The best of the week’s news by Lindsay Beyerstein
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The Best of the Week’s News
The Bureau of Land Management backed down from an armed standoff with militiamen on a Nevada ranch Saturday and returned over 300 head of cattle seized for non-payment of grazing fees, thereby setting the precedent that if you’re white and well-armed, you can steal from the government with impunity. Just in time for Tax Day!
Ian Millhiser of Think Progress explains how this fiasco came about:
This conflict arises out of rancher Cliven Bundy’s many years of illegally grazing his cattle on federal lands. In 1998, a federal court ordered [Cliven] Bundy to cease grazing his livestock on an area of federal land known as the Bunkerville Allotment, and required him to pay the federal government $200 per day per head of cattle remaining on federal lands. Around the time it issued this order, the court also commented that “[t]he government has shown commendable restraint in allowing this trespass to continue for so long without impounding Bundy’s livestock.” Fifteen years later, Bundy continued to defy this court order.
The rangers can’t be blamed for temporarily withdrawing, given that they were facing real guns with stun guns, but this prudent short-term decision sets a terrible long-term precedent.
As Steve Benen wrote on the Rachel Maddow Show website:
But you probably see the problem: it’s unsustainable to think a group of well-armed extremists can simply block the enforcement of American laws in the United States. It’s perfectly understandable that the Bureau of Land Management saw a crisis unfolding and pulled back to prevent bloodshed, but there’s an obvious problem with establishing a radical precedent: you, too, can ignore the law and disregard court rulings you don’t like, just so long as you have well-armed friends pointing guns at Americans.
To put it mildly, that’s not how the American system works. Indeed, that’s not how any system of government can ever work.
[Illustration: A Nevada ranch, Creative Commons.]
In February, Kiera Feldman exposed a culture of sexual misconduct and official indifference at Patrick Henry College, the elite evangelical school known as “God’s Harvard.” Feldman found that, when it comes to protecting students from rape, the college promises much more and delivers less than your average secular institution.
Today, Feldman reports that her story has sparked soul searching among Henry’s administrators, students, and alumni. (Link fixed.) The school says it is doing more to prevent rape now. Some voices on campus are even beginning to ask what role the school’s self-proclaimed patriarchal and authoritarian values play in perpetuating the culture of rape and victim-blaming on campus.
The Best of the Week’s News
[Photo credit: Wander Mule, Creative Commons.]
Carol Marbin Miller and Audra D.S. Burch of the Miami Herald win the April Sidney Award for “Innocents Lost”, an investigative multi-media package profiling some 477 Florida children who died after the state’s child protection authorities investigated their families for abuse or neglect but failed to take them into care.
Marbin Miller and Burch collected the death reports on each child who died of confirmed abuse or neglect within five years of Florida’s Department of Children and Families finding maltreatment in the home during a prior investigation, from 2008 onwards. They found that deaths had skyrockedted since the state implemented slashed funding for child protection in the name of “family preservation.” The reporters also found that DCF was low-balling the number of child deaths with priors they reported to the state legislature by as many as 39 cases a year.
[Photo credit: Wander Mule, Creative Commons.]
A judge dismissed a “depraved heart” murder charge against a Mississippi woman who delivered a stillborn baby and positive for a metabolite of cocaine. Rennie Gibbs was 16 years old when she delivered her stillborn child in 2006. There was never any evidence that drugs caused the demise of the fetus, which was born with the cord wrapped around its neck.
The judge dismissed the case on a legal technicality:
[Lowndes County Circuit Court Judge Jim] Kitchens dismissed the charge against Gibbs Wednesday. Citing Mississippi Supreme Court case Buckhalter v. State, he said the law was unclear on the appropriate charge for Gibbs.
“Gibbs was indicted prior to Buckhalter and the law was unclear in Mississippi as to the appropriate charge, if any, to be levied when a pregnant woman allegedly consumed illegal drugs and allegedly caused the death of her unborn child,” Kitchens ruling stated.
He added, “Accordingly, pursuant to the Mississippi Supreme Court’s ruling this case for depraved heart murder is dismissed without prejudice.” [CD]
Nina Martin of ProPublica and the other reporters who kept this case in the spotlight probably had a lot to do with justice finally being served, at least for the time being.
The prosecutor has pledged to send the case back to a grand jury in August.
A great scoop from Molly Reden of Mother Jones:
When Obamacare compelled businesses to include emergency contraception in employee health care plans, Hobby Lobby, a national chain of craft stores, fought the law all the way to the Supreme Court. The Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate, the company’s owners argued, forced them to violate their religious beliefs. But while it was suing the government, Hobby Lobby spent millions of dollars on an employee retirement plan that invested in the manufacturers of the same contraceptive products the firm’s owners cite in their lawsuit.
Documents filed with the Department of Labor and dated December 2012—three months after the company’s owners filed their lawsuit—show that the Hobby Lobby 401(k) employee retirement plan held more than $73 million in mutual funds with investments in companies that produce emergency contraceptive pills, intrauterine devices, and drugs commonly used in abortions. Hobby Lobby makes large matching contributions to this company-sponsored 401(k).
So much for Hobby Lobby’s sincerely held religious belief that IUDs and emergency contraception are forms of abortion and therefore contrary to its religion.
[Image Credit: “Copper IUD, Mechanisms of Action,” MIT Open Courseware, Creative Commons.]
[Photo credit: Wander Mule, Creative Commons.]
A ruling by the director of the NLRB’s Chicago office puts the football team at Northwestern one step closer to unionization, Dave Jamieson reports. The regional director of the Chicago office ruled that the players are employees and are therefore eligible to vote on whether to have a union.
[Photo Credit: Pennstatenews, Creative Commons.]
