A sign offering bank owned homes for sale is seen in a subdivision in Maricopa, Arizona in this file photo from May 27, 2009. Credit: Reuters/Joshua Lott/Files
Mon Dec 31, 2012 12:07pm EST
(Reuters) - U.S. regulators are close to securing another multibillion-dollar settlement with the largest banks to resolve allegations that they unlawfully cut corners when foreclosing on delinquent borrowers, a source familiar with the talks said.
The settlement with five big banks would be part of a larger deal that the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency hopes will include 14 banks and total about $10 billion, the source said.
Such a settlement would address an outstanding issue that was left unsettled after the $25 billion deal that the banks reached in February with the Justice Department, housing authorities, and state attorneys general.
In 2011, the OCC had separately required the big banks to "look back" and compensate borrowers wrongfully foreclosed upon in 2009 and 2010. It appears that the case-by-case analysis is proving too cumbersome, and the banks are instead opting for a lump-sum settlement.
The top five mortgage lenders -- Bank of America Corp, Wells Fargo & Co, JPMorgan Chase & Co, Citigroup Inc and Ally Financial Inc -- may reach a deal in the coming days, the source said.
The largest banks would pay the majority of the $10 billion target. That money would be paid out to a group of borrowers foreclosed upon during the period of time covered by the review, said the source, who was not authorized to speak publicly.
The OCC and the banks are still negotiating how to calculate individual payouts, the source said, adding that regulators will give the banks credit for compensation they have already given borrowers as part of ongoing foreclosure reviews.
The New York Times first reported the pending deal.
"The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency is committed to ensuring the Independent Foreclosure Review proceeds efficiently and to ensuring harmed borrowers are compensated as quickly as possible," the OCC said in a statement.
Ally, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan, Bank of America and Citigroup declined to comment.
(Reporting by Aruna Viswanatha, with additional reporting by Sakthi Prasad, Rick Rothacker and Douwe Miedema; Editing by Leslie Gevirtz)
Frank Sorrentino, chief of North Jersey Community Bank, where some deposits have extra protection. Benjamin Norman for The New York Times
By NATHANIEL POPPER and JESSICA SILVER-GREENBERG Published: December 30, 2012
On the first day of the New Year, $1.5 trillion of bank deposits will lose an unlimited government guarantee that was granted during the financial crisis to assure skittish customers that their cash was safe. For a handful of boutique firms that service banks, it’s a boon for business.
The accounts losing the insurance are used by businesses, municipalities and other entities like nonprofits that are willing to forgo any interest in order to have immediate access to their large pools of cash.
Now a scramble is under way to make sure these customers do not withdraw large sums out of banks, particularly community banks that have benefited from the guarantee. Because a depositor is barred from spreading out $1 million into four accounts within the same bank, many smaller banks are turning to a handful of specialized cash-management firms that can split up deposits into multiple $250,000 chunks and distribute them among a network of banks, each of which can insure $250,000.
One firm doing this parceling work, Reich & Tang, has had an influx of 25 new banks in the last few weeks sign up for the program, a 20 percent growth. Deposits managed by another firm, StoneCastle Cash Management, have surged to roughly $3 billion from just over $2 billion in September. “Interest has picked up dramatically,” said Joshua Siegel, managing principal of StoneCastle.
The end of the unlimited insurance, known as the Transaction Account Guarantee, is the latest twist in the government’s effort to scale back its support for the financial system, and the banking industry’s effort to mute the impact of the new lower limits.
Many analysts assume that even with the end of the government guarantee, the vast majority of the deposits will remain in the banks because the government will continue serving as some sort of backstop for most of the $1.5 trillion.
For small banks, there are programs like Reich & Tang’s, with the government fully insuring the scattered deposits. For the nation’s largest banks, there is a widely shared assumption that the government would be forced to provide a backstop to protect depositors in a crisis, as it did in 2008.
“Implicitly or explicitly, most of this money is going to still be guaranteed,” said Bruce Hinkle, an executive with Farin & Associates, a consulting firm that works with banks.
The unlimited guarantee was created in the depths of the crisis by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, in order to stop a migration of customers from smaller banks to larger ones that were viewed as less likely to fail.
Most individual savers keep their money in interest-bearing accounts, where since the crisis the insurance coverage was raised to $250,000 from $100,000. Some families have gotten around the insurance limit by dividing money into separate $250,000 accounts under the names of different family members.
Firms like Reich & Tang will do this more systematically for wealthy clients. The end of the unlimited guarantee for corporate and municipal depositors is set to significantly increase business at these firms.
Mr. Siegel, managing principal of StoneCastle, which runs one of the largest programs, said he had seen a tenfold increase in interest from community banks in the last month. Begun in 2011, the service, called the Federally Insured Cash Account program, distributes large deposits throughout a network of roughly 500 banks.
StoneCastle and other firms make money by charging banks a small percentage of any deposits they distribute, generally less than 0.2 percent.
Frederick L. Cannon, a bank analyst at Keefe Bruyette & Woods, says that the expansion of the practice from wealthy individuals to corporate customers makes the F.D.I.C.’s limits toothless and exposes the government to more risk if banks fail in the future.
“You want these limits so there is some kind of market discipline on these banks,” said Mr. Cannon. “If I were on the F.D.I.C. board, I would be concerned about this.”
The F.D.I.C. has not taken any position on the cash management companies, but a spokesman said that it was important to ensure strict record-keeping to preserve a full accounting of where the deposits ended up.
Tom Nelson, the chief investment officer at Reich & Tang, said that by spreading money among banks, his firm and others like it increased the stability of the banking system and that the practice “reduces the risk of runs on banks.”
The F.D.I.C. guarantee was one of a number of factors that encouraged depositors to shift money into noninterest bearing accounts after the crisis. Since 2011, when the account guarantee program was extended as part of the Dodd-Frank financial regulation [ http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/subjects/c/credit_crisis/financial_regulatory_reform/index.html ] law, the amount of money in such accounts rose by 70 percent, or $678 billion, according to Alex Roever, a JPMorgan Chase analyst.
The vast majority of the holdings in these accounts are above the $250,000 limit and are held in the nation’s largest banks. That money is expected to stay put no matter what, in part because corporations and municipalities widely believe that the government will step in if those large banks encounter trouble, effectively considering them too big to fail.
In recent months, as the deadline loomed, community banks lobbied fiercely for the program to be extended, arguing that it helped level an uneven playing field that favored large banks. The smaller banks said that without the unlimited guarantee, the nation’s largest banks would win an even greater concentration of total customer deposits. Congressional leaders at first appeared ready to continue the guarantee, but this December decided against it, saying that it threatened to allow more bank bailouts.
Before the latest financial crisis wiped out hundreds of banks and left Wall Street teetering on the brink of collapse, many depositors were comfortable keeping large sums in accounts even if there was no government guarantee. But with the memory of bank failures still fresh, customers are more aware of the inherent risks involved.
Frank Sorrentino, the chairman and chief executive of North Jersey Community Bank in Englewood Cliffs, N.J., signed up with StoneCastle to have a product in place to offer any worried corporate clients.
The insurance “isn’t even dead yet and it’s just nice to know that we have an answer for any clients that are concerned,” Mr. Sorrentino said. The bank, where 7 percent of its $724 million in deposits are in T.A.G.-insured accounts, also has been approached by other firms pitching the cash management service. So far, Mr. Sorrentino has said that only a handful of clients have asked about how the insurance expiration might imperil their cash. With the cash management option in place, he said he was confident that money would stay with his bank. Bank analysts at FBR Capital Markets estimate that concerned depositors may move around $250 billion out of the noninterest bearing accounts in the coming months, most of it from smaller banks to money market funds, which received a government safety net during the crisis, or to larger banks.
But other banking analysts say that the doomsday predictions of community banks are overblown. Mr. Cannon of Keefe Bruyette said that institutional investors were unlikely to move large sums because the waves of cheap funds for banks have decreased the chances that community banks will encounter any trouble. What is more, Mr. Cannon said, the government ended up standing behind a large proportion of even the uninsured deposits at banks that failed.
Jeffrey Esser, the executive director of the Government Finance Officers Association, said that his organization had made municipal treasurers aware of the end of the unlimited guarantee, but few had expressed alarm.
Mr. Cannon said he expected that if money did move, it would go into ultrasafe Treasury securities [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/t/treasury_department/treasury_securities/index.html ] and mortgage-backed bonds that pay at least some interest. Economists at Goldman Sachs said recently this flow of money could exert a further downward pressure on the yield offered by the benchmark 10-year Treasury note, which has dropped to 1.7 percent from around 5 percent before the crisis.
The biggest winners could be the cash management providers. Mr. Hinkle, the executive with bank consultancy Farin & Associates, said that the largest such program was run by the Promontory Financial Group, which will take a maximum of $50 million from each customer and spread it among a network of 2,500 banks. A spokesman for Promontory did not return calls for comment.
Steve Shear, who heads up cash management at First Western Trust in Colorado, said he decided to sign up for Reich & Tang’s program in recent months as it became clear that the guarantee program would not be expanded. While his customers did not have the deposits insured five years ago, the crisis has made them accustomed to the government backstop.
“Even though it’s only been in place for the last four years, people have grown very accustomed to having that security blanket,” said Mr. Shear. “Having that insurance is a nice safety net.”
Christina Culver with her son Tyler, 6, at home in Colorado Springs this month. In 2007, Tyler was hospitalized when the price of Acthar soared. Kevin Moloney for The New York Times
Soon after taking over at Questcor, Don M. Bailey sharply raised the price of Acthar to reposition it as a specialty drug to treat infantile spasms. J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times
New uses for Acthar represent multibillion-dollar opportunities for the drug and for Questcor, its sole maker.
By ANDREW POLLACK Published: December 29, 2012
ANAHEIM, Calif.
THE doctor was dumbfounded: a drug that used to cost $50 was now selling for $28,000 for a 5-milliliter vial.
The physician, Dr. Ladislas Lazaro IV, remembered occasionally prescribing this anti-inflammatory, named H.P. Acthar Gel, for gout [ http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/disease/acute-gouty-arthritis/overview.html ] back in the early 1990s. Then the drug seemed to fade from view. Dr. Lazaro had all but forgotten about it, until a sales representative from a company called Questcor Pharmaceuticals [ http://www.questcor.com/ ] appeared at his office and suggested that he try it for various rheumatologic conditions.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Dr. Lazaro, a rheumatologist in Lafayette, La., says of the price increase.
How the price of this drug rose so far, so fast is a story for these troubled times in American health care — a tale of aggressive marketing, questionable medicine and, not least, out-of-control costs. At the center of it is Questcor, which turned the once-obscure Acthar into a hugely profitable wonder drug and itself into one of Wall Street’s highest fliers.
That Acthar is even a potential blockbuster is a remarkable turn of events, considering that the drug was developed in the 1950s by a division of Armour & Company, the meatpacking company that once ruled the Union Stock Yards of Chicago. As in the 1950s, Acthar is still extracted from the pituitary glands of slaughtered pigs — essentially a byproduct of the meatpacking industry.
The most important use of Acthar has been to treat infantile spasms, also known as West syndrome, a rare, sometimes fatal epileptic disorder that generally strikes before the age of 1.
For several years, Questcor, which is based in Anaheim, lost money on Acthar because the drug’s market was so small. In 2007, it raised the price overnight, to more than $23,000 a vial, from $1,650, bringing the cost of a typical course of treatment for infantile spasms to above $100,000. It said it needed the high price to keep the drug on the market.
“We have this drug at a very high price right now because, really, our principal market is infantile spasms,” Don M. Bailey, Questcor’s chief executive [ http://www.questcor.com/about-questcor/board-directors/don-m-bailey ], told analysts in 2009. “And we only have about 800 patients a year. It’s a very, very small — tiny — market.”
Companies often charge stratospheric prices for drugs for rare diseases — known as orphan drugs — and Acthar’s price is not as high as some. Society generally tolerates those costs to encourage drug companies to develop crucial, possibly lifesaving drugs for these often neglected diseases.
But Questcor did almost no research or development to bring Acthar to market, merely buying the rights to the drug from its previous owner for $100,000 in 2001. And while the manufacturing of Acthar is complex, it accounts for only about 1 cent of every dollar that Questcor charges for the drug.
Moreover, the tiny “orphan” market soon became much bigger. Before long, Questcor began marketing the drug for multiple sclerosis [ http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/disease/multiple-sclerosis/overview.html ], nephrotic syndrome [ http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/disease/nephrotic-syndrome/overview.html ] and rheumatologic conditions, even though there is little evidence that Acthar is more effective for those other conditions than alternatives that are far cheaper. And the company did so without being required to prove that the drug actually works. That is because Acthar was approved for use in 1952, before the Food and Drug Administration required clinical trials to show a drug is effective for a particular disease. Acthar is essentially grandfathered in.
