Hypocrisy Watch category archive

The women at Swarthmore are fed up.

Hope Brinn says administrators were dismissive after a male student showed up in her room when she was unclothed and refused to leave, and Mia Ferguson says she was an assault victim. The two 19-year-old sophomores organized 20 other students and alums to complain to federal authorities that Swarthmore is violating the 1990 Clery Act that requires full reporting of campus crimes, including sexual assaults.

(snip)

About the only thing everyone agrees on is that underreporting sexual assaults and harassment is a national problem, not just a Swarthmore problem. On the same day as the Swarthmore complaint, 37 students and alums from Occidental College – the Southern California campus President Obama once attended – also lodged a Clery Act complaint, following complaints at a half-dozen other schools, including University of North Carolina and Amherst College.

Colleges don’t want the embarrassment of being in the news, unless it’s a victory on the athletic field.

After all, it’s not a cover-up when it’s “protecting the reputation of the institution,” now, is it?

The Old Boys Club protects not only Old Boys, but also young boys.

After all, young boys grow up to be Old Boys.

Wild oats and all that (harrumph), eh what?

Aside:

I wasn’t always cynical. Once I pinned a towel around my neck and pretended I was Superman.

Then I turned 11.

At the University of North Carolina, which seems to have relocated to Steubenville.

Attorney Clay Turner sent a letter Monday to Chancellor Holden Thorp, advising the school that his client, Landen Gambill, filed the complaint with the Office for Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education. The letter also asks Thorp to dismiss charges filed in honor court against Gambill.

The decision to pursue the honor court violations against Gambill are in retaliation for her participation in a Title IX complaint filed against the university and for her public criticisms of the way the school treats sexual violence survivors, he wrote.

Although she has not publicly identified the man she alleges raped her, Gambill is accused of violating the honor code by creating an environment that’s intimidating for him. A university hearings board earlier cleared him of sexual assault charges but found him guilty of harassing her. He faces no criminal charges.

The Booman has more.

Let no sin go unrewarded.

Retired Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahoney is soon off to Rome to vote on a successor to St. Peter, even though Mahoney was recently stripped of public duties by his successor after documents revealed he helped cover up scores of clerical sex abuse cases in the 1980s.

Archbishop Jose Gomez, who did the stripping, nonetheless is asking the faithful to pray for Cardinal Mahoney. Gomez is confident that his predecessor’s experience will serve “well” as cardinals work “to discern the will of the Holy Spirit” and elect a new pope.

Ireland’s Cardinal Sean Brady will be joining Mahoney in Rome. Two years ago, it was revealed that Brady swore to secrecy in 1975 two boys who were repeatedly abused by a monk and serial pedophile.

More at the link.

There’s a certain Zuckerboardian schadenfreude here.

A picture that (Facebook’s Mark–ed.) Zuckerberg’s sister posted on her personal Facebook profile was seen by a marketing director, who then posted the picture to Twitter and her more than 40,000 followers Wednesday.

That didn’t sit well with Zuckerberg’s sister, Randi, who tweeted at Callie Schweitzer that the picture was meant for friends only and that posting the private picture on Twitter was “way uncool.” Schweitzer replied by saying the picture popped up on her Facebook news feed.

Later on in the story, she is quoted as saying that it is rude to repost other persons’ stuff without their permission

You know, the way Facebook did (maybe still does) with your pictures in their ads.

(Other users were quoted as saying that the problem is that Facebook’s privacy policies, well, just zuck.)

Tagg Romney notoriously said that, when President Obama called out his Daddy’s lies in Tuesday’s debate, he wanted to rush the stage and–well–tag the President one.

In the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Tony Norman wonders why Tagg didn’t declare a desire to tag Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, or any other of Mitt the Flip’s opponents who have remarked on Mitt’s malignantly militant mendacity.

Gee.

Whatever could it have been?

I just can’t imagine how Mr. Obama could have made Mr. Tagg so uppityset.

A nugget from Mr. Norman (emphasis added).

And let’s address the elephant in the room: Tagg Romney was in no hurry to rush the stage when primary opponents this year and in 2008 questioned Mitt Romney’s integrity. He wouldn’t have had to worry about the Secret Service intervening when Gov. Rick Perry was mocking his father. Why didn’t he take a swing at the Texas governor? Because Mr. Perry would have stomped him silly and then stomped his dad for good measure.

When former House Speaker Newt Gingrich explicitly called Mitt Romney a liar, somehow Tagg Romney kept his composure. Former Sen. Rick Santorum insisted that Gov. Romney was the worst possible nominee the GOP could run against Barack Obama. Tagg smiled through Mr. Santorum’s withering assessment and kept his violent thoughts to himself. There were no goofy threats giggled into radio microphones back then, despite ample opportunities.

The fact that Tagg Romney could vent to his fantasies about taking a swing at the first black president is a testament to his broad-mindedness in a way. He’s another Republican who “doesn’t see color.” All Tagg Romney sees is someone taking a shot at his dad, and it makes him mad now in a way that didn’t make him quite as mad before.

It is all around us. We have only to look.

Via Contradict Me.

From the website:

Meet Matthew Fogg, a former U.S. Marshal whose??? exploits led him to be nicknamed “Batman.” When he noticed that all of his team’s drug raids were in black areas, he suggested doing the same in the suburbs. His boss didn’t shine to that idea.

Notice how the professional religionists always seem to be going for the gold?

God works in mysterious ways, it’s said, but his path to state lawmakers in Sacramento has taken a particularly odd route – through a North Carolina courtroom.

A bitter split three years ago in an evangelical group providing Bible studies at California’s Capitol has sparked an East Coast lawsuit. Two groups – Capitol Ministries and Capitol Commission – are rivals for the chance to bring Christian teachings to legislators at capitols nationwide.

