A Gentleman’s view.

It’s in Their Culture by Nicholas Farrell 

We are endlessly told that white people are racist and that white men are sexist. But in my experience people of a different color are much more racist and men of a different color much more sexist. It is just that we do not hear about this racism because no one is allowed to speak about it for fear of being branded…a racist.

Now from Britain comes the latest horrific example of nonwhite racism and sexism. And try as they might, the British media were unable this time to avoid telling us at least part of the truth.

Here it is: Nine British Muslims, eight of Pakistani and one of Afghani origin, gang-raped dozens of underage white girls in the northern England town of Rochdale between 2008 and 2010. One of the nine just happens to be a father of five and a religious-studies teacher in his local mosque.

There were 47 known victims, mostly aged 12-16 and living in local government children’s homes. But there were probably many more victims and many more rapists.

“If nine non-Muslim white men did the same thing to dozens of Muslim teenage girls, British Muslims would blow up the Houses of Parliament and Buckingham Palace.”

Last Tuesday in Liverpool those nine men were convicted and sentenced to a total of 77 years in prison. In separate recent trials, 56 men (50 of them Muslims) were convicted of similar crimes in other northern England towns.

In the coverage of this latest child-rape-industry trial, the British media avoided the fact that racism motivated the nine and that they are all Muslims. The police and social workers failed to investigate for the same reason. The nine are usually referred to as “Asian” or “Pakistani” and not “Muslim.” But at the root of their racism is their religion. Asian or Pakistani Christians or Hindus, for example, treat women of whatever age and color differently.

The Pakistani/Muslim attitude to women in general is very bad; the Pakistani/Muslim attitude to non-Muslim white women is even worse.

To such men, white women who go out without a male chaperone, dressed in miniskirts and high-heeled shoes, plastered in make-up, and who drink and take drugs, are sluts plain and simple. Infidel sluts.

In short: They are not merely asking to be raped. They do not just want to be raped. They deserve to be raped. That they are underage and in the care of the social services only reinforces this point of view.

All men, me included, have issues regarding how women dress and behave, don’t we? But most of us deal with them as best we can.

And most Muslims in non-Muslim countries, even of Pakistani origin, do not do what the Rochdale Nine did to all those non-Muslim, white, teenage girls. Nor are most Muslims in non-Muslim countries, even if of Pakistani origin, Islamic terrorists.

But let’s face it: Many, many Muslims do think that non-Muslim white women are sluts and the perfect symbols of Western decadence and that this is a core reason why they do not (how shall I put this?) approve of Western civilization and therefore why they would like it to be run along Islamic lines, just as the Islamic terrorists do, even if personally they do not actively support al-Qaeda, et al. Not in public, at least.

The crimes committed by those nine Muslim sexist racists in Rochdale, a former mill town and once the pride of Britain’s textile industry, included multiple counts of rape and sex trafficking. The gang members, many of whom were taxi drivers, enticed the teenage girls to go out on the town with them by plying them with free alcohol and drugs. They would then pass the girls around to have sex with several men a day, several times a week, in taxis, flats, and kebab shops. One 13-year-old was forced to have sex with 20 men in one night.

In 2008, the police and the social workers had evidence of these terrible crimes. But they did little mainly because to do something would have meant criticizing the British Muslim community of Pakistani origin. Terrified of being accused of racism—an accusation that could easily have destroyed their careers and led to criminal charges against them as well as civil unrest—they turned a blind eye.

Even now, the metropolitan chattering classes and the multicultural freak-show crowd that control the media still insist that the Rochdale case has nothing to do with race.

Let’s not forget the sexism. This racism and sexism were rooted in the religion of the nine men, Islam. To do the same thing to Muslim girls, on the other hand, would have been for them unthinkable.

They all pleaded not guilty on the grounds that they had done nothing wrong in their eyes and were thus were brought to trial only because of their race and religion. One was banned from court after he called the judge “a racist bastard.”

At least Nazir Afzal, the Chief Crown Prosecutor in the northwest who eventually brought the case and who is of Pakistani origin and a Muslim, had the balls to say after the trial that “imported cultural baggage” had played a role, although he carefully avoided the word “religious.” Regardless of how you define it, that baggage involves among other things forced marriage, honor killings, and genital mutilation.

But still the metropolitan chatterers and the multicultural freaks refuse to concede defeat. They chant their tired old mantra: Sexual exploitation of teenage girls happens in every racial and ethnic group. Oh no, it doesn’t! Not on this scale against girls chosen precisely because they came from a different racial and religious group. And if nine non-Muslim white men did the same thing to dozens of Muslim teenage girls, British Muslims would blow up the Houses of Parliament and Buckingham Palace. And that would only be the first course.

It is time that the left abandoned its multicultural diktat of turning a blind eye to such disgusting racism and sexism by nonwhite men simply because “it’s in their culture.” And it is time for the rest of us to look after vulnerable white non-Muslim teenage girls a little better than this.

The Curse of King Martin by Kathy Shaidle 

Rich Lowry owes John Derbyshire an apology.

When Lowry fired Derbyshire from National Review for writing a “racist” column here at Taki’s, he took particular issue with Derb’s contention that whites should “Stay out of heavily black neighborhoods.”

Lowry was clearly unfamiliar with (black) comedian Chris Rock’s 1996 bit about avoiding any street in America named Martin Luther King Boulevard. As everyone (except National Review editors) knows, avenues christened in honor of that self-proclaimed champion of nonviolence usually run through black neighborhoods and tend to be among the country’s most dangerous.

The Curse of King Martin now seems to have extended beyond eponymous boulevards. In a development that’s sure to equal bad news for the Mall in DC, whites are on notice to steer clear of streets boasting monuments to MLK, too.

“Don’t leave your driveway without Derb behind the wheel and Chris Rock sitting shotgun.”

An 83-foot-tall obelisk honoring King stands over the corner of Brambleton Avenue and Church Street in Norfolk, Virginia, which is precisely where a white couple were driving last month when they were set upon by (depending on who’s doing the talking) “dozens” or “at least 100” black youths.

Sadly, such black-on-white swarms have become commonplace over the last few years, although you’d never know it unless you read the Drudge Report, which is one of the only “mainstream” news outlets that dares to report on the epidemic.

The white victims attacked in Norfolk worked four blocks away at a mainstream news outlet—the local Virginian-Pilot newspaper.

Which decided not to report this attack on its very own reporters.

(Maybe because, hey, they were short-staffed for a week—the pair having been forced to take time off work due to their injuries and all….)

It wasn’t until a Virginian-Pilot columnist wrote an opinion piece on the incident a fortnight later that residents learned about the couple’s terrifying ordeal. And boy, were they pissed: at the black teens and their online supporters (one of whom called the attack revenge for Trayvon Martin—an “excuse” that’s proving to be predictably popular with thugs of late); at their local self-appointed media gatekeepers; and at the police, whose indifferent mumblings about the crime sound like dialogue deleted from RoboCop as unrealistic. Mechanical police wouldn’t sound either this touchy or this indifferent:

An officer on the scene reportedly told one injured victim to “shut up and get in the car,” then shrugged that the attackers “were probably juveniles anyway. What are we going to do? Find their parents and tell them?” He then supposedly pointed to a nearby public housing complex and shrugged, “It’s what they do.”