Today, only about 10 percent of the drug’s sales are for infantile spasms. The new uses, Mr. Bailey has told analysts, represent multibillion-dollar opportunities for Acthar and Questcor, its sole maker.
The results have been beyond even the company’s wildest dreams. Sales of Acthar, which accounts for essentially all of Questcor’s sales, totaled nearly $350 million in the first nine months this year, up 145 percent from the period a year earlier. In the same period, Questcor’s earnings per share nearly tripled, to $2.12. In the five years after the big Acthar price increase in August 2007, Questcor shares rose from around 60 cents to about $50, in one of the best performances of any stock in any industry.
But in September, the shares plummeted after Aetna, the big insurer, said it would no longer pay for Acthar, except to treat infantile spasms, because of lack of evidence the drug worked for other diseases. The stock now trades at $26.93.
Questcor, meanwhile, has disclosed that the United States attorney’s office in Philadelphia is investigating its marketing practices. The company hasn’t been accused of wrongdoing.
Mr. Bailey, Questcor’s C.E.O., defends his company’s practices. He says that when Questcor raised Acthar’s price, it did not initially intend to market the drug for other uses. It simply responded to demand. “Nobody predicted this,” he said. “Nobody.”
He also says that Questcor isn’t competing with low-price alternatives, but that it is marketing the drug as a treatment when those alternatives fail. Used that way — for instance, as a last chance to avert kidney failure [ http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/disease/acute-kidney-failure/overview.html ] — insurers are still paying for the drug at least 85 percent of the time, he says.
Still, given that Questcor is now pursuing billion-dollar opportunities far beyond the treatment of infantile spasms, is the high, orphan-drug price still justified?
“We could lower the price and make less money,” Mr. Bailey says, “and then we would be sued by our shareholders.”
Whatever the case, one group of shareholders has done pretty well for itself. Over the last two years, as the company’s share price mainly soared, Questcor insiders have sold more than $100 million of stock.
It turned out that another Mayo researcher, Dr. Edward C. Kendall [ http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1950/kendall.html ], had isolated six hormones made by the adrenals, the small glands atop the kidneys that are chiefly responsible for releasing stress hormones. When a few patients were injected with one of the hormones in 1948, their symptoms subsided.
Dr. Hench obtained some ACTH from the Armour meatpacking company, which was extracting it from pigs as part of an effort to develop markets for leftover animal parts. (Its big success was Dial soap, introduced in 1948.)
In 1952, Armour won approval from the F.D.A. for H.P. Acthar Gel, or “highly purified” ACTH mixed with gelatin (another animal byproduct) to make it last longer in the body and require fewer injections. The label said the drug could be used to treat about 50 diseases.
But by the 1980s, drug companies had learned to synthesize steroids like prednisone, and those became the treatment of choice. In 1995, when the F.D.A. found numerous quality control problems at the factory manufacturing Acthar, the drug’s owner at the time, Rhône-Poulenc Rorer, decided to discontinue the product rather than invest in manufacturing improvements.
That decision provoked an outcry from some patient groups and pediatric neurologists, who said the drug was the best treatment for infantile spasms. So Rhône-Poulenc, which became Aventis after a merger, continued to make a limited supply that was rationed to treat only infantile spasms or severe flare-ups of multiple sclerosis. With Aventis losing several million dollars a year on the drug, on sales of only about a half-million dollars, the company looked for a way out.
It sold the drug in 2001 to Questcor for $100,000 as well as a 1 percent royalty on annual sales over $10 million. At the time, Questcor, formed by a merger of two small companies in 1999, was losing money and looking for drugs to market. With help from Aventis, Questcor set up its own, somewhat more modern manufacturing through a contractor on Prince Edward Island, Canada.
Questcor immediately raised the price of Acthar to $700 a vial, from $40, and the price rose gradually after that. By the end of 2006, Acthar sales were about $12 million a year, but the company was still losing money.
In May 2007, James L. Fares, left as chief executive and was replaced, initially on an interim basis, by Mr. Bailey, who had joined the board a year earlier. A mechanical engineer by training, Mr. Bailey had retired in 2000 from a 10-year run as chief executive of Comarco, a military contractor and telecommunications concern.
Three months later, Questcor announced the huge price jump, aimed at repositioning Acthar as a specialty drug. The move prompted protests from parents and pediatric neurologists.
“It made us so sick to the stomach — just the fact that something like that could happen overnight with a drug my child needed to live,” says Christina Culver of Colorado Springs. “It’s just like someone saying, ‘I’m going to charge you for oxygen now.’ ”
Ms. Culver’s son Tyler was in the hospital, being treated for infantile spasms, just as the price increase hit. Tyler was due to leave the hospital, and Ms. Culver and her husband, Randy, were to continue the injections at home. Then the Culvers’ insurer, Blue Cross Blue Shield, refused to pay the new high price. After a storm of publicity, the insurer backed down.
Questcor, however, hasn’t, and has continued to raise the price, now at more than $28,400 a vial. Insurers generally pay for Acthar because it is considered the best treatment for infantile spasms. They also tend to pay for other approved uses if cheaper drugs have been tried first. And Questcor has carefully executed the orphan-drug playbook. Patients who cannot pay are given the drug free. The company helps with insurance co-payments, to make sure that a patient’s inability to make a co-payment doesn’t stand in the way of the drug being used and the insurer paying $28,000 a vial.
In other words, Questcor shifts the cost onto insurance companies while staving off consumer protests. It has a staff of 30 people who do nothing but work on insurance reimbursements — about one staff member for each of the roughly 30 prescriptions [ http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/specialtopic/getting-a-prescription-filled/overview.html ] it gets in a typical day for all uses.
Questcor executives argue that with the free drug program and the ample supply, patients have better access to Acthar now than when it was cheaper and often in short supply.
“We believe we’ve been good stewards of this product,” Mr. Bailey says.
This year, the foundation awarded its first corporate citizenship award to Questcor. Dr. Brown says Questcor’s donations — the amount has not been disclosed — to the foundation didn’t influence the award.
STILL, the price remains a sticking point.
At Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, “we’ve been instructed not to hospitalize a child with spasms unless the authorization has been procured to pay for it,” said Dr. Phillip L. Pearl, chief of child neurology [ http://www.childrensnational.org/research/faculty/bios/cnr/pearl_p.aspx ]. In practice, however, no child has been turned away.
Dr. Shaun Hussain of Mattel Children’s Hospital [ http://www.uclahealth.org/homepage_mattel.cfm ] in Los Angeles said that the studies showing Acthar to be better than far cheaper steroids used too low a dose of steroids.
At his hospital, he reported at a medical meeting this month, 18 of 30 babies were successfully treated with two weeks’ worth of a high-dose oral steroid. Only the 12 who did not respond were switched to Acthar, with five of them successfully treated.
Given that the steroids cost $200 for each baby, compared with about $125,000 for Acthar, the approach saved more than $2 million. “We have to look at the cost to the health care system,” Dr. Hussain said.
Mr. Bailey says the new price was set to make the company viable based solely on sales for infantile spasms. Executives assumed at the time that the high price would preclude other uses.
But to Questcor’s surprise, he says, some prescriptions continued to trickle in to treat the periodic flare-ups that plague people with multiple sclerosis.
So Questcor began hiring sales representatives to promote the drug for that use. Then it hired a sales force to promote the drug as a treatment for nephrotic syndrome, a kidney injury [ http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/disease/injury-kidney-and-ureter/overview.html ] that can lead to kidney failure. In June, it began selling to rheumatologists.
For all these diseases, there are cheaper alternatives. Oral prednisone, which might be used for some rheumatological diseases, can cost $10 a month. Intravenous steroids, used to treat multiple sclerosis flares, cost several hundred dollars.
Because Acthar was approved for these conditions decades ago, Questcor has not had to do large clinical trials to show that the drug works. It has paid for some small studies, mainly by individual doctors, who then publish a paper that the sales force can present to doctors.
The study that justified calling on rheumatologists involved five patients with rare conditions, all of them treated by a single doctor. All the patients had much improvement on Acthar after failing to benefit from more standard therapies, the doctor, Todd Levine, said in a Questcor conference call.
Still, it appears that at least a couple of small studies that may have raised questions about the drug have been suspended.
“From my standpoint it just didn’t work,” said Dr. Sungchun Lee, a Phoenix nephrologist who stopped a small study testing Acthar as a treatment for nephrotic syndrome. “I think they were O.K. with me stopping because we weren’t getting the results,” he said.
Another study that was terminated sought to determine whether multiple sclerosis patients who did not have a good response to steroids should be treated with either another round of steroids or with Acthar. The study was halted midway through “to analyze data,” according to the summary of the trial [ http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00947895 ] on the federal clinical trial database.
A negative result could have jeopardized already growing sales for multiple sclerosis. The company says the trial fell hopelessly behind its goal in recruiting patients.
Given the scarce data, and the high price, most doctors do not use Acthar for multiple sclerosis, nephrotic syndrome or rheumatology.
“It’s absurd,” says Dr. Douglas R. Jeffery, a multiple sclerosis specialist in Advance, N.C. “There’s never a clinical setting where I can justify spending $23,000 to treat an M.S. relapse.”
But some doctors say Acthar can be effective in cases that are not well treated by steroids. They say that there is emerging evidence that Acthar does more than just stimulate the body to produce its own steroids.
“It really looks like the ACTH does bring something different to the table that standard steroids don’t,” said Dr. Ben W. Thrower [ http://www.shepherd.org/about/medical-staff/28 ], director of the multiple sclerosis institute at the Shepherd Center [ http://www.shepherd.org/ ], a hospital in Atlanta. Dr. Thrower, who is a paid speaker for Questcor, said his institute had tried Acthar for about 60 of its 3,000 patients, ones who did not respond to steroid treatment. Acthar made the symptoms subside in about half of them.
GIVEN Acthar’s price, Questcor does not need many prescriptions to make a good business. A course of treatment for nephrotic syndrome can run $250,000, while a shorter treatment for a multiple sclerosis relapse typically costs $40,000.
Questcor sales representatives who are lucky enough or skillful enough to have a big prescriber in their territory can reap bonuses of $50,000 a quarter, according to former employees of the company.
Executives are paid well, too. In 2009, Mr. Bailey hired his daughter Kirsten Fereday as director of business analytics and evaluation, a job that paid $275,000 in cash and stock last year.
Mr. Bailey and Steve Cartt, Questcor’s chief operating officer [ http://www.questcor.com/about-questcor/management-team/steve-cartt ], say the company’s marketing has been aboveboard and that the company is now starting to sponsor more studies. “This wasn’t possible until the drug was financially viable,” Mr. Bailey said.
Patients report mixed results. Sharon Keller of Austin, Tex., who has nephrotic syndrome, tried Acthar after two other drugs had not worked. But she stopped, she says, because side effects including mood swings and weight gain were “much worse than I’d ever experienced.”
“I almost had to fight with my doctor not to push it on me,” Ms. Keller, 59, says. She says her insurer was charged $130,000 for her drug, including a vial she did not use. “I have a Cadillac in my refrigerator,” she says of that leftover vial.
ONE big uncertainty hanging over Questcor is competition. As an old drug without patent protection, Acthar would seem to be a sitting duck for generic rivals. And other versions of ACTH have been sold in the past.
Yet Questcor is now arguing that its studies show that Acthar, despite the “highly purified” in its name, actually contains other substances from the pig pituitary glands that account for some of its effectiveness. The company does not intend to say what those other ingredients are, thus making it extremely hard for a generic company to copy Acthar.
“Coca-Cola is not going to tell you what Coke contains, either,” Mr. Bailey says.
Whether such an argument will work remains to be seen. Even if it does, competitors could still sell other forms of ACTH. Novartis, which sells a synthetic version called Synacthen in Europe, has applied for a United States trademark, a sign that the drug might be brought to this country.
A small Maryland company, Cerium Pharmaceuticals, recently won orphan-drug designation from the F.D.A. for Synacthen to be used to treat infantile spasms. But that does not necessarily mean that Cerium has the rights to the drug or intends to market it.
Cerium is run by Gregg Lapointe, a former Questcor board member. He declined to comment for this article.
Still, Synacthen, or other versions of ACTH, might have to go through lengthy trials before being approved, and would have to be approved for one disease at a time.
So there is at least a chance that Questcor might maintain its high-priced dominance for a long time. In the meantime, the company plans to systematically expand the marketing of the drug to treat other diseases, starting with those already on the label.
Given that Acthar has many potential uses, Mr. Bailey says, Questcor sees no reason to come up with other drugs. The company has been buying back its stock, helping to underpin the price, and recently said it would start paying a dividend.
“We’ll take it where it goes,” Mr. Bailey says of Acthar. “It’s taken us to places we never expected.”
