The great Oliver Wendell Holmes once observed that important Supreme Court decisions “exercise a kind of hydraulic effect.” Even if the authors of such decisions assert that their rulings will have limited impact, these cases invariably have a profound influence. So it has been with Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., which is less than six months old.
It would be an insult to anyone possessing the tiniest flicker of intelligence to suggest that, in a 12-month period on a college campus, no student had reported to any campus employee that he or she had been a victim of a forcible sex offense.
Which says a lot about the staff of the Department of Education. Because every October, most of the around 11,000 higher education institutions in the country file reports saying just that. And the department — which is tasked with enforcing the law that requires this reporting — does nothing.
The annual crime report is one of the key provisions of the Clery Act, a law designed to help students protect themselves by providing information about crime on campus. Institutions receiving federal education funding must submit the total numbers of reported violent crimes on campus in the past year.
In the last few months, a great deal of attention has been devoted to the Clery Act’s role in preventing sexual assault on campus. New mandatory categories have been added to these reports, and Congress has discussed the possibility of increasing fines for violations.
Which would be great, if the reports themselves weren’t mostly a collection of outrageous lies rubber-stamped by the Department of Education.
The Student Press Law Center (my employer) and The Columbus Dispatch recently completed an audit of the last 12 years of these reports for all the colleges in the United States.
The result? Every year, the majority of schools tell the Department of Education they have received zero reports of forcible sex offenses. (And we’re talking about reports to non-clergy, non-counselor staff members, not just law enforcement.)
One of two things is true: Either these schools are outright lying through their collective teeth, or the schools are working very hard not to find victims on their campuses.
You might well think, “Okay, the Clery Act has penalty provisions. Aren’t schools afraid of being found to have violated the Clery Act by failing to count sexual assault numbers properly?”
Mmm, no. The odds of being caught are almost nil. From the SPLC/Dispatch investigation: “Federal education officials, who typically investigate only after a complaint has been filed, have audited only about six dozen of the nation’s 11,000 schools.”
And that’s since reporting started in 1991. So let’s do a little bit of back-of-the-envelope math: 11,000 schools reporting for 21 years (because the numbers above stopped at 2012) resulted in about 72 audits. The odds of being audited, then, are around 1 in 3,200 and change.
The odds of being struck by lightning in your lifetime are about 1 in 3,000.
So why doesn’t the Department of Education audit some of the schools reporting zeroes — which, again, is most of them? If you pick a random number between one and 11,000, and count that many names down the list of universities, the odds are in your favor that the name you find claims to have heard of no sexual assaults whatsoever.
Because it’s not their job, they say.
Jim Moore, the Department of Education official in charge of these statistics, defends them in the SPLC/Dispatch piece by saying, “We encourage people to use the Clery Act as a starting point,” Moore said.
But if, ultimately, the annual Clery numbers are so unreliable that a student looking for safety information is expected to do her own research thereafter, what is this annual report even for?
If the Department of Education does no auditing of any kind on this data until someone makes a complaint, why even have an annual reporting deadline?
Perhaps it’s the result of an agency rule-making processes that packs a room with lobbyists and representatives of the institutions supposedly to be regulated. Perhaps it’s the result of too many years of deferring to educational institutions as if they were some kind of mysterious alien worlds that shouldn’t have to answer to our common notions of transparency and decency.
Whatever the cause, the result is clear. As it exists, the annual statistics in the Clery Act make students slightly less safe by providing a federally mandated and endorsed format for lying about crime. If the Obama administration is serious about preventing sexual assault on campus, it has to start by actually enforcing the minimal requirement that the colleges attempt to count the number of students brave enough to speak out about the crimes they’ve experienced.
In a post on RhRealityCheck.org Tuesday, I reported that an advertisement produced by senatorial candidate Cory Gardner refers to the “American Association of Obstetricians and Gynecologists” as a backer of his proposal to sell contraception over-the-counter. But this group apparently does not exist.
The advertisement states:
Supported by the American Association of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, Cory’s proposal would make oral contraception: Less expensive — about the price of Aspirin; More convenient — helping women obtain The Pill on their own schedule without an appointment; More accessible — ensures women in underserved urban and rural areas have greater ability to obtain The Pill. [BigMedia emphasis]
The RH Reality Check post states:
A Google search for the “American Association of Obstetricians and Gynecologists” returns references to the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG).
After seeing the Gardner mailer, Kate Connors, ACOG Director of Media Relations, told RH Reality Check via email, “For all I know, there is an AAOG out there, somewhere, but it has certainly never come to my attention. I dare say that the mailer’s reference to it is an error.”