Stung by charges of dereliction and incompetence, the Norfolk cops’ spokesman Chris Amos complained wearily that, when trying to establish the exact number of teen attackers, “we’re kind of at the mercy of our victims.” He didn’t ascribe any racial motives to the crime, which he characterized as “someone throwing a rock at someone’s car” and “simple assault”—because “there’s no code for mob assault” in the police department’s “system.”

Amos’s advice for motorists who find themselves in similar situations?

“Call the police,” of course.

Except the couple did call 911. It took them three tries to get through.

If only they’d had the chance to use Microsoft’s “ghetto app” instead.

It’s officially called “Pedestrian Route Production”—this still-in-development smart-phone application will be designed to help the user avoid “unsafe neighborhoods.”

Predictably, the Dallas NAACP and other black critics have denounced the as-yet-unavailable phone feature as “racist.”

But what about listening to Chris Rock’s Bring the Pain in the car? Is that “racist,” too?

The ever-helpful comic has another routine about “driving while black.” Once again, he provides simple, common-sense (and foul-mouthed) tips for avoiding a beatdown, this time at the hands of police: obey the law, turn down that loud rap music, and don’t run from the cops.

Rock also jokingly tells black drivers to “get a white friend” whose mere presence in the bitch seat could mean the difference “between a ticket and a bullet in the ass.”

In all likelihood, Microsoft will be bullied by racial shakedown artists into junking the “ghetto app” that—especially if programmed to alert users to any street (or statue) with Martin Luther King’s name on it—could’ve prevented the Norfolk attack and many others.

This leaves white drivers who’d rather risk death than accusations of racism with one utterly impractical, ultra-low-tech option when they need tips on which neighborhoods to avoid: Don’t leave your driveway without Derb behind the wheel and Chris Rock sitting shotgun.

MSNBC Panel Lectures Conservatives On The Nature Of ‘The Republican Brain’

MSNBC’s Up with Chris Hayes hosted a panel discussion on Saturday about the nature of the “Republican brain” and why it seems, according to the intellectuals that populate weekend cable news programming, that conservatives reject scientific advances. What followed was a myopic, masturbatory, self-aggrandizing exercise in liberal “confirmation bias,” in a discussion on Republican’s supposed “confirmation bias.”

RELATED: Chris Hayes Asks ‘Republican Meteorologist’ To Help Convince GOP Of Climate Change

Hayes opened the panel with author of The Republican Brain, Chris Mooney, describing the findings in his book. He conceded that he found liberals have their biases, but the arch of history bends toward the truth on their side of the aisle. Conservatives, meanwhile, dig in their heels and reject new and potentially contradictory information.

Hayes was vexed by the scale of the problem, as it seemed to dawn on him that he was going to be largely unsuccessful over his career in winning conservative hearts and minds.

“How do we avoid a bleak landscape of will-to-power nihilism, in which no one can persuade anyone of anything and I come to work every day hoping to, like, you know, bring some information to the public and I completely bang my head against the wall and my life is meaningless,” Hayes asked, one would have to imagine, rhetorically. Fortunately, he went to break before his fawning panel could respond to this ego-stroking lament.

After the break, Hayes asked a leading, 47-second question about the nature of the “enlightenment project” – the magnum opus in which one presumes he believes himself to be engaging.

Author of The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt, told Hayes that science is based on premises being challenged and tested and eventually confirmed or discarded. So, science and understanding evolves overtime whereas religion tends to avoid that level of critical introspection. Conservatives, they say, for the most part reject this process.

Finally, the brilliant and entertaining New York Daily News columnist John McWhorter chimed in and challenged the presumption of the theory of evolution from an atheist’s perspective. He said he had engaged the scientific community recently and asked how they would account for what he suggested were the holes in the theory that do not account for grand jumps in biological advancements. Shockingly, he found that the liberal scientific community – which perceives itself to be the pinnacle of open-mindedness – was rather unaccepting of his heretical questioning of what is presumed to be, and this is the appropriate term, gospel.

“The liberal scientists thought that I was the worst thing,” said McWhorter. “This was the kind of behavior that is associated with conservatives. There was a circling of the wagons, not reason, because I was trying to make sense – I wasn’t making a godly argument – that happened. It’s over. But, it leads me to think that this is perhaps human behavior.”

His thought provoking question was immediately shot down — Mooney told McWhorter that he was injecting god into the conversation whether he knew it or not. DailyBeast columnist Michelle Goldberg told McWhorter that he was contradicting science and that, in fact, his presumption that there are instances when the evolutionary theory is not entirely explanatory were factually incorrect.

So, McWhorter was both willfully spouting misinfromation and was buying into religious propaganda. And suddenly, there is no critical thought required. Phew! That was close.

What McWhorter admirably attempted to do was provoke actual discussion – even potentially contentious discussion. The panel’s immediate revulsion to his attempt to impose some level of objectivity on his fellow panelists confirms the findings in a much-discussed Pew Center poll from March which showed that the average liberal is twice as likely to block material online that they find politically disagreeable than conservatives. Those close-minded right-wing nuts actually seek out information and opinion that challenges their beliefs more than liberal. Who knew? Well, probably John McWhorter.

“The mistake you made was to talk to the devil,” said Haidt. “A principle in my book is to follow the sacredness, and around it you’ll find a ring of motivated ignorance.” Gosh, that does sound so enlightening.

Haidt said that the scientist in question, who McWhorter cited when asking his genuinely curious question of the scientific community, “was not a respected scientist, so you basically committed treason by even just talking to him.”

Gotcha. So, religious conservatives are ignorant and closed-minded but liberals, who are enlightened opinion leaders, suggest that even talking to people you don’t agree with amounts to “treason.”

Hayes concluded the panel saying that he drew the line at opponents of the theory of anthropogenic climate change, and would not have those heretics on his show. He said it was a dangerous philosophy to espouse… And we’re the ones who get lectured on “confirmation bias.”

Look, religious conservatives (or rather, religious people of all political stripes) take certain tenets of their faith literally. Some sects accept evolution, some do not. But the issue has become politicized and the discussion is no longer about the science on either side of the aisle. On the right, the issue serves as a coalescing force that draws like-minded individuals together. Guess what? It’s precisely the same on the other side of the aisle. And when they get together, they have the same conversation about how awful the other side is using practically the same parlance.

This is not the case for everyone, of course. Most people accept evolution as science, and the majority of conservatives and liberals who accept evolution do not see this as a sign of their moral and intellectual superiority. But many on this panel appeared to view the acceptance of this scientific theory as evidence that they are imbued with some form of higher consciousness. Hey progressives, how do you think those religious conservatives who reject evolution feel about themselves and their faith? How much you want to bet they feel the precise same way?

Meet the Former Right-Wing Blogger Who Realized Conservatives Are Crazy

Charles Johnson was among the nation’s leading “anti-jihad” bloggers until he realized that his compatriots were totally nuts.