A sharply divided Montana Supreme Court has ruled that forcing a Hutterite religious colony to pay workers' compensation insurance for jobs outside the commune is not an unconstitutional intrusion into religion.
The 4-3 decision upholds a 2009 law requiring religious organizations to carry workers' compensation insurance, which the Legislature passed after businesses complained they could not outbid the religious workers.
The Big Sky Colony of Hutterites in northwestern Montana sued, saying the law targeted its religion and infringed on its beliefs. Its members have no personal property and make no wages as part of their communal life, which is central to their religious beliefs, and a member can't make a claim against the colony or take money for himself without risking excommunication.
The Hutterites are Protestants similar to the Amish and Mennonites who live a life centered on their religion. But unlike the others, Hutterites live in German-speaking communes scattered across northern U.S. states and Canada. They are primarily agricultural producers but have expanded into construction with success because they can offer lower job bids than many private businesses.
Justice Brian Morris, writing for the majority, said the workers' compensation requirement does not interfere with the Hutterites' religious practices but only regulates their commercial activities like any other business.
He cites numerous cases, from two Native Americans fired for ingesting peyote to Jimmy Swaggart's ministry attempting to avoid paying taxes on selling religious merchandise, as examples in which courts rejected religious organizations' arguments that participation in a government program violated their beliefs.
In a sharply worded dissent, retiring Justice James Nelson wrote the court's decision violates the U.S. and Montana constitutions by allowing the government to interfere with the beliefs of a religious institution only to appease businesses that believed they are at a competitive disadvantage against the Hutterite laborers.
"Apparently, henceforth, 'no law' prohibiting the free exercise of religion does not actually mean 'no law' in Montana. Rather, it means no law, except to the extent that the law greases the squeaky wheel of a powerful industry," Nelson wrote.
Justices Jim Rice and Patricia Cotter also dissented, with Rice saying the decision gives the appearance the law applies equally to all employers, but it is specifically targeted at the Hutterites — noting the legislative debate of the bill focused solely on that religious group.
"Had this been the status of religious freedom in 1620, the Pilgrims may well have sailed right by," Rice wrote.
The ruling doesn't address the religious tenets the Hutterites would be forced to violate to participate in the system, nor does it recognize how intertwined their religion and communal living is, Rice wrote.
Morris wrote that a colony member could refrain from filing a claim or share a claim award with the rest of the colony. Nothing prevents the colony from excommunicating a member who receives compensation and refuses to turn it over, so there is no interference with the religious practices, Morris wrote.
Rice responded that such a system would force the Hutterites to pay insurance for which they would never receive any benefit, "the very definition of illusory coverage that 'defies logic' and violates public policy."
Hundreds of Hutterite colonies are scattered across Canada, from Manitoba to British Columbia. In the U.S., there are colonies in Montana, South Dakota, North Dakota, Minnesota, Washington and Oregon.
There are about 50 colonies in Montana, with an average of about 100 people on each colony, according to a state report from 2010.
Building Congregations Around Art Galleries and Cafes as Spirituality Wanes
The house band started a service one recent Sunday at the Life in Deep Ellum church in Dallas. Allison V. Smith for The New York Times
Joel Triska, lead pastor. Allison V. Smith for The New York Times
Rachel Triska, the church's executive director. Allison V. Smith for The New York Times
By AMY O’LEARY Published: December 29, 2012
DALLAS — The mural painted on the side of a building in the Deep Ellum warehouse district here is intentionally vague, simply showing a faceless man in a suit holding an umbrella over the words “Life in Deep Ellum.” Inside there are the trappings of a revitalization project, including an art gallery, a yoga studio and a business incubator, sharing the building with a coffee shop and a performance space.
But it is, in fact, a church.
Life in Deep Ellum [ http://www.lifeindeepellum.com/organization/ ] is part of a wave of experimentation around the country by evangelicals to reinvent “church” in an increasingly secular culture, and it comes as the megachurch boom of recent decades, with stadium seating for huge crowds, Jumbotrons and smoke machines, faces strong headwinds. A national decline in church attendance, the struggling economy and the challenges of marketing to millennials have all led to the need for new approaches.
“It’s unsettling for a movement that’s lasted 2,000 years to now find that, ‘Oh, some of the things we always assumed would connect with the community aren’t connecting with everyone in the community in the way they used to,’ ” said Warren Bird [ http://warrenbird.com/ ], the director of research for the Leadership Network, a firm that tracks church trends.
According to a recent report by the Pew Research Center [ http://www.pewforum.org/Unaffiliated/nones-on-the-rise.aspx ], the percentage of Americans who are not affiliated with any religion is on the rise, including a third of Americans under 30. Even so, nearly 80 percent of unaffiliated Americans say they believe in God, and close to half say they pray at least once a month.
The “spiritual but not religious” category is an important audience that evangelical leaders hope to reach in a culture that many believers call “post-Christian.”
So they arrange meetings in movie theaters, schools, warehouses and downtown entertainment districts. They house exercise studios and coffee shops to draw more traffic. Many have even cast aside the words “church” and “church service” in favor of terms like “spiritual communities” and “gatherings,” with services that do not stick to any script.
One Sunday before Easter, the pastor at the Relevant Church [ http://www.relevantchurch.com/ ] in Tampa, Fla., wearing a rabbit suit, whisked the unsuspecting congregation away on chartered buses to a nearby park to build enthusiasm for the coming service.
Although the number of evangelical churches in the United States declined for many years, the trend reversed in 2006, with more new churches opening each year since, according to the Leadership Network’s most recent surveys. This wave of “church planting” has been highest among nondenominational pastors, free to experiment outside traditional hierarchies.
“I hear a lot of pastors say, ‘I’m not just trying to be creative and avant-garde, I think this is maybe the last chance for me,’ ” said Doug Pagitt [ http://dougpagitt.com/ ], the founder of Solomon’s Porch [ http://www.solomonsporch.com/ ] in Minneapolis.
Many of their innovations are being adopted by an increasing number of pastors in the mainstream.
For new leaders coming out of seminary, “the cool thing is church planting,” Mr. Bird said. “The uncool thing is to go into the established church. Why that has taken over may speak to the entrepreneurialism and innovation that today’s generation represents.”
That generation includes Mark Batterson [ http://markbatterson.com/ ], the 43-year-old pastor of National Community Church in Washington.
“If the kingdom of God had departments, we’d want to work in research and development,” Mr. Batterson said.
With 3,000 members, National Community Church is technically a megachurch, according to religion scholars, for whom any congregation over 2,000 qualifies. But with a high turnover rate of nearly 40 percent a year, its continued growth is a noteworthy feat.
Sunday services are held in six locations, mostly movie theaters, where the smell of Saturday night’s popcorn hangs in the air as prerecorded sermons play on the big screen.
The church also runs a coffee shop called Ebenezers near Union Station, where its religious affiliation is hard to detect. Until it ran out of room, it used to hold services in the basement, drawing new members from the coffee drinkers who wandered downstairs to investigate the music.
For Mr. Batterson, the strategy has biblical roots.
“We felt like Jesus didn’t hang out at the synagogue, he hung out at wells,” he said. “Coffeehouses are postmodern wells. Let’s not wait for people to come to us, let’s go to them.”
The church has fielded hundreds of requests from other pastors for insights about its approach, and it has plans to franchise Ebenezers, first in Charlotte, N.C.
These kinds of locations — urban, multipurpose and with plenty of foot traffic — are favored sites, in part because they are less expensive to operate than a sprawling suburban campus. Coffee shops, too, help generate revenue, as do space rentals.
Today, younger pastors are less willing to try to finance multimillion-dollar churches with debt. After the recession, there was a surge in church foreclosures, reaching record highs in 2010 and 2011. Since 2008, more than 300 church properties have been sold after defaulting on their loans, according to the CoStar Group, a real estate information firm.
Building professionals who work with churches say they have seen these shifts firsthand.
“Every generation wants their own thing,” said Houston Clark, whose company designs spaces [ http://www.clark.is/ ] and audiovisual systems for churches nationwide. “Kids in their late 20s to midteens now, they really crave intimacy and authenticity. They want high-quality experiences, but don’t necessarily want them in huge voluminous buildings.”
Five years ago, Mr. Clark said, 90 percent of his business was installing expensive lighting and sound systems for megachurches that could hold up to 5,000. But today, 70 percent of his business is working on existing buildings, like warehouses, to renovate the interiors as multipurpose spaces for churches to operate.
It is a trend that even established megachurches, like Bent Tree Bible Fellowship [ http://www.benttree.org/ ] in Carrollton, Tex., are studying. After paying off $5 million in debt on its 135,000-square-foot facility last year, the church is again seeking to expand. But instead of building another huge campus, church officials are looking at smaller satellite spaces that can operate seven days a week, with services like child care, shared office spaces and a community theater.
“That’s a significant difference for us,” said Paul Miller, the pastor of ministries for Bent Tree. “We’re really building a community center, more than we are a worship center.”
That strategy, blending religion with everyday activities, disarms people put off by traditional notions of church, said Scott L. Thumma, a professor at the Hartford Institute for Religion Research.
“It’s pretty low risk to wander into a bar or movie theater or hotel,” Professor Thumma said. “It ends up delivering the message of relevance: we’re just like you, we’re struggling, we might have a beer together — and our faith is also relevant.”
The church of Scientology -- which is not recognized as a faith in Belgium -- and several of its top-ranking members face charges including extortion, fraud, illegal practice of medicine and violation of privacy laws, according to Flanders News.
The complaint stems from an investigation of fraudulent labor contracts issued by the church of Scientology in an effort to recruit new volunteers and members. A judge ordered raids on Scientology offices [ http://www.standaard.be/artikel/detail.aspx?artikelid=DMF20121228_00416144 ] in 2008 that allegedly uncovered a "wealth of evidence" that the organization had spied on and extorted money from its members, according to De Standaard.
An estimated 500 people belong to the church of Scientology in Belgium. The organization's European headquarters are located in Brussels.
Belgium is not the only European country in which Scientology has faced criticism and legal action.
Germany does not recognize Scientology as a faith [ http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1695514,00.html ], and a 1997 state-level interior ministry report described the organization's agenda and activities as "marked by objectives that are fundamentally and permanently directed at abolishing the free democratic basic order," Time reported in 2007.
However, also according to Time, many Germans find the question of what qualifies as a religion a personal one and skeptics fear that banning the church outright could backfire, making the organization appear a victim of persecution.
Aquino Trumps Catholic Church, Big Tobacco With Twin Laws
Benigno Aquino, president of the Philippines. Julian Abram Wainwright/Bloomberg
By Norman P. Aquino & Joel Guinto - Dec 20, 2012 12:54 AM CT
Philippine President Benigno Aquino defeated the Catholic Church and the tobacco lobby by using his popularity to push through twin laws to provide free condoms to the poor and boost taxes on cigarette and liquor.
Lawmakers yesterday ratified a reproductive health bill that had been introduced and blocked repeatedly since 1998, and the legislation will be signed into law before the end of the year, Aquino said. The extra revenue from the so-called sin tax will help the country win an investment grade credit rating, Tax Commissioner Kim Henares said today.
Aquino, 52, endured the possibility of excommunication from the church and criticism from boxing champion Manny Pacquiao and former first lady Imelda Marcos to win support for the health bill. His approval rating is the highest for a president since actor Joseph Estrada in 1999, buoyed by efforts to fight corruption and tackle an entrenched culture of tax evasion.
“Aquino managed to resurrect and rally support for controversial measures in which his predecessors had failed,” said Ramon Casiple, executive director of the Manila-based Institute for Political and Electoral Reform. “His advocacy of these bills was personal and more than ministerial. He made good on his promises and proved that he’s reform-oriented.”
Aquino signed the sin tax bill today, touting its health- care benefits and criticizing opponents of the new law.
“Many thought it was impossible to pass the sin tax,” said Aquino, who is a smoker himself. “The enemy was strong, noisy, organized. Those who were against it had deep pockets.”
Sex Education
The reproductive health bill calls for mandatory sex education and requires the government to pay for contraceptives and family planning services for poor people. The United Nations has said it will help reduce poverty among the fifth of the nation’s 104 million people who live in slum conditions.
The contraceptives bill had been refiled and blocked in each three-year congressional term since it was introduced 14 years ago amid opposition from Catholics, the faith of at least 80 percent of Filipinos.
“Logic and reason won,” said Carlos Celdran, an activist who was jailed for a day after staging a protest at a 2010 meeting of bishops in the city’s cathedral. “It shows that the Philippines is moving into the 21st century and is progressing mentally. It has broken the shackles of the Catholic Church, which no longer wields the same power it had in the past.”
