that not inciting violence? Is that not asking for violence?” Videos of fires in Greece played behind him.
“That is not a call for violence,” Ms. Piven said Friday of the references to riots. “There is a kind of rhetorical trick that is always used to denounce movements of ordinary people, and that is to imply that the massing of people itself is violent.”
That, she said, is what Mr. Beck is doing, trying to frighten his viewers.
The Nation, which has featured Ms. Piven’s columns for decades, quoted some of the threats against her in an editorial this week that condemned the “concerted campaign” against her.
One such threat, published as an anonymous comment on The Blaze, read, “Somebody tell Frances I have 5000 roundas ready and I’ll give My life to take Our freedom back.” (The spelling and capitalizing have not been changed.)
That comment and others that were direct threats were later deleted, but other comments remain that charge her with treasonous behavior.
Mr. Beck generally does not have guests on his hourlong Fox program, and Ms. Piven has not been invited to defend herself on the program. Neither Mr. Beck nor any of his producers have ever contacted her, she said.
The Center for Constitutional Rights said it took exception to the sheer quantity of negative attention to Ms. Piven.
“We are vigorous defenders of the First Amendment,” the center said in its letter to Fox. “However, there comes a point when constant intentional repetition of provocative, incendiary, emotional misinformation and falsehoods about a person can put that person in actual physical danger of a violent response.” Mr. Beck is at that point, they said.
Ms. Piven, for her part, said she was amazed that she was still being brought up on Mr. Beck’s show as recently as Wednesday.
“There are hundreds and hundreds of people who are just boiling with anger and hate,” she said.
Frances Fox Piven, a City University of New York professor, has been a primary character in Mr. Beck’s warnings about a progressive take-down of America. Ms. Piven, Mr. Beck says, is responsible for a plan to “intentionally collapse our economic system.”
Her name has become a kind of shorthand for “enemy” on Mr. Beck’s Fox News Channel program, which is watched by more than 2 million people, and on one of his Web sites, The Blaze. This week, Mr. Beck suggested on television that she was an enemy of the Constitution.
Never mind that Ms. Piven’s radical plan to help poor people was published 45 years ago, when Mr. Beck was a toddler. Anonymous visitors to his Web site have called for her death, and some, she said, have contacted her directly via e-mail.
In response, a liberal nonprofit group, the Center for Constitutional Rights, wrote to the chairman of Fox News, Roger Ailes, on Thursday to ask him to put a stop to Mr. Beck’s “false accusations” about Ms. Piven.
“Mr. Beck is putting Professor Piven in actual physical danger of a violent response,” the group wrote.
Fox News disagrees. Joel Cheatwood, a senior vice president, said Friday that Mr. Beck would not be ordered to stop talking about Ms. Piven on television. He said Mr. Beck had quoted her accurately and had never threatened her.
“ ‘The Glenn Beck Program,’ probably above and beyond any on television, has denounced violence repeatedly,” Mr. Cheatwood said.
He said he had no knowledge of the threats against Ms. Piven, and noted that The Blaze was operated independently of Fox News.
Ms. Piven said in an interview that she had informed local law enforcement authorities of the anonymous electronic threats. But she added, “I don’t want to give anybody the satisfaction of thinking they’ve got me trembling.”
The interest in Ms. Piven is rooted in an article she wrote with her husband, Richard Cloward, in 1966. The article, “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty,” proposed that if people overwhelmed the welfare rolls, fiscal and political stress on the system could force reform and give rise to changes like a guaranteed income. By drawing attention to the topic, the proposal “had a big impact” even though it was not enacted, Ms. Piven said. “A lot of people got the money that they desperately needed to survive,” she said.
In Mr. Beck’s telling on a Fox broadcast on Jan. 5, 2010, Ms. Piven and Mr. Cloward (who died in 2001) planned “to overwhelm the system and bring about the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with impossible demands and bring on economic collapse.” Mr. Beck observed that the number of welfare recipients soared in the years after the article, and said the article was like “economic sabotage.”
He linked what he termed the Cloward-Piven Strategy to President Obama’s statement late in the 2008 presidential campaign that “we are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”
Mr. Beck has invoked Ms. Piven dozens of times since. Conservative Web sites, like the ones operated by Andrew Breitbart, have also spent time dissecting her articles and speeches.
Ms. Piven came under additional scrutiny when she wrote in the liberal magazine The Nation this month that unemployed people should be staging mass protests.
Her assertions that “an effective movement of the unemployed will have to look something like the strikes and riots that have spread across Greece,” and that “protesters need targets, preferably local and accessible ones,” led Mr. Beck to ask on Fox this week, “Is that not inciting violence? Is that not asking for violence?” Videos of fires in Greece played behind him.
“That is not a call for violence,” Ms. Piven said Friday of the references to riots. “There is a kind of rhetorical trick that is always used to denounce movements of ordinary people, and that is to imply that the massing of people itself is violent.”