Connors said that it was also an “error” for Gardner to suggest that “we have supported his proposal.”
Gardner has previously cited “a committee” ACOG as supporting over-the-counter birth control sales.
A September 9 ACOG statement emphasizes over-the-counter sale of contraception is a long-term goal, not a proposal it supports currently.
Politifact.com, in a September 8 analysis, judged Gardner’s claim about the pill being cheaper if sold over-the-counter as “mostly false,” in light of various uncertainties as well as the fact that, under the Affordable Care Act, insurance companies cannot charge policy holders a co-pay for preventive health care, including contraception. So, for most women, contraception is currently free.
DENVER (AP) — The protests over a Colorado school district’s proposal to promote patriotism and de-emphasize civil disobedience in American history classes have found their way into the state’s marquee midterm election races, injecting a volatile issue two weeks before early voting ballots land in mailboxes across the state.
As hundreds of students in Jefferson County walk out of class, Democrats running for governor and Senate are decrying the proposed changes, while some Republicans question the role of the teachers union, which is in its own battle over merit pay. Statewide contests in Colorado are won and lost in the vast Denver suburb, and partisans on each side hope the heightening passions rebound to help their team in November. Colorado is the site of a top-tier gubernatorial contest and a neck-and-neck Senate race that could help determine which party controls that chamber.
“This is an issue that seems closer to people’s lives than what they are seeing in the political ads on TV, and it could absolutely impact races up and down the ballot,” said Craig Hughes, a Democratic consultant. Democrats, facing a tough election with President Obama’s low approval ratings, are particularly hopeful the controversy shakes up state politics.
The demonstrations broke out more than a week ago. A conservative bloc of three new members was elected to the school board last year, and they instantly became the majority, pushing out the district’s veteran superintendent and clashing with its teachers union and parent-teacher association.
At its Sept. 19 meeting, the board proposed creating a committee to review texts and course plans, starting with Advanced Placement history, to make sure materials “promote citizenship, patriotism, essentials and benefits of the free-market system, respect for authority and respect for individual rights” and don’t “encourage or condone civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law.”
The ensuing walkouts brought criticism from some candidates, including Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob Beauprez, a former congressman who represented Jefferson County. He said the board is within its rights to consider the adjustments.
“They have every right to discuss curriculum,” Beauprez said. “What this is really about is the continuing tiff between the teachers union and the elected majority.”
His opponent, Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper, criticized the proposed curriculum changes.
“Parents do not want a narrow curriculum or limited educational experience for their children,” said Hickenlooper, father of a 12-year-old. “The question is: Do you want your kids to learn about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Boston Tea Party? Personally, my answer is, Yes.”
The students’ passion brought the praise of Democratic Sen. Mark Udall, who called them inspiring, and said he hoped the school board would listen.
Rep. Cory Gardner, the Republican challenging Udall, wouldn’t weigh in, saying it was up to Jefferson County and that the federal government shouldn’t get involved.
Jefferson County is the second well-regarded suburban Denver school district racked by partisan battles. In 2009, a conservative slate took over the Douglas County School Board in a Republican-leaning county southwest of Denver. Critics and teachers unions have been unable to dislodge them in subsequent elections that have drawn support from national conservative figures including Jeb Bush and the Koch brothers’ group Americans For Prosperity.
But the perennial swing county of Jefferson has a far different political profile and is more evenly split between Democrats, Republicans and independents. School board elections in Colorado are nonpartisan.
The issue could come to a head Thursday, when the board meets and could vote on the proposal. In the meantime, it’s got people talking.
“As a Jefferson County parent, I can say that this was topic No. 1 at my kids’ soccer games this weekend, and no one was defending the board’s decision,” Hughes said.
Some Republicans doubt the curriculum debate will resonate outside the county.
Don Ytterberg, a Republican who is challenging Democratic U.S. Rep. Ed Perlmutter, said no one has asked him about the issue as he goes door-to-door.
He doesn’t think anyone is going to benefit from the issue in the election. “I think it’s a disadvantage to the kids,” he said.
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Follow Nicholas Riccardi at https://twitter.com/NickRiccardi .
What is it going to take to save the planet from environmental devastation?
Sheer people power? We certainly saw that on the eve of last week’s UN Climate Summit in New York. Some 400,000 marchers packed the streets of Manhattan. Millions more rallied the same day in over 2,600 other actions in 162 countries.
Or can simple shaming get world leaders to start seriously addressing the climate change challenge? We saw some serious shaming last week, too.