Protesting Priests
In August, more than 9,000 nuns, priests and churchgoers dressed in red held rallies in Manila in an attempt to derail the legislation. The protesters described themselves as pro-life and distributed pamphlets that also denounced divorce and same- sex marriage in addition to the bill.
“Whether or not an individual should live in this world should not be placed in the hands of his fellow men,” boxing champ Pacquiao said during a Congressional debate Dec. 12. “Only God has power over this.”
Imelda Marcos, a Congresswoman and the widow of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos, said during the same debate that “any law against natural law, the fundamental law of God, is against God.”
One in five women of reproductive age in the Philippines has an unmet family planning need, the UN Population Fund says, leading to unintended pregnancies. The population is growing 1.7 percent a year, compared with 0.9 percent in the Asia-Pacific region, according to a 2011 UN Population Fund report.
The bill “is unfortunate and tragic,” Manila Archbishop Luis Antonio Tagle said after last week’s second reading. “We do not take it as a defeat of truth, for truth shall prevail, especially the truth about human life, marriage and the family.”
Sin Tax
While the church rallied opponents of the reproductive health bill, some of the nation’s wealthiest businessmen were assailing Aquino’s efforts to pass the sin tax, which will raise levies on wine and spirits and calls for twice-yearly tax increases on cigarettes.
San Miguel Corp. (SMC), which controls 90 percent of the nation’s beer market, Asia Brewery Inc. and the Philippine Tobacco Institute ran separate advertisements saying the law will hurt sales and put jobs at risk. Aquino’s uncle, Eduardo Cojuangco, is chairman of San Miguel, while Asia Brewery, Philip Morris Philippines Manufacturing Inc. and Fortune Tobacco Corp. are controlled by billionaire Lucio Tan.
Seven of the 10 leading causes of death in the Philippines, where 28 percent of people aged 15 and older smoke, are diseases related to tobacco consumption, according to data from the Department of Health.
‘Powerful’ Tool
“Higher tobacco taxes will save lives,” the World Health Organization said today by e-mail. “Tax increases that raise the price of tobacco products are the most powerful policy tool to reduce tobacco use and the single most effective intervention.”
The measure may reduce the number of smokers by 170,000 a year, or to 15.6 million by the end of Aquino’s term in 2016, the UN group said. The bill will index tobacco and liquor tax rates by 4 percent yearly to discourage their use, Finance Secretary Cesar Purisima said.
“It’s the best piece of legislation that this administration has passed,” said Modesto Llamas, president of the Philippine Medical Association, which represents 68,000 doctors. Doctors are more divided over the reproductive health bill, “such as on the issue of when does life begin,” he said.
Debt Rating
While the WHO said the sin tax is “primarily a health measure,” it also will provide an important boost to the country’s finances, said Henares, the tax chief.
“The credit rating agencies want to see that we are willing to do what needs to be done to put our fiscal house in order,” she said in an interview today, adding that the sin tax law languished in Congress for more than a decade. “It’s convincing them that we are willing to make hard decisions and can take hard action and implement it.”
Moody’s Investors Service, Fitch Ratings and Standard & Poor’s rate the Philippines a step below investment grade with a stable outlook. A higher rating may help bolster Aquino’s plan to attract $16 billion of investments in roads and airports to spur economic growth to as fast as 7 percent in 2013.
The president’s performance rating after two years in office remained steady at 78 percent last month, according to a poll of 1,200 adults by Pulse Asia Inc. on Nov. 23 to 29.
“Nowadays, no politician would want to be identified as Aquino’s enemy,” Casiple, the political analyst, said. “In next year’s national and local elections, a candidate’s endorsement by the president will be a decisive factor.”
To contact the reporters on this story: Norman P. Aquino in Manila at naquino1@bloomberg.net; Joel Guinto in Manila at jguinto1@bloomberg.net To contact the editor responsible for this story: Lars Klemming at lklemming@bloomberg.net
KHUSHI knew it was cancer. Ankita thought she was injured. None of the girls knew why they were suddenly bleeding, why their stomachs were “paining,” as Indian English has it. They cried and were terrified and then they asked their mothers. And their mothers said, you are normal. You are menstruating. You are a woman now.
But that is not all. The girls, whose names I’ve changed here for the sake of their privacy, were also told: when you menstruate, don’t cook food because you will pollute it. Don’t touch idols because you will defile them. Don’t handle pickles because they will go rotten with your touch.
Pickles, I asked Ankita? Yes, madam, she told me, in her schoolyard in rural Uttar Pradesh. My mother says it is so. Her mother believed it, and her mother before her. It must be true.
I read of another girl who said that her nail polish had spoiled because she had applied it during her period. She saw nothing weird about this.
I met Ankita and her peers in November, while accompanying a sanitation and hygiene carnival, the Great Wash Yatra [ http://www.nirmalbharatyatra.org/ ], which has traveled a thousand miles across rural India. The aim of the Yatra, organized by a nonprofit called WASH United, is to spread the right messages about health and hygiene — do not defecate in the open, wash your hands with soap after the toilet and before eating — using singing, dancing, games and support from cricket players and Bollywood stars. The tactic works: all of its stalls have queues of men and boys waiting to play. All except one: a curtained tent, where only women are allowed.
This is the Menstrual Hygiene Management Lab, where girls and women can come to learn how to safely make and maintain cloth sanitary napkins (use clean cloth; dry it in the sun; iron it to remove moisture) as well as for something even more revolutionary: to talk frankly about periods.
The taboo of menstruation in India causes real harm. Women in some tribes are forced to live in a cowshed [ http://www.wateraid.org/documents/plugin_documents/menstrual_hygiene_in_south_asia_1.pdf ] throughout their periods. There are health issues, like infections caused by using dirty rags, and horror stories, like that of one girl who was too embarrassed to ask her mother for a clean cloth, and used one she found without knowing it had lizard eggs in it. According to one of the Yatra outreach workers, the subsequent infection meant her uterus had to be removed when she was 13. She would be forever tainted as a barren woman, so that whoever saw her first in the morning had to take a bath to wash her stain away.
But beyond superstition and discrimination, many Indian women face the straightforward lack of clean, safe lavatory facilities. Back in my high school in England, we may have been embarrassed by our periods, as most girls are, but we had clean bathroom stalls in which to change our sanitary pads in privacy, and trash bins in which to throw them.
Many students in India, where around 650 million people still lack toilets, can’t say the same. Most schools I visited had filthy latrines, used only because there was no alternative. Some had none at all. Students and teachers made do with fields and back alleys.
Concentrating on lessons when you are desperate for the bathroom is hard on anyone. It’s nearly impossible for a girl who is menstruating and has nowhere to change or dispose of her pad. Girls grow tired of dealing with it. Often their families encourage them to stay home from school and get married. In one survey, 23 percent of Indian school-age girls dropped out of school when they reached puberty.
“Girls suffer if they aren’t empowered to manage their menstrual cycle without pain and shame each month,” said Chris Williams, the executive director of the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council, which runs the Menstrual Hygiene Management Lab. “Their health, schooling and dignity are in the balance.” And the world suffers, too: educated women are healthier, have smaller families, often earn more and have a positive impact on development.
It can take years, even generations, to change a taboo. But anecdotally, outreach workers note that the only girls who don’t believe the superstitions about menstruation are those with educated mothers. So the best way to change the minds of future women is to keep girls in school today, and basic lavatory facilities are one of the easiest ways to do that.
Back in Ankita’s schoolyard, something revolutionary was happening. Although many male teachers in rural India are terrified that broaching the subject of menstruation will be considered inappropriate or worse, one of Ankita’s teachers was different. After attending a Yatra outreach session, he used 200 rupees (less than $4) of his own money to turn a disused latrine into a simple incinerator, which girls could use to burn their dirty cloths.
It isn’t perfect: girls still face the embarrassment of going to the incinerator with everyone knowing why. But this rudimentary construction, with its vent made from a discarded well-water pump, could have huge consequences. Not only could it bring educational salvation to Ankita and her classmates, but a better future for generations to come.
Lauren Myracle, with her children. Asked why she writes books about teenagers, she said, "Because I haven't yet grown up." Benjamin Rasmussen for The New York Times
Lauren Myracle, outside her home in Fort Collins, Colo. Benjamin Rasmussen for The New York Times
Amulet Books
By CATHERINE SAINT LOUIS Published: December 28, 2012
LAUREN MYRACLE has been called Satan, a pedophile, and a corrupter of youth, yet her series of books about a trio of Atlanta teenagers, written entirely in text messages, has sold a total of 1.5 million copies. She has been hailed as this generation’s Judy Blume for her candor, but outraged parents have lobbied to ban her books, which tackle topics like erections, that awkward first bra purchase, and clueless flirting that leads one sophomore to have a hot-tub encounter with a teacher. (Spoiler: her BFFs rescue her in the nick of time.)
With 17 tween and teen novels under her belt, Ms. Myracle, 43, a newly divorced mother of three, ruffles feathers because she unflinchingly addresses the pitfalls of adolescence. Many people would prefer that she not write about teenagers dancing topless at a boozy frat party, or smoking marijuana to impress a friend with benefits. While she understands their impulse to protect children, she feels it is more dangerous to keep knowledge from them.
“Give your kid some credit for being smart — just because they read about something doesn’t mean they will do it,” she said. “Fiction is a safe place to explore.”
Last year, Ms. Myracle’s so-called Internet girls series — consisting of the titles ”ttyl,” “ttfn,” and “l8r, g8r” (ask a young person to decipher the texting language) — topped the list of challenged and banned books nationwide, according to the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom. (Angela Maycock, its assistant director, estimated that only 20 to 25 percent of challenges to books on school or public library shelves are reported.) Earning such a ranking requires a groundswell of people going to their libraries and declaring, “This is trash,” Ms. Maycock explained.
When her books were first banned in 2007, Ms. Myracle apologized to Susan Van Metre, her editor at Abrams Books. “She was shook up,” Ms. Van Metre recalled. But the author has become accustomed to controversy, Ms. Van Metre said. “She’s grown to be proud of it for what it represents in terms of being honest with kids, and bearing the brunt of parental fear.”
These days, Ms. Myracle does seem more comfortable playing the role of lightning rod. When she provides a visitor directions to her Craftsman bungalow in Fort Collins, Colo., she said, “Look for the one that brings the neighborhood down!”
If she is Satan, then this devil has been cast against type. She is a sweet-toothed baker, a hugger with hints of a Southern twang, and a lively chatterbox whose house has sock-puppet portraits on the walls.
Ms. Myracle, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt that reveals an around-the-bicep vine tattoo, has made her home the go-to gathering place for her children — Al, 14, Jamie, 11, and Mirabelle, 7 — and their friends after school. (A ready supply of Dr Pepper and brownies certainly helps.)
“I’ve always wanted to be the house that all the kids come to,” she said. “So far it’s working.”
Why?
“Because then I know,” she replied.
On the parenting continuum, Ms. Myracle hits a midpoint between laid back and nosy. She wants to know what her kids are up to (in a they’d-better-not-be-sniffing-glue way). But she also wants to be the first to know their latest crush, if they’ve set up a Glassboard (a private social network), and how they are coping after she and their father divorced in June after 17 years.
It’s been a hard but fruitful year for Ms. Myracle. Her own soul-searching has deepened her empathy for the young people she writes about. “Figuring out who I am again — it’s a parallel to adolescence,” she said.
Of late, she has ventured into darker terrain in her books for teenagers. In 2011, “Shine” — about a horrific hate crime with a gay victim and impoverished teenagers, some into meth — was nominated for a National Book Award [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/n/national_book_awards/index.html ], then not. It emerged that “Shine” was wrongly nominated because the judges had confused it with another single-word title. She was asked to drop out, a crushing blow.
She has just handed in a 377-page draft of a novel that promises to cement her reputation for straight talk among teenage fans — and her critics, given that the book is about a newly graduated 18-year-old losing her virginity.
Her aim, she said, is to write about sex without a “soft fade” — as in cutting from “he leaned in for a kiss” to “they lay in bed, naked, smiling.” She wants to fill in the blanks, because kids are curious about the mechanics, and deciding when first to have sex has inherent drama.
“Sometimes I worry I’m writing ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ for teenagers, but I’m not,” Ms. Myracle, dressed in fuchsia jeans with rose-colored booties, said over lunch. “It is sexually explicit. It’s sexy.”
Over the years, so many upset parents have e-mailed Ms. Myracle that she set up a special folder for them.
After reading “The Fashion Disaster That Changed My Life,” one mother of a 12-year-old girl wrote to say she disliked how giggling seventh graders dared one another to scream “honey-roasted penis!” at a sleepover party as a prank on the host mother, who thought they were saying “peanuts.”
“Why can’t kids be kids and not throw this kind of stuff at them?” wrote the mother, who also fretted about the offhanded mention of a “ménage à trois.”