That, she said, is what Mr. Beck is doing, trying to frighten his viewers.
The Nation, which has featured Ms. Piven’s columns for decades, quoted some of the threats against her in an editorial this week that condemned the “concerted campaign” against her.
One such threat, published as an anonymous comment on The Blaze, read, “Somebody tell Frances I have 5000 roundas ready and I’ll give My life to take Our freedom back.” (The spelling and capitalizing have not been changed.)
That comment and others that were direct threats were later deleted, but other comments remain that charge her with treasonous behavior.
Mr. Beck generally does not have guests on his hourlong Fox program, and Ms. Piven has not been invited to defend herself on the program. Neither Mr. Beck nor any of his producers have ever contacted her, she said.
The Center for Constitutional Rights said it took exception to the sheer quantity of negative attention to Ms. Piven.
“We are vigorous defenders of the First Amendment,” the center said in its letter to Fox. “However, there comes a point when constant intentional repetition of provocative, incendiary, emotional misinformation and falsehoods about a person can put that person in actual physical danger of a violent response.” Mr. Beck is at that point, they said.
Ms. Piven, for her part, said she was amazed that she was still being brought up on Mr. Beck’s show as recently as Wednesday.
“There are hundreds and hundreds of people who are just boiling with anger and hate,” she said.
Friday, January 21, 2011
FINALLY SOMEONE IS TAKING MY SUGGESTION!
I'm declaring February a Palin-free month. Join me!
Dana Milbank Washington Post
Though it is embarrassing to admit this in public, I can no longer hide the truth. I have a Sarah Palin problem.
I have written about her in 42 columns since Sen. John McCain picked her as his vice-presidential running mate in 2008. I've mentioned her in dozens more blog posts, Web chats, and TV and radio appearances. I feel powerless to control my obsession, even though it cheapens and demeans me.
But today is the first day of the rest of my life. And so, I hereby pledge that, beginning on Feb. 1, 2011, I will not mention Sarah Palin -- in print, online or on television -- for one month. Furthermore, I call on others in the news media to join me in this pledge of a Palin-free February. With enough support, I believe we may even be able to extend the moratorium beyond one month, but we are up against a powerful compulsion, and we must take this struggle day by day.
I came to this inner strength by trusting in a power greater than myself: my former Washington Post colleague Howie Kurtz, now with the Daily Beast. A week ago, on his CNN show, "Reliable Sources," I was complaining about the over-coverage of Palin when I found myself saying that "the best thing would be -- it's impossible, of course -- that we in the media should declare some sort of a Sarah Palin moratorium."
It's impossible, I figured, because Palin is a huge source of cheap Web clicks, television ratings and media buzz. If any of us refused to partake of her Facebook candy or declined to use her as blog bait, we would be sending millions of Web surfers, readers, viewers and listeners to our less scrupulous competitors.
The media obsession with Palin began naturally and innocently enough, when the Alaska governor emerged as an electrifying presence on the Republican presidential ticket more than two years ago. But then something unhealthy happened: Though Palin was no longer a candidate, or even a public official, we in the press discovered that the mere mention of her name could vault our stories onto the most-viewed list. Palin, feeding this co-dependency and indulging the news business's endless desire for conflict, tweeted provocative nuggets that would help us keep her in the public eye -- so much so that this former vice presidential candidate gets far more coverage than the actual vice president.
We need help.
I found some hope in last Sunday's New York Times, where columnist Ross Douthat said it is time for the media and Palin to "go their separate ways" and for the press to "stop acting as if she's the most important conservative politician in America."
Let's take it one step further. I call on Douthat (who has mentioned Palin in 21 of his Times columns since 2008, according to a Lexis-Nexis search, and in scores of blog posts) to join my moratorium -- thereby forming a bipartisan coalition of The Post and the Times. I challenge columnists Eugene Robinson (33 Palin mentions), Paul Krugman (14), Kathleen Parker (30) and Maureen Dowd (45) to do the same.
I also call on Keith Olbermann (345 shows mentioning Palin) and Rachel Maddow (183 shows) of MSNBC, as well as Sean Hannity (411 Palin segments) and Bill O'Reilly (664 segments) of Fox News, to take the pledge. Will Politico -- with 96 Palin items in the past month alone -- join this cause? Will the Huffington Post, which had 19 Palin mentions on a single day last week -- stand with me?
Palin clearly isn't going away: "I am not going to sit down. I'm not going to shut up," she told Hannity on Monday. But if we treat her a little less like a major political figure and a little more like Ann Coulter -- a calculating individual who says shocking things to attract media attention -- it won't matter. Sure, we might lose some Web traffic or TV ratings, but we might also gain something. Remember the "Seinfeld" episode where George Costanza, by giving up sex, suddenly frees up brain power to learn Portuguese and Euclidean geometry, to teach Derek Jeter the physics of batting, to become a "Jeopardy" whiz and to solve a Rubik's cube? If we stop obsessing over Palin, we might suddenly become experts in the federal budget or Medicare reimbursement rates.
