When people are convinced God is on their side, there is no need for self-criticism. For if God approves me, why should I even think to disapprove myself?
“The Talib think God is a tiny, little conservative being who would send girls to hell for going to school." Malala Yousafzai Alan: All over the world, conservatives are constricted, constricting people. Conservative men are unusually intent on constricting women.
Oct 10, 2014 - FILE - In this file photo taken Friday, Sept. 27, 2013, Malala Yousafzai listens as Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust introduces her to ...
Jan 4, 2013 - Doctors said she had made "excellent progress" since being shot at point blank range as she caught a bus home from school in early October ...
Oct 16, 2012 - It's so heartening to see most media outlets applauding Malala's courage. Yet, some commentators are using this cowardly act to attack my faith ...
Oct 11, 2013 - Ms. Nikpour is frighteningly opaque to both truth and democratic process. ... Sixteen-year-old Malala Yousafzai brought down the house at The ...
Nov 10, 2013 - Tens of millions of Pakistani children will struggle to lay their hands on the book written by Malala Yousafzai after the organisation representing ...
Jul 12, 2013 - Malala Yousafzai, the teenage Pakistani activist who was shot in the head by Taliban forces in October 2012, addressed the United Nations ...
The constitution was written -- to some limited extent -- to prevent tyranny of the majority.
The constitution was not written -- "in large part" (as Sen. Reed says) -- to prevent majority rule.
1.) Electoral process, 2.) legislative process and 3.) Supreme Court process are all governed by majority rule.
Yes, there are exceptions.
In recent decades I have noticed (and the epistemological error cannot be over-emphasized) that many conservatives now dedicate themselves to ferreting out "exceptions to rules," and then -- presto change-o! -- they convert the exceptions themselves into New Rules!?!
Here are data portraying the current state of the Constitution's most significant constraint on Majority Rule, i.e., the allocation of 2 senators to each state regardless its population.
The Population of the 10 Least Populous States:
Maine: 1,330,000
New Hampshire: 1,327,000
Rhode Island: 1,055,000
Montana: 1,024,000
Delaware: 936,000
South Dakota: 853,000
North Dakota: 739,000
Alaska: 737,000
Vermont: 627,000
Wyoming: 584,000
Total Population of the 10 Least Populous States: 9,885,000
3.1% of the population controls 20% of the Senate vote.
At the other end of the demographic spectrum, the ten most populous states -- California, Texas, Florida, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Georgia, North Carolina, and Michigan -- have a total population of 172,609,000.
The upshot?
Each citizen in the least populous ten states has 17.46 times more legislative clout than each citizen in the ten most populous states.
Does "special wisdom" justify voters in the least populous states having nearly 8 times as much "say so" in the world's most powerful legislative body as citizens in other states? And 17.46 times the senatorial clout of citizens in the most populous states?
If "contribution to the economy" is a measure of political worth (and I understand that this is a dubious proposition) we see that industrial, post-industrial, agricultural and sci-tech production is disproportionately greater - and greater by a wide measure - in those states with greater population. Does it make good sense that we grossly undervalue voters in states that contribute most to The Common Weal?
This offensive disparity has worsened over time so that the egregious discrepancy between most and least populous states - while understandable in origin - now degrades anything like democratic representation.
In 1789 when The Constitution took effect the total population The United States was 3 and a half million and the population discrepancy between the seven most -- and seven least -- most popular states was much less than now.
In 1789, residents of the least populous states had 5.7 times the senatorial clout of citizens in the most populous states, three times less voting advantage than residents in the least populous states currently wield.
Is there no valid argument to be made about Tyranny of the Minority?
Pax On Both Houses: Compendium Of Voter Fraud And Voter Suppression Posts
Lindsay Graham defines the motivation behind such tyranny.
Among the most populous states, California, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Michigan are solidly blue, while Texas, Florida, Georgia and North Carolina are clearly shifting from red to "purple."
Ohio is an exception to this demographic rule.
The Buckeye State has supplied the United States with more presidents than any other; one of them a Whig, the remaining seven were all Republicans... but "back in the day" when bible-belters would not be caught dead voting for The Party of Lincoln. What contemporary conservative would vote for this guy?http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-gop-is-not-party-of-lincoln-its.html
8 U.S. Presidents Came From Ohio: 90-Second-Know-It-All video clips on each.
But the Constitution puts limits on majority rule. Sen. James A. Reed, Missouri: “ … This is not a country of majority rule. The Constitution of the United States was written, in large part, to prevent majority rule. The Declaration of Independence was an announcement that there are limitations upon majority rule.
The rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were declared in the Declaration to be inalienable rights. They could not be given away by the citizen himself. Much less could they be taken away by temporary agents, sitting in legislative bodies, holding a limited authority of brief duration.
The Constitution itself is a direct limitation upon majority rule. "You shall not take property without due process of law," says the Constitution, and before we can take that safeguard away what must we do? …”
I’ve always been taught that if the majority decided to take away your wallet, it is not a legal decision. Or something like that!
From Annenberg Classroom: “ … Majority rule is limited in order to protect minority rights, because if it were unchecked it probably would be used to oppress persons holding unpopular views. Unlimited majority rule in a democracy is potentially just as despotic as the unchecked rule of an autocrat or an elitist minority political party.… “ :)
I'll go along with "charges against the mayor of San Francisco" (who, in keeping with The American Way, will be acquitted by a jury of his peers) in exchange for your recognition that Kim Davis' appeal to "freedom of religion" as grounds for carving out special "workplace exemptions" -- constitutes unacceptable appeal by public employees charged with providing all citizens equal treatment before The Law.
This is not to say that The Law cannot be changed.
However, legal change depends on minute adherence to procedure and process, not instantaneous proclamation. (The Supreme Court -- currently a conservative body with a majority of Catholics-- has already refused to hear Ms. Davis' grievance.)
Surely "America" is about "something more" than re-litigation. What's to re-litigate? This morning I learned that fully half of American Evangelicals approve same-sex marriage as do 80% of Americans under 30. The situation is akin to usury which in the Middle Ages was a particularly nefarious sin. Today, there is not a single American nun or priest -- including bishops and cardinals -- without a pocketful of credit cards that charge usurious rates of interest.
The fact that Ms. Davis'"job description changed after she was employed" is a red herring.
Job descriptions change all the time.
If an employee doesn't like a revised job description, s/he quits.
It seems to me that Ms. Davis (and much of conservative America) is playing the victim card.
Personally, I am happy for victims to play this "card."
However, it is ironic that conservatives now embody the very attitude which used to be grounds for summary dismissal of "victims'" grievances.