Spoken-word poet Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner from the Marshall Islands — the nation climate change most immediately endangers — helped open Tuesday’s UN summit with an open letter to her baby daughter that reportedly brought many of the 120 world leaders present to tears.
That letter, unfortunately, wouldn’t be enough to bring those world leaders to their senses. Last week’s summitry, a Christian Science Monitor analysis notes, left the international community “without a comprehensive strategy to fight climate change,” just the hope that maybe the next summit “would enact a plan to slow and eventually reverse the upward growth of global carbon emissions.”
People have been entertaining hopes along that line, British commentator George Monbiot has observed, ever since world leaders first started gathering for environmental summits back in 1992.
“These summits have failed for the same reason that the banks have failed,” Monbiot explains. “Political systems that were supposed to represent everyone now return governments of millionaires, financed by and acting on behalf of billionaires.”
Expecting these governments to protect the biosphere, Monbiot adds, makes no more sense than “expecting a lion to live on gazpacho.”
Why should that be the case? Over recent decades, analysts and activists have made all sorts of links between the increasing degradation of our global environment and the increasing concentration of our global wealth.
The super-rich, for starters, stomp out a huge carbon footprint. The best symbol of this stomping? That may be the private jet.
These high-powered playthings of the global elite emit six times more carbon per passenger than normal commercial jets. Between 1970 and 2006, the number of private jets worldwide multiplied by ten times over.
The super-rich don’t just consume at rates that dwarf the consumption of mere financial mortals. Their profligate spending stimulates endless consumption all the way down the economic ladder.
“Large income gaps,” as Rob Dietz and Dan O’Neill point out in their book Enough Is Enough, “lead to unhealthy status competition and consumption of materials and energy beyond what’s necessary to meet people’s needs.”
In more equal societies, analysts note, most people can afford the same things. In that environment, things don’t matter all that much.
But things become a powerful marker of social status in unequal societies where most people can’t afford the same things. In these societies, you either accumulate more and bigger things or find yourself labeled a failure.
How do we begin to reverse this endless consumption cycle? We can overcome “socially and environmentally destructive status competition,” social scientists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett argue in their just-published pamphlet A Convenient Truth, by working to “extend democracy into the economic sphere.”
Firms with worker representatives on their governing boards, employee-owned companies, and co-op enterprises “typically have much smaller pay differences within them,” note Wilkinson and Pickett, the authors of the landmark bestseller The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better.
We also need to work together, suggests Boston College sociologist Juliet Schor, to start evolving the “community provisioning of basic needs,” through, for instance, publicly owned utilities that provide households power and heat at sustainably reasonable prices.
All this working together won’t be easy. People, at some level, are going to have to trust each other, notes Bill Kerry of the UK’s Equality Trust. But inequality undercuts trust. The more unequal a society, research has shown, the less trust within it.
The less democracy as well. In nations where income and wealth concentrate the most severely, the wealthy can wield their wildly disproportionate political power to derail the environmental reforms that threaten their gravy trains.
Energy company CEOs, for instance, can squelch limits on carbon emissions that endanger their corporate profits — and personal rewards.
These execs are now using “their considerable financial and political power,” notes veteran activist Chuck Collins, “to block sane energy policy, extract taxpayer subsidies, thwart renewables, and limit consumer choice.”
The wealthy can also employ their wealth to end-run sane resource policies that do make it into effect. In drought-ravaged California, for instance, wealthy landowners in Montecito, news reports relate, have been “paying more than ten times the going rate for water” to sidestep new local water use limits.
These wealthy landowners are having water trucked in from private wells elsewhere in the state “in a desperate bid to save their manicured lawns and towering topiary.” The trucks are destroying local roads.
Other Montecito affluents are rushing to drill private wells on their own property — at $100,000 a pop — that could eventually empty local aquifers.
“If the world can’t find a way to collectively curb emissions by its largest users,” policy analyst Jim Tankersley noted last week, “rich countries — and rich people within those countries — will buy relief that the poorest among us cannot.”
The struggles against environmental degradation and for greater equality, in short, need to go hand in hand. A deeply unequal globe can never be sustainable. The “greenest” major city on Earth, Oslo, doesn’t just happen to sit in Norway, one of the world’s most equal nations.
Environmental activists increasingly understand this connection. Spreading that understanding — and acting on it — has now become our biggest challenge. We can solve both inequality and environmental decline, as the Earth Island Journal‘s Annie Leonard sums up neatly, “but only if we see the two struggles as one.”
Sam Pizzigati edits Too Much, the Institute for Policy Studies’ online weekly on excess and inequality. His latest book is The Rich Don’t Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph Over Plutocracy That Created the American Middle Class (Seven Stories Press).