And so I pledge to you: Sarah Palin's name will not cross my lips -- or my keyboard -- for the entire month of February. Who's with me?
Dana Milbank is an op-ed columnist for The Washington Post and the author of "Tears of a Clown: Glenn Beck and the Tea Bagging of America." He will be online Monday, Jan. 24, at 11 a.m. ET to discuss this article. Submit your questions before or during the chat.
Dana Milbank Washington Post
Though it is embarrassing to admit this in public, I can no longer hide the truth. I have a Sarah Palin problem.
I have written about her in 42 columns since Sen. John McCain picked her as his vice-presidential running mate in 2008. I've mentioned her in dozens more blog posts, Web chats, and TV and radio appearances. I feel powerless to control my obsession, even though it cheapens and demeans me.
But today is the first day of the rest of my life. And so, I hereby pledge that, beginning on Feb. 1, 2011, I will not mention Sarah Palin -- in print, online or on television -- for one month. Furthermore, I call on others in the news media to join me in this pledge of a Palin-free February. With enough support, I believe we may even be able to extend the moratorium beyond one month, but we are up against a powerful compulsion, and we must take this struggle day by day.
I came to this inner strength by trusting in a power greater than myself: my former Washington Post colleague Howie Kurtz, now with the Daily Beast. A week ago, on his CNN show, "Reliable Sources," I was complaining about the over-coverage of Palin when I found myself saying that "the best thing would be -- it's impossible, of course -- that we in the media should declare some sort of a Sarah Palin moratorium."
It's impossible, I figured, because Palin is a huge source of cheap Web clicks, television ratings and media buzz. If any of us refused to partake of her Facebook candy or declined to use her as blog bait, we would be sending millions of Web surfers, readers, viewers and listeners to our less scrupulous competitors.
The media obsession with Palin began naturally and innocently enough, when the Alaska governor emerged as an electrifying presence on the Republican presidential ticket more than two years ago. But then something unhealthy happened: Though Palin was no longer a candidate, or even a public official, we in the press discovered that the mere mention of her name could vault our stories onto the most-viewed list. Palin, feeding this co-dependency and indulging the news business's endless desire for conflict, tweeted provocative nuggets that would help us keep her in the public eye -- so much so that this former vice presidential candidate gets far more coverage than the actual vice president.
We need help.
I found some hope in last Sunday's New York Times, where columnist Ross Douthat said it is time for the media and Palin to "go their separate ways" and for the press to "stop acting as if she's the most important conservative politician in America."
Let's take it one step further. I call on Douthat (who has mentioned Palin in 21 of his Times columns since 2008, according to a Lexis-Nexis search, and in scores of blog posts) to join my moratorium -- thereby forming a bipartisan coalition of The Post and the Times. I challenge columnists Eugene Robinson (33 Palin mentions), Paul Krugman (14), Kathleen Parker (30) and Maureen Dowd (45) to do the same.
I also call on Keith Olbermann (345 shows mentioning Palin) and Rachel Maddow (183 shows) of MSNBC, as well as Sean Hannity (411 Palin segments) and Bill O'Reilly (664 segments) of Fox News, to take the pledge. Will Politico -- with 96 Palin items in the past month alone -- join this cause? Will the Huffington Post, which had 19 Palin mentions on a single day last week -- stand with me?
Palin clearly isn't going away: "I am not going to sit down. I'm not going to shut up," she told Hannity on Monday. But if we treat her a little less like a major political figure and a little more like Ann Coulter -- a calculating individual who says shocking things to attract media attention -- it won't matter. Sure, we might lose some Web traffic or TV ratings, but we might also gain something. Remember the "Seinfeld" episode where George Costanza, by giving up sex, suddenly frees up brain power to learn Portuguese and Euclidean geometry, to teach Derek Jeter the physics of batting, to become a "Jeopardy" whiz and to solve a Rubik's cube? If we stop obsessing over Palin, we might suddenly become experts in the federal budget or Medicare reimbursement rates.
And so I pledge to you: Sarah Palin's name will not cross my lips -- or my keyboard -- for the entire month of February. Who's with me?
Dana Milbank is an op-ed columnist for The Washington Post and the author of "Tears of a Clown: Glenn Beck and the Tea Bagging of America." He will be online Monday, Jan. 24, at 11 a.m. ET to discuss this article. Submit your questions before or during the chat.
The GOP's rude awakening on health-care repeal Eugene Robinson
This whole health-care thing isn't quite working out the way Republicans planned. My guess is that they'll soon try to change the subject - but I'm afraid they're already in too deep.
Wednesday's vote to repeal President Obama's health insurance reform law was supposed to be a crowning triumph. We heard confident GOP predictions that cowed Democrats would defect in droves, generating unstoppable momentum that forced the Senate to obey "the will of the people" and follow suit. The Democrats' biggest domestic accomplishment would be in ruins and Obama's political standing would be damaged, perhaps irreparably.