As I see it, much of conservative America is slowly realizing it doesn't really like The American Way -- at least insofar as our system of governance depends on Majority Rule, a governmental method rooted in The Founding Fathers ferocious opposition to theocracy (and interlinked monarchy).
Pax tecum
Alan
On Thu, Sep 10, 2015 at 1:17 PM, EK wrote:
Possibly … but I don’t know that slavery was preached from the pulpit after slavery was abolished?
Anyway, an argument could be that the mayor of San Francisco should be arrested for refusing to enforce the laws on immigration? Also, the job description for Kim’s position changed after she accepted the job …
Alan: If Kim Davis' refusal to perform her job -- while insisting she keep it -- has legal standing, Quaker officials could refuse to issue gun permits and Muslim officials could refuse to issue driver's licenses to women. It is a historical fact that slavery was preached from the pulpit so that practitioners of "old time Religion" could, in conscience, refuse marriage licenses to biracial couples.
2009 Louisiana Interracial Marriage License Incident
But beyond this predictable debate lies a more fundamental issue, now conveniently scotomized. From the Christian point of view, the linchpin degradation of marriage took place when Christians themselves began to divorce in numbers essentially equivalent to secular society. Once "the Christian rank-and-file""broke rank," The Party of Family Values elected, and thus normalized, the nation's first (and only) divorced president, Ronald Reagan. People and societies accommodate "water under the bridge," even devout Christians formerly aghast at hint of heterodoxy. Such accommodation often occurs when a family member embodies a previously verboten behavior - divorce, same-sex relationship, usury, working on The Lord's Day.
Is there one American Christian in a million who would agree with Jesus' teaching in The Gospel of Mark, the oldest of the four canonical gospels? "What God has joined together, man must never separate... Whoever divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against her. And if a woman divorces her husband and marries another man, she commits adultery.”
Before quitting her post (the only honorable thing to do), Kim Davis should express Christian opposition to issuing marriage licenses to divorced applicants.
Gospel Of Mark: Why Doesn't Kim Davis Deny Marriage Licenses To The Previously Divorced?
NYPD Gets Its Man: "Yep! He Was Black Alright." Professional Tennis Player Pre-Convicted Of "Walking While Black" Video: http://time.com/4032115/nypd-james-blake-video/?xid=gonewsedit&google_editors_picks=true The New York Police Department released video Friday afternoonof an officer tackling former tennis star James Blake outside a Manhattan hotel on Sep. 9 after apparently mistaking him for a wanted criminal.
The video shows Blake leaning against a wall outside the hotel when a plainclothes officer rushes from the sidewalk, lurches Blake to the side, pins him to the ground and secures his hands behind his back.
“I am determined to use my voice to turn this unfortunate incident into a catalyst for change in the relationship between the police and the public they serve,” Blake said in a statement. “For that reason, I am calling upon the City of New York to make a significant financial commitment to improving that relationship, particularly in those neighborhoods where incidents of the type I experienced occur all too frequently.”
The NYPD says the takedown of Blake—who is mixed race—was a case of mistaken identity, but the incident has resurrected questions about racial profiling and the use of force by New York City police officers. The NYPD opened an internal investigation into the use of force, and the officer has been placed on desk duty.
Following the incident, Police Commissioner William Bratton met with Blake on Thursday, “I spoke to Mr. Blake a short time ago and personally apologized for yesterday’s incident,” Bratton said in a statement. Mayor Bill de Blasio also communicated with the former tennis player by text, CNN reports.
Deputy commissioner of public information Stephen Davis said in a statement that the NYPD Internal Affairs Bureau interviewed Blake on Thursday night. The police department released this footage, taken outside the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York, and provided a copy of the video to Blake’s attorney.
Although I am not a very virtuous person -- and have great difficulty with "breathe-from-the-belly forgiveness" -- it is clear, as you suggest, that we "must" do "the right thing" because the way we treat others is, ultimately, the way we treat ourselves.
Best Pax Posts On Psychological Projection And "The Shadow"
"It is true that there is a thing crudely called charity, which means charity to the deserving poor; but charity to the deserving is not charity at all, but justice. It is the undeserving who require it, and the ideal either does not exist at all, or exists wholly for them." Heretics, ch. 12 (1905) Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936)
Rep. Don Young of Alaska reminding us once again just how classy Alaska Republicans can be during a question and answer session at—where else?—Wasilla High School:
... teacher Carla Swick posed a question about Alaska’s high suicide and domestic violence rates and asked what Young's office is doing about it.
Young started talking about suicide, mentioning the role played by alcohol and depression, several witnesses said. The school didn’t record the assembly.
But then, witnesses say, Young said suicide shows a lack of support from friends and family.
That comment stunned students and staff still mourning the loss of a student who died Thursday, staffers say.
The school's principal, Amy Spargo, said she was taken aback:
"When I heard 'a lack of support from family' and I heard 'a lack of support from friends,' I felt the oxygen go out of the room, but I gasped as well," Spargo said. "It just isn't true in these situations. It's just such a hurtful thing to say."
Young's office issued a statement saying the Congressman's comments blaming the students were "well-intentioned." According to the statement, Young felt he merely "shared some suggestions for helping family members and friends who are dealing with suicidal thoughts."
Well, Congressman Young, here's a suggestion for you: The next time someone asks you about dealing with the suicide of someone close to them, don't blame them for it. And if you do, apologize—don't defend it.
The West Wing was always a great show, but this scene in particular is tops. It completely dismantles the religious right's argument against homosexuality and their defense of discrimination because of it.
While addressing supporters, the fictional President Bartlet notices a popular conservative talk show host in the room and interrupts his speech to take her bigotry head on. The moment was an absolutely perfect takedown of bigotry based on biblical beliefs. Watch the masterful scene (full transcript below):
BARTLET: It’s a good idea to be reminded of the awesome impact, the awesome impact… I’m sorry. You’re Dr. Jenna Jacobs, right?
JACOBS (obviously pleased to be recognized): Yes, sir!
BARTLET: It’s good to have you here.
JACOBS: Thank you!
BARTLET: … the awesome impact of the airwaves, and how that translates into the furthering of our national discussions, but obviously also how it can … how it can … Forgive me, Dr. Jacobs. Are you an M.D.?
JACOBS: A Ph.D.
BARTLET: A Ph.D.
JACOBS: Yes, sir.
BARTLET: In psychology?
JACOBS: No, sir.
BARTLET: Theology?
JACOBS: No.
BARTLET: Social work?
JACOBS: I have a Ph.D. in English Literature.
BARTLET: I’m asking ‘cause on your show people call in for advice – and you go by the name Dr. Jacobs on your show – and I didn’t know if maybe your listeners were confused by that and assumed you had advanced training in psychology, theology or health care.
JACOBS: I don’t believe they are confused, no, sir.