For years, Charles Johnson was a prominent right-wing “war-blogger.” On his site, Little Green Footballs, he coined the term “anti-idiotarian,” wrote frequently of a “leftist-Islamist axis,” called Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas “a fanatical, deadly enemy of Western civilization” and inspired the hawkish Israeli journalist Gil Ronen to gush, “If anyone ever compiles a list of Internet sites that contribute to Israel’s public relations effort, Johnson’s site will probably come in first, far above the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s site.” His comments section became an infamous hotbed of xenophobia and wingnuttery.

That was then and this is now. Visit LGF today, and you’ll find posts decrying his former fellow travelers’ knee-jerk Islamophobia, debunking the Breitbrats’ steaming piles of nonsense and defending the Obama administration against scurrilous charges from Fox News. Johnson has undergone a remarkable political transformation over the past five years, but it didn’t come without a cost; he is now among the top targets of the right blogosphere – an apostate drawing an enormous amount of venom from people he once considered his allies.

This week, Charles Johnson appeared on the AlterNet Radio Hour. Below is a lightly edited transcript (you can listen to the whole show here).

Joshua Holland: Charles, I’ll be honest, I used to find you kind of terrifying. Not in a personal way, but as a prominent member of this group of so-called war bloggers. You were prominent in that group. You co-founded Pajamas Media and you were widely credited with helping to bring down Dan Rather after he reported on George W. Bush’s Air National Guard service. You used to be really filled with Islamophobia and xenophobia. James Wolcott of Vanity Fair once compared your site to “a disorganized Nuremberg rally.”

Charles Johnson: Yeah, I’ve heard worse. That’s a fair enough description. If you actually go back before the 9/11 attacks and read what I wrote on my blog you’ll find that I actually was never what you’d think of as a right-winger at all.

JH: You were always kind of an anachronistic right-wing blogger. You’re a highly accomplished jazz guitarist; you always seemed to care about the environment. What were your politics like on September 10 or during the Clinton years?

CJ: My politics in one sense didn’t change because even when I started to be more associated with right-wing blogs and that whole milieu I was still what you call a social liberal. I never went in for the religious right stuff. In fact the rising importance and power of those kind of people in the Republican Party is one of the reasons why I finally had to just go elsewhere.

JH: September 11th was a traumatic experience for the entire country. We all felt that way. Is it fair to say that you kind of snapped?

CJ: In a sense I guess you can say that. It hit me really hard. I grew up in New York and I was actually interested in architecture, so I followed the construction of the World Trade Center. It helped that I had a really personal connection to the area. It hit me really hard.

I don’t know if I snapped so much as I really wanted to know more about what was going on. I tend to focus real intensely on things when I get interested. That’s what happened with the blog. I focused on fundamentalist Islam and radical Islam. Over the years I began to be involved with people like Robert Spencer and Frank Gaffney. If I had known some of the things I know about them now I’d like to think I wouldn’t have been associated with them, but you live and you learn, I guess.

JH: Right. You were a very early entrant into the blogging world. By the time I started reading blogs, maybe in 2002 or 2003, you were very much like Robert Spencer. You were using this method common to people who have a fear of Islam which is finding examples of Muslims doing terrible things, and then at least implying, if not stating outright, that these horrific incidents represent the Muslim community outright.

CJ: That’s a fair criticism, and that’s one of the reasons why I’ve changed my focus. I’ve realized that to be true. At that point I had to say to myself that this doesn’t really make sense, knowing what I know now about some of the motivations of people like Spencer and the like. That’s one of the big reasons I’ve changed the focus of my blog.

Just to be clear, I was never really known as a right-winger until after the September 11th attacks. On my blog there were some pretty harsh criticisms of George W. Bush prior to the 2000 elections. And I didn’t vote for him.

JH: OK, so along the way you began to see things a little differently and you started to criticize your erstwhile allies. You started calling out Fox News inaccuracies. You called Jim Hoft, the dumbest person on the internet, a “borderline illiterate bigot.”

CJ: I stand by those words.

JH: They’re not even controversial, Charles. Along the way, and correct me if I’m wrong because I was an outsider looking in, it seems the tipping point came in 2007 when you had this epic flame war with Pamela Geller, who remains one of the country’s biggest bigots to this day. Geller was behind this ridiculous Ground Zero mosque controversy and was an apparent inspiration for Anders Breivik, who murdered 70-plus Norwegians last year. Tell me about that incident. And what is Vlaams Belang?

CJ: So you’ve been googling around a bit. Actually the split between me and the far-right blogging scene had begun before that, but that was one of the big schism points. It wasn’t just Pamela Geller, but Robert Spencer and those who called themselves the “anti-Jihad bloggers.” They had gone to Belgium to have a meeting with a bunch of European like-minded bloggers and other personalities. When I discovered that one of the people there was Filip Dewinter of the Belgian Vlaams Belang party, which actually is a successor to a party called Vlaams Blok, which was banned by the Belgian government for their neo-Nazi roots and extreme-right hate speech. What they did is basically reform the image of the party, but didn’t change much else.

When I discovered that this was one of the people they were making alliances with, I said I can’t. This is not for me. I started to criticize people like Pamela Geller. Geller in response started to lash out at me with incredible viciousness, which is kind of her standard mode of operation, and it went from there. Basically the more I looked into and really started to investigate the connections that were forming between these people and the American anti-Jihad blogging scene, the more I realized there’s something really wrong here. We’re talking about people who are fascists, who not only have neo-Nazi connections but also have connections to real, oldtime Nazis, the real Nazis from the Third Reich.

At that point I had a real gut check. It was a moment where things kind of changed — I began to look at things differently.

JH: Geller continues to dance with European far-right-wing parties like the English Defense League as well. And, as you say, she lashed out with lupine ferocity. She wrote at one point that your “campaign to destroy the most effective voices on the right from within has been completely exposed.” That you “have been outed for the mole, the plant, the dis-informationalist” that you are.

CJ: Both her and Robert Spencer question who’s paying me. They have all kinds of conspiracy theories about who bought me out, and is that even really me anymore?

JH: It’s George Soros, right?

CJ: Of course! He’s always behind it. But really what they’re doing is trying to divert attention from the very real issues I bring up about the people they associate with. That’s the bottom line with those people. All these personal attacks are really an attempt to divert attention away from the facts.

JH: On some level, blogging communities do form. It must have been kind of nerve-racking to switch sides when you’d developed these allegiances in these ongoing blog wars. Did you have second thoughts? Were you worried about whether you would be villified?

CJ: Absolutely I had feelings like that. Emotionally, it wasn’t easy to go through all this stuff, but sometimes you have to and hopefully you come out the other side better. I’ve always looked at my blog not as something I wanted to be the most popular place. Believe it or not, I try not to do things that just make my blog more popular on purpose. What I try to do is be as honest, straightforward and factual as I can. That’s kind of always been my intent, and sometimes above and sometimes below the line. Whether a whole bunch of other bloggers suddenly stop linking to me or said bad things about me, I can’t let that influence what I do. It doesn’t make any sense, otherwise I won’t be doing it anymore.