What actually happened, though, is that the Republican majority managed to win the votes of just three Democrats - all of them Blue Dogs who have been consistent opponents of the reform package anyway. In terms of actual defectors, meaning Democrats who changed sides on the issue, there were none. This is momentum?
The unimpressive vote came at a moment when "the will of the people" on health care is coming into sharper focus. Most polls that offer a simple binary choice - do you like the "Obamacare" law or not - show that the reforms remain narrowly unpopular. Yet a significant fraction of those who are unhappy complain not that the reform law went too far but that it didn't go far enough. I think of these people as the "public option" crowd.
A recent Associated Press poll found that 41 percent of those surveyed opposed the reform law and 40 percent supported it. But when asked what Congress should do, 43 percent said the law should be modified so that it does more to change the health-care system. Another 19 percent said it should be left as it is.
More troubling for the GOP, the AP poll found that just 26 percent of respondents wanted Congress to repeal the reform law completely. A recent Washington Post poll found support for outright repeal at 18 percent; a Marist poll pegged it at 30 percent.
In other words, what House Republicans just voted to do may be the will of the Tea Party, but it's not "the will of the people."
"The test of a first-rate intelligence," F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, "is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." By this standard, House Republicans are geniuses. To pass the "Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act," they had to believe that the work of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office is both authoritative and worthless.
The CBO, which "scores" the impact of proposed legislation, calculated that the health-reform law will reduce federal deficits by at least $143 billion through 2019. Confronted with the fact that repeal would deepen the nation's fiscal woes, Republicans simply claimed the CBO estimate to be rubbish. Who cares what the CBO says, anyway?
Er, um, Republicans care, at least when it's convenient. Delving into the CBO's analysis, they unearthed a finding that they proclaimed as definitive: The reform law would eliminate 650,000 jobs. Hence "Job-Killing" in the repeal bill's title.
One problem, though: The CBO analysis contains no such figure. It's an extrapolation of a rough estimate of an anticipated effect that no reasonable person would describe as "job-killing." What the budget office actually said is that there are people who would like to withdraw from the workforce - sometimes because of a chronic medical condition - but who feel compelled to continue working so they can keep their health insurance. Once the reforms take effect, these individuals will have new options. That's where the "lost" jobs supposedly come from.
The exercise in intellectual contortion that was necessary for the House to pass the repeal bill will be an excellent tune-up for what's supposed to come next. "Repeal and replace" was the promise - get rid of the Democrats' reform plan and design one of their own. This is going to be fun.
It turns out that voters look forward to the day when no one can be denied insurance coverage because of preexisting conditions. They like the fact that young adults, until they are 26, can be kept on their parents' policies. They like not having yearly or lifetime limits on benefits. The GOP is going to have to design something that looks a lot like Obamacare.
Meanwhile, Obama's approval ratings climb higher every week. Somebody change the subject. Quick!
Wednesday's vote to repeal President Obama's health insurance reform law was supposed to be a crowning triumph. We heard confident GOP predictions that cowed Democrats would defect in droves, generating unstoppable momentum that forced the Senate to obey "the will of the people" and follow suit. The Democrats' biggest domestic accomplishment would be in ruins and Obama's political standing would be damaged, perhaps irreparably.
What actually happened, though, is that the Republican majority managed to win the votes of just three Democrats - all of them Blue Dogs who have been consistent opponents of the reform package anyway. In terms of actual defectors, meaning Democrats who changed sides on the issue, there were none. This is momentum?
The unimpressive vote came at a moment when "the will of the people" on health care is coming into sharper focus. Most polls that offer a simple binary choice - do you like the "Obamacare" law or not - show that the reforms remain narrowly unpopular. Yet a significant fraction of those who are unhappy complain not that the reform law went too far but that it didn't go far enough. I think of these people as the "public option" crowd.
A recent Associated Press poll found that 41 percent of those surveyed opposed the reform law and 40 percent supported it. But when asked what Congress should do, 43 percent said the law should be modified so that it does more to change the health-care system. Another 19 percent said it should be left as it is.
More troubling for the GOP, the AP poll found that just 26 percent of respondents wanted Congress to repeal the reform law completely. A recent Washington Post poll found support for outright repeal at 18 percent; a Marist poll pegged it at 30 percent.
In other words, what House Republicans just voted to do may be the will of the Tea Party, but it's not "the will of the people."
"The test of a first-rate intelligence," F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, "is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." By this standard, House Republicans are geniuses. To pass the "Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act," they had to believe that the work of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office is both authoritative and worthless.
The CBO, which "scores" the impact of proposed legislation, calculated that the health-reform law will reduce federal deficits by at least $143 billion through 2019. Confronted with the fact that repeal would deepen the nation's fiscal woes, Republicans simply claimed the CBO estimate to be rubbish. Who cares what the CBO says, anyway?