BARTLET: I like your show. I like how you call homosexuality an “abomination!”
JACOBS: I don’t say homosexuality is an abomination, Mr. President. The Bible does.
BARTLET: Yes it does. Leviticus!
JACOBS: 18:22.
BARTLET: Chapter and verse. I wanted to ask you a couple of questions while I had you here. I wanted to sell my youngest daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. She’s a Georgetown Sophomore, speaks fluent Italian, always cleared the table when it was her turn. What would a good price for her be?
(Bartlet only waits a second for a response, then plunges on.)
BARTLET: While thinking about that, can I ask another? My chief of staff, Leo McGary, insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly says he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself? Or is it okay to call the police?
(Bartlet barely pauses to take a breath.)
BARTLET: Here’s one that’s really important, because we’ve got a lot of sports fans in this town. Touching the skin of a dead pig makes one unclean. Leviticus 11:7. If they promise to wear gloves, can the Washington Redskins still play football? Can Notre Dame? Can West Point? Does the whole town really have to be together to stone my brother John for planting different crops side by side? Can I burn my mother in a small family gathering for wearing garments made from two different threads? Think about those questions, would you?
(The camera pushes in on the president.)
One last thing. While you may be mistaking this for your monthly meeting of the Ignorant Tight-Ass Club, in this building when the president stands, nobody sits.
(Jacobs sees that, in fact, the president is standing and she is the only one in the room sitting. After a moment, she rises, holding her tiny plate of appetizers. After the president exits, Sam Seaborn sternly approaches a thoroughly belittled Jacobs.)
Apple's co-founder Steve Wozniak has given his first in-depth interview about the forthcoming Steve Jobs movie.
Woz - as he's commonly known - acted as a consultant to Danny Boyle's film after refusing to be involved in an earlier biopic.
The movie is already being tipped for awards glory after a rough cut was shown to the public last weekend, ahead of its official premiere in October.
The movie's scriptwriter is Aaron Sorkin. His previous account of Facebook's rise won three Oscars. But the social network's founder Mark Zuckerberg was not a fan.
You've now had a chance to watch the rough cut of the film. What were your impressions of it?
I've actually seen two rough cuts. My impression was I was shocked and amazed at how good it was in the sense of professional filmmaking.
I usually go to a movie not looking for "do I like the story" as much as: "What is the quality that came out of the heads of the people that made it?"
In this case the filmmakers have done an award-winning job. The acting was just so realistic.
In some prior movies, I saw [the actors] simulating Steve Jobs, but they didn't really make me feel like I was in his head understanding what was going on inside of him - his personality.
This movie absolutely accomplishes that, and it's due to great acting, which obviously comes from great directing.
Some people had been critical that Michael Fassbender doesn't look like Steve Jobs. What did he manage to do, then, to capture him?
Image copyrightGetty ImagesImage captionSteve Jobs referenced his early relationship with Steve Wozniak at the iPad's launch in 2010
A lot of people think the face of Steve Jobs matters, but it's his brain, his head, the way he worked, how did he think, how did he act with people - that's important.
Michael does an incredible job with a tight script and for very much of it he's interfacing with Kate [Winslet, who plays Apple's marketing chief Joanna Hoffman], and the two of them are superb together.
It's believable that this is how things would have happened and went down, and I felt I was seeing the real Steve Jobs in there.
Of course, I have prosopagnosia where I don't really store faces. So, to me faces don't matter that much anyway.
What particular aspects of Steve Jobs' personality are shown well?
Image copyrightGetty ImagesImage captionSteve Jobs died in 2011, he was 56 years old
It deals with what we are all very familiar with - a lot of his negativism.
This comes about less with him doing negative things to other people, and more him just sort of standing [there] and not caring as much about others as himself, and not being able to have feelings very much.
It deals very much with that part of him all through the movie right to the end, with some resolution to it. That's the major conflict in the movie.
But it also deals with him going through various product introductions and how he would have to be very tightly in control.
Part of the "reality distortion field" is in there, and his failing to listen to others on occasion and only seeing everything he did as right.
These are well-known traits and there are stories we've heard about Steve Jobs.
But when you see it portrayed dramatically, not the way it really happened but in a way that is emotionally graphic, it really conveys what Steve Jobs was really like inside... and what it was like to be around him.
How involved were you in making the film?
Image copyrightGetty ImagesImage captionAaron Sorkin previously wrote The Social Network, A Few Good Men and The West Wing
About a year-and-a-half ago I went down and met with Aaron Sorkin.
He would ask some questions and I would start relating bits and pieces of stories. And he would put them into his movie.
He didn't put them in what I consider necessarily accurate or fair ways in every case, but it still came out as a good movie.
Things that were in existence in the real world were put into my mouth.
So, I may not have said those things. I may not have been talking to Steve at those events.
But they were "in the air", so you have to put them in someone's mouth to make a movie.
You have previously said you didn't talk to Walter Isaacson, who wrote the biography on which the movie is based. What made you decide to get involved this time round?
Image copyrightGetty ImagesImage captionThe new movie is tied to Steve Jobs' official biography but follows a different structure
Walter Isaacson said I did meet him at a couple of events - see I don't pay attention to names, I'll talk to anybody - and I guess I did give him information.
I did not get involved in the movie Jobs that starred Ashton Kutcher.
I was interested in doing consulting for it, and then they sent me a script and I thought: "You've already got a script written and it's really lousy."
My feeling is that it just didn't represent things well at all. But I went to the movie thinking maybe it would be good.
And I felt like I'd eaten a big full meal but was still hungry. Ashton Kutcher did a great job of looking like and personifying Steve Jobs on the outside but the script didn't get me to the inside.
This [new] movie was just night and day the opposite of that.
You earlier expressed concerns about a scene in the trailer in which Seth Rogen depicts you. How well do you think he did with the part now you've seen the whole film?
Image copyrightUniveral picturesImage captionSeth Rogan's version of Woz challenges the notion that Steve Jobs was a genius
I thought he did an excellent job.
In many places in the movie I'm portrayed saying things that are negative directly to Steve Jobs.
Anybody who knows me will tell you I just don't say negative things to people, and could not have said them, and didn't.
However, there were real issues going on in the company, the world, the customers, the board, whatever.
There's a tendency to mythologise successful people after their deaths. To what degree have we seen that with Jobs?
Image copyrightOpen Road FilmsImage captionMr Wozniak does not believe an earlier movie was critical enough about his ex-colleague
Oh my gosh, even while Steve was alive [so was] the myth.
He became our hero because we have our iPhones, and he saw the way the world was going to evolve much earlier than others, so we love him.
But the mythology, even while he was alive, was extended back to make him that person from day one.
