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FOCUS | Janay Rice Responds |
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Tuesday, 09 September 2014 11:25 |
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Rice writes: "No one knows the pain that the media and unwanted [opinions] from the public has cause my family. To make us relive a moment in our lives that we regret every day is a horrible thing."
Janay Rice, the wife of running back Ray Rice of the Baltimore Ravens, looks on during a news conference at the Ravens training center on May 23, 2014, in Owings Mills. (photo: Rob Carr/Getty Images)
ALSO SEE: What the Ray Rice
Video Really Shows
Janay Rice Responds
By Janay Rice, Reader Supported News
09 September 14
 The following statement was published on Janay Rice's Instagram account.
 woke up this morning feeling like I had a horrible nightmare, feeling like I’m mourning the death of my closest friend. But you have to accept the fact that reality is a nightmare in itself. No one knows the pain that the media and unwanted [opinions] from the public has cause my family. To make us relive a moment in our lives that we regret every day is a horrible thing. To take something away from the man I love that he has worked his ass off for all his life just to gain ratings is horrific. THIS IS OUR LIFE! What don’t you all get. If your intentions were to hurt us, embarrass us, make us feel alone, take all happiness away, you succeeded on so many levels. Just know we will continue to grow and show the world what real love is! Ravens nation we love you!
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Ray Rice, Baltimore Ravens, and the NFL Were Reckless and Callous |
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Tuesday, 09 September 2014 08:18 |
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Excerpt: "We find it somewhat difficult to believe that tmz was able to get a copy of the video while the NFL and the Ravens, presumably with the ability to demand Mr. Rice's cooperation, were not. But it doesn't really matter. What did they think happened on that elevator?"
Ray Rice was released by the Baltimore Ravens. (photo: The Baltimore Ravens)
Ray Rice, Baltimore Ravens, and the NFL Were Reckless and Callous
By The Baltimore Sun | Editorial
09 September 14
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzRT2m6Cp8k
 he Ravens insist they had not seen the video taken by an Atlantic City casino elevator security camera showing Ray Rice knock out his then-fiancée, now wife, Janay Palmer, until it was posted Monday morning by the website tmz.com. Ditto the National Football League. Thus, we are expected to believe, these two organizations were just as shocked and appalled as the general public at the sight of the 206-pound running back punching Ms. Palmer with his left fist so forcefully that it knocked her off her feet, into the handrail at the side of the elevator they were riding, and then to the floor. So shocked, in fact, that the team, which had previously expressed nothing but support for Mr. Rice, would immediately release him from his contract, and NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, who had previously insisted that his new, tougher stance on domestic violence would not apply to Mr. Rice, would suspend him indefinitely.
We find it somewhat difficult to believe that tmz was able to get a copy of the video while the NFL and the Ravens, presumably with the ability to demand Mr. Rice’s cooperation, were not. But it doesn’t really matter. What did they think happened on that elevator?
The video does not provide us with any new facts about this incident. We have long known that in the early morning hours of Feb. 15, Ms. Palmer and Mr. Rice entered an elevator in the now defunct Revel Casino in Atlantic City, that the two had an altercation, and that Mr. Rice struck her, rendering her unconscious. Those facts were plainly stated in the official complaint against Mr. Rice in New Jersey. We, the NFL and the Ravens did not need video evidence to know that when a man knocks a woman unconscious, it is grotesque and horrifying. That is what domestic violence is.
Yet until today, the league, the Ravens and many fans were willing to suspend their good judgment about what we must have known intuitively to be true. Mr. Goodell initially defended his decision to apply a punishment for domestic violence that was less severe than some players have received for smoking marijuana. He only admitted he had been wrong and established tougher penalties for future cases after a massive public outcry. The Ravens — including owner Steve Bisciotti, General Manager Ozzie Newsome and Coach John Harbaugh — have repeatedly defended and supported Mr. Rice during the last six months. And Ravens fans gave Mr. Rice a standing ovation when he took to the field for the first time this year in a pre-season game.
Such support is now inconceivable because we can no longer pretend that Mr. Rice’s actions that night were anything other than what they were: sickening violence and callous indifference to the damage he had wrought. The video is a bit grainy, but this much is clear: After the two enter the elevator, Ms. Palmer presses a button, the two exchange some words, and then some shoving. Ms. Palmer rushes at Mr. Rice, but before she can reach him at the other side of the elevator, he throws a single punch that sends her tumbling to the ground where she lies, unresponsive.