Er, um, Republicans care, at least when it's convenient. Delving into the CBO's analysis, they unearthed a finding that they proclaimed as definitive: The reform law would eliminate 650,000 jobs. Hence "Job-Killing" in the repeal bill's title.
One problem, though: The CBO analysis contains no such figure. It's an extrapolation of a rough estimate of an anticipated effect that no reasonable person would describe as "job-killing." What the budget office actually said is that there are people who would like to withdraw from the workforce - sometimes because of a chronic medical condition - but who feel compelled to continue working so they can keep their health insurance. Once the reforms take effect, these individuals will have new options. That's where the "lost" jobs supposedly come from.
The exercise in intellectual contortion that was necessary for the House to pass the repeal bill will be an excellent tune-up for what's supposed to come next. "Repeal and replace" was the promise - get rid of the Democrats' reform plan and design one of their own. This is going to be fun.
It turns out that voters look forward to the day when no one can be denied insurance coverage because of preexisting conditions. They like the fact that young adults, until they are 26, can be kept on their parents' policies. They like not having yearly or lifetime limits on benefits. The GOP is going to have to design something that looks a lot like Obamacare.
Meanwhile, Obama's approval ratings climb higher every week. Somebody change the subject. Quick!
Olbermann Leaves ‘Countdown’ on MSNBC (my motto was NEVER BELIEVE YOUR OWN B S)
Updated Keith Olbermann, the highest-rated host on MSNBC, announced abruptly on the air Friday night that he was leaving his show, “Countdown,” immediately.
The host, who has had a stormy relationship with the management of the network for some time, especially since he was suspended for two days last November, came to an agreement with NBC’s corporate management late this week to settle his contract and step down.
In a closing statement on his show, Mr. Olbermann said simply that it would be the last edition of the program. He offered no explanation other than on occasion “all that surrounded the show – but never the show itself – was just too much for me.”
Mr. Olbermann thanked his viewers for their enthusiastic support of a show that had “gradually established its position as antiestablishment.”
In a statement, MSNBC said: “MSNBC and Keith Olbermann have ended their contract. The last broadcast of ‘Countdown with Keith Olbermann’ will be this evening. MSNBC thanks Keith for his integral role in MSNBC’s success and we wish him well in his future endeavors.”
NBC executives said the move had nothing to do with the impending takeover of NBC Universal by Comcast. With viewers and fans of Mr. Olbermann suggesting that Comcast was responsible for forcing Mr. Olbermann out, Comcast also released an official statement late Friday night:
“Comcast has not closed the transaction for NBC Universal and has no operational control at any of its properties including MSNBC. We pledged from the day the deal was announced that we would not interfere with NBC Universal’s news operations. We have not and we will not.”
MSNBC announced that “The Last Word” with Lawrence O’Donnell would replace “Countdown” at 8 p.m., with “The Ed Show” with Ed Schultz taking Mr. O’Donnell’s slot at 10 p.m. Mr. Olbermann did not discuss any future plans, but NBC executives said one term of his settlement would keep him from moving to another network for an extended period of time.
Mr. Olbermann signed a four-year contract extension in 2008 for an estimated $30 million. He had hosted “Countdown” at 8 p.m. since 2003 and it became the foundation of the channel’s surge to its status as the second-ranked news channel on cable television, after Fox News, surpassing the one-time leader CNN.
Mr. Olbermann’s outspoken, and sometimes controversial, support of liberal positions and Democratic candidates redefined MSNBC from a neutral news channel to one that openly offered a voice to viewers on the left, much as Fox News has done for conservatives.
Mr. Olbermann challenged Fox News publicly on numerous occasions, especially the top-rated cable host Bill O’Reilly.
Ratings for Mr. Olbermann’s show grew, though he never approached Mr. O’Reilly’s level of popularity. But he helped expand the MSNBC brand by his frequent invitations to Rachel Maddow, who was eventually offered her own show on MSNBC.
Ms. Maddow became the 9 p.m. host following Mr. Olbermann and has built such a successful show that some NBC executives felt less concerned about losing Mr. Olbermann as the signature star of the network.
According to several senior network executives, NBC’s management had been close to firing Mr. Olbermann on previous occasions, most recently in November after he revealed that he had made donations to several Democratic candidates in 2010 — one of them, coincidentally, was Representative Gabrielle Giffords, who has been the subject of many of his recent shows after being shot in an assassination attempt.
The top MSNBC executive, Phil Griffin, said the donations had violated NBC News standards and ordered Mr. Olbermann suspended. His fans responded with a petition to reinstate him that attracted over 250,000 signatures. Mr. Olbermann returned two days later. In his response he said the rules on donations had been “inconsistently applied.”
The host, who has had a stormy relationship with the management of the network for some time, especially since he was suspended for two days last November, came to an agreement with NBC’s corporate management late this week to settle his contract and step down.
In a closing statement on his show, Mr. Olbermann said simply that it would be the last edition of the program. He offered no explanation other than on occasion “all that surrounded the show – but never the show itself – was just too much for me.”