[People] try and make him a lot more right about things than he was and ignore what some of the real facts were.
The most incredible scene in the Sorkin movie is between Steve Jobs and [ex-Apple chief executive] John Sculley.
It goes back and forth at two points in time [with them] saying different things that add up to where the company stood and the difference between the two of them. And it was really just a business difference.
Image copyrightAPImage captionSteve Jobs had hoped John Sculley would be a mentor, but the two men clashed after Sculley refused to lower the price of the Macintosh to boost sales
See, the mythology is that Steve Jobs had this beautiful vision for the Macintosh and the board and John Sculley didn't buy into it.
No. Our entire company bought into that vision as the future for Apple.
It was just going to take at least three years to build until it could finally not lose money.
And John Sculley is the one who actually made the Macintosh successful because of believing in it.
There's another film out - the documentary Steve Jobs: Man in the Machine - which a lot of reviewers suggest is particularly critical of Jobs. Its maker Alex Gibney has suggested that Steve Jobs' personality didn't change as he aged so much as he learned better how to control his public image. Apple's software chief Eddy Cue has described the film as being "inaccurate and mean-spirited". What do you make of the tension between those two views?
Image copyrightCNN FilmsImage captionA new documentary about Steve Jobs has been attacked by one of the firm's leaders
I have not seen the film, but know it has a lot of first-hand interviews with people who were very close and around Steve during things like the early Macintosh and Next days.
And a bunch of them on Facebook have told me they were there around Steve, and they've seen the movie and it exactly represents the way he was.
And you know what? Eddy Cue wasn't around in those early days.
Steve Jobs always dealt very nicely and respectfully with me - we were friends to the end - and I never saw a lot of the bad behaviour that he was accused of by others.
But I've heard about it from others.
Eddy Cue by being smart and good at what he does, Steve would have worked with him in a very different way [to his] "You can't have your ideas, I'm going to cut you down" [behaviour].
I don't think he had arguments with Eddy Cue or Tim Cook. He got along with people he respected highly. Even engineers who stood up to him, if they had a basis for standing up, Steve showed them respect.
But I don't think Steve was never that way.
To what degree do you think Apple wants to protect Jobs' reputation?
Image copyrightGetty ImagesImage captionSteve Job's return to Apple has been described as the "greatest second act in the history of business"
I think Apple goes out of its way to try to enhance his reputation and safeguard the "great" Steve Jobs.
Steve was not a nice "people person". I meet a lot of CEOs who are, and they don't have these kind of reputations and stories about their background.
Think about this: What would Steve Jobs' legacy be had he been nice to everyone and still have sold great products, which is totally possible?
He would just be the hero of all time.
But his personality settled in around aged 18 to 23 and it stayed for life. It really almost never changed.
So, his way of acting that way and not caring what other people thought about him - which let's you be nastier than you would have been otherwise - that was right there at the start of Apple.
Image copyrightUniversal PicturesImage captionThe finished cut of Steve Jobs will be shown at the New York Film Festival on 3 October
All of a sudden we had a bunch of money, Steve saw the chance to have power - which he always wanted in his life - and he ensured he was always involved in the power even though he hadn't really ever created the product or had a [prior] executive job to qualify him for the title.
He established himself by force to be the leader, that was his goal.
That was when his personality changed from being the nice prank-playing joking person that we'd go to concerts with, to all of a sudden everything had to be super-serious and super-business and you couldn't fall behind anyone else.
I saw that change, I was there during those days, and from then on Steve wasn't the person he'd been before we had started Apple.
But I would point this out: he ended up with a wife and a family and a home. He spent a lot of time there and had good relationships with his family.
So, he did manage to have a side of his life that kind of didn't matter so much [to him] when he was younger and starting to get rich.
MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) — Sources tell WCCO that Brian Short shot and killed his wife and three children before taking his own life.
Sources say a shotgun was found near the father’s body at the family’s multi-million dollar home on Lake Minnetonka. Police discovered the bodies Thursdayafter coworkers of the father requested a welfare check on the family. He hadn’t been to work in several days.
Short, a registered nurse, founded the website allnurses.com in the 90s. The site was meant to be a place where nurses from all over the country could connect and share online. A statement from the website Thursday confirmed that the family was killed in the incident.
Investigators said Thursday that the crime scene was complex, with the bodies of Brian Short, his wife Karen Short, and three children — 17-year-old Cole Short, 15-year-old Madison Short and 14-year-old Brooklyn Short — scattered throughout the large home. Police say the victims all suffered “traumatic injuries” and called the crime scene, “unspeakable.”
South Lake Minnetonka Police Chief Michael Siitari did confirm that there was no note found in the house.
(credit: CBS)
Police say the wife and three children were found in each of their bedrooms. The father was found in the garage.
Legal Trouble At Work
WCCO has learned a New Jersey college prep company filed a lawsuit against Short and the business he started, AllNurses.com, claiming defamation, libel and fraud, among other things. AllNurses is a networking site, a place where people can post information and comment.
The lawsuit alleges in part that Short paid people to post under fictitious names, and increase site hits to make advertisers pay more. The college prep company also claims a competitor was given preferential treatment on the site, and the paid posters colluded to make their company look bad, therefore causing injury and loss of business.
The company seeks damages during a jury trial. In the last two weeks, a judge ruled the lawsuit can move forward, and would be heard in Minnesota. Neither side immediately returned requests for comment.
Community Mourns
Friends say they remembered Brian Short as a down-to-earth guy, who was always there for his friends. Bob Weigel says he still can’t believe his best friend Brian, Brian’s wife Karen and their three kids are gone.
“I still can’t believe it happened, to be honest with you,” Weigel said. “I called them up last night on his phone, left a message hoping he would return it.”
Weigel’s grief is made more difficult knowing how they spent their final moments. During their snowmobiling trips together, he says he always saw a happy family, with nothing to indicate such a tragic end.
For Nick Collins, school hasn’t been the same without his friend, Cole.
“He was always happy,” Collins said. “I could never forget his voice or smile. That always got to me.”
All three of the teens attended Minnetonka High School, where some 20 guidance counselors were brought in Friday to talk to students who might need help.
A memorial is growing outside the Short family home, where friends and community members are leaving flowers and pictures.
(credit: CBS)
The youngest of the family, Brooklyn, played with traveling soccer team Tonka United. Stacy Hoschka, whose child also played on the team, says both of Brooklyn’s parents were at every soccer game, cheering on their daughter.
“Just a happy, spontaneous kind of girl,” Hoschka said. “She would play so hard, never complained, always said thank you. Just a beautiful and brilliant girl, and the team loved her very much.”
Hoschka also said Brooklyn had aspirations to become an engineer, so she brought the girl to work for a recent career day.
