As Pretty As A Song

Lara Logan thought she was going to die in Tahrir Square when she was sexually assaulted by a mob on the night that Hosni Mubarak’s government fell in Cairo.

Ms. Logan, a CBS News correspondent, was in the square preparing a report for “60 Minutes” on Feb. 11 when the celebratory mood suddenly turned threatening. She was ripped away from her producer and bodyguard by a group of men who tore at her clothes and groped and beat her body. “For an extended period of time, they raped me with their hands,” Ms. Logan said in an interview with The New York Times. She estimated that the attack lasted for about 40 minutes and involved 200 to 300 men.

Ms. Logan, who returned to work this month, is expected to speak at length about the assault on “60 Minutes” on Sunday night.

Her experience in Cairo underscored the fact that female journalists often face a different kind of violence. While other forms of physical violence affecting journalists are widely covered — traumatic brain injury suffered by the ABC News anchor Bob Woodruff in Iraq in 2006 was a front-page story at that time — sexual threats against women are rarely talked about within journalistic circles or in the media.

With sexual violence, “you only have your word,” Ms. Logan said in the interview. “The physical wounds heal. You don’t carry around the evidence the way you would if you had lost your leg or your arm in Afghanistan.”

Little research has been conducted about the prevalence of sexual violence affecting journalists in conflict zones. But in the weeks following Ms. Logan’s assault, other women recounted being harassed and assaulted while working overseas, and groups like the Committee to Protect Journalists said they would revise their handbooks to better address sexual assault.

You want 9/11 first responders to know that - before they get their chemo money for the cancer they got sifting through World Trade Center rubble in hopes to identify those we lost in the attack - you have one, last, just tiny loose end to tie up. We just have to make sure you’re not a terrorist.

Actually, you know who else has to go through that type of check to get their money? Nobody. Not for Medicare, not for Medicaid, not Social Security, not farm subsidies, not oil subsidies, not for FEMA disaster money.

You want billions in bailout money? You get that without being crosschecked across the terrorist watch list. The only thing they want to know in that case is… did you start the financial meltdown in the first place? Because if you did, here’s your f**king money!

To put pressure on lawyers defending clients or laws because lobby groups don’t like them is deeply illiberal. It remains disgusting, for example, that rightwing groups targeted lawyers defending terror suspects and Gitmo prisoners. When the far right did this, it was despicable. Now that the left is doing it [in regards to DOMA], it remains just as despicable.

Memo to the gay rights leadership: the ends do not justify the means. Let DOMA have the most robust defense it can possibly muster and let us argue just as passionately for its unconstitutionality. When civil rights groups bully, they lose the moral high-ground. When you have men like David Brock leading the charge - and there are no means he has ever eschewed to achieve his ends - the danger is that we prove the far right’s point. We must be better than them.

True, Bernie Madoff ripped off rich and famous people, and true also, Bill Maher is rich and famous, and the guys who ripped him off - namely Lehman Brothers execs like Dick Fuld - have gotten off, unlike Madoff. So I suppose that’s sort of a contradiction. I think the point I was trying to make is that Madoff was really an anomaly, more of a common street con-man who ripped off high-society types, while guys like Fuld and the other bankers represented a more sophisticated systemic sort of fraud that broadly targeted foreigners, pensioners, and the middle and lower classes (and especially the urban poor). Going after one of the latter types would have opened a giant Pandora’s box and forced an industry-wide examination of financial practices that caused the crisis, while busting Madoff was a relatively simple matter that didn’t force the Justice Department and the SEC to take on the whole financial sector.

Madoff is exactly the kind of case that the SEC likes: a soft target whose investigation doesn’t necessarily lead in too many directions. Also, as former Lehman lawyer Oliver Budde just pointed out to me in an email, they couldn’t NOT prosecute Madoff - he confessed and was turned in! They would have had to do crazy intellectual somersaults to avoid jailing the guy. Not that they aren’t capable, of course.

When confronted by journalists with the actual fact that over 90 percent of the services provided by Planned Parenthood clinics throughout the country are comprised of preventive health care services such as breast and cervical cancer screenings, testing and treatment of sexually transmitted infections, and the provision of contraceptive supplies, Kyl’s office replied as follows:
The Senator’s statement on the floor of the Senate was “not intended to be factual.” I am sure Kyl’s office did not intend it as such but this is perhaps the most apt and revealing description of the anti-choice movement ever offered by one of its members.

In fact, it is based on a foundation of lies so deep I’d recommend regulation by the Mine Safety and Health Administration if I thought they did their job regulating coal mines effectively in the first place.
It is a movement not intended to be factual.

There are things that happen in the news for which you need a reporter, like — hey, the rebels in Benghazi are getting some international military help now. How do those rebels feel about that? Call Richard Engel. He’s in Benghazi.

There are also things that happen in the news for which you don’t necessarily need a reporter. You need an expert analyst, like — hey, it’s not just the reactors, it’s the spent fuel pools that aren’t getting cooled anymore at Fukushima either. How dangerous is that? Call Professor Von Hippel at Princeton, he’ll know.

But then there are things that happen in the news for which you do not need a reporter. You understand the facts of what’s happening. You do not need an expert analysis. The layman’s base is enough to understand what it all means.

There are things that happen in the news for which you don’t need a reporter. You don’t need an expert analyst to help you understand. What you need is a comedian in order to understand their importance.