Ms. Myracle, who says she often answers vitriolic letters because she’s a “good Southern girl,” wrote back, “Kids *do* talk about sex in the 7th grade. Sometimes, seeing this reflected in a book (that overall has a very moral message) can give them a safe place to process it.”
Ms. Myracle, perhaps not surprisingly, doesn’t blush when discussing potentially cringe-worthy topics with her children. She and Jamie had a good laugh about the fact that when they first watched “Gangnam Style,” they thought the rapper Psy was saying “Condom Store.”
“Lauren’s life is very much threaded through her children’s lives,” said Ms. Myracle’s sister, the novelist Susan Rebecca White, adding, “It’s very different than the parents in a Charlie Brown novel where the adults are outside of the world the kids live in.”
Thursday nights, Ms. Myracle and her sons have a standing date with Chelsea the Terrible, their name for the personal trainer who makes them lunge and lift. Trash talking ensues. Al complains the workout isn’t hard enough. Ms. Myracle, who once held a plank pose for 10 minutes to beat another gym member, doesn’t let them win.
And unlike plenty of boys on the edge of facial hair, her sons tell her their dirt, unfiltered. One afternoon after Ms. Myracle picked up Jamie at school, he recounted how a seventh grader was smoking pot on school grounds and offering it around. He was upset and shocked. Ms. Myracle didn’t pass judgment or ask him if he had been involved. “You know you can choose your friends, and you can always say, ‘No,’ “ she said.
He nodded, comforted. She explained later that she often role-plays difficult situations with her children so they know what to say in the moment.
For instance, if someone is being bullied, she’s told them, “You have to be the one to say ‘This is not cool.’ “ Or if someone makes a joke about rape, she tells them it’s fine to say, “I don’t think that’s funny.” Or if an adult ever says, “Don’t tell your mother,” Ms. Myracle advises, “You come straight and tell me, because no adult should ever say that.”
Ms. Myracle has used some of her own teenage blunders as fodder for the books — she says that she was the girl who ended up in a hot tub with a teacher before “I realized I was in trouble.”
Her mother, Ruth White, said that when Lauren was younger — part of a blended family with six children in Atlanta — she kept journals, read whatever she wanted, and had a habit of buttonholing adults. “She would say, ‘Tell me what it was like when you were in the third grade,’ “ Mrs. White recalled. Ms. Myracle gets her name from her father, Don Myracle, who still lives in her birthplace, Brevard, N.C., but he pronounces it MY-racle, while Lauren pronounces it “miracle.”
At her private Christian high school, she was a friend to loners, more interested in hanging out with motorcycle riders than cheerleaders, got top grades and had a posse of girlfriends nicknamed “the Beer Bros.”
Early in her career, she said, someone asked her at a book reading why she writes about teenagers. She replied, “Because I haven’t yet grown up.”
A soldier stood guard in Mixco, Guatemala, a municipality next to the capital, Guatemala City. Johan Ordonez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL Published: January 5, 2013
IN the wake of the tragic shooting deaths at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., last month, the National Rifle Association [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/national_rifle_association/index.html ] proposed that the best way to protect schoolchildren was to place a guard — a “good guy with a gun” — in every school, part of a so-called National School Shield Emergency Response Program.
Indeed, the N.R.A.’s solution to the expansion of gun violence in America has been generally to advocate for the more widespread deployment and carrying of guns.
I recently visited some Latin American countries that mesh with the N.R.A.’s vision of the promised land, where guards with guns grace every office lobby, storefront, A.T.M., restaurant and gas station. It has not made those countries safer or saner.
“A society that is relying on guys with guns to stop violence is a sign of a society where institutions have broken down,” said Rebecca Peters, former director of the International Action Network on Small Arms. “It’s shocking to hear anyone in the United States considering a solution that would make it seem more like Colombia [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/colombia/index.html ].”
As guns proliferate, legally and illegally, innocent people often seem more terrorized than protected.
In Guatemala, riding a public bus is a risky business. More than 500 bus drivers have been killed in robberies since 2007, leading InSight Crime, which tracks organized crime in the Americas, to call it “the most dangerous profession on the planet.” And when bullets start flying, everyone is vulnerable: in 2010 the onboard tally included 155 drivers, 54 bus assistants, 71 passengers and 14 presumed criminals. Some were killed by the robbers’ bullets and some by gun-carrying passengers.
Scientific studies have consistently found that places with more guns have more violent deaths, both homicides and suicides. Women and children are more likely to die if there’s a gun in the house. The more guns in an area, the higher the local suicide rates. “Generally, if you live in a civilized society, more guns mean more death,” said David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center. “There is no evidence that having more guns reduces crime. None at all.”
After a gruesome mass murder in 1996 provoked public outrage, Australia enacted stricter gun laws, including a 28-day waiting period before purchase and a ban on semiautomatic weapons. Before then, Australia had averaged one mass shooting a year. Since, rates of both homicide and suicide have dropped 50 percent, and there have been no mass killings, said Ms. Peters, who lobbied for the legislation.
Distinctive factors contribute to the high rates of violent crime in Latin America. Many countries in the region had recent civil wars, resulting in a large number of weapons in circulation. Drug- and gang-related violence is widespread. “It’s dangerous to make too tight a link between the availability of weapons and homicide rates,” said Jeremy McDermott, a co-director of InSight Crime who is based in Medellín, Colombia. “There are lots of other variables.”
Still, he said that the recent sharp increase in homicides in Venezuela could be in part explained by the abundance of arms there. Although the government last spring imposed a one-year ban on importing weapons, there had previously been a plentiful influx from Russia. There is a Kalashnikov plant in the country.
In 2011, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime [ http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/homicide.html ], Honduras led the world in homicides, with 91.6 per 100,000 people. But rates were also alarmingly high in El Salvador (69.1), Jamaica (40.9), Colombia (31.4) and Guatemala (38.5). Venezuela’s was 45.1 in 2010 but is expected to be close to to 80 this year. The United States’ rate is about 5.
THOUGH many of these countries have restrictions on gun ownership, enforcement is lax. According to research by Flacso, the Guatemalan Social Science Academy, illegal guns far outnumber legal weapons in Central America.
All that has spawned a thriving security industry — the good guys with guns that grace every street corner — though experts say it is often unclear if their presence is making crime better or worse. In many countries, the armed guards have only six weeks of training.
Guatemala, with approximately 20,000 police officers, has 41,000 registered private security guards and an estimated 80,000 who are working without authorization. “To put people with guns who are not accountable or trained in places where there are lots of innocent people is just dangerous,” Ms. Peters said, noting that lethal force is used to deter minor crimes like shoplifting.
Indeed, even as some Americans propose expanding our gun culture into elementary schools, some Latin American cities are trying to rein in theirs. Bogotá’s new mayor, Gustavo Petro, has forbidden residents to carry weapons on streets, in cars or in any public space since last February, and the murder rate has dropped 50 percent to a 27-year low. He said, “Guns are not a defense, they are a risk.”
William Godnick, coordinator of the Public Security Program at the United Nations Regional Center for Peace, Disarmament and Development in Latin America and the Caribbean, said that United Nations studies in Central America showed that people who used a gun to defend against an armed assault were far more likely to be injured or killed than if they had no weapon.
Post-Sandy Hook, gun groups in the United States are now offering teachers firearms training. But do I really want my kid’s teachers packing a weapon?
“If you’re living in a ‘Mad Max’ world, where criminals have free rein and there’s no government to stop them, then I’d want to be armed,” said Dr. Hemenway of Harvard. “But we’re not in that circumstance. We’re a developed, stable country.”
Elisabeth Rosenthal is a physician and a science reporter for The New York Times.
Younger Americans die earlier and live in poorer health than their counterparts in other developed countries, with far higher rates of death from guns, car accidents and drug addiction [ http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/disease/drug-abuse-and-dependence/overview.html ], according to a new analysis of health and longevity in the United States.
Researchers have known for some time that the United States fares poorly in comparison with other rich countries, a trend established in the 1980s. But most studies have focused on older ages, when the majority of people die.
The findings were stark. Deaths before age 50 accounted for about two-thirds of the difference in life expectancy between males in the United States and their counterparts in 16 other developed countries, and about one-third of the difference for females. The countries in the analysis included Canada, Japan, Australia, France, Germany and Spain.
The 378-page study by a panel of experts [ http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=13497 ] convened by the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council [ http://www.iom.edu/ ] is the first to systematically compare death rates and health measures for people of all ages, including American youths. It went further than other studies in documenting the full range of causes of death, from diseases to accidents to violence. It was based on a broad review of mortality and health studies and statistics.
The panel called the pattern of higher rates of disease and shorter lives “the U.S. health disadvantage,” and said it was responsible for dragging the country to the bottom in terms of life expectancy over the past 30 years. American men ranked last in life expectancy among the 17 countries in the study, and American women ranked second to last.
“Something fundamental is going wrong,” said Dr. Steven Woolf [ http://www.familymedicine.vcu.edu/directory/woolf.html ], chairman of the Department of Family Medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University, who led the panel. “This is not the product of a particular administration or political party. Something at the core is causing the U.S. to slip behind these other high-income countries. And it’s getting worse.”
Car accidents, gun violence and drug overdoses were major contributors to years of life lost by Americans before age 50.
The rate of firearm homicides was 20 times higher in the United States than in the other countries, according to the report, which cited a 2011 study of 23 countries. And though suicide rates were lower in the United States, firearm suicide rates were six times higher.
Sixty-nine percent of all American homicide deaths in 2007 involved firearms, compared with an average of 26 percent in other countries, the study said. “The bottom line is that we are not preventing damaging health behaviors,” said Samuel Preston [ http://sociology.sas.upenn.edu/samuel_preston ], a demographer and sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, who was on the panel. “You can blame that on public health officials, or on the health care system. No one understands where responsibility lies.”
Panelists were surprised at just how consistently Americans ended up at the bottom of the rankings. The United States had the second-highest death rate from the most common form of heart disease, the kind that causes heart attacks, and the second-highest death rate from lung disease, a legacy of high smoking rates in past decades. American adults also have the highest diabetes [ http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/disease/diabetes/overview.html ] rates.
Americans also had the lowest probability over all of surviving to the age of 50. The report’s second chapter details health indicators for youths where the United States ranks near or at the bottom. There are so many that the list takes up four pages. Chronic diseases, including heart disease, also played a role for people under 50.
“We expected to see some bad news and some good news,” Dr. Woolf said. “But the U.S. ranked near and at the bottom in almost every heath indicator. That stunned us.”
The panel sought to explain the poor performance. It noted the United States has a highly fragmented health care system, with limited primary care resources and a large uninsured population. It has the highest rates of poverty among the countries studied.
Education also played a role. Americans who have not graduated from high school die from diabetes at three times the rate of those with some college, Dr. Woolf said. In the other countries, more generous social safety nets buffer families from the health consequences of poverty, the report said.
Still, even the people most likely to be healthy, like college-educated Americans and those with high incomes, fare worse on many health indicators.
The report also explored less conventional explanations. Could cultural factors like individualism and dislike of government interference play a role? Americans are less likely to wear seat belts and more likely to ride motorcycles without helmets.
The United States is a bigger, more heterogeneous society with greater levels of economic inequality, and comparing its health outcomes to those in countries like Sweden or France may seem lopsided. But the panelists point out that this country spends more on health care than any other in the survey. And as recently as the 1950s, Americans scored better in life expectancy and disease than many of the other countries in the current study.
Keith Ratliff Dead: FPSRussia YouTube Channel Producer Shot In Apparent Homicide, Georgia Police Say
Posted: 01/09/2013 11:56 am EST | Updated: 01/09/2013 11:22 pm EST
A producer behind a popular gun enthusiast YouTube channel was found dead with a single gunshot wound to the head at his business last week.
Police in Georgia are investigating the apparent homicide of Keith Ratliff, a 32-year-old Franklin County resident.
"It's really heartbreaking [ http://www.myfoxatlanta.com/story/20538156/fpsrussia ], and everything I see, or any kind of memorable thing -- I mean, I just break down," Amanda Ratliff, the victim's wife, told MyFoxAtlanta. "He had such a life to live, and such a good life to live, and things to look forward to."
Ratliff worked mostly behind the scenes to produce videos for the YouTube channel FPSRussia [ http://www.youtube.com/user/FPSRussia ], a site dedicated to showcasing high-power firearms. FPSRussia -- which commands nearly 3.5 million subscribers and has generated over 500,000 page views is one of the top 10 channels ranked on YouTube [ http://www.youtube.com/charts/videos_views?t=a&gl=US ].
In addition to his contributions to FPSRussia, Ratliff also worked for FPS Industries [ http://fpsindustries.com/ ], a company focussing on "product development and testing for hard use firearms shooters," according to its website. FPS Industries is located in Carnesville, Ga.