By bridging the fields of anthropology, evolutionary biology, behavioral ecology, geopolitics, and social science, trailblazing scientist Jared Diamond (b. September 10, 1937) has done more than anyone since Margaret Mead to decondition the Eurocentric approach to history and debunk the biological fallacies on which the monster of racism feeds. His Pulitzer-winning 1997 book Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (public library) is a foundational text illuminating the conditions that led to inequality in the modern world and combating the broken logic that perpetuates these toxic beliefs.
At the heart of Diamond's work is the notion that in order to understand any one society, we must contextualize it in the larger ecosystem of humanity and therefore must understand all societies. Only by grasping the richness and diversity of the entire ecosystem can we begin to dismantle our assumptions about the value of others and realize that people from different groups fared differently in history not due to their innate abilities but due to a complex cluster of environmental and geopolitical forces.
Diamond writes:
We all know that history has proceeded very differently for peoples from different parts of the globe. In the 13,000 years since the end of the last Ice Age, some parts of the world developed literate industrial societies with metal tools, other parts developed only nonliterate farming societies, and still others retained societies of hunter-gatherers with stone tools. Those historical inequalities have cast long shadows on the modern world, because the literate societies with metal tools have conquered or exterminated the other societies. While those differences constitute the most basic fact of world history, the reasons for them remain uncertain and controversial.
[...]
Questions about inequality in the modern world can be reformulated as follows. Why did wealth and power become distributed as they now are, rather than in some other way? For instance, why weren’t Native Americans, Africans, and Aboriginal Australians the ones who decimated, subjugated, or exterminated Europeans and Asians?
[...]
The history of interactions among disparate peoples is what shaped the modern world through conquest, epidemics, and genocide. Those collisions created reverberations that have still not died down after many centuries, and that are actively continuing in some of the world’s most troubled areas today.
Diamond arrived at studying the interplay of these complex forces via an unlikely path. A self-described "fanatical bird-watcher" since the age of seven, he came to study biology, then nearly dropped out of his Ph.D. program in physiology to become a linguist. But he did complete his science degree and landed in Papua New Guinea as a passionate thirty-something biologist studying bird evolution. He spent the decades that followed doing fieldwork in evolutionary biology, which took him into a remarkably wide range of human societies. Out of that immersion sprang the centerpiece of Diamond's work – an unflinching invitation to nuance in how we think about progress.
He confronts a common bias:
Don’t words such as “civilization,” and phrases such as “rise of civilization,” convey the false impression that civilization is good, tribal hunter-gatherers are miserable, and history for the past 13,000 years has involved progress toward greater human happiness? In fact, I do not assume that industrialized states are “better” than hunter-gatherer tribes, or that the abandonment of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle for iron-based statehood represents “progress,” or that it has led to an increase in human happiness. My own impression, from having divided my life between United States cities and New Guinea villages, is that the so-called blessings of civilization are mixed.
With an eye to the social environment and educational opportunities that shape the intellectual destiny of human beings, Diamond argues that our notions of intelligence are not only gravely skewed by the Western perspective but just about inverted. The IQ tests on which technologically advanced societies like our own do better than technologically primitive societies like aboriginal cultures – results on which many racist claims are predicated – actually measure cultural learning rather than innate cognitive ability. He writes:
My perspective on this controversy comes from 33 years of working with New Guineans in their own intact societies. From the very beginning of my work with New Guineans, they impressed me as being on the average more intelligent, more alert, more expressive, and more interested in things and people around them than the average European or American is. At some tasks that one might reasonably suppose to reflect aspects of brain function, such as the ability to form a mental map of unfamiliar surroundings, they appear considerably more adept than Westerners. Of course, New Guineans tend to perform poorly at tasks that Westerners have been trained to perform since childhood and that New Guineans have not. Hence when unschooled New Guineans from remote villages visit towns, they look stupid to Westerners. Conversely, I am constantly aware of how stupid I look to New Guineans when I’m with them in the jungle, displaying my incompetence at simple tasks (such as following a jungle trail or erecting a shelter) at which New Guineans have been trained since childhood and I have not.
In this excerpt from a talk at British science powerhouse The Royal Institution, animated by artist Andrew Khosravani, Diamond illustrates New Guineans' intellectual superiority with one particularly striking example of their sounder judgment in everyday matters:
In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Diamond points to two factors that explain New Guineans' superior intelligence: First, European cultures have spent thousands of years in areas so densely populated that infectious disease spread and became the major cause of death, while centralized government and law enforcement kept murder at a relatively low rate. In New Guinea, on the other hand, societies were too sparse for epidemics to evolve, making murder, accidents, and tribal warfare the primary causes of death. Smart people were more likely to escape murder and avoid accident, passing their intelligent genes forward.
The second factor Diamond considers strikes much closer to the present and points to perilous forces we still have a chance to avert:
Modern European and American children spend much of their time being passively entertained by television, radio, and movies. In the average American household, the TV set is on for seven hours per day. In contrast, traditional New Guinea children have virtually no such opportunities for passive entertainment and instead spend almost all of their waking hours actively doing something, such as talking or playing with other children or adults. Almost all studies of child development emphasize the role of childhood stimulation and activity in promoting mental development, and stress the irreversible mental stunting associated with reduced childhood stimulation. This effect surely contributes a non-genetic component to the superior average mental function displayed by New Guineans.
That is, in mental ability New Guineans are probably genetically superior to Westerners, and they surely are superior in escaping the devastating developmental disadvantages under which most children in industrialized societies now grow up.
Writing in 1997, Diamond could not yet point to other developmentally detrimental Western technologies that now hijack our cognitive faculties by reducing the world's complexity to clickbait and listicles. But the cultural forces he examines make sense of how we ended up here. A revelatory read in its entirety, Guns, Germs, and Steel is thus no less timely today, packed with insight into the microscopic and monumental forces that shape our daily lives. Complement it with a very different and equally important perspective on the unconscious biases that permeate our world.
“You gotta be able to act a little, feel a little, think a little.”
In the fall of 1945, a month after WWII ended, the great author, historian, and broadcasting pioneer Studs Terkel (May 16, 1912–October 31, 2008) began hosting an hourlong weekly radio program called The Wax Museum. Well before the phrase “disc jokey” entered the vernacular, he became one. Over the months that followed, his initially tiny audience not only grew but, to Terkel’s own surprise, transcended the usual boundary of public radio listeners — he soon began receiving fan mail from steelworkers and truck drivers and waitresses, people touched by his sincere love of music and the generosity with which he shared it. For forty-five years, Terkel filled the airwaves with an uncommon and enchanting mix of oral histories celebrating these ordinary people and interviews with some of the greatest musicians of the twentieth century.