Mr. Olbermann thanked his viewers for their enthusiastic support of a show that had “gradually established its position as antiestablishment.”
In a statement, MSNBC said: “MSNBC and Keith Olbermann have ended their contract. The last broadcast of ‘Countdown with Keith Olbermann’ will be this evening. MSNBC thanks Keith for his integral role in MSNBC’s success and we wish him well in his future endeavors.”
NBC executives said the move had nothing to do with the impending takeover of NBC Universal by Comcast. With viewers and fans of Mr. Olbermann suggesting that Comcast was responsible for forcing Mr. Olbermann out, Comcast also released an official statement late Friday night:
“Comcast has not closed the transaction for NBC Universal and has no operational control at any of its properties including MSNBC. We pledged from the day the deal was announced that we would not interfere with NBC Universal’s news operations. We have not and we will not.”
MSNBC announced that “The Last Word” with Lawrence O’Donnell would replace “Countdown” at 8 p.m., with “The Ed Show” with Ed Schultz taking Mr. O’Donnell’s slot at 10 p.m. Mr. Olbermann did not discuss any future plans, but NBC executives said one term of his settlement would keep him from moving to another network for an extended period of time.
Mr. Olbermann signed a four-year contract extension in 2008 for an estimated $30 million. He had hosted “Countdown” at 8 p.m. since 2003 and it became the foundation of the channel’s surge to its status as the second-ranked news channel on cable television, after Fox News, surpassing the one-time leader CNN.
Mr. Olbermann’s outspoken, and sometimes controversial, support of liberal positions and Democratic candidates redefined MSNBC from a neutral news channel to one that openly offered a voice to viewers on the left, much as Fox News has done for conservatives.
Mr. Olbermann challenged Fox News publicly on numerous occasions, especially the top-rated cable host Bill O’Reilly.
Ratings for Mr. Olbermann’s show grew, though he never approached Mr. O’Reilly’s level of popularity. But he helped expand the MSNBC brand by his frequent invitations to Rachel Maddow, who was eventually offered her own show on MSNBC.
Ms. Maddow became the 9 p.m. host following Mr. Olbermann and has built such a successful show that some NBC executives felt less concerned about losing Mr. Olbermann as the signature star of the network.
According to several senior network executives, NBC’s management had been close to firing Mr. Olbermann on previous occasions, most recently in November after he revealed that he had made donations to several Democratic candidates in 2010 — one of them, coincidentally, was Representative Gabrielle Giffords, who has been the subject of many of his recent shows after being shot in an assassination attempt.
The top MSNBC executive, Phil Griffin, said the donations had violated NBC News standards and ordered Mr. Olbermann suspended. His fans responded with a petition to reinstate him that attracted over 250,000 signatures. Mr. Olbermann returned two days later. In his response he said the rules on donations had been “inconsistently applied.”
Why Parents Fear the Needle
DESPITE overwhelming evidence to the contrary, roughly one in five Americans believes that vaccines cause autism — a disturbing fact that will probably hold true even after the publication this month, in a British medical journal, of a report thoroughly debunking the 1998 paper that began the vaccine-autism scare.
That’s because the public’s underlying fear of vaccines goes much deeper than a single paper. Until officials realize that, and learn how to counter such deep-seated concerns, the paranoia — and the public-health risk it poses — will remain.
The evidence against the original article and its author, a British medical researcher named Andrew Wakefield, is damning. Among other things, he is said to have received payment for his research from a lawyer involved in a suit against a vaccine manufacturer; in response, Britain’s General Medical Council struck him from the medical register last May. As the journal’s editor put it, the assertion that the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine caused autism “was based not on bad science but on a deliberate fraud.”
But public fear of vaccines did not originate with Dr. Wakefield’s paper. Rather, his claims tapped into a reservoir of doubt and resentment toward this life-saving, but never risk-free, technology.
Vaccines have had to fight against public skepticism from the beginning. In 1802, after Edward Jenner published his first results claiming that scratching cowpox pus into the arms of healthy children could protect them against smallpox, a political cartoon appeared showing newly vaccinated people with hooves and horns.
Nevertheless, during the 19th century vaccines became central to public-health efforts in England, Europe and the Americas, and several countries began to require vaccinations.
Such a move didn’t sit comfortably with many people, who saw mandatory vaccinations as an invasion of their personal liberty. An antivaccine movement began to build and, though vilified by the mainstream medical profession, soon boasted a substantial popular base and several prominent supporters, including Frederick Douglass, Leo Tolstoy and George Bernard Shaw, who called vaccinations “a peculiarly filthy piece of witchcraft.”
In America, popular opposition peaked during the smallpox epidemic at the turn of the 20th century. Health officials ordered vaccinations in public schools, in factories and on the nation’s railroads; club-wielding New York City policemen enforced vaccinations in crowded immigrant tenements, while Texas Rangers and the United States Cavalry provided muscle for vaccinators along the Mexican border.