Ratliff was known as an outspoken gun advocate. In a message posted to Twitter on Aug 11, 2012, he wrote: "I went to the movies with my pistol in my pocket the whole time I was praying that somebody would try to pull a Batman!"
As it seems to be leaking out I will confirm to save more messages and questions coming to me. As I am sure most of you know Keith Ratliff has been with the FPS Russia channel for quite some time now, helping us out with everything from pulling pranks to finding almost impossible weapons to use in videos. It saddens me to confirm that he was indeed found having passed away here in Georgia on Thursday. I do ask for some privacy right now as you can imagine it has shocked us all and our main thoughts and concerns lay with his family right now. Thank you for understanding.
Ratliff had recently moved to northern Georgia for work. His wife and 2-year-old son remain in Kentucky.
Scroll through the slideshow for relevant images, video and tweets:
What you're seeing here are friends and family coping with the loss of a loved one. The man on the right, who is new to most of you, is the victim's cousin. Not all of our time has been so lighthearted but it's good to get your mind off of the tragedy from time to time.
WHITE PLAINS — Local newspapers across the country look for stories that will bring them national attention, but The Journal News [ http://www.lohud.com/ ], a daily nestled in a wooded office park in a suburb north of New York, may have gotten more than it bargained for.
Two weeks ago, the paper published the names and addresses of handgun permit holders — a total of 33,614 — in two suburban counties, Westchester and Rockland, and put maps [ http://www.lohud.com/interactive/article/20121223/NEWS01/121221011/Map-Where-gun-permits-your-neighborhood- ] of their locations online. The maps, which appeared with the article [ http://www.lohud.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2012312230056 ] “The Gun Owner Next Door: What You Don’t Know About the Weapons in Your Neighborhood,” received more than one million views on the Web site of The Journal News — more than twice as many as the paper’s previous record, about a councilman who had two boys arrested for running a cupcake stand.
But the article, which left gun owners feeling vulnerable to harassment or break-ins, also drew outrage from across the country. Calls and e-mails grew so threatening that the paper’s president and publisher, Janet Hasson, hired armed guards [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/03/nyregion/putnam-officials-keep-gun-permit-records-from-journal-news.html ] to monitor the newspaper’s headquarters in White Plains and its bureau in West Nyack, N.Y.
Personal information about editors and writers at the paper has been posted online, including their home addresses and information about where their children attended school; some reporters have received notes saying they would be shot on the way to their cars; bloggers have encouraged people to steal credit card information of Journal News employees; and two packages containing white powder have been sent to the newsroom and a third to a reporter’s home (all were tested by the police and proved to be harmless).
“As journalists, we are prepared for criticism,” Ms. Hasson said, as she sat in her meticulously tended office and described the ways her 225 employees have been harassed since the article was published. “But in the U.S., journalists should not be threatened.” She has paid for staff members who do not feel safe in their homes to stay at hotels, offered guards to walk employees to their cars, encouraged employees to change their home telephone numbers and has been coordinating with the local police.
The decision to report and publish the data, taken from publicly available records, happened within a week of the school massacre in nearby Newtown, Conn. On Dec. 17, Dwight R. Worley, a tax reporter, returned from trying to interview the families of victims in Newtown with an idea to obtain and publish local gun permit data. He discussed his idea with his immediate editor, Kathy Moore, who in turn talked to her bosses, according to CynDee Royle, the paper’s editor.
Mr. Worley started putting out requests for public information that Monday, receiving the data from Westchester County that day and from Rockland County three days later. All the editors involved said there were not any formal meetings about the article, although it came up at several regular news meetings. Ms. Royle, who had been at The Journal News in 2006 when the newspaper published similar data, without mapping it or providing street numbers, said that editors discussed publishing the data in at least three meetings.
Ms. Hasson said Ms. Royle told her that an article with gun permit data would be published on Sunday, Dec. 23. While Ms. Hasson had not been at the paper in 2006, she knew there had been some controversy then. She made sure to be available on Dec. 23 by e-mail, and accessible to the staff if any problems came up. A spokesman for Gannett, which owns The Journal News, said it was never informed about the coming article.
“We’ve run this content before,” Ms. Hasson said. “I supported it, and I supported the publishing of the info.”
By Dec. 26, employees had begun receiving threatening calls and e-mails, and by the next day, reporters not involved in the article were being threatened. The reaction did not stop at the local paper: Gracia C. Martore, the chief executive of Gannett, also received threatening messages.
Many of the threats, Ms. Hasson said, were coming from across the country, and not from the paper’s own community. But local gun owners and supporters are encouraging an advertiser boycott of The Journal News. Scott Sommavilla, president of the 35,000-member Westchester County Firearm Owners Association [ http://www.wcfoany.org/ ], said 44,000 people had downloaded a list of advertisers from his group’s Web site. But he emphasized that his association would never encourage any personal threats. Appealing to advertisers, he said, is the best way for gun owners to express their disapproval of the article.
“They’re really upset about it,” Mr. Sommavilla said. “They’re afraid for their families.”
The paper’s decision has drawn criticism from journalists who question whether The Journal News should have provided more context and whether it was useful to publish individual names and addresses. Journalists with specialties in computer-assisted reporting have argued that just because public data has become more readily available in recent years does not mean that it should be published raw. In ways, they argued, it would have been more productive to publish data by ZIP code or block.
“The Journal News, I personally think, should have rethought the idea as actually going so far to identify actual addresses,” said Steve Doig, a professor with an expertise in data journalism at Arizona State. “This particular database ought to remain a public record. Just because it’s available and public record doesn’t mean we have to make it so readily available.”
Mr. Worley disagrees. “The people have as much of a right to know who owns guns in their communities as gun owners have to own weapons,” he said.
Mr. Doig pointed out that the recent publication of gun information by other papers has made access to this public information more difficult because legislators started blocking the data immediately. “The backlash, very typically from this, is for legislators to try to close up the access to this type of data.”
Mr. Worley said he had received mainly taunting phone calls sprinkled in with callers who said “you should die.” He found broken glass outside of his home and would not say how much time he was spending there right now. But he said he had largely been supported by the newsroom.
The Journal News’s features editor, Mary Dolan, said that while she was not involved with the publication of the article, her home address and phone numbers were published online in retaliation. She has had to disconnect her phone and has “taken my social media presence and just put it on the shelf for a while.” She has also received angry phone calls from former neighbors in Westchester whose gun information was published.
She said she was especially concerned about the part-time staff members who write up wedding anniversary and church potluck announcements who have been harassed. But she supports the paper for its decision.
“It sparked a conversation that needed to occur in this country, and it revealed tactics that will be employed when gun owners feel their rights are threatened,” she said.
Putnam County has refused to release similar data, but Ms. Hasson said she would continue to press for it. She would not say whether the paper had lost any of its advertisers. According to the Alliance for Audited Media [ http://www.auditedmedia.com/ ], The Journal News, like many newspapers nationwide, has had sharp declines in circulation. Its total circulation from Monday through Friday fell from 111,536 in September 2007 to 68,850 in September 2012.
At the same time, Ms. Hasson has been trying to calm the nerves of her family after photographs of the home she is renting and references to her adult children were put online.
“They are concerned about my safety,” she said about her children. “But they are very supportive.”
Gun Owners Are Coming To Take Away Our Free Speech Rights
By Judge H. Lee Sarokin Posted: 01/07/2013 12:53 pm
Is there anything more delicious than gun owners urging that a right guaranteed under the Constitution should be subject to reasonable regulation if the failure to do so causes harm? They want limitations -- but not on the Second Amendment right to bear arms but rather the First Amendment right of free speech. A Westchester County, N.Y. newspaper, the Journal News, published a map showing the names and addresses of pistol permit holders. The information was public and there is no real dispute over the right to publish it. Nonetheless, the outcry from gun advocates was deafening.
The primary complaint seemed slightly illogical: the publication of the information placed gun owners in greater danger from criminals. Wait a minute. Isn't this what it's all about -- that having a gun in your house protects you from criminals and deters them? Why would criminals knowing that you have a weapon in the house increase rather than reduce the risk of home invasion? Publicizing those that don't have guns might do that, but that complaint doesn't come from gun owners.
On the other hand, neighbors, particularly parents, would like to know if their children are playing at houses that have guns. They fear that one of those four-year-old "bad guys" will find and play with their father's gun and accidentally shoot their child. Others might be concerned that the crazy guy next door has a weapon. Opponents of the publication validly claim that it might target weapons for theft. It also identifies the location of law enforcement personnel, police and prison guards; although one suspects that such information regarding addresses is available through other sources.
Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter ranted on this issue like two inmates in an insane asylum. In the most ludicrous analogy every posited, Coulter said [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/04/ann-coulter-guns-women-abortions-mothers-murder-child_n_2408584.html ] if these facts about gun owners can be posted, why not publicize "which women (who had an abortion) on the street are likely to murder a child" -- suggesting that somehow a woman who had an abortion is likely to murder someone else's child! She also declared that "liberals won't let us go after criminals," and, of course, "They are coming after our guns!" In like vein, the newspaper received death threats and had to hire security guards. I don't think even the NRA can claim that these threats came from criminals rather than "law-abiding" gun owners.
The point of all of this is that there well may be some merit to the concerns from the publication of this information, despite the absolute right to do so. Maybe reconsideration should be given to designating this as public information or thought be given to restricting its publication in a reasonable and sensible way. Maybe those who oppose publication are not intent on destroying all rights of free speech, just in the same way persons who want to restrict and regulate semi-automatic weapons, huge ammunition magazines and gun shows are not necessarily intent on confiscating all guns. Free speech certainly does less harm than guns. Shouldn't both be susceptible to some sensible and reasonable regulation in the public interest? Encroachment, limitations or regulations of any constitutional right should be done with great caution and only for compelling reasons, but if the First Amendment should yield a little to reason -- should not the Second as well?
DebraLee Hovey, Connecticut Republican, Apologizes For Telling Gabrielle Giffords To 'Get Out'
By Nick Wing Posted: 01/07/2013 6:22 pm EST | Updated: 01/08/2013 8:14 am EST
Connecticut state Rep. DebraLee Hovey (R) has apologized after directing a Facebook post at former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) last week, telling the lawmaker who was wounded in a mass shooting to "stay out of [her] towns." Giffords on Friday visited Newtown, Conn., where a mass shooting last month killed 26, including 20 first graders, as well as the gunman and his mother.
“The remarks I made regarding Congresswoman Gifford’s visit were insensitive and if I offended anyone I truly apologize,” Hovey said, according to the New Haven Register [ http://www.nhregister.com/articles/2013/01/07/news/doc50eb20ed3b8d0204090529.txt ]. "My comments were meant to be protective of the privacy of the families and our community as we work to move on, and were in no way intended as an insult to Congresswoman Giffords personally. Our community has struggled greatly through this tragedy, and we are all very sensitive to the potential for this event to be exploited for political purposes. This is what I wish to avoid."
Hovey's posts [ http://courantblogs.com/capitol-watch/state-rep-debralee-hovey-to-gabby-giffords-stay-out/ ], removed since their original posting on Friday, read "Gabby Giffords stay out of my towns!!!" and went on to allege that the meeting between Giffords, state leaders and families of those killed during last month's massacre was driven by "pure political motives."
Giffords' trip to Newtown was days before the two-year anniversary of the shooting in Tucson, Ariz., which killed six and injured 13, including the congresswoman. Giffords was left partially blind, with a paralyzed right arm and brain injury, according to the Associated Press [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/05/gabrielle-giffords-newtown-visit_n_2415720.html ].
Giffords's husband, Mark Kelly, has become a vocal proponent for gun control since her shooting. Upon hearing the news of the Newtown shooting, Kelly challenged leaders [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/14/mark-kelly-newtown-school-shooting_n_2303008.html ] to exhibit "the courage to participate in a meaningful discussion about our gun laws -- and how they can be reformed and better enforced to prevent gun violence and death in America."
Melinda Herman, Mom Who Shot Intruder, Inspires Gun Control Foes
By KATE BRUMBACK 01/09/13 07:47 PM ET EST
LOGANVILLE, Ga. -- A Georgia mother who shot an intruder at her home has become a small part of the roaring gun control debate, with some firearms enthusiasts touting her as a textbook example of responsible gun ownership.
Melinda Herman grabbed a handgun and hid in a crawl space with her two children when a man broke in last week and approached the family at their home northeast of Atlanta, police said. Herman called her husband on the phone, and with him reminding her of the lessons she recently learned at a shooting range, Herman opened fire, seriously wounding the burglary suspect.
The National Rifle Association tweeted a link to a news story about the shooting, and support poured in from others online, hailing Herman as a hero. The local sheriff said he was proud of the way she handled the situation.
"This lady decided that she wasn't going to be a victim, and I think everyone else looks at this and hopes they have the courage to do what she done," Walton County Sheriff Joe Chapman said Wednesday.