Terkel’s previously unpublished interviews are collected in And They All Sang: Adventures of an Eclectic Disc Jockey (public library) — a trove of lively and insightful conversations with such legendary musicians as Louis Armstrong, Bob Dylan, Leonard Bernstein, and Woody Guthrie. Among them is a 1968 interview with 25-year-old Janis Joplin, who had made her debut only a year earlier and had already established herself as, in Terkel’s words, “the most popular of all the young white blues singers of the late sixties.”
Terkel recounts:
At the time we spoke, I had slight reservations about her as a singer of blues, but nonetheless, seeing her on the stage, the powerful animal quality that she had obviously registered with the young came through.
The conversation begins with Joplin’s influences, among whom were the gospel legends Mahalia Jackson and Big Mama Thornton. But no one shaped her sensibility more palpably than Bessie Smith. Joplin tells Terkel:
I just fell in love with her. You know how kids listen to radio and all. I never listened to radio, I didn’t never get into that rock-and-roll trip. I just listened to blues. It seemed real. The other stuff seemed so tacky, teenagey. It didn’t seem to have any truth in it or something. From the first moment I ever heard it that was my music.
When Terkel probes about legendary musician and civil rights activist Josh White’s incendiary assertion that no white person can sing the blues, Joplin pushes back against the limiting notion that any art form can stake its integrity on a premise of exclusion:
Even a housewife in Nebraska can sing the blues. Anybody can sing the blues. Well, I don’t know whether they can sing them or not, but they can feel them. All you gotta do is have a throat, the throat’s the difference. Everybody’s got feelings inside of them. It’s just the faculty of being able to transform it into music. I mean, everybody’s got ’em. [Shouts] Everybody’s got ’em, Mama got ’em, Papa got ’em, everybody’s got ’em! Everybody’s got those things, they’ve just got to know what to do with it. You either repress it or you use it. Sort of. I feel better after singing, yeah.
In reflecting on her parents’ response to her art, Joplin exposes the seemingly small lacerations of the soul that add up to profound personal tragedy. She tells Terkel:
[My father] said he likes Bach. He said he couldn’t get into [my music]. He said, “I’m sure that you’re doing something up there that’s good, Janis. The kids all seem to like it, but I couldn’t really get behind it.” Which is fine, that’s generous. He could say it was bad. My mother says, “Why do you have to sing so loud?” She says, “You have such a pretty voice, Janis.” She doesn’t understand.
Here, Terkel’s own genius as an explorer of the human experience shines through. “Prettiness,” he sighs. “For years we think of the young girl and pretty songs.” Joplin, surprised by the insight with which he names something with which she herself had inarticulably grappled, responds with what is essentially a summation of her credo and a lamentably timely account of mainstream pop culture to this day:
No one’s ever brought that up before. I think that’s a really valid point. Like most chick singers, like any female, they’re very ladylike in their conduct. That’s why I think they don’t think they can sing the blues, you know what I mean? I don’t mean to sound trite. But, I mean, you can’t sing the blues and have your hair bleached platinum blond and look like a cheerleader. I mean, you gotta have something else going. You gotta be able to act a little, feel a little, think a little, guts. And so most chicks don’t do that. I don’t think American girls want to be any other way than that. Like I got a sister that’s just exactly like that. And she doesn’t want to be any other way. Which is fine, it’s fine for her. It’s just not fine for me. I gotta do my own thing and that’s the way I turned out.
True Believer? Why Donald Trump Is The Choice Of The Religious Right
When Donald Trump stepped to the podium in a football stadium in Mobile, Alabama, filled with 30,000 people there to hear him spread the gospel of Trump, he was overcome.
"Now I know how the great Billy Graham felt," Trump said last month.
Trump and Graham, the famed Baptist revival preacher and counselor to presidents, are not exactly cut from the same cloth. And yet, Trump is winning over Christian conservatives in the current Republican presidential primary.
That's right — the candidate currently leading among the most faith-filled voters is a twice-divorced casino mogul, who isn't an active member of any church, once supported abortion rights, has a history of crass language — and who says he's never asked God's forgiveness for any of it.
If that sounds like an Onion story, it's not. His blunt talk against a broken political system in a country rank-and-file evangelicals believe is veering away from its traditional cultural roots is connecting. He pledges to "Make America Great Again," a positive spin on the similar Tea Party refrain of "Take Our Country Back."
That redeeming message — and his tough talk on immigration, foreign policy and the Republican establishment — is quite literally trumping traditional evangelical concerns about a candidate's morality or religious beliefs.
"I've come to see somebody that's not scared to say what he thinks, and he thinks like I think," gushed Joe Smart, a security guard who was at a Trump event in Greenville, S.C., last month. "He's religious, and from what I hear, he's going to change the White House back to Christianity. I pray every night that our nation will come back to God."
It's all left prominent evangelical leaders in disbelief.
"Trump has made his living as a casino mogul in an industry that preys on the poor and incentivizes immoral and often criminal behavior," said Dr. Russell Moore, head of the influential Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.
Moore offered a searingly blunt assessment of the current GOP front-runner in an interview with NPR. "He's someone who is an unrepentant serial adulterer who has abandoned two wives for other women," he added. "He's someone who has spoken in vulgar and harsh terms about women, as well as in ugly and hateful ways about immigrants and other minorities. I don't think this is someone who represents the values that evangelicals in this country aspire to."
Whether evangelical voters — who have been so key to national Republican presidential success — will heed that message or stick with a candidate who seems so anathema to many of their core beliefs will be tested as the campaign wears on.
Finding Trump Appeal In The Buckle Of The Bible Belt
In the heart of the Bible Belt at a Greenville, S.C., convention center last month — just down the road from the iconic evangelical school Bob Jones University — the line was long to get in to hear Trump's latest sermon against political demons.
When pressed, many in the crowd in the key early primary state said they didn't know about some of Trump's more controversial statements regarding his faith.
On whether he'd ever asked for forgiveness from God for his sins, he told pollster Frank Luntz this in Iowa in July:
"I am not sure I have. I just go on and try to do a better job from there ... think if I do something wrong, I think, I just try and make it right. I don't bring God into that picture. I don't."
He went on to describe the sacrament of communion this way:
"When I drink my little wine — which is about the only wine I drink — and have my little cracker, I guess that is a form of asking for forgiveness, and I do that as often as possible because I feel cleansed. I think in terms of, 'Let's go on, and let's make it right.'"
Audrey Lindsey of Spartanburg, S.C., said she hadn't heard those comments, but believed his later exhortations of his faith. "He says his favorite book is the Bible," Lindsey said, "and I believe that's what it's going to take — good, honest Christian people praying for this country."
