Mississippi is poised to vote on a ballot initiative that would redefine fertilized eggs as human beings. Amazingly, both the Democratic and Republican gubernatorial candidates have endorsed this proposal.

Irin Carmon of Salon travelled to Mississippi to interview the leaders of the local Personhood movement. Officially, the impetus for redefining fertilized eggs as people is to ban all abortion prior to overturning Roe and, ultimately, to lay the groundwork to challenge Roe itself. As Carmon discovered, that’s only part of the agenda:

[T]he Personhood movement hopes to do nothing less than reclassify everyday, routine birth control as abortion. The medical definition of pregnancy is when a fertilized egg successfully implants in the uterine wall. If this initiative passes, and fertilized eggs on their own have full legal rights, anything that could potentially block that implantation – something a woman’s body does naturally all the time – could be considered murder. Scientists say hormonal birth-control pills and the morning-after pill work primarily by preventing fertilization in the first place, but the outside possibility, never documented, that an egg could be fertilized anyway and blocked is enough for some pro-lifers.

Indeed, at least one pro-Personhood doctor in Mississippi, Beverly McMillan, refused to prescribe the pill before retiring last year, writing, “I painfully agree that birth control pills do in fact cause abortions.” Bush does prescribe the pill, but says, “There’s good science on both sides … I think there’s more science to support conception not occurring.” Given that the Personhood Amendment is so vague, I asked her, what would stop the alleged “good science” on one side from prevailing and banning even the pill?

Bush paused. “I could say that is not the intent,” she said. “I don’t have an answer for that particular [case], how it would be settled, but I do know this is simple.” Which part is simple? “The amendment is simple,” she said. “You can play the ‘what if’ game, but if you keep it simple, this is a person who deserves life.” What about the IUD, which she refuses to prescribe for moral reasons, and which McMillan told me the Personhood Amendment would ban? “I’m not the authority on what would and would not be banned.” No – Bush simply plays one on TV. And if her amendment passes, only condoms, diaphragms and natural family planning — the rhythm method – would be guaranteed in Mississippi.

The proponents of ovum personhood in Mississippi come off as profoundly disingenuous and/or hopelessly off-message. A cynical reader might conclude that even they aren’t serious about this egg-as-person rhetoric. Are they really prepared to call for the death penalty for women who use IUDs? Because by their logic, those women are serial killers. It seems like this “egg as person” talk is just a pretext to restrict the rights of women.

[Photo credit: Sir Chalky, Creative Commons.]

The Ombudsman of the Washington Post, Patrick B. Pexton says that his paper should not have republished the Bloomberg Markets magazine expose of Koch Industries:

The story was about illegal or questionable business practices by Koch subsidiaries dating back to the 1990s and earlier. The Post story, shortened from the original, describes Koch company activities that include bribing foreign officials in Africa, the Middle East and India to get contracts; selling petrochemical equipment to Iran (legal at the time); being found liable for a pipeline explosion that killed two teenagers in Texas; falsifying records about the amount of oil pumped from federal and Indian lands; and misreporting the amount of benzene emissions at a refinery.

It all looks pretty bad, and it is, on many levels. Koch companies paid hundreds of millions of dollars in fines and settlements to resolve these cases, no small change.

But I think The Post erred in republishing this story, or at least in the way it did. And when the Kochs complained to The Post after publication, The Post’s response wasn’t handled well.

Pexton concedes that Koch Industries bribed officials, traded with Iran; neglected a pipeline so badly that it exploded and killed two teens; falsified records to steal oil from the U.S. Treasury and Indian tribes, and pumped vast qualities of untreated benzene into the air and lied about it.

Pexton admits it all looks “pretty bad.” He goes on to say that, as far as he can tell, it’s all true:

Now, I couldn’t find any outright falsehoods in the story that would warrant corrections. Bloomberg, too, has published no corrections. But I think the story lacked context, was tendentious and was unfair in not reporting some of the exculpatory and contextual information Koch provided to Bloomberg.

His main objection is that the reporters didn’t remind readers that Koch Industries isn’t the only flagrant law-breaking corporation out there, not by a long shot:

As Indiviglio and Rubin wrote, lots of companies have foreign subsidiaries that until recently did business with Iran, including GE, Hewlett-Packard and Caterpillar. Many multinational companies have been investigated and prosecuted for violations of the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and been fined and prosecuted for violating clean water and clean air laws.

Are the Kochs worse, better or in the middle? We can’t tell from this story.

For Pexton, adequate context requires a precise accounting of where Koch Industries stands in the grand scale of corporate wrongdoing. That’s an ambitious project. We can’t know for sure how bad Koch Industries is until we’ve looked at all the other companies.

As the original story notes, the Kochs have been champions for the rights of all corporations to bribe, steal, pollute, and endanger innocent people. For all we know, some firms have imitated, or even surpassed the masters.

The ombudsman of the Washington Post is calling for a forensic audit of the capitalist system. Talk about burying the lede.

The Post should immediately allocate all necessary resources to conduct a complete audit of corporate malfeasance, in the interest of providing full context. The Ombudsman has spoken: The Koch Brothers deserve it! 

[Photo credit: AMagill, Creative Commons.]