SHERWOOD, Ark. (AP) — Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush praised education proposals from gubernatorial candidate Asa Hutchinson in Arkansas Tuesday despite differences between the Republicans on key school reforms, as the potential 2016 GOP presidential candidate stepped up campaigning for Republicans in tight races ahead of the midterm elections.
Bush singled out Hutchinson’s proposal to expand computer science classes in Arkansas schools after the two toured a Sherwood charter school and viewed students’ science projects. He also planned to headline a fundraiser for Hutchinson, who is running against Democratic nominee and fellow ex-congressman Mike Ross.
“Your whole education plan is right on target, and I think the state and children of Arkansas will do well with your leadership,” Bush said at a news conference.
Bush, the brother and son of the last two Republican presidents, is mulling whether to run for the White House in 2016. Unlike several other possible GOP contenders, he kept a relatively low public profile earlier in the year. But he has actively campaigned for GOP candidates of late. He is the latest of a series of possible 2016 White House hopefuls to appear in Arkansas, including U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.
A day earlier, Bush campaigned for Republican U.S. Sen. Pat Roberts in Kansas. Last week, he was in North Carolina to boost Senate candidate Thom Tillis, and he appeared at a fundraiser in Chicago recently for another GOP governor candidate, Illinois businessman Bruce Rauner.
Bush has been an advocate of the Common Core academic standards, which were developed by a bipartisan group of governors and state school officials and later promoted by the Obama administration. The standards have faced a backlash from conservatives in Arkansas and other states, and Hutchinson has said he’ll review them next year.
When asked if he had any advice for Hutchinson on the issue, Bush said higher standards are needed – even if it’s not Common Core.
“For the United States to succeed and for states to succeed, we need high standards,” Bush said. “Whether they’re called Common Core or best Arkansas standards, whatever we have today need to be higher and they need to be assessed faithfully and we need to assure that more than a third of our kids are college and/or career ready.”
Hutchinson said he believed the two were in agreement.
“I’ve consistently said whatever standards we resolve that we need to make sure they’re high standards and have high expectations for our students and that’s critically important and that they’re measurable,” he said.
Bush has also been a vocal supporter of private school vouchers, an idea that Hutchinson said he doesn’t support in Arkansas.
Ross and Hutchinson are running to succeed Democratic Gov. Mike Beebe, who is barred by term limits from seeking re-election. Republicans, who already have a majority among the nation’s governors, hope to win a seat in Arkansas from the Democrats.
It’s an obvious stunt. Nestle Fitness outfitted a woman with a bra camera to show just how many people sneak a glance throughout the day. Spoiler! It’s a lot of random eyeballs. Why did they do this? Nestle Fitness says: to remind women around the world to check their breasts regularly to help prevent breast cancer.
For those familiar with the Hearthstone game from Blizzard, you guys are probably aware that the game is only available on the computer and on the iPad. Unfortunately it is not available for smartphones or the Android platform which we guess for Android users is a bit disappointing.
Well it seems that one gamer by the name of Khanh Hoang Tran has decided to do something about it. Like we said Hearthstone is only available on the iPad as far as mobile devices are concerned, but what Tran did was that he took the PC version of the game and turned it into a playable version on his Android device!
In fact it wasn’t even an Android tablet but an Android smartphone, and by the looks of it, it seems like it is one of Pantech’s Vega smartphones. Now Tran has not made the game available to the public yet as he isn’t sure if it will work across the board. He admits that he did run into some issues, but overall he seems quite chuffed with his work so far.
Tran stated that he will be publishing a how-to article in the future so that other Android gamers will be able to get the game up and running on their phones. We should note that despite it being an unofficial port, Tran was still able to connect to Blizzard’s Battle.net servers where he could play against other players.
Hearthstone Gets Unofficial Android Port
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The nice thing about living in Apple’s ecosystem is everything is consistent: the app library, the user interface and design motifs echo across all of the company’s devices. Well, unless you have a gold iPhone — then any iPad you could possibly buy…
SALHIYAH, Iraq (AP) — Kurdish fighters in northern Iraq captured a border crossing with Syria on Tuesday, expelling Islamic State militants in heavy fighting that ground down to vicious house-to-house combat and close quarters sniping.
In neighboring Syria, Kurdish militiamen were on the defensive as the extremists pressed ahead with a relentless assault on a town near the Turkish border. The attack on Kobani, also known as Ayn Arab, has driven more than 160,000 people across the frontier in the past few days. Iraqi Kurdish fighters, known as peshmerga, were doing the bulk of the fighting on the ground as a U.S.-led coalition carried out an aerial assault against the Islamic State group in both Iraq and Syria. Britain joined the air campaign Tuesday, carrying out its first strikes against the extremists in Iraq — though it does not plan to expand into Syria.