JH: Jonathan Haidt is a psychologist who studies the relationship between cognitive styles and ideology. He says that one of the attributes — and he says it’s a positive attribute — that conservatives display more prominently than liberals is loyalty. Loyalty is a good thing, but it has a dark side, which is tribalism. They’re more likely to have these tribal inclinations. I think you experienced what going against the tribe looks like first-hand.

CJ: That’s evident in my Twitter timeline — even in the last week, it’s been really nuts out there. I think it was Gandhi who said first they laugh at you, then they fight you, and then you win? They tried to ignore me, and now they’re going kind of in the mocking mode and graduating toward the attacking mode. Hopefully we’ll continue on with this analogy.

JH: The New York Times said you moved into a gated community because you were worried about these online threats. Is that true?

CJ: I’ve actually told other people that they kind of exaggerated that. They asked me what caused me to move into this gated community here. Really it was just that I found a nice place that happened to be in a gated community. It really wasn’t because I was worried about the threats, although I have had some threats, including one from a neo-Nazi who is a friend of blogger Stacy McCain. That was a concern, but it wasn’t the primary reason at all.

JH: Now what about the other side? From my perspective, once you shifted the focus of your writing I had no hesitation adding you to my RSS feed, and following you on Twitter. Were there people on the left who you’d tangled with in the past who had a harder time accepting you into their fold?

CJ: Absolutely. There have been one or two, but most people have been willing to just see where I’m at now and see what I’ve said about the stuff I wrote in the past. A lot of it I do regret, there’s no doubt about it. Hopefully all I can do is continue to do what I do, and be as straight and true to what I believe as possible.

JH: You say you have regrets. I wonder is there one thing that you regret more than others? Is there something that stands out in your mind?

CJ: I was totally wrong about Barack Obama. That’s one of my main regrets at this point. I really fell for a lot of the right wing propaganda, and I thought he was going to be a communist and a radical leftist and all that stuff. I believed a lot of the propaganda about him. If I could go back I would vote for him now, but we don’t have that time machine yet. That’s actually one of the main things. I should not have been so ready to accept it. That was one of the things that really woke me up, seeing the truth as opposed to all the lies that were being spread by this blizzard of propaganda.

JH: I had Eric Boehlert on the show a few weeks ago. He’s with Media Matters. He said something really interesting. He said that in the era of Obama, when things have really gone off the deep end on the right, they don’t bother debunking a lot of the right-wing media outlets that they used to track regularly because they’ve become so transparently crazy that nobody pays attention to them.

CJ: That’s a great point. Sometimes I actually stop myself from copying or covering that stuff as well, because it does seem like just another crazy or absurd thing. At this point they’re so far out there that there’s absolutely no concern for reality on these blogs. And they never back down and never correct anything.

JH: They certainly don’t. Do you think that their influence has truly waned? We saw Mitt Romney try to court right-wing bloggers this week.

CJ: I think influence is an interesting thing that’s hard to measure. The effects of the Tea Party on the Republican Party was definitely exacerbated by the right-wing blogs. I don’t really know how much of that Mitt Romney meeting was just pandering and how much of it was a genuine attempt to curry favor with the base. Some of the people they invited are weird choices if you really know their background. Some of these people have been incredibly vicious toward Romney, but that’s politics.

Breaking: Obama Endorses Same Sex-Marriage

President Obama announced his support of same-sex marriage in an interview with ABC.

Today, less than 24 hours after North Carolina’s hateful passage of the discriminatory Amendment One which bans gay marriage and curbs civil unions, President Obama announced his support of same-sex marriage in an interview with ABC.

Earlier in the day, the rumors began to circulate that this kind of announcement was coming. But nothing was confirmed until the 3pm publication of the attention-grabbing, much-sought-after headline: “Obama: ‘Same-Sex Marriage Should be Legal’ followed by “President says his position on marriage has evolved.”

The president’s actual words in the interview “…it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married.” He also credited his family for helping him move forward on the position.

Shorly therafter, Rick Jacobs, President of the Courage Campaign, emailed supporters that “this day will go down in history as the beginning of the end of legalized discrimination against LGBT people in America.” It is the first time a sitting president has come out for marriage equality.

The President’s “evolution” on the issue is not entirely linear. Back when he was a younger, more radical politician, he endorsed gay marriage on a questionnaire, then reversed course for what appeared to be political expediency.

Even now, Richard Kim at the Nation wants us to focus on the actual impact of these historic words, legal rights-wise: none.

Obama, however, stopped short of lending full support to the multi-state legal and political campaign for marriage equality. According to ABC News, the President stressed that his is a “personal position,” and he continues to think that states should decide the issue independently.

Indeed, the White House’s talking points, leaked and reported on BuzzFeed, read “We make it absolutely clear that we are talking about civil marriages and civil laws. This isn’t a federal issue.”

These reminders are sobering. And of course, they feed into another sobering point: actual policy, far more than words, has the lion’s share of impact on the civil rights for LGBTQ Americans.

Sadly, in that area our nation has so much room for improvement it’s not funny. Couples with and without state marriage rights have to jump through hurdles for adoption, hospital rights, taxes. State-level budget austerity leads to cuts in shelter programs for LGBTQ kids who are kicked out of their homes. Bullying and teen suicide remain a plague. Outright homophobia persists in and beyond ultra-religious circles. The scourge of killings and beatings of transgender individuals is abetted by the lack of encoded protections (in ENDA and elsewhere) for them. Gay couples whose love crosses international borders don’t have the benefit of being able to marry for citizenship. All of these issues and many more affect the day to day lives of LGBTQ citizens–as do the currently dire issues of poverty, reproductive rights, and civil liberties–and need desperately to be addressed.

Still, culture resonates, and activists need wind in their sails to get things done. So Obama’s position as an influencer of the zeitgeist, a rock star and celebrity in many circles, a charismatic leader and an eloquent spokesman for the causes he chooses to champion shouldn’t be entirely underestimated either. Young questioning and LGBT people watching TV or reading the web will know that the president supports them. So will their parents. There’s a dignity conferred by the President’s statement, and that’s important.

So here’s to a whole lot more “evolution” for the President, his advisors, the GOP, and the rest of the country on this issue. We’re already evolving at a rapid rate, after all, as MSNBC’s first read points out, the polls on the issue have totally reversed in a few short years:

Same-sex marriage is hardly the hot-button issue it was compared to the last decade, though. Support for it now eclipses opposition; 49 percent of Americans said that favor allowing gays and lesbians to marry, according to the March NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, while 40 percent oppose it. (In October 2009, 49 percent opposed same-sex marriages, while 41 percent supported them.)

Crucially, that shifting number includes political independents–which may have figured into the President’s calculations.

Partisan Death Jam: How the Two Parties Are Destroying Our Political System By Lucy McKeon

The new book “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks” explores the adversarial, winner-take-all climate we find ourselves in today that makes governing near impossible.

If you thought the debates over the debt ceiling last year – one of the most striking examples of political dysfunction and gridlock in recent memory — were over, think again. Although Republicans agreed to a small raise and to put off discussion of the issue until after the upcoming 2012 elections, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told Fox, “We’ll be doing it all over” in 2013. Clearly, the partisan rupture that’s dividing Washington is not going to heal any time soon, but how did things get so dire to begin with?