The best part of Ken Auletta’s long New Yorker profile of Jill Abramson, the first female executive editor of the New York Times, comes in the final paragraph:

To celebrate her return to the city, in 2003, Abramson got a small tattoo on her right shoulder that replicates an old subway token. It was intended, she says, as a tribute to the subway system, which she rides and which she associates with her home town, and as a declaration that she had “come back to New York, likely for good.” The slogan on the coin, she said, was also meant as a reflection of her philosophy that life is not a dress rehearsal for anything: “Good for one fare.”

Unfortunately, the rest of the profile is an extended rumination on whether Abramson is a bitch. Auletta is obsessed with this question. The piece is a littany of people Jill Abramson did or didn’t fight with over the course of her distinguished career. Steven Brill: only that one time; Howell Raines: oh, yes; Bill Keller: no; Dean Baquet: no.

In the very first paragraph we’re told that Abramson was “nervous” on her first day as executive editor because “many in the newsroom feared her.” Auletta takes it for granted that this is a bad thing.

In fairness, Abramson seems determined to cast herself as a repentant overbearing boss determined to mend her ways. The piece hints that this might be a strategic decision. We’re given the strong impression that Howell Raines’ imperious personality shortened his tenure as executive editor and that Abramson knows it.

Oddly, for a piece that’s explicitly about gender and power, Auletta gives scant consideration to the possibility that Abramson is being judged unfairly because she’s an assertive woman. He sets the stage by rattling off some anecdotes and statistics about the Times’ male-dominated history, but that’s about it.

The piece weighs two theories of Abramson’s psychology: incorrigible bitch and unintentional bitch capable of reform. An anonymous senior editor is quoted as saying, “Unlike Howell, she is not mean. Jill is a nice, caring person. … She doesn’t enjoy torturing people. So much of her negativity is unintended.” Abramson remarks that her children often perceived her as yelling at them, even when she wasn’t.

Auletta remarks on Abramson’s “schoolteacherlike” manner of speech and her “cackle of a laugh.” He gets a lot of people to say that Abramson was mean at meetings, but he doesn’t get around to describing what she actually said. “Abramson interrupted, without allowing them to finish the presentation, and began belittling many of their ideas,” he writes in one representative passage, adding that “even her supporters were mildly critical of her behavior” that day.

Auletta portrays Abramson’s decision to write a dog training memoir, “The Puppy Diaries: Raising a Dog Named Scout,” as an unfathomable feminine quirk, one that Abramson herself is somewhat self-conscious about. “Say what you will about the grayer days of the Times in mid-century, but it was always hard to imagine James Reston writing a book about a beloved household pet,” he writes. It doesn’t seem to occur to him writing a book about nurturing a puppy might be a strategy to soften her image.

The piece is so focused on Abramson’s interpersonal style that it glosses over much more interesting and substantial themes, themes that Auletta identifies as important and then abandons to go back to talking about Abramson’s voice. Auletta reports that Arthur Sulzberger hired Abramson for the top job in large part because he wanted an editor who understood “the move from search to social and what that means for us.” According to Sulzberger, “Increasingly, people are learning where they want to go, what they want to consume, how they want to engage with news or games or a variety of different things from each other.” Yet, Auletta barely touches on Abramson’s new media strategy.

We’re told that Abramson’s background as an investigative reporter has informed her approach to editing the paper. She wants the paper to “get to the bottom of things” whereas Bill Keller, a former foreign correspondent, was more interested in “explaining things” (meaning, roughly, describing events as they unfolded). That’s pretty much all we learn about a purportedly profound philosophical shift at the national newspaper of record.

Imagine you’re pitching a magazine profile. Your angle is that the executive editor of the New York Times can be brusque, abrupt, and intimidating. That’s a dog bites man story, unless of course the executive editor is a woman.

[Photo credit: “Abramson to Replace Keller as The Times’s Executive Editor,” John Niedermeyer, Creative Commons.]

The National Labor Relations Board could once again be paralyzed by lack of quorum, Nick Jones reports in Labor Notes:

NLRB Chair Wilma Liebman stepped down August 28 after 14 years on the board, leaving only three of five seats filled, all by Obama appointees. The board must have at least three members to issue decisions, following a Supreme Court decision last year.

So conservative activists are calling for Obama’s one Republican appointee, Brian Hayes, to resign in order to cripple the board.

It’s a bit of a stretch to call these activists “conservative” when they are openly calling on an NLRB member to step down in order to cripple the very organization he swore to serve. South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley said last month she would support Hayes’ resignation or “anything that would disband the NLRB.”

Jones explains that the quorum conundrum won’t go away, even if Hayes stays on: 

It is unclear whether Hayes will do so, but in any case the term of Craig Becker, a former attorney for the AFL-CIO and SEIU, expires at the end of this year. The Senate is unlikely to approve any new nomination from Obama, and maneuvering by House Republicans could prevent him from making a recess appointment. (Since President Reagan, appointments made while the Senate is in recess have become a common way that presidents have installed their picks at the NLRB.)

Even without quorum the boad could still oversee unionization elections and investigate allegations of unfair labor practices, but it would not be allowed to rule on cases. So, employers would have no incentive to settle disputes rather than face the board.

[Photo credit: justmakeit, Creative Commons.]