What happens next only makes matters worse. Mr. Rice does not kneel to comfort her, or to check on her injuries. He waits until the elevator doors open and then lifts her limp form from under the shoulders and tries to drag her from the elevator. He leaves her face-down, half in and half out of the elevator and at one point nudges her with his foot as if to see whether she might be roused. A man who appears to be a security guard arrives, and Mr. Rice manages to get her into a sitting position in the elevator doorway, and he paces in the periphery of the screen as she sits crumpled on the ground.
There is no doubt that law enforcement officials in New Jersey had seen all of this, yet they permitted Mr. Rice to enter a pretrial diversion program that could eventually result in all charges being erased from his record. We do not dispute the value of the counseling Mr. Rice and Ms. Palmer must complete as a result nor do we discount the possibility that the two could move on from this incident. But we certainly question prosecutors’ willingness to agree to a deal that could, from a legal standpoint, erase it from the record.
As for the Ravens, they remained supportive of Mr. Rice after an earlier video surfaced, showing the scene outside of the elevator as Mr. Rice dragged Ms. Palmer into the corridor and dumped her as if she were a sack of flour. At the time, Mr. Harbaugh, in discussing the arrests of Mr. Rice and several other Ravens during the off-season, said that “redemption is something we think is important,” adding, “If there's ever a point in time when we feel like that person has lost value for our team, really it starts with football, or because of their character they're no longer what we want to have be a part of us, then you move on from those guys.” In July, he said of Mr. Rice, “When your family member has a problem, you do not unilaterally abandon them.”
On Monday, the Ravens dumped him and announced it on Twitter.
For all Mr. Harbaugh’s talk of character and family, the Ravens are a business. They supported Mr. Rice when they thought he still added value to the team. Now, no amount of on-field talent can make up for the revulsion Ravens fans will feel when they remember the sight of his left fist smashing into Ms. Palmer’s face. If team officials really hadn’t seen the video until Monday, their unwavering support for Mr. Rice was reckless, in that they had to assume that it would have come out eventually, and callous, in that they knew all the pertinent facts about what happened in the elevator without having seen it. Evidently the Ravens can stomach having a player who would knock a woman down and then treat her with all the care he would give to a sack of flour — just so long as the public doesn’t see it.
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Meet One of the Scariest People on Planet Earth |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=5494"><span class="small">Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Monday, 08 September 2014 15:22 |
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Weissman writes: "Chauprade presents himself as a geopolitical realist. In fact, he’s more an old-fashioned romantic and right-wing Catholic traditionalist defending the French nation, its identity, its 1500-year-old civilization, its European origins, and its Christian culture against a host of modernist evils."
Aymeric Chauprade. (photo: Wikimedia.de)
Meet One of the Scariest People on Planet Earth
By Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News
08 September 14
  e know that almost one thousand jihadists with French nationality have gone to fight in Syria and Iraq and that many of them have joined the Islamic Caliphate,” declares Aymeric Chauprade, chief foreign policy adviser to the Front National’s Marine Le Pen and her likely choice to be foreign minister should she win the presidential election in 2017.
“We must eliminate them in situ and this should be the role of our special services immediately,” he said. “It is the responsibility of every European nation to eliminate its jihadist nationals before they return.”
Dick Cheney is alive and well and now living in France, having morphed into the controversial French political scientist now advising Europe’s ultra-right to make a priority of targeted assassinations. Did I say Dick Cheney? Or did I mean to say Barack Obama?
Chauprade presents himself as a geopolitical realist. In fact, he’s more an old-fashioned romantic and right-wing Catholic traditionalist defending the French nation, its identity, its 1500-year-old civilization, its European origins, and its Christian culture against a host of modernist evils. These include materialism, individualism, multiculturalism, the dictatorship of relativism, and the naive celebration of democracy and the Rights of Man, which Chauprade sees as an outlandish civic religion without God and “the good news of Christ.”
He sees “Holy Russia” as the “only major European power to openly and firmly embrace its Christian civilization,” and as a strategic partner against American hegemony and “the alliance of Western globalism with anarchist nihilism.” This unholy “alliance” Chauprade blames for “the color revolutions” in Georgia and Ukraine, FEMEN, Pussy Riot, homosexual marriage in France, gender theory, and “enslavement by consumerist urges and sexual impulses.”