When congressional scholars Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein say “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks” – the title of their book – they’re being serious (subtitle: “How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism”). Mann, the W. Averell Harriman chair and senior fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, and Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, began the Congress Project in the midst of the 1978 midterm campaign to track the institution as it evolved. What they’ve found since hasn’t been encouraging.

In their book, Mann and Ornstein trace political dysfunction to the present, illuminating the basic incompatibility they see between the U.S. constitutional system and two highly partisan, parliamentary-like parties. Mann and Ornstein argue that the adversarial, winner-take-all climate we find ourselves in today makes it extremely hard for a majority to act in our two-party governing system. Though both parties engage in corruption, they believe the current Republican Party – which they argue is unpersuaded by fact and science, and has little in common with Reagan’s GOP – tilts the political system into “asymmetric polarization” with its refusal to support anything that might help Democrats, no matter the cost to collective interest.

Meanwhile, changes in mass media, a populist distrust of non-military leaders deemed suspiciously “elite,” and the insidious connection between money and politics join to create the terrible recipe for a truly dysfunctional political system. At a time when we’re facing serious national and global problems, they write, “The country is squandering its economic future and putting itself at risk because of an inability to govern effectively.” But there’s hope. Mann and Ornstein dedicate the second half of the book to outlining what specific institutional restructuring won’t work and what will, as well as what the public and media can do to be part of positive change.

Salon spoke with Thomas E. Mann about how the media plays into the partisan warfare, the role of the Citizens United decision in the upcoming election, and what we can do to make American politics less dysfunctional.

I’m wondering how you chose the book’s title.

It is a rather unusual title, isn’t it? We were thinking through titles and somehow we got in our minds Mark Twain’s quip about Wagner’s music, which is “It’s better than it sounds.” And so we were thinking relative to how our dysfunctional political system looks and we said, “Well, we’ve gotta say it’s worse than it looks, but that would make no sense to people who think it looks horrible already.” So we put the “even” in it – “It’s even worse than it looks.”

We are two long-time students of American politics and Congress. We’ve really become exceedingly discouraged about developments in our politics and in thought. And we’ve become frustrated by what we think is a commentary about it that ends up not being especially accurate and, frankly, reinforces the destructive dynamics of the system by leading the public to think it’s all hopeless: They’re all the same, it’s a corrupt system, it’s an utterly incompetent system, and therefore removing, in many respects, any basis on which a public could actually change that system. Instead you get a kind of visceral reaction: “Throw the bums out!” And that usually has the effect of reinforcing whatever you have now or making it worse.

How is partisan confrontation more serious today than it has been since you began studying American politics? 

It’s the worst we’ve seen in our 40 years of observing up-close Congress and the presidency and the American political system more broadly. We’ve gone through very difficult periods in our politics: polarized times in the post-Reconstruction period; turn of the 2oth century; we’ve, of course, just had exceptionally traumatic times before the Civil War; and difficulties in the early 1800s as well. So we make no claim that this is the worst ever, but if we’re comparing ourselves now to the pre-Civil War period, that’s not such good news, is it? What we can say is that the parties are more polarized than they have been in over a century. We can say that the Republican Party is more conservative than it’s been in over a century. We can get that evidence from looking at behavior within the Congress and patterns of voting, but we can also see how, in many respects, that public aligns with those polarized parties.

Some people make an argument, which we believe is more myth than reality, that the public is overwhelmingly moderate, centrist, pragmatic, independent, and it’s only the elite, the partisan elite, that engage in their own wars and cause the problems – that they don’t properly represent the sentiments of voters. We think that’s wrong, that the public – at least, the public active enough to vote – and in those who do more than voting particularly, are very much a piece of this now. We’ve kind of sorted ourselves into two warring parties. We’ve done it by a choice of neighborhoods in which to reside, on the base of our own ideological dispositions. A whole host of factors have led us into areas of people with like-minded values and beliefs and preferences, and that actually encourages the developments in Washington and, frankly, in state legislatures around the country that many people bemoan. So that’s part of it, why we think it’s exceptionally bad now.

Another part is that we’re facing the most serious economic crisis since the Great Depression, and yet our political system is set up in a way in which it’s very hard for an opposition party to be open to participating in any solutions to that because that would legitimize the party in power, which would keep them from getting there. And so they are engaged now in an ever more permanent campaign to obstruct, defeat, discredit, repeal anything that is done by – usually defined as – the president’s party. And we’ve now seen a willingness to engage in hostage-taking and a game of dangerous threats,  which lead to the downgrading of American currency.

You explicitly dispel the media myth that both sides are equally guilty of partisan misbehavior. What’s different about the current Republican Party?

It’s a very important piece of the argument that we’re making. I’ve already indicated to you that in ideological terms, as best as we can measure, the Republican Party is the most conservative it’s been in over a century. But I think just as importantly, it’s become a party that believes it’s essential to stick to your principles and not engage in any kind of collaboration with – negotiating or compromise with – the enemy, which is defined as the other party. That’s unusual. And then you put that together with simply no respect for facts, for evidence, for science, and add to that the willingness to simply reject the legitimacy of the other side. It’s as if we were replaying the election of 1800 and the party that eventually won wouldn’t take office because they were deemed illegitimate or vice versa. The peaceful transfer of power, the respect for the office of the presidency, the willingness to say, “We have our differences, it’s important to discuss those but in the end we’re all Americans,” and so on, that’s rejected by a whole lot of Republicans right now.

Our politics and governing system just doesn’t work very well when one of our parties has strayed – in both policy and process terms – far from the mainstream, because we have a system of separated powers, we have numerous veto points, and it really does require willingness at some point to work across the aisle. If we had a parliamentary system of government, then these parliamentary-like parties would be OK, because you would, through an election, create a majority and that majority (the government) could put its program into place and then be judged accordingly for five years later. But we don’t have that. We have a system in which a minority can frustrate the efforts of the majority, not to simply get a better negotiating position, which is the way in the past it has worked, but to literally stop the new president’s or new majority’s program dead in the water. And that together is what created our dysfunctional politics.

And how does the media contribute to all of this?

I think the “mainstream media,” that is the non-partisan or ideological press, is utterly helpless in the face of the reality that we have right now. That is, the strong journalistic norms of fairness, of balance, of getting the full story, which tends to be interpreted as both sides out, has in effect created a distorted view of what’s happening in the world, and the irony is many individual members of the press know it. So I guess the biggest problem with the press and, again, by that I’m talking about the sort of press that aspires to practice good journalism, and not simply to be a partisan or ideological participant in the political wars, that they have basically assumed that getting both sides, letting the warring parties and individuals speak, is the best way to cover the story and also provide a little safety from charges of political bias. And in so doing, they’ve actually helped to perpetuate the very problems that we have. And I say that as a friend and admirer and regular reader of many, many, many members of that press.

How do you think Obama’s election affected the dysfunctional atmosphere back in 2008?