The goal of the campaign is to push back the militant group that has declared a self-styled caliphate, or Islamic state, ruled by its brutal interpretation of Islam in territory it has seized across much of Iraq and Syria.
On Tuesday, Kurdish fighters in Iraq said they saw some of the heaviest fighting yet. Peshmerga spokesman Halgurd Hekmat told The Associated Press the Kurds seized the border crossing of Rabia, which the extremists captured in their blitz across Iraq over the summer.
Rami Abdurrahman, the director of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, also said the Kurds had retaken the border post. He said Syrian Kurdish militiamen, who control the Syrian side of the frontier, had helped in the fight.
Kurds wounded in the fighting were brought to a makeshift clinic in the town of Salhiyah, where dusty and exhausted, they described savage battles, with militants sniping at them from inside homes and from the windows of a hospital in Rabia.
“They’re such good fighters,” said one soldier, resting outside the clinic on a rock surrounded by blood-soaked bandages. He refused to be identified because he was not a senior officer. “They’re fighting with weapons the Iraqi military abandoned — so, American weapons really.”
Fighters at the clinic described how the peshmerga first took the town of Mahmoudiya near the Syrian border on Monday, then moved down the highway to assault Rabia. The two sides had intense clashes overnight, with Islamic State group snipers shooting from inside houses and setting off roadside bombs.
Peshmerga fighters advanced on a five-story hospital in the city, only to be ambushed by some two dozen militants inside, the fighters said.
Hekmat said the Kurdish fighters intended to push further south toward the town of Sinjar, which the extremists took last month, prompting the flight of members of the small Yazidi religious sect.
In Britain’s first airstrikes of the campaign, two Tornado jets hit a heavy weapons post and an armored vehicle being used by the militants to attack Kurdish forces in northwest Iraq, British Defense Secretary Michael Fallon said in London.
In Washington, Pentagon spokesman Navy Rear Adm. John Kirby said the U.S. and its coalition partners conducted 20 strikes in Iraq and Syria against fixed and mobile targets. So far, about 306 air attacks have been conducted — more than 230 in Iraq and the rest in Syria, he said.
He said the strikes were having an effect because the extremists have changed their tactics — blending in more with the local population, dispersing and refraining from communicating as openly as they once did.
But, he said, that “doesn’t mean they aren’t still trying, and in some cases succeeding, at taking and holding ground.”
“No one should be lulled into a false sense of security by accurate airstrikes,” he said. “We will not, we cannot bomb them into obscurity.”
In northern Syria, Islamic State group fighters have pushed ahead with an assault for days trying to take the beleaguered Kurdish town of Kobani near the Syrian-Turkish border — despite U.S. airstrikes on their positions.
The fighting has created one of the single largest exoduses in Syria’s civil war, now in its fourth year: More than 160,000 people have fled into Turkey over the past few days, the U.N. humanitarian chief Valerie Amos said.
“Their fear is so great that many people crossed heavily mined fields to seek refuge,” she told the U.N. Security Council.
Kurds and militants battled Tuesday on Kobani’s eastern edge, said Ahmad Sheikho, an activist operating along the Syria-Turkey border. He said that members of the Syrian Kurdish militia, known as the YPG, destroyed two tanks belonging to the Islamic State group. Militants have been hitting the town with mortars and artillery shells.
A day earlier, fighting around Kobani killed 57 fighters, both Kurds and militants, the Observatory said.
The situation in Kobani is “very difficult,” said Nawaf Khalil, a spokesman for Syria’s leading Kurdish Democratic Union Party.
Just outside Kobani, Islamic State militants captured the deserted Kurdish village of Siftek on Tuesday and appeared to be using it as a headquarters from which to launch attacks on Kobani itself.
The fighting could be seen from a hilltop on the Turkish side of the border, in the Karacabey area, where spectators — mostly Turkish Kurds — watched the fighting, peering through binoculars and cheering on their Syrian Kurdish brethren.
“Long live YPG! Long live Apo!” shouted one woman, referring to Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan, whose YPG group has been fighting Turkey for Kurdish autonomy, by the Kurdish nickname for Abdullah.
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Lucas reported from Beirut. Associated Press writers Jill Lawless in London, Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations, Burhan Ozbilici in Suruc, Turkey, and Bassem Mroue in Beirut contributed to this report.
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