The hands-on architect of the Le Pens’ collaboration with Putin, he traveled to Moscow to applaud Russia’s anti-gay laws. He appears regularly on Russian media and served as an international observer for Moscow’s Crimean referendum, along with former collaborationists and present-day neo-Nazis organized by a Russian-backed NGO in Brussels, the Eurasian Observatory for Democracy & Elections (EODE).
“Russia has become the hope of the world against new totalitarianism,” he told members of the Duma, Russia’s parliament. And Putin has become Chauprade’s personal hope for a return to what he sees as the natural attachments of family, nation, and the divine.
For Chauprade, these are significant concerns. But, in his current view, the greatest threat is a historic “Clash of Civilizations,” Muslim vs. Christian, and more pointedly the replacement of the native French “by a population that has an African and Muslim majority.”
Hold in mind that his fear is largely bogus. The CIA’s latest World Factbook puts the country’s current population at just over 66 million, of which only 5-10% are Muslim. But many here in France share Chauprade’s feelings, just as the declining white European majority in the United States feel threatened by the growing number of non-whites, Hispanics, Asians, and other “outsiders.” We need only look at the Tea Party or listen to Rush Limbaugh. The difference, at least of degree, is that Chauprade is trying to use the nativist fear to build a majority political movement around Marine with her undeniable Fascist roots in the Front National.
Newly elected as Marine’s hand-picked candidate for the European parliament, he sees the Front National as “the last chance for France to safeguard its civilization.” His Jesuitry is cold-blooded. “There is no other credible solution than to build this majority with those who have already understood the link between the internal Islamic threat and the external Islamic threat.”
This is not the Chauprade observers know from the past. In 2009, he wrote the first edition of his “Chronique du Choc des Civilizations,” in which he proclaimed without the least shred of hard evidence that the CIA and other elements of America’s “Deep State” conspired with Israel to create the horrors of 11 September 2001. It was hardly an original argument, but the defense minister sacked him from his influential teaching post at the Joint Defense College. Chauprade went to court, won back his job, and established his reputation as something other than a defender of Israel.
Now a major player Marine Le Pen’s newly repackaged Front National, he has become just that. “Israel is not the enemy of France,” he insists. “France today has but one true enemy: Sunni fundamentalism.”
“The throat slitting, beheading, rape of young Christian or Shiite virgins, summary executions, burying alive of prisoners, macabre videos posted on YouTube and downloaded in our urban ghettos tens of millions of times, all these evil deeds we owe to ‘our magnificent allies,’ our new Middle Eastern friends gorged on petrodollars, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.”
All of which brings Chauprade to support “without reserve” American military strikes against the Islamic State in Iraq and to call for a new alliance with Syrian dictator Bashir al-Assad. Anyone who can put all that together with backing Putin as the champion of Christian civilization and great white hope has a mind greatly to be feared.
A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he is researching a new book, "Big Money and the Corporate State: How Global Banks, Corporations, and Speculators Rule and How to Nonviolently Break Their Hold."
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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Scots, What the Heck? |
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Monday, 08 September 2014 15:21 |
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Krugman writes: "Next week Scotland will hold a referendum on whether to leave the United Kingdom. And polling suggests that support for independence has surged over the past few months."
Paul Krugman. (photo: Getty Images)
Scots, What the Heck?
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
08 September 14
 ext week Scotland will hold a referendum on whether to leave the United Kingdom. And polling suggests that support for independence has surged over the past few months, largely because pro-independence campaigners have managed to reduce the “fear factor” — that is, concern about the economic risks of going it alone. At this point the outcome looks like a tossup.
Well, I have a message for the Scots: Be afraid, be very afraid. The risks of going it alone are huge. You may think that Scotland can become another Canada, but it’s all too likely that it would end up becoming Spain without the sunshine.
Comparing Scotland with Canada seems, at first, pretty reasonable. After all, Canada, like Scotland, is a relatively small economy that does most of its trade with a much larger neighbor. Also like Scotland, it is politically to the left of that giant neighbor. And what the Canadian example shows is that this can work. Canada is prosperous, economically stable (although I worry about high household debt and what looks like a major housing bubble) and has successfully pursued policies well to the left of those south of the border: single-payer health insurance, more generous aid to the poor, higher overall taxation.
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