Let me say, it’s worth looking back to the Clinton presidency, especially the first couple of years and last couple of years. Because he ran on a tax cut, but then was persuaded that he had to do something to deal with deficits and he spent most of his first year trying to do it. He never got a single Republican vote in the House or Senate for this. And he was attacked, subject to dozens of corruption investigations, most of which ended up being bogus, and in the end he was impeached! In 1998, by a Republican House that had just been dealt a setback in the election because of its talk about impeachment. So this has been in the works for some time. But I think Obama has intensified and accelerated it. Certainly his race is a consideration. But so too was the threat of a Democratic president mobilizing constituencies that are growing and potentially putting the Democratic Party in a dominant position. So all of that conspired to convince the Republicans in Congress, who’d just taken a shellacking, to develop a strategy – which is now well-documented – before Obama was inaugurated, to sit together to oppose everything.

In part two of the book, you outline many major institutional changes that you think definitely will, or definitely won’t, work. Can you speak to some of the solutions you do support? 

As you say, we devote one chapter to saying what not to do. We try to pare down some horrible ideas that get great credence in the public discussion. We say we need to change our electoral system in ways to increase public participation because that would have diminished some of the intense ideological views expressed by the public as a whole. We need to change the institutional arrangements so that the routinization of the filibuster can be destroyed – it is a modern phenomenon and we have some ideas about that. But in the end, we say it’s the electorate that has to rein in the insurgent outlier, and that’s very problematic just because of the confusion of what would make for a better, more workable system. And so, the odds are, depending on what happens with the economy, that Obama will win. But Republicans could easily hold the House and take the Senate. And therefore, Republicans might be encouraged to basically have the same strategy of opposition as they have now. We argue in the book that it’s the public that produces divided government, but in times of highly polarized parties, that’s a formula for gridlock, inaction and government dysfunction.

And the individual citizens of a democracy must have a role in this change as well.

What the public could do is what democratic theory tells us they would do, which is that if one party goes too far from the mainstream of public thinking, public preferences, accepted democratic processes, they’ll be reined in by the electorate. So an overwhelming across-the-board Democratic vote would probably so shake the Republican Party that those who have been distressed within the party by recent developments would have an opportunity to come forward as a new kind of leadership with alternative programs and platforms. But that seems very unlikely to happen, so what we’re probably going to have is Obama figuring out a way to use the expiration of all of the tax cuts in the beginning of the sequestration of defense and other things as a way to force a compromise with the Republicans because, in this case, the status quo is unacceptable to them.

It’s going to be a tricky bit of maneuvering but I think that the thrust of our argument is all these so-called bipartisan or nonpartisan efforts to sort of bring the parties together and find a bipartisan solution: It’s a pipe dream. It’s ridiculous. It can’t happen. So we’re going to have to figure out, voters and politicians, how to operate in a hyper-partisan system, and hopefully get leverage at times to force action that is actually responsive to the country’s problems.

Looking ahead to the coming election, in the wake of the Citizens United decision, what sort of alternative to corrupt campaign funding do you see?

We argue that efforts on the left for full public financing of elections right now is simply impossible given the interpretations the Supreme Court has made about the First Amendment as applied to money and politics. Such systems have to be voluntary; they get overwhelmed by the independent spending group like, in its latest manifestation, the super PACs, and it’s sort of a pipe dream. There are individuals out there writing books, making the case that money is the root of all evil and if we just get it out of the system our politics will return to a healthy equilibrium. We think there are a lot of problems with money in politics, and we need to deal with them, but the problems go well beyond that. Given the composition of the court, there are only incremental things one can do: increasing transparency, trying to generate more small donations, and looking for ways to improve the process that way. The others are as much pipe dreams as those on the right calling for a balanced budget amendment.

The Dark Side of the Prestigious Marine Barracks

By Col. Ann Wright

According to Marine Corps lore, semper fidelis, a Latin phrase for “always faithful,” commands Marines to remain a “brotherhood, faithful to the mission at hand, to each other, to the Corps and to country, no matter what. Becoming a Marine is a transformation that cannot be undone and once made, a Marine will forever live by the ethics and values of the Corps.”

The Marine Barracks in Washington, D.C., is the official residence of the commandant of the Marine Corps. It is the home of the Marines who are the ceremonial guard for the president during official U.S. government functions and the security force for the White House and Camp David. The Marine Band, also located at the Barracks, is known as “The President’s Own.” The Barracks is the showplace of the Marine Corps with its Silent Drill Platoon giving weekly military precision performances for the public during the busy summer tourist season.

But the Marine Barracks has its dark and ugly side. It is also the home of officers and enlisted men of the Marine Corps who have been accused of sexually harassing, assaulting and raping female Marine officers and enlisted and civilian women who work there.

According to information provided by the Marine Barracks Washington legal adviser at the request of the Senate Armed Services Committee minority counsel, from 2009 to 2010 three female Marines and two civilian women reported to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) that they had been raped by male Marines. Two of the female Marines held high-visibility jobs at the Barracks and said they were raped by senior officers.

During the same period, two other female Marines and two other civilian women reported that they had been sexually harassed by Marines at the Barracks.

Second Rape Lawsuit Filed Against Marines, Navy and DOD

On March 6, 2012, attorney Susan Burke filed a federal lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., on behalf of eight military women—four Marines and four Navy members—who said they were raped while in the service. Two of the four female Marine officers served at the Barracks and alleged that they had been raped by Marines assigned there. The two, Lt. Ariana Klay and Lt. Elle Helmer, spoke at a news conference announcing the lawsuit and on national TV shows afterward.

This is the second lawsuit filed in a little over a year against the Department of Defense on the issue of rape in the military. The first lawsuit was filed on Feb. 15, 2011, and was brought by 15 female and two male active-duty military personnel and veterans. They accused the DOD of permitting a military culture that fails to prevent rape and sexual assault and alleged that it mishandled cases that were brought to its attention, thus violating the plaintiffs’ constitutional rights.

On Dec. 9, 2011, U.S. District Judge Liam O’Grady dismissed the suit, saying the sexual assault allegations were “troubling” but that Supreme Court and other court decisions had advised against judicial involvement in cases of military discipline. O’Grady cited Gilligan v. Morgan, decided in 1973 by the U.S. Supreme Court, which determined that “matters of military discipline should be left to the ‘political branches directly responsible—as the judicial branch is not—to the electoral process.’ ” O’Grady said, “Not even the egregious allegations within the plaintiffs’ complaint will prevent dismissal.”

The March 2012 lawsuit names current and former secretaries of defense and military chiefs of the Navy and Marine Corps as defendants. It alleges that “Although defendants testified before Congress and elsewhere that they have ‘zero tolerance’ for rape and sexual assault, their conduct and the facts demonstrate the opposite: They have a high tolerance for sexual predators in their ranks, and ‘zero tolerance’ for those who report rape, sexual assault and harassment.” The lawsuit alleges that “Defendants have a long-standing pattern of ignoring congressional mandates designed to ameliorate the armed services’ dismal record of rape and sexual assault. As but one example, defendant [Leon] Panetta [secretary of defense] continues to violate the law requiring the Department of Defense to establish an incident-specific Sexual Assault Database no later than January 2010.” More than two years later, the database still does not exist.