Public resistance was immediate, from riots and school strikes to lobbying and a groundswell of litigation that eventually reached the Supreme Court. Newspapers, notably this one, dismissed antivaccinationists as “benighted and deranged” and “hopeless cranks.”
But the opposition reflected complex attitudes toward medicine and the government. Many African-Americans, long neglected or mistreated by the white medical profession, doubted the vaccinators’ motives. Christian Scientists protested the laws as an assault on religious liberty. And workers feared, with good reason, that vaccines would inflame their arms and cost them several days’ wages.
Understandably, advocates for universal immunization then and now have tended to see only the harm done by their critics. But in retrospect, such wariness was justified: at the time, health officials ordered vaccinations without ensuring the vaccines were safe and effective.
Public confidence in vaccines collapsed in the fall of 1901 when newspapers linked the deaths of nine schoolchildren in Camden, N.J., to a commercial vaccine allegedly tainted with tetanus. In St. Louis, 13 more schoolchildren died of tetanus after treatment with the diphtheria antitoxin. It was decades before many Americans were willing to submit to public vaccination campaigns again.
Nevertheless, the vaccination controversy of the last century did leave a positive legacy. Seeking to restore confidence after the deaths in Camden and St. Louis, Congress enacted the Biologics Control Act of 1902, establishing the first federal regulation of the nation’s growing vaccine industry. Confronted with numerous antivaccination lawsuits, state and federal courts established new standards that balanced public health and civil liberties.
Most important, popular resistance taught government officials that when it comes to public health, education can be more effective than brute force. By midcentury, awareness efforts had proven critical to the polio and smallpox vaccination efforts, both of which were huge successes.
One would think such education efforts would no longer be necessary. After all, today’s vaccines are safer, subject to extensive regulatory controls. And shots are far more numerous: as of 2010, the Centers for Disease Control recommended that every child receive 10 different vaccinations. For most Americans, vaccines are a fact of life.
Still, according to a 2010 C.D.C. report, 40 percent of American parents with young children have delayed or refused one or more vaccines for their child. That’s in part because vaccines have been so successful that any risk associated with their use, however statistically small, takes on an elevated significance.
It also doesn’t help that, thanks to the Internet, a bottomless archive of misinformation, including Dr. Wakefield’s debunked work, is just a few keystrokes away. All of which means the public health community must work even harder to spread the positive news about vaccines.
Health officials often get frustrated with public misconceptions about vaccines; at the turn of the last century, one frustrated Kentucky health officer pined for the arrival of “the fool-killer” — an outbreak of smallpox devastating enough to convince his skeptical rural constituency of the value of vaccination.
But that’s no way to run a health system. Our public health leaders would do far better to adopt the strategy used by one forward-thinking federal health official from the early 20th century, C. P. Wertenbaker of the Public Health and Marine-Hospital Service.
As smallpox raged across the American South, Wertenbaker journeyed to small communities and delivered speech after speech on vaccinations before swelling audiences of townsfolk, farmers and families. He listened and replied to people’s fears. He told them about the horrors of smallpox. He candidly presented the latest scientific information about the benefits and risks of vaccination. And he urged his audiences to protect themselves and one another by taking the vaccine. By the time he was done, many of his listeners were already rolling up their sleeves.
America’s public health leaders need to do the same, to reclaim the town square with a candid national conversation about the real risks of vaccines, which are minuscule compared with their benefits. Why waste another breath vilifying the antivaccination minority when steps can be taken to expand the pro-vaccine majority?
Obstetricians, midwives and pediatricians should present the facts about vaccines and the nasty diseases they prevent early and often to expectant parents. Health agencies should mobilize local parents’ organizations to publicize, in realistic terms, the hazards that unvaccinated children can pose to everyone else in their communities. And health officials must redouble their efforts to harness the power of the Internet and spread the good word about vaccines.
You can bet that Wertenbaker would have done the same thing.
Michael Willrich, an associate professor of history at Brandeis University, is the author of the forthcoming “Pox: An American History.”
That’s because the public’s underlying fear of vaccines goes much deeper than a single paper. Until officials realize that, and learn how to counter such deep-seated concerns, the paranoia — and the public-health risk it poses — will remain.
The evidence against the original article and its author, a British medical researcher named Andrew Wakefield, is damning. Among other things, he is said to have received payment for his research from a lawyer involved in a suit against a vaccine manufacturer; in response, Britain’s General Medical Council struck him from the medical register last May. As the journal’s editor put it, the assertion that the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine caused autism “was based not on bad science but on a deliberate fraud.”
But public fear of vaccines did not originate with Dr. Wakefield’s paper. Rather, his claims tapped into a reservoir of doubt and resentment toward this life-saving, but never risk-free, technology.
Vaccines have had to fight against public skepticism from the beginning. In 1802, after Edward Jenner published his first results claiming that scratching cowpox pus into the arms of healthy children could protect them against smallpox, a political cartoon appeared showing newly vaccinated people with hooves and horns.