Herman was working from home Friday when she saw a man walk up to the front door. She told police he rang the doorbell twice and then over and over again. He went back to his SUV, got something out and walked back toward the house, a police report said.
Herman took her 9-year-old son and daughter into an upstairs bedroom and locked the door. They went into bathroom and she locked that door, too. She got her handgun from a safe, the report said, and hid with her children. At some point, she called her husband, who kept her on the line and called 911 on another line.
In a 10-minute 911 recording released by the Walton County Sheriff's Office, Donnie Herman calmly explained what was happening to a dispatcher. His part of the conversation with his wife was also recorded.
"Is he in the house, Melinda? Are you sure? How do you know? You can hear him in the house?" Donnie Herman said.
His wife told him the intruder was coming closer.
"He's in the bedroom? Shh, shh, relax. Just remember everything that I showed you, everything that I taught you, all right?" Donnie Herman told his wife, explaining later to the dispatcher that he had recently taken her to a gun range.
It wasn't clear from the recording exactly when they went to range and Donnie Herman told The Associated Press on Wednesday the family didn't want to talk about the shooting.
After Donnie Herman told his wife police were on the way, he started shouting: "She shot him. She's shootin' him. She's shootin' him. She's shootin' him. She's shootin' him."
"OK," the dispatcher responded.
"Shoot him again! Shoot him!" Donnie Herman yelled. He told the dispatcher he heard a lot of screaming, but he seems to get increasingly worried when he doesn't hear anything from his wife.
Melinda Herman told police she started shooting the man when he opened the door to the crawl space. The man pleaded with her to stop, but she kept firing until she had emptied her rounds, she told police. She then fled to a neighbor's house with her children.
The man drove away in his SUV. Police found the SUV on another subdivision street and discovered a man bleeding from his face and body in a nearby wooded area. Police identified the suspect as 32-year-old Paul Slater of Atlanta.
Chapman said the hospital asked him not to comment on Slater's condition, but he said he is not certain Slater will survive. Authorities have a warrant but haven't formally arrested Slater yet. They plan to charge him with burglary, possession of tools for the commission of a crime and aggravated assault, Walton County sheriff's Capt. Greg Hall said.
A phone number for Slater was not listed and it was not clear whether he has an attorney.
Authorities believe Slater targeted a home in another local subdivision but left when confronted by the homeowner, Chapman said.
Misty Nunley, Woman Killed In Tulsa Shooting, Was 'Getting Her Life Back Together'
Misty Nunley, 33, was killed during a shooting at an apartment complex in Tulsa, Okla.
By JUSTIN JUOZAPAVICIUS 01/08/13 08:27 PM ET EST
TULSA, Okla. -- One of four women found fatally shot inside a Tulsa apartment was staying at the crime-plagued building with a friend as she tried to get her life back together, her mother said Tuesday as police asked for the public's help in solving the murders.
Misty Nunley, along with 23-year-old twin sisters Rebeika Powell and Kayetie Melchor, and Julie Jackson, 55, were found dead Monday by police. No arrests have been made, and investigators have released no other details – including possible suspects, how the women knew each other or why they may have been targeted.
But Nunley's mother, Cheryl Nunley, said her 33-year-old daughter had befriended Powell and had been staying with her on and off for the past week. She said she called her daughter nearly every morning to check in, and spoke to her Monday just hours before the women were found dead.
"She had positive people back in her life," Cheryl Nunley told The Associated Press, holding back tears while sitting with family and friends in a tiny apartment a few blocks away from the crime scene.
"She's not perfect. She ran around with some people she shouldn't have been running around with, but she was getting her life back together."
Tulsa police spokesman Leland Ashley said Tuesday that detectives and officers were "beating the bushes" to figure out what happened at the apartment, where police also found an unharmed 3-year-old boy. Police said he was taken into protective custody but released no other information.
"Right now, we have no clear-cut suspect," Ashley said, urging anyone with information to come forward.
"I don't want to strike fear in the community tonight, but we do have an individual or individuals who murdered four people," he added. "Do we know if there was a motive, like a jealous lover? We don't know that. We can't say if it was random or if someone knew (the victims)."
Relatives and neighbors have told Nunley's family there may have been a romantic spat between one of the women who lived at the apartment and a boyfriend or ex-boyfriend. Police wouldn't comment on those rumors.
Hillary McGuire, the former stepsister of Powell and Melchor, told the AP she had lost touch with the sisters over the past couple years but remembered both as "the nicest girls."
"I hope to God they find whoever did it and lock them away forever," she said.
Messages left by the AP at phone numbers believed to belong to other relatives of the victims weren't returned Tuesday.
The four women were found dead in a unit at the Fairmont Terrace Apartments, a gated but rundown complex in south Tulsa's Riverwood neighborhood where residents say crime is common. The complex has a nighttime security patrol and curfew, but police believe the killings occurred during the day Monday. Police said they received a 911 call reporting the shooting around 12:30 p.m.
Cheryl Nunley said she didn't know the other three women or how they knew each other. She said Misty had been estranged from her family but was working to repair the relationships and get reacquainted with her own 19-year-old daughter, Shondelle.
"She last called me Sunday night," recalled Shondelle. "She told me she was proud of me."
Cheryl Nunley is convinced that more than one assailant was responsible for the killings, saying her daughter would have fought any one attacker "to the death."
"I don't know anybody who was mad enough at my daughter to do that to her," she said.
Crime-scene tape had been removed by Tuesday afternoon at the apartment complex, where bed sheets or cardboard hang as improvised draperies in many windows behind a black wrought-iron gate. The guard shack is empty and signs read "Curfew 10 p.m. for everyone, everyday" and "Photo ID required to be on property." Three of the units are burned out and boarded up with plywood.
Tulsa police said there were two murders at the complex last year, and residents of the neighborhood say gunfire and break-ins are fairly common.
"We're in the eye of the storm," said Charles Burke, a 48-year-old construction worker who lives across the street but didn't hear the shootings. "You're on your toes. You can't be too careful."
Jamie Kramer, a 28-year-old mother of two young children, has lived in the neighborhood for 10 years. She said crime seems to come in cycles and that things had been pretty quiet for several months until Monday.
"It escalates and goes back down, it escalates and it goes back down," she said.
Alexis Draite, a 20-year-old who recently moved to the area from Oklahoma City, also said she didn't hear gunshot Monday. She said she has a routine: "Lock the doors, lock the cars and don't stay outside longer than you need to."
We're now one step closer to America's coming civil war
In this Tuesday, Jan. 1, 2013, file photo, the dome of the Capitol is reflected in a skylight of the Capitol Visitor's Center in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)
By Arthur Herman Published January 03, 2013 FoxNews.com
The New Year has started with a monstrosity of a budget deal, one that proves that neither political party, Democrats or Republicans, is really serious about controlling the growth of big government.
But soap opera dramatics about fiscal "cliffs" and sequestration shouldn’t deflect from where President Obama is really taking this country. Consider this story from the Wall Street Journal a few days before Christmas:
“Thousands of people in several Argentine cities ransacked supermarkets for a second day in the latest challenge to President Chistina Kirchner, who is struggling to revive a weak economy...In the central city Rosario, two people were killed during the incidents and 137 people arrested.
“The violence puts Mrs. Kirchner in a difficult position as the poor are [her] core constituents...Her government spends billions of dollars a year to help low income families, including free health care...[Yet] Argentine activists who claim to represent the poor traditionally block access to supermarkets in the month of December to demand free food and other items...The latest events were some of the worst acts of looting and vandalism in years.... Local media showed dozens of men, women, and children hauling away televisions, refrigerators, and food.”
Some have said my warnings about a coming civil war between makers and takers are exaggerated. It’s true that Argentina’s politicians have been waging class warfare since Juan and Eva Peron–and they aren’t fazed when it turns bloody. Obama and the Democrats are relative newcomers to the game. But Argentina reveals who really suffers when those who create a nation’s wealth get mugged by those who spend it–as just happened this week in Washington.
It’s the poor and the middle class, the very ones big government says it’s trying to protect.
And sadly that’s where Mitt Romney had it wrong.
That 47 percent of Americans who get unemployment benefits, Social Security disability checks, Medicare and Medicaid, and government student loans, aren’t the real takers. Like the rioters in Rosario, they’re just pawns in a perennial battle between those who see wealth and prosperity as something created by hard work, ingenuity, and innovation in a free market system–or something to be doled out by government.
Experience teaches that those who believe in free markets are right. The November election and the budget deal, however, show that the other side is winning, and winning big.
Since 1970, America’s public sector has exploded as a percentage of GDP, rising to almost 25% last year. While the national unemployment rate hovers at the 8% mark, government worker unemployment rate is a cozy 3.8%. Sixteen percent of America’s workforce now work for government. By the time the Obama administration ends, we won’t be that far away from Argentina’s 21 percent.
Yet as an economic and social enterprise, government creates nothing.
Far from adding to people’s standard of living, government is the number one cause of poverty in this country. It forces those who depend on its largesse to live hand to mouth, with no time or money to plan for the future. They become unable to fend for themselves---and increasingly resentful of those who can.
When the economy tanks and the government checks have to shrink, their only alternative is to take to the streets. That’s what happening in Argentina, and in Greece; and that’s where the growth of government is taking us here, as this current budget deal increases handouts–and more and more Americans are finding that an unemployment or Social Security disability check is their only life line.
Washington’s Republicans and Democrats alike have become the toll collectors on the road to serfdom–and the road to Rosario.
How far down that road depends on how our private sector rallies in 2013 after two numbing defeats, first on November 7 and then on Capitol Hill this week.
It needs to explain to that 47 percent that when big government wins, we all lose–and that this nation won’t survive if it does.
Schaeffer Cox, Alaska Militia Leader, Sentenced To Nearly 26 Years
Schaeffer Cox, a boyish-looking young man with a soft voice who spewed anti-government rhetoric and amassed weapons in a plot to kill federal law enforcement officials, will spend nearly 26 years in a federal prison.
By MARK THIESSEN 01/08/13 07:12 PM ET EST
ANCHORAGE, Alaska -- A boyish-looking young man with a soft voice who spewed anti-government rhetoric and amassed weapons in a plot to kill federal law enforcement officials will spend nearly 26 years in a federal prison.
Schaeffer Cox was sentenced Tuesday in U.S. District Court on nine felony counts, including conspiracy and possessing illegal weapons. The 28-year-old is the third and last member of the Alaska Peacemakers Militia to be sentenced after authorities used an informant to infiltrate the group.
Cox came off at times as arrogant during his trial last spring, but he spoke with a very different demeanor during the two-hour sentencing hearing.
"I put myself here, with my own words," he said, choking back tears. "And I feel horrible about that. And I hurt my family, and that's who is really paying."
Federal prosecutors portrayed Cox as a dangerous militia leader who helped stockpile a huge cache of illegal weapons while plotting a strategy to one day kill judges, state troopers and other government officials.
According to prosecutors, Cox believed his group would eventually need to take up arms against the government, and be sufficiently armed and equipped to sustain a takeover of the government or become a new government in the event of a collapse.
Cox came to the attention of the FBI in late 2009 after speeches in Montana that claimed the Fairbanks militia had 3,500 members and was armed with mines and other military weapons. But the group only had about a dozen members and, as Judge Robert Bryan noted, never trained for military duty.
As the investigation unfolded over more than a year, the FBI eventually used an informant to infiltrate the group. He recorded more than 100 hours of conversations.
Cox's attorney Nelson Traverso claimed during the trial that the case was an overreach by prosecutors and an attempt to silence Cox and his offensive but protected speech.
Cox once told a state judge some militia members would sooner murder her than appear before her, and told an Alaska State Trooper the militia had officers outgunned.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Steven Skrocki said that Cox eventually crossed the line separating offhand comments about killing someone to formulation of plans to do so.
He and others hatched a plan intended to kill two government officials for every one militia member who was killed – a strategy known within the group as "241" or "two for one."
Cox, along with militia foot soldiers Coleman Barney and Lonnie Vernon, have been sentenced in the plot.
Cox's new lawyer, Peter Camiel of Seattle, had him undergo a psychological examination, which indicated Cox suffered from paranoia disorders, which he said could be treated with drugs and counseling.
"I put a lot of people in fear by the things that I said," Cox told the court Tuesday. "Some of the crazy stuff that was coming out of my mouth, I see that, and I sounded horrible.
"I couldn't have sounded any worse if I tried. The more scared I got, the crazier the stuff," he said. "I wasn't thinking, I was panicking."
He took sole credit for any blame, and apologized for putting his wife and two small children, ages 2 and 4, into a position of pain and uncertainty.
He said it was important to him to provide his children both their parents and home where they could grow up.