“Rather than being respected and appreciated for reporting crimes and unprofessional conduct,” the lawsuit alleges, “plaintiffs and others who report are branded ‘troublemakers,’ endure egregious and blatant retaliation, and are often forced out of military service.”

Lt. Ariana Klay

According to the lawsuit, Klay, a Naval Academy graduate, served as a protocol officer for the Marine Barracks. She alleges that while there, she was sexually harassed by a lieutenant colonel, a major and a captain. She said she was gang-raped by a Marine officer and his civilian friend, a former Marine. Klay alleges that the Marine officer threatened to kill her and told his friend he would show him “what a slut she was” and “humiliate” her.

After she reported the alleged rapes and subsequent harassment, the Marine Corps investigation ruled that she welcomed the harassment because “she wore makeup, regulation-length skirts as a part of her uniform and exercised in running shorts and tank tops.”

The Marine Corps did not punish any of those who were accused of sexually harassing Klay. One of her alleged harassers was granted a waiver by the Corps that permitted him to get a security clearance despite accusations of hazing and sexual misconduct against not only Klay but many others. He was selected to be in a nationally televised recruitment commercial while he was still under investigation. According to the lawsuit, the Marine Corps featured Klay’s alleged rapist and a harasser in the Marine calendar.

The Marine Corps finally court-martialed one of Klay’s alleged attackers but didn’t convict him of rape, instead finding him guilty of adultery and indecent language (a common escape by military courts from the rape charge). The military court ruled that Klay “consented” to having sex with the men despite the evidence that the accused threatened to kill her.

Klay has attempted suicide since the alleged rapes and harassment and has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Lt. Elle Helmer

In 2005, Helmer was appointed the public affairs officer for the Barracks, the federal lawsuit says. In 2006, she was selected to also serve as the first female “ceremonial parade staff flanking officer.” Helmer alleged that the “selecting” officer, a Marine captain, made continuing sexual advances to her that she reported to the Marine Barracks equal opportunity officer. Nothing was done to stop the advances, Helmer said.

Another superior officer, a major, required Helmer to attend a “pub crawl” for St. Patrick’s Day that had been endorsed by the unit’s colonel, the lawsuit alleges. When Helmer objected to going, she says the major told her that it was a mandatory work event. The pub crawl involved Marine officers identified by the T-shirts they were wearing going from bar to bar on Capitol Hill drinking excessive amounts of alcohol, paid for by the Marine Corps, the lawsuit says. Helmer says she was required to drink shots of liquor at the same pace as the bigger male officers and when she drank water to try to keep herself from becoming intoxicated, she was required by the major to drink an extra shot as a punishment.

Helmer became intoxicated and left the group to find a cab home. She said the major followed her and told her that she must come with him to his office to discuss a business matter. When they reached his office, Helmer alleges, the major tried to kiss her and when she resisted he grabbed her and knocked her over. She says she lost consciousness at that point.

Upon regaining consciousness, she said, she found herself lying on the floor in the major’s office, wearing his shorts. He was allegedly passed out on the floor nearby, naked.

Helmer left the office and reported to the Marine Command that she had been raped. She alleges the colonel there discouraged her from asking for a rape kit examination, saying it would “be out of his hands.” Nonetheless, Helmer got a medical examination that employed a rape kit.

NCIS initially refused to investigate Helmer’s allegations, despite the medical and circumstantial evidence, saying that her inability to recall the incident precluded any investigation. After a delay in which the alleged crime scene was destroyed, NCIS eventually conducted a brief investigation and because of Helmer’s lack of consciousness during the incident concluded that nothing could be done. Additionally, the Marine Corps reported it had lost the Helmer rape kit, the medical evidence allegedly indicating rape.

Helmer took the case to the major’s superior officer, who acknowledged that the NCIS investigation was “woefully inadequate” and removed the major from his command. No further steps were taken, the lawsuit alleges. Helmer says the superior officer told her, “You’re from Colorado—you’re tough. You need to pick yourself up and dust yourself off. I can’t baby-sit you all of the time.”

Helmer says she was eventually forced to leave the Marine Corps. The alleged rapist remains a Marine officer in good standing.

Rape Reporting in the Military

The Department of Defense estimates that only 20 percent of military personnel who experience “unwanted sexual contact” report it to military authorities because the accusations can be met with suspicion and the victims can experience retaliation.

In 2009, 3,230 service members reported being raped or sexually assaulted, but the Department of Defense estimated that 16,150 actually were raped or sexually assaulted during that year.

In 2010, 3,158 military personnel reported sexual assault or rape. The DOD estimated 15,790 were actually raped or assaulted.

In addition, in 2010, 68,379 veterans had at least one VA outpatient visit related to military sexual trauma. About 39 percent, or 26,904, of those outpatients requesting treatment for military sexual trauma were male veterans.

Retaliatory Culture for Those Reporting Rape

The Department of Defense has finally quantified the retaliatory culture of the military. The DOD 2010 Annual Report on Sexual Assault in the Military found that 44 percent of active-duty women and 20 percent of active-duty men who had been victims of sexual assaults or rapes did not report them because “they thought their performance evaluation or chance for promotion would suffer.” Even more decided not to report because they “thought they would be labeled a troublemaker.”

Most rapists evade any form of punishment, much less incarceration. The DOD sexual assaults report said that fewer than 8 percent of suspected perpetrators were court-martialed and convicted, while in civilian life 40 percent of the accused were prosecuted. Most military personnel who have committed rape or sexual assault are allowed to be honorably discharged; if they’re forced to retire, they still receive their full benefits.

The DOD does not maintain a military sex offender registry that can alert service members, unit commanders, communities and civilian law enforcement to the presence and movement of sexual predators. Military sex offenders are not placed on the national sex offenders’ database created by the Department of Justice.

The Navy and the Marine Corps give a substantial number of waivers to potential recruits who have criminal records, including felony convictions. A 2007 study found that in 2006 the Marines gave 20,750 recruits (54.3 percent of all those recruited that year) waivers for criminal convictions. In 2005, 20,426 recruits (53.5 percent) were given them.

In 2006, the Navy gave 3,502 recruits, or 9.7 percent of those recruited, waivers for criminal conduct. In 2005, it gave them to 3,467 recruits, or 9.2 percent.

According to a 2009 study, 13 percent of men enlisting in the Navy admitted that they had raped someone. Of those men, 71 percent admitted to serial rapes. The perpetrators said that they targeted people they knew rather than strangers and generally used drugs or alcohol rather than brute force to incapacitate their victims.

What Can Be Done to Stop Rape and Boost Prosecutions?

Anu Bhagwati, a former Marine Corps captain and company commander and now executive director of the Service Women’s Action Network, says that the Pentagon’s primary solution for ending rape is through its Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office (SAPRO), which has no law enforcement authority to prosecute or punish. She says SAPRO’s messaging to military troops is questionable, including its infamous poster that says “Ask Her When She’s Sober.”