But Trump, who says he ranks the Bible just ahead of his own Art of the Deal, has been unable in this campaign to name his favorite Bible verse or even testament.
"Well, I wouldn't want to get into it, because to me, that's very personal," Trump told Bloomberg. When pressed, he demurred, saying, "I don't want to get into specifics."
He said the Old and New Testaments were "probably equal."
So, is Trump one of those "good, honest Christian people"?
"That's a question mark," Lindsey said. "That's between him and God. I know people make mistakes, and you can change your life. I'm hoping through this situation that if he's not a Christian, he'll come to know Christ."
Larry Linsin of Seneca, S.C., is also willing to give Trump the benefit of the doubt.
"People do change, if it's an honest, legitimate turnaround," said Linsin, who is also considering voting for Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, someone with long evangelical credentials. "None of us has a perfect past."
'I Love Them. They Love Me.'
Like with most things, Trump is confident about his appeal to evangelical voters.
"I love them. They love me," he said in a press conference following his Greenville speech. "I am protestant — I am Presbyterian. I love the evangelicals. Why do they love me? You'll have to ask them — but they do."
The polls so far bear that out. A national CNN poll out last week showed Trump (32 percent) and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson (28 percent) as the top choices among self-identified evangelicals.
In South Carolina, a state where nearly two-thirds of the GOP electorate identifies as evangelical or born-again Christians, Trump led Carson 33 to 13 percent, according to an August Monmouth University poll. In Iowa, Monmouth had Trump narrowly behind Carson with religious voters.
It's an astonishing development, particularly considering the rest of the Republican presidential field. He leads a Southern Baptist minister in former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, two sons of preachers in Cruz and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, plus former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, who won over Iowa evangelicals four years ago to take the first presidential nominating contest.
Bob Vander Plaats, an influential evangelical leader in Iowa and president of The Family Leader, said many religious voters see a kinship with Trump in his targets.
"It's not surprising is that the enemy of our enemy is our friend," Vander Plaats said. "That's the art of political warfare. He's calling out the establishment, the 'media elite,' and he's calling out a lot of people."
James Guth, a professor of political science at Furman University in Greenville who studies the intersection of religion and politics, said he, like many, have been "baffled" by the rise of Trump. But he echoed Vander Plaats in noting that evangelicals like that he's attacking a common enemy — the GOP establishment.
"He's quite clearly putting it to the Republican Party," Guth said, "and a lot of evangelical Christians feel like they've been neglected by the Republican Party."
The Christian Broadcasting Network's David Brody explained it this way in July:
"They like his boldness. They relate to him because when they've been bold about their faith they get blasted too. It's a kinship in a strange sort of way. Here's the point with evangelicals: they'd rather someone be honest about their views about God. The honesty resonates with them and you know what evangelicals will probably end up doing? Instead of hating Trump, they'll put him on a church 'prayer chain' and get on their knees themselves and pray that Donald Trump draws closer to God through this process."
Robert Jeffress, pastor of the megachurch First Baptist Dallas, wrote that evangelical voters aren't under any delusion that Trump believes the same as them. Instead, they're just glad he's closer to their beliefs than President Obama:
"No Evangelical I know is expecting Trump to lead our nation in a spiritual revival. But seven years of Barack Obama have drastically lowered the threshold of spiritual expectations Evangelicals have of their president. No longer do they require their president to be one of them. Evangelicals will settle for someone who doesn't HATE them like the current occupant of the Oval Office appears to."
Skepticism From The Pulpit
When the Christian World Magazine surveyed 94top evangelical leaders in July about who they support for 2016, Trump was near the bottom of the pack. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio was their choice.
Moore contends that polls showing Trump ahead may be inaccurately identifying evangelicals and not differentiating among people who are committed, regular churchgoers.
"There ought to be a criterion of character for candidates for public office," Moore said. "Someone who has a life and a tenor of life that is so obviously at odds with what evangelicals claim to be their values, ought to cause some alarm."
Trump's lack of support among leaders may be because they are skeptical that he's a true believer. In addition to his past support for abortion rights, his divorces and inability to identify Bible verses, questions remain about his moral conviction on abortion and same-sex marriage. And there are holes in his story about something as basic as where he goes to church.
Trump recently agreed with an interviewer's suggestion that a good Supreme Court nominee would be his sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, a judge on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. But she supports abortion rights. Many of Trump's rivals and conservative groups, like Concerned Women for America, pounced.
Trump talks fondly of growing up going to Sunday School at First Presbyterian Church in the Jamaica section of Queens, N.Y. When asked by NPR where he currently attends, he said he goes to Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan.
What's more, Marble Collegiate is part of the Reformed Church in America — typically considered more of a mainline rather than evangelical denomination. The church issupportive of gay rights, according to its website.
Vander Plaats — who backed the Iowa winners in both 2008 (Huckabee) and 2012 (Santorum) and will reveal his pick for president around Thanksgiving this year — said he thinks Trump is "very genuine." He trusts that his conversion on issues like abortion and same-sex marriage is real.
But Vander Plaats noted that Trump's lack of support for Kim Davis, the Rowan County, Kentucky, clerk who was jailed for not issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples, could be a problem for him. Huckabee and Cruz, on the other hand, rallied to her side and stood with her as she was released from jail Tuesday.
"[Voters] will hold his feet to the fire on a very real issue," Vander Plaats said, "and that's a danger issue for him."
Trump will hold a gathering of evangelical leaders at the end of the month. But it's led by Paula White, a Florida televangelist who preaches the "prosperity gospel"— a belief that it's God's will to financially bless devout Christians, something controversial in many evangelical circles.
Can The Support Of The Rank-And-File Last?
Throughout the summer, Trump defied political gravity. After each gaffe that would have been fatal for a conventional candidate, Trump has instead only soared.
The large field of candidates is helping Trump with evangelicals. There isn't one candidate the religious right has rallied around, so their support is split.
Guth, for one, is skeptical Trump's appeal can last. "I think as time goes on, many people in the evangelical community will begin to have reservations," he predicted. "Some of that fascination with Trump will eventually wear off once they become more aware of his downside."
It very well could be that as religious conservatives learn more about Trump's positions or another candidate connects as the primaries get closer, their support fades. But Moore conceded that evangelicals have not always supported the candidate who lines up exactly with what they believe. But even of those candidates, they were always men who espoused a legitimate moral turnaround.
Religious conservatives are credited with fueling George W. Bush's 2000 election and 2004 re-election despite his past with drugs and alcohol. And one of their heroes is Ronald Reagan, who himself was divorced.
Bush, of course, is the quintessential redemption story. While he never expressed publicly that he was "born again," he did point to a 1985 conversation with the aforementioned Billy Graham. Bush wrote in his 1999 autobiography, A Charge to Keep, that Graham "planted a mustard seed in my soul, a seed that grew over the next year."