"I was so scared that something would jeopardize that, that I wound up running right into the very thing I was running away from," he said.
His new tone didn't sway the lead prosecutor in the case.
"Our view of what Mr. Cox said to the court is really contradicted by his actions," said Skrocki, who sought a 35-year term for Cox.
At the end of the trial in June, Bryan said he wrote down observations about Cox, which included: paranoia, grandiosity, narcissism, egocentricity and pathological lying.
He said the paranoia diagnosis from the defense's psychological exam may supply some reasons for some of Cox's actions, "but it does not provide excuses."
And if it is a true diagnosis, Bryan said Cox will need long-term care to treat it, something the judge said he wasn't sure he would get outside jail.
Bryan also noted Cox was never so ill he didn't have followers.
Under previous federal sentencing guidelines no longer in place, Cox would have faced life in prison with no opportunity for the judge to consider a shorter sentence
Murder conspiracy and other charges against the men were thrown out of a state court in October 2011 after a judge ruled audio and video recordings made during the six-month FBI investigation into Cox and the militia were not admissible because they were made without a search warrant, and therefore violated the Alaska Constitution. The FBI has wider authority to obtain warrants, and charges remained in federal court.
Lonnie Vernon was charged with conspiring to kill public officials, amassing weapons and, along with his wife, of planning to kill a federal judge and an Internal Revenue Service official over a tax dispute. On Monday, he received the same sentence as Cox.
Karen Vernon was sentenced to 12 years in prison on Monday.
Barney was sentenced last year to five years in prison on weapons charges.
Daniel Day Lewis stars as President Abraham Lincoln in this scene from director Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln" from DreamWorks Pictures and Twentieth Century Fox. (Credit: David James, Smpsp)
Lincoln's unfinished war rages on, as the neo-Confederacy tries to turn back the clock on women, gays, God and guns
By Andrew O'Hehir Saturday, Jan 5, 2013 10:30 AM CST
On a repeat viewing of Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln [ http://www.salon.com/topic/lincoln/ ]” over the New Year’s holiday, a scene I had barely noticed the first time jumped out at me. Confederate vice-president Alexander Stephens [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_H._Stephens ] (played with reptilian gentility by Jackie Earle Haley), in a secret meeting [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hampton_Roads_Conference ] aboard a steamboat with Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of State William Seward, faces up to the reality that the era of slavery has come to an end. Ratification of the 13th Amendment, Stephens muses, will destroy the basis of the Southern economy and the South’s traditional way of life. “We won’t know ourselves anymore,” he says.
If only it had been so. What an affluent slaveowner like Stephens feared most, no doubt, was the utopian vision of “radical Reconstruction” imagined by legendary abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thaddeus_Stevens ] (Tommy Lee Jones in the movie), in an earlier conversation with Lincoln in the White House kitchen. Stevens envisioned a future in which all the land and property of the Southern aristocracy would be dispossessed and divided among the emancipated slaves, building a new society of free soil and free labor amid the ruins of tyranny. To put it in contemporary social-studies terms, Stevens hoped that by uprooting and destroying the South’s slave economy, one could also replace its culture.
It didn’t quite work out that way. You can’t boil one of the most tumultuous periods of American history down to one paragraph, but here goes: Lincoln was assassinated by a domestic terrorist and replaced by Andrew Johnson [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Johnson ], who was an incompetent hothead and an unapologetic racist. Within a few years the ambitious project of Reconstruction [ http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/aaohtml/exhibit/aopart5.html ] fell victim to a sustained insurgency led by the Ku Klux Klan and similar white militia groups. By the late 1870s white supremacist “Redeemers” controlled most local and state governments in the South, and by the 1890s Southern blacks had been disenfranchised and thrust into subservience positions by Jim Crow laws that were only slightly preferable to slavery.
So even though it’s a truism of American public discourse that the Civil War never ended, it’s also literally true. We’re still reaping the whirlwind from that long-ago conflict, and now we face a new Civil War, one focused on divisive political issues of the 21st century – most notably the rights and liberties of women and LGBT people – but rooted in toxic rhetoric and ideas inherited from the 19th century.
We’ve just emerged from a presidential campaign that exposed how hardened our political and cultural divide has become, and how poorly the two sides understand each other. Part of the Republican problem, in an election that party thought it would win easily, was that those who felt a visceral disgust toward both the idea and the reality of President Barack Obama simply could not believe that they didn’t represent a majority. As many Republicans are now aware, the party now faces an existential crisis. It’s all very well to go on TV and talk about attracting Latinos and downplaying cultural wedge issues. But the activist core of the Republican Party is neo-Confederate, whether it thinks of itself that way or not. It isn’t interested in common cause with Mexicans or turning down the moral thermostat. Just ask Rick Santorum: What it wants is war.
In the recent “fiscal cliff” negotiations, which ended (of course) in yet another short-term stopgap measure, most congressional Republicans, having sworn a blood oath never to raise taxes on their millionaire patrons, were content to let the nation slide into chaos and catastrophe rather than reach a compromise with the president they have consistently depicted as a socialist renegade or alien interloper. It was like a third-rate farcical reprise of the great congressional struggle depicted by Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner in “Lincoln,” when the defeated and embittered Democrats of 1864 fought a rear-guard action to defend slavery, in defiance of not just history, morality and basic human decency but also tactical judgment and common sense.
Thanks to Lincoln’s great political victory in that Congress, slavery has faded into the history books — maybe too much so. As the controversy over Quentin Tarantino’s slave-revenge western “Django Unchained [ http://www.salon.com/topic/django_unchained/ ]” demonstrates, it still isn’t a history we know how to talk about. It may seem melodramatic to claim that the curse of slavery hangs over us still, but Lincoln himself clearly foresaw that possibility, as his slaveowning predecessor Thomas Jefferson had before him. In Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address [ http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres32.html ], he described slavery as an offense against God, and the bloodshed of the Civil War “as the woe due to those [on both sides] by whom the offense came.” Perhaps a cruel cosmic justice was now being extracted, he concluded, and the war would go on “until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.”
I’m not sure America ever paid that debt, in blood or money or any other currency. The lingering effects of our racist history – from the resegregation of our public schools to the enduring and astonishing “wealth gap [ http://money.cnn.com/2012/06/21/news/economy/wealth-gap-race/index.htm ]” between whites and blacks – are national problems, not just Southern problems. Our new Civil War is infused with the undead spirit of the old one and waged by a rebellious neo-Confederacy rooted in the states of the Old South, but its influence can be felt, as with the pro-slavery forces of the 1860s, in every part of the country. (Fernando Wood, the fiery pro-slavery Democrat played by Lee Pace in “Lincoln,” was a former mayor of New York.)
The new Civil War is not entirely or even principally about race, although there’s no mistaking its pernicious racial component. Even making allowances for Bobby Jindal and Allen West, the neo-Confederate forces are perhaps 99 percent white, in a nation whose fastest-growing demographic groups are neither white nor black. While the issues of the new Civil War are contemporary, its rhetoric is ancient and all too familiar, from states’ rights and resistance to Washington to claims of a special relationship with the Almighty and vague appeals to distinctive “cultural traditions,” employed as a justification for bigotry and oppression.
While the Civil War of the 1860s really was about slavery first and foremost – it was the foundation of the Southern economy, and had concentrated immense wealth in the hands of a small landowning caste – the true subject matter of the new Civil War is much less clear. Abortion and same-sex marriage play a crucial role, to be sure (and we may soon see guns and marijuana enter the picture as well). Those are symbolic issues that reflect larger social tensions around gender roles, sexuality and the “war on women,” but they are not just symbolic issues. Many people on the neo-Confederate side see abortion and Adam-and-Steve marriage as moral outrages or offenses against God, to borrow Lincoln’s phrasing, which must be stopped at almost any cost. Of course, pro-choice activists and marriage-equality advocates see those issues as matters of basic economic justice, guaranteeing to all people the kind of basic personal autonomy that men take for granted, or the common-law legal and medical rights that heterosexual married couples have long enjoyed.
We appear to be moving into an unstable Missouri Compromise [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missouri_Compromise ] period of American history, in which regional tiers of states adopt sharply different policies on reproductive rights and marriage rights in particular, but also seem locked into fixed political identities and differing views on fundamental questions of national identity and the national future. Within the past week, we saw Illinois and Rhode Island – core “neo-Union” states, if you will – move closer to legalizing gay marriage, while the Republican governors of Michigan and Virginia (exactly the kind of “border states” where these battles are being fought on the ground) snuck new restrictions on abortion through the legal back door.
If you correlate the states where both same-sex marriage and same-sex civil unions have been banned and the states with the harshest restrictions on abortion, you begin to measure the breadth of the neo-Confederacy: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, the Dakotas, the Carolinas, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah. Most (but not all) are onetime Southern slave states and hotbeds of evangelical Christianity, and most (but not all) coincide with the familiar red-blue split between Republicans and Democrats. The battleground states of the moment, on these issues as on many others, are strikingly familiar: Florida, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin. All four are currently in the grip of neo-Confederate forces on a state level, and all four have enacted gay-marriage bans and abortion restrictions, even though Obama won them all in both of his election campaigns.
Do I even need to mention that none of the neo-Confederate states are in the Northeast or on the West Coast, regions where abortion remains widely available and same-sex marriage is rapidly becoming routine? Or that the neo-Confederate states of the South and the Plains States have sent nearly all of the intransigent, anti-taxation Tea Party members to Congress, while the neo-Union states of the East and West, with their polyglot, immigrant-rich populations, have elected few or none?
Ultimately, the Missouri Compromise collapsed (as did the short-lived Compromise of 1850 [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compromise_of_1850 ] that followed it), tearing the nation apart and forcing a long overdue reckoning with the enormous evil of slavery.. We are heading toward a similar reckoning now. Secession is no longer an option (although many, on both sides, might wish it were), so the new Civil War is not likely to involve pitched battles in the meadows of Pennsylvania, or hundreds of thousands of dead. Today’s fights over abortion and gays and God and guns have a profound moral dimension, but don’t quite have the world-historical weight of the slavery question. As with slavery, however, it’s tough to imagine any viable long-term middle ground. At the moment, two women who get married in Iowa will have no legal relationship if they move to Kansas, and a teenage girl in Seattle can easily get a safe and legal abortion while her cousin in Dallas faces mandatory counseling, a 24-hour waiting period and a parental consent law. (If they have another cousin in rural Mississippi, she probably won’t find legal abortion services under any terms.)
Regardless of how you feel about those issues, that’s nuts. No nation-state can function indefinitely on that kind of patchwork-quilt basis. Then again, this is the United States of America, land of semi-permanent political paralysis, so “functional” doesn’t really apply. It’s tempting to call upon history and proclaim that the only possible outcome of this new Civil War, after many years of ugly politics and occasional outbreaks of craziness and violence, will resemble the outcome of the last one: the continued expansion of constitutional rights and freedoms and the final defeat of the Confederate strain in American political and cultural life. But other, darker outcomes are definitely possible, and I suspect that as long as we’ve got a country, the Confederacy will still be with us.
Bob Casey Voices Concerns Over Militias, Gun Violence
By Mollie Reilly Posted: 01/10/2013 12:21 am EST
During a meeting with constituents, Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) further detailed his changing gun control views in light of last month's tragic shooting in Newtown, Conn., voicing concerns over the existence of citizen militias and the proliferation of gun violence.
"The power of the weapon, the number of bullets that hit each child, that was so, to me, just so chilling, it haunts me. It should haunt every public official," Casey told the paper.
Casey said, "I was haunted by the reality of 20 kids dead and the possibility of an entire school dying. My daughter asked me, Dad, you have a vote. What are you going to do about it?"
For the first time, he questioned the existence of militias and the unlimited rights of gun owners.
"I do not know how many of my constituents are in the militia category, but as someone who loves his country and sees the government as a force of good for its citizens, I am clearly alarmed by this segment of our society," said Casey.
Casey's office did not immediately return a request for comment.
"I can't think of a better advertisement for gun control than Alex Jones' interview last night," Morgan told CNN on Tuesday [ http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2013/01/08/morgan-on-fiery-alex-jones-interview-startling-deluded/ ]. "It was startling, it was terrifying in parts, it was completely deluded. It was based on a premise of making Americans so fearful that they all rush out to buy even more guns ... the kind of twisted way that he turned everything into this assault on the Second Amendment is exactly what the gun rights lobby people do."
At least one person agreed that Jones was a terrible spokesman for gun rights: Glenn Beck. Speaking on his radio show Tuesday, he said that Morgan had chosen well if his intention was to discredit the pro-gun movement.
"Piers Morgan is trying to have gun control," Beck said. "He is trying to make everybody who has guns and who believes the Second Amendment to be a deterrent to an out of control government look like a madman. So now he immediately books the madman and makes him look like a conservative."
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