Bhagwati strongly believes that the military should have all sexual assault cases handled at the General Court Martial Convening Authority level, where a general officer—with more experience, maturity and impartiality than a junior commander in whose unit the alleged crime occurred—would decide whether they should be prosecuted.

Another option is offered in the Sexual Assault Training Oversight and Prevention Act (the STOP Act), introduced by Congresswoman Jackie Speier on Nov. 16, 2011. H.R. 3435 would take the reporting, oversight, investigation and victim care of sexual assaults out of the hands of the military’s normal chain of command and place jurisdiction for them in the newly created, autonomous Sexual Assault Oversight and Response Office, composed of civilian and military experts.

Speier has been talking about the issue of rape in the military each week for four months on the floor of the House of Representatives.

Because of the reluctance of the military to prosecute sexual predators, Bhagwati also calls for reform to allow service members access to the federal courts for civil redress of these crimes. Currently, service members cannot bring a tort claim in federal court for rape, sexual assault and harassment cases and other crimes and acts of negligence by the military, including medical malpractice and workplace discrimination.

There is a pattern of the military using psychiatric diagnoses to get women who report sexual assaults out of the military.

According to a Freedom of Information Act request, from 2001 to 2010 the military discharged more than 31,000 service members, citing a personality disorder—“a long-standing, inflexible pattern of maladaptive behavior and coping, beginning in adolescence or early adulthood.” The military considers a personality disorder diagnosis as a non-service-related, pre-existing condition. Veterans Affairs will not provide treatment for a pre-existing condition, and the service members are left without treatment for their sexual assault trauma. Additionally, service members who are diagnosed with a personality disorder and are discharged lose GI Bill educational benefits and have to repay re-enlistment bonuses.

Military records obtained by Yale Law School’s Veterans Legal Services Clinic through a separate Freedom of Information Act request show that the personality diagnosis is used disproportionately on women. In the Army, 16 percent of all soldiers are women, but they constitute 24 percent of all personality disorder discharges. Women make up 21 percent of the Air Force but account for 35 percent of personality discharges. In the Navy, women account for 17 percent of the total members but 26 percent of personality discharges, while the 7 percent of the Marine Corps who are female account for 14 percent of the personality discharges. The records do not state how many women were ordered discharged from the military with a personality disorder diagnosis.

On April 16, 2012, after pressure during meetings with congressional leaders, Secretary of Defense Panetta said he would ensure that officers of at least the rank of colonel with special court-martial authority would oversee sexual assault cases rather than junior officer commanders. Although reported sexual assaults continue to rise, junior commander-initiated actions to prosecute offenders were down 23 percent, courts-martial were down 8 percent and convictions decreased 22 percent from 2010 to 2011.

Panetta also will recommend to the military that special victims units be established to handle the offenses and that National Guard and Reserve members be allowed to remain on duty after they are sexually assaulted so they can obtain treatment and support, which they currently lose when they are removed from active duty.

To learn more about rape in the military, see the film “The Invisible War.” It won the audience award at the Sundance Film Festival in January.

The Curse of King Martin by Kathy Shaidle 

Rich Lowry owes John Derbyshire an apology.

When Lowry fired Derbyshire from National Review for writing a “racist” column here at Taki’s, he took particular issue with Derb’s contention that whites should “Stay out of heavily black neighborhoods.”

Lowry was clearly unfamiliar with (black) comedian Chris Rock’s 1996 bit about avoiding any street in America named Martin Luther King Boulevard. As everyone (except National Review editors) knows, avenues christened in honor of that self-proclaimed champion of nonviolence usually run through black neighborhoods and tend to be among the country’s most dangerous.

The Curse of King Martin now seems to have extended beyond eponymous boulevards. In a development that’s sure to equal bad news for the Mall in DC, whites are on notice to steer clear of streets boasting monuments to MLK, too.

“Don’t leave your driveway without Derb behind the wheel and Chris Rock sitting shotgun.”

An 83-foot-tall obelisk honoring King stands over the corner of Brambleton Avenue and Church Street in Norfolk, Virginia, which is precisely where a white couple were driving last month when they were set upon by (depending on who’s doing the talking) “dozens” or “at least 100” black youths.

Sadly, such black-on-white swarms have become commonplace over the last few years, although you’d never know it unless you read the Drudge Report, which is one of the only “mainstream” news outlets that dares to report on the epidemic.

The white victims attacked in Norfolk worked four blocks away at a mainstream news outlet—the local Virginian-Pilot newspaper.

Which decided not to report this attack on its very own reporters.

(Maybe because, hey, they were short-staffed for a week—the pair having been forced to take time off work due to their injuries and all….)

It wasn’t until a Virginian-Pilot columnist wrote an opinion piece on the incident a fortnight later that residents learned about the couple’s terrifying ordeal. And boy, were they pissed: at the black teens and their online supporters (one of whom called the attack revenge for Trayvon Martin—an “excuse” that’s proving to be predictably popular with thugs of late); at their local self-appointed media gatekeepers; and at the police, whose indifferent mumblings about the crime sound like dialogue deleted from RoboCop as unrealistic. Mechanical police wouldn’t sound either this touchy or this indifferent:

An officer on the scene reportedly told one injured victim to “shut up and get in the car,” then shrugged that the attackers “were probably juveniles anyway. What are we going to do? Find their parents and tell them?” He then supposedly pointed to a nearby public housing complex and shrugged, “It’s what they do.”

Stung by charges of dereliction and incompetence, the Norfolk cops’ spokesman Chris Amos complained wearily that, when trying to establish the exact number of teen attackers, “we’re kind of at the mercy of our victims.” He didn’t ascribe any racial motives to the crime, which he characterized as “someone throwing a rock at someone’s car” and “simple assault”—because “there’s no code for mob assault” in the police department’s “system.”

Amos’s advice for motorists who find themselves in similar situations?

“Call the police,” of course.

Except the couple did call 911. It took them three tries to get through.

If only they’d had the chance to use Microsoft’s “ghetto app” instead.

It’s officially called “Pedestrian Route Production”—this still-in-development smart-phone application will be designed to help the user avoid “unsafe neighborhoods.”

Predictably, the Dallas NAACP and other black critics have denounced the as-yet-unavailable phone feature as “racist.”

But what about listening to Chris Rock’s Bring the Pain in the car? Is that “racist,” too?

The ever-helpful comic has another routine about “driving while black.” Once again, he provides simple, common-sense (and foul-mouthed) tips for avoiding a beatdown, this time at the hands of police: obey the law, turn down that loud rap music, and don’t run from the cops.

Rock also jokingly tells black drivers to “get a white friend” whose mere presence in the bitch seat could mean the difference “between a ticket and a bullet in the ass.”

In all likelihood, Microsoft will be bullied by racial shakedown artists into junking the “ghetto app” that—especially if programmed to alert users to any street (or statue) with Martin Luther King’s name on it—could’ve prevented the Norfolk attack and many others.

This leaves white drivers who’d rather risk death than accusations of racism with one utterly impractical, ultra-low-tech option when they need tips on which neighborhoods to avoid: Don’t leave your driveway without Derb behind the wheel and Chris Rock sitting shotgun.