Trump has pointed to no such conversion.
"As of right now, Donald Trump is the incarnation of a bumper sticker," Moore said. "The support for Donald Trump is a way of sending message of anger with the status quo, and there are many people angered with the status quo. But I don't think that that necessarily translates into people wanting to hand the nuclear codes to that living bumper sticker.
"I would feel like I'd let Beau down if I didn't just get up."
At one point, Stephen Colbert's third-night audience at the Ed Sullivan Theater in Manhattan broke into a chant: "Joe, Joe, Joe!"
"Be careful what you wish for!" Vice President Joe Biden joked, his famous smile flashing to applause. It's little wonder the audience was responding in this way. Biden was giving perhaps the most frank, intimate, and emotional interview a politician has given in recent memory—a major score for Colbert's new show, and a rare chance for Americans to see their second-in-command speak so eloquently about grief, faith, and family.
The newsiest part of The Late Show interview on CBS was, of course, Biden telling Colbert that he didn't feel like he was emotionally ready to run for president in 2016 after the recent death from brain cancer of his son Beau. (Biden has reportedly been exploring a run for the White House with donors and supporters in recent weeks.)
"I don't think any man or woman should run for president unless, number one, they know exactly why they would want to be president, and two, they can look at folks out there and say, 'I promise you have my whole heart, my whole soul, my energy, and my passion,'" Biden said. "And, and, I'd be lying if I said that I knew I was there. I'm being completely honest. Nobody has a right in my view to seek that office unless they are willing to give it 110 percent of who they are."
But there was so much more to this interview, littered as it was with wise quotes from Biden's mother and characterized by a mutual warmth between two men that have suffered great tragedies in their lives. (Colbert lost his father and two brothersin a plane crash.) But the most emotional and revealing parts were when Biden spoke about his son Beau, who died of brain cancer in May: "I was a hell of a success. My son was better than me. He was better than me in every way."
Inside Vice President Joe Biden’s Family Tragedies
BY MICHELLE WARD TRAINOR
05/31/2015
As the Biden family mourns the death of Beau Biden, the former Delaware Attorney General who died on Saturday of brain cancer at 46, it’s a sad reminder of the many personal tragedies that have befallen the vice president. In 1972, just one month after winning his first Senate race, Biden received a phone call telling him his wife and college sweetheart Neilia and their 13-month-old daughter Naomi had been killed in a car accident on their way to buy a Christmas tree. "By the tone of the phone call, you just knew," he said in 2012, addressing the families of fallen U.S. soldiers. "You just felt it in your bones: Something bad happened." As he left the U.S. Capitol building, "I remember looking up and saying, 'God,' as if I was talking to God myself, 'You can’t be good, how can you be good?'" he recalled, telling the families, "For the first time in my life, I understood how someone could consciously decide to commit suicide. Not because they were deranged, not because they were nuts, because they had been to the top of the mountain, and they just knew in their heart they would never get there again." The couple's two sons, Beau and Hunter, who were 4 and 3 at the time, were also in the car and badly injured. When Biden was sworn into the Senate in 1973, he did so at Beau's Wilmington, Delaware bedside, which he rarely left.
Joe Biden (center) being sworn in while by the bedside of Beau Biden (right corner)
"I was supposed to be sworn in with everyone else that year in '73, but I wouldn't go down. So ... the secretary of the Senate [came] to swear me in, in the hospital room with my children," he recalled in a Yale University commencement address less than two weeks ago. Biden, who commuted from the family home in Wilmington, Del., to Washington, D.C., also reflected on why it was so important for him to be there for his kids. "I began to commute thinking I was only going to stay a little while – four hours a day, every day – from Washington to Wilmington, which I’ve done for over 37 years," he told the Yale students. "I did it because I wanted to be able to kiss them goodnight and kiss them in the morning the next day. No Ozzie and Harriet breakfast or great familial thing, just climb in bed with them. Because I came to realize that a child can hold an important thought, something they want to say to their mom and dad, maybe for 12 or 24 hours, and then it's gone. And when it's gone, it's gone. And it all adds up. But looking back on it, the truth be told, the real reason I went home every night was that I needed my children more than they needed me. Some at the time wrote and suggested that Biden can't be a serious national figure. If he was, he'd stay in Washington more, attend to more important events. It’s obvious he's not serious. He goes home after the last vote. But I realized I didn't miss a thing. Ambition is really important. You need it. And I certainly have never lacked in having ambition. But ambition without perspective can be a killer." And, the close father-and-son relationship was something that Beau proudly expressed as well. As a tribute to Biden’s 72nd birthday in November, heTweeted a photo of himself as a young boy with his dad at a baseball game. "Happy Birthday to the best coach I could have asked for. Love you Pop." Like his father, Beau was also a family man who was devoted to his wife Hallie and their kids Natalie and Hunter.
Beau Biden (left) and Joe Biden in the '70s
COURTESY BIDEN FAMILY
"For all that Beau Biden achieved in his life, nothing made him prouder; nothing made him happier; nothing claimed a fuller focus of his love and devotion than his family," President Obama said in a statement after Beau's death. In December, he happily tweeted a photo of his children with their new puppy. "Say hello to Indi, our adopted 10 month old lab #rescuedog & newest member of the family!" he wrote. Now the family is left to mourn yet another member gone too soon. "It's a family that's had some real tragedy," said Ted Kaufman, a longtime aide to Joe Biden who filled his Senate seat after he became vice president in 2009. "I would just say he was the very best of us. He was special, such a good person." Kaufman, who has known Beau since childhood continued: "He was young and everybody I talked to who knew him in politics, which is such a tough business, commented on what a good person he was and what a great future he had." Speaking to the families of fallen soldiers in 2012, the Vice President – who had his own brush with death in 1988 after undergoing surgery for two brain aneurysms – sounded a hopeful note to those dealing with grief. "There will come a day," he told them, "when the thought of your son or daughter, or your husband or wife, brings a smile to your lips before it brings a tear to your eye."
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NO PURCHASE OR CONTRIBUTION NECESSARY TO ENTER OR WIN. A PURCHASE OR CONTRIBUTION WILL NOT IMPROVE YOUR CHANCES OF WINNING.The 3rd Annual NRA Gun Raffle Sweepstakes is open to legal residents of the 50 United States and Washington D.C., age 21 years or older. Sweepstakes begins at 9:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time ("EDT") on 7/13/15 and ends at 11:59 PM EDT on 9/22/15. To enter and view complete Official Rules which govern this Sweepstakes, visit www.NRARaffle.org. Void where prohibited by law. Sponsor: National Rifle Association of America.