Each nonprofit group blames the other for backstabbing and deceit in the effort to touch lawmakers’ hearts through ministries funded by millions of dollars from Christians and sympathetic churches, foundations and businesses.

The story makes Hamlet, minus the swordplay of course, seem like an episode of the Flintstones.

Roman Catholic parishioners were told their priest had to leave his church in 1992 because he had Lyme disease, even though his removal actually came after an altar boy’s fondling complaint, a witness testified Monday.

Mary Mignogno, who knew about the boy’s complaint, didn’t know what to say to her children when she heard the lie from the pulpit.

Nothing to add. Nothing needs adding.

As a follow-up to this, now comes this:

Cincinnati Landlord Jamie Hein asked the Ohio Civil Rights Commission to reconsider its ruling that Hein had discriminated against a young black girl by posting a “Whites Only” sign at a public pool. The Commission said, “nope!” and upheld its decision 4-0 without discussion.

Rational (heated, but rational) commentary at the link.

Mike Gruss, writing in my local rag, considers the tendency of beseiged companies to change their names to something vaguely latinate and altogether uncommunicative so as to outrun their reputations. He mentions, Philip Morris Altria and Bell Atlantic/NYNEX Verizon (but unaccountably leaves out Southwestern Bell Cingular not-your-father’s AT&T).

Then he focuses on Swampwater, now T/A Xe Academi. A nugget:

Blackwater, once headquartered in Moyock, N.C., is dead, but only kind of. The name still lives in video games and T-shirts and in lawsuits and news stories, but is not the property of the new company. Xe always was viewed as a joke, a transparent attempt to play on America’s short-term memory when we’re more sophisticated than that.

Academi may be a top-notch training school, or it may be a place Arnold Schwarzenegger stopped by in “Total Recall.” No one knows because they’ve never seen the word before.

Then the natural instinct is to be afraid.

Which, given Blackwater’s history and pending lawsuits, might not be a bad thing.

A mercenary by any other name is still a gun for hire.

A few days ago, Chicago Tribune columnist Dennis Byrne invested energy in attempting to justify the Great and Glorious Patriotic War for a Lie in Iraq. Here’s a bit:

We well know about the horrible costs of the war: almost 4,500 American troops and tens of thousands of Iraqis killed and more than $1 trillion spent. But while we’ve heard a lot about the cost side of this equation, we’ve heard not so much about the benefit side. It’s as if there was no benefit.

And a good way to calculate the benefits is to ask: What if President George W. Bush and Congress had decided in 2003 not to attack the tyrannical and murderous regime of Saddam Hussein? With the support of much of the American public.

He proceeds to waste a couple hundred words trying to prove that sending persons to die for a lie is somehow a worthy exercise in the common weal.

I suggest you read it. We are likely to hear more of this sort of revisionist drivel from the “war is always good” crowd over the coming years.

Click for a larger image.

What John Cole said, especially the penultimate sentence of the middle paragraph.

In the Guardian, George Monbiot considers how the rich conclude that wealth equals virtue:

If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire. The claims that the ultra-rich 1% make for themselves – that they are possessed of unique intelligence or creativity or drive – are examples of the self-attribution fallacy.

Click to read the rest.

Annette John-Hall considers wingnut reaction to a black talk radio jock’s statement that black folks should support President Obama because he’s black.

Aside: I’m old enough to remember white folks saying that white folks should support George Wallace because he was white and right (wing, that is).

Here’s a snippet from the article:

Is this call to blackness that Joyner espouses some kind of diabolical plot, some secret code intended to erase the post-racial nirvana some think we achieved with the election of a black president?

I could almost see Jason Johnson, professor of political science at Hiram College in Ohio, rolling his eyes.

“Identity politics is only a problem when minorities do it. Whites do it all the time,” Johnson argues.

“It’s absolutely naive to question the unified behavior of a minority group, given the fact that [historically] the majority has always been unified in their oppression.”

He’s got a point there. I guess there’s a reason it took us so long to get to our first black president.

Read the whole thing.

Underneath all the guff, the reality that apologists for the Confederacy refuse to face (or wish to conceal–depending on the apologist) is that slavery was ultimately about trading persons as in the markets and then using them, like draft animals:

One hundred and fifty years after the start of the nation’s bloodiest war, the audience sat rapt as a professor displayed a screen image of a single page in a slaveowner’s account book that showed slavery was today’s equivalent of a $100 million-a-year business.

Bob Molinaro, discussing rumors of another college conference reshuffle in my local rag:

. . . yet another reminder that television and boosters – not administrators – call the shots at the top of the football food chain.

(snip)

As you may have noticed, tradition in college sports doesn’t exist anymore. Unless you’re talking about the tradition of winking at ethics and decency.

NCAA is holding a retreat to consider ways to fix the cesspool that is big time NCAA athletics.

The Boston Globe has an excellent editorial on this. Here’s a bit:

The meeting comes in the wake of a torturous spring of embarrassments for collegiate sports. They include the NCAA’s stripping the University of Southern California of its 2004-2005 football title because of illegal payments to running back Reggie Bush, the resignation of Ohio State football coach Jim Tressel after players got illegal gifts from the owner of a local tattoo parlor, the suspension of University of Connecticut basketball coach Jim Calhoun for recruiting violations, and an ongoing investigation of the University of Tennessee’s football and basketball programs.

My guess is that they will be more concerned with whitewash than with deep cleaning.

I’ve lost interest in college sports. The parade of cheating–in the front offices, not on the fields–the exploitation of the players, and the sell outs to the media have done me in.

I’ll watch the bowl games on New Year’s Day, but that’s about it.