Nevertheless, during the 19th century vaccines became central to public-health efforts in England, Europe and the Americas, and several countries began to require vaccinations.
Such a move didn’t sit comfortably with many people, who saw mandatory vaccinations as an invasion of their personal liberty. An antivaccine movement began to build and, though vilified by the mainstream medical profession, soon boasted a substantial popular base and several prominent supporters, including Frederick Douglass, Leo Tolstoy and George Bernard Shaw, who called vaccinations “a peculiarly filthy piece of witchcraft.”
In America, popular opposition peaked during the smallpox epidemic at the turn of the 20th century. Health officials ordered vaccinations in public schools, in factories and on the nation’s railroads; club-wielding New York City policemen enforced vaccinations in crowded immigrant tenements, while Texas Rangers and the United States Cavalry provided muscle for vaccinators along the Mexican border.
Public resistance was immediate, from riots and school strikes to lobbying and a groundswell of litigation that eventually reached the Supreme Court. Newspapers, notably this one, dismissed antivaccinationists as “benighted and deranged” and “hopeless cranks.”
But the opposition reflected complex attitudes toward medicine and the government. Many African-Americans, long neglected or mistreated by the white medical profession, doubted the vaccinators’ motives. Christian Scientists protested the laws as an assault on religious liberty. And workers feared, with good reason, that vaccines would inflame their arms and cost them several days’ wages.
Understandably, advocates for universal immunization then and now have tended to see only the harm done by their critics. But in retrospect, such wariness was justified: at the time, health officials ordered vaccinations without ensuring the vaccines were safe and effective.
Public confidence in vaccines collapsed in the fall of 1901 when newspapers linked the deaths of nine schoolchildren in Camden, N.J., to a commercial vaccine allegedly tainted with tetanus. In St. Louis, 13 more schoolchildren died of tetanus after treatment with the diphtheria antitoxin. It was decades before many Americans were willing to submit to public vaccination campaigns again.
Nevertheless, the vaccination controversy of the last century did leave a positive legacy. Seeking to restore confidence after the deaths in Camden and St. Louis, Congress enacted the Biologics Control Act of 1902, establishing the first federal regulation of the nation’s growing vaccine industry. Confronted with numerous antivaccination lawsuits, state and federal courts established new standards that balanced public health and civil liberties.
Most important, popular resistance taught government officials that when it comes to public health, education can be more effective than brute force. By midcentury, awareness efforts had proven critical to the polio and smallpox vaccination efforts, both of which were huge successes.
One would think such education efforts would no longer be necessary. After all, today’s vaccines are safer, subject to extensive regulatory controls. And shots are far more numerous: as of 2010, the Centers for Disease Control recommended that every child receive 10 different vaccinations. For most Americans, vaccines are a fact of life.
Still, according to a 2010 C.D.C. report, 40 percent of American parents with young children have delayed or refused one or more vaccines for their child. That’s in part because vaccines have been so successful that any risk associated with their use, however statistically small, takes on an elevated significance.
It also doesn’t help that, thanks to the Internet, a bottomless archive of misinformation, including Dr. Wakefield’s debunked work, is just a few keystrokes away. All of which means the public health community must work even harder to spread the positive news about vaccines.
Health officials often get frustrated with public misconceptions about vaccines; at the turn of the last century, one frustrated Kentucky health officer pined for the arrival of “the fool-killer” — an outbreak of smallpox devastating enough to convince his skeptical rural constituency of the value of vaccination.
But that’s no way to run a health system. Our public health leaders would do far better to adopt the strategy used by one forward-thinking federal health official from the early 20th century, C. P. Wertenbaker of the Public Health and Marine-Hospital Service.
As smallpox raged across the American South, Wertenbaker journeyed to small communities and delivered speech after speech on vaccinations before swelling audiences of townsfolk, farmers and families. He listened and replied to people’s fears. He told them about the horrors of smallpox. He candidly presented the latest scientific information about the benefits and risks of vaccination. And he urged his audiences to protect themselves and one another by taking the vaccine. By the time he was done, many of his listeners were already rolling up their sleeves.
America’s public health leaders need to do the same, to reclaim the town square with a candid national conversation about the real risks of vaccines, which are minuscule compared with their benefits. Why waste another breath vilifying the antivaccination minority when steps can be taken to expand the pro-vaccine majority?
Obstetricians, midwives and pediatricians should present the facts about vaccines and the nasty diseases they prevent early and often to expectant parents. Health agencies should mobilize local parents’ organizations to publicize, in realistic terms, the hazards that unvaccinated children can pose to everyone else in their communities. And health officials must redouble their efforts to harness the power of the Internet and spread the good word about vaccines.
You can bet that Wertenbaker would have done the same thing.
Michael Willrich, an associate professor of history at Brandeis University, is the author of the forthcoming “Pox: An American History.”
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