The Shutdown, Part II: Coming This January to a Federal Government Near You
Posted by MichaelGroff on October 17, 2013 | Filed under Podcasts, Uncategorized
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After a 16 day government shut down, federal employees were returning to work on Thursday. Shortly before midnight Wednesday, the House and Senate were able to reach a temporary budget agreement that would keep the government operational through January. This latest budget resolution also prevents the United States from defaulting on the debt.
“There are no winners”, said President Barack Obama with regard to the more than two week government shut down. While the President repeatedly asked for compromise and called for an end to the rhetoric, he was quick to point out that all of this (the shut down) could have been avoided had “one side” not engaged in “Brinksmanship”. Obvious rhetorical hypocrisy aside, perhaps the President was partially correct in that much of this fiasco could have been avoided.
The House of Representatives, currently occupied by the Republicans, is the branch of government that is in charge of the budget for the nation. Essentially they hold the check book and can decide how much funding, if any, a certain department or project will receive. Realizing that their ultimate goal to repeal ‘Obamacare’ (The Affordable Care Act) is an impossible dream, Republicans came up with the idea of defunding the measure. Pretty clever, right?
Flashback to just a few weeks ago; the polls weren’t looking so great for President Obama, his approval rating was near it’s lowest level since taking office in 2009, Americans were somewhat skeptical about the looming shut down, the debt and even the Affordable Care Act. Republicans were going into the budget negotiations in the position of strength. Had the GOP stayed with their original message from the 2012 campaign to cut spending across the board it is likely that Democrats would have had to make some concessions. Republicans, however, tunnel visioned to the Affordable Care Act and Democrats were never going to budge on this measure. A stalemate ensued and the government shut down begins.
After several days, the poll numbers begin to shift. Republican favorability begins dropping, and even worse for the GOP, the rollout of the Affordable Care Act begins as scheduled. The irony in the entire shut down is that the Republicans were fighting to defund a project that was going to occur anyway because of other legislative measures and funding already in place. President Obama’s approval rating began climbing, despite the fact that the websites for ‘Obamacare’ weren’t working properly. The tide was turning against the GOP and so some members of the party began renegotiating budget talks. Of course in this situation the Republicans were now in a position of weakness, each day the shut down continued they looked worse and worse. In the end, 16 days worth of shut down, billions in back pay, the GOP getting absolutely nothing out of the many items they wanted changed in the budget and President Obama’s approval rating actually went up a few points. Could this have backfired any worse for the right?
Republicans Not the Only Loser in the Shut Down
The shut down also showed the American people one other interesting tidbit. Government isn’t nearly as important as some people would like you to believe. During the last 16 days national parks, monuments and national forests were closed because federal employees weren’t there to monitor or operate the facilities. This could have had the potential to cost local economies millions of dollars each day, but local governments and private business contributions saved the day in many cases by providing the funding necessary to reopen these areas.
Just another example of how local government and private enterprise can do things more efficiently than the federal government. So, perhaps, the other big loser in the government shut down was the government itself as people began to learn that there are other ways of handling a crisis than simply turning to the feds.
It’s Not Rape if You’re a Local Celebrity With Political Family Ties
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: The setting; a small town in the midwest, the story; a young girl (14 years old) is drinking at a party, passes out and is sexually assaulted by a 17 year old high school football player while a fellow athlete (also 17 years old) records the incident on his iPhone. Upon being dumped on her front lawn, the victim’s mother rushes the girl inside, discovers what has happened and alerts the authorities. Within a matter of a few hours the police have rounded up the two boys who confess to the crime and it looks like case closed. Except the (alleged) rapist is the grandson of a prominent state senator and the local prosecutor decides that there is insufficent evidence to move forward.
This is not a flashback to Steubenville, Ohio, but the similarities are frightening to say the least. Hopefully with the recent media attention to the case, along with the power of the activist group Anonymous, some semblance of justice will prevail.
Here’s the story with all of the details as it appeared in the LA Times:
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Pressure continued to gather against a northwestern Missouri prosecutor after top state officials called for the state attorney general to intervene and for a grand jury to investigate the alleged rape of a 14-year-old girl in the small town of Maryville.
And in separate interviews with the Los Angeles Times, the girl’s mother and the county sheriff disagreed with each other on basic facts about the handling of the case, while the county prosecutor declined to discuss his part in the investigation.
Nodaway County has been at the center of a runaway controversy as a result of county prosecutor Robert Rice’s decision to drop sexual assault and sexual exploitation charges against two former high school football players, both 17 at the time of the incident.
One boy, identified as Matthew Barnett, was accused of raping Daisy Coleman, then 14, who had consumed alcohol at his home late one night in January 2012. The other boy, Jordan Zech, allegedly videotaped part of the act.
Daisy was left on the front lawn of her home in freezing weather, lightly clothed.
Since the Kansas City Star published an explosive report on Daisy’s ordeal over the weekend, the town of 12,000 has been besieged by reporters and the hacking collective Anonymous, which has targeted key officials for harassment as well as some of the suspects’ friends and family.
Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder and House Speaker Tim Jones on Tuesday added their voices to the chorus of critics. Questions over why the case wasn’t prosecuted, Kinder said in a statement, “will fester and taint the reputation of our state for delivering impartial justice to all.”
Kinder called on Atty. Gen. Chris Koster and prosecutor Rice to join him in asking the U.S. Circuit Court to convene a grand jury to review the case and determine whether criminal charges should be filed. “The appalling facts in the public record shock the conscience and cry out that responsible authorities must take another look,” he said.
Jones, like Kinder, a Republican, went further and urged Koster to intervene. The attorney general’s office has previously declined to do so, saying it did not have the authority.
Like the rape case that made Steubenville, Ohio, a household name, the Maryville case has forced local officials and small-town families to explain themselves in the court of national public opinion.
Since the story caught national attention, Rice has become a target for the hacktivist collective Anonymous, which tweeted out his office’s number to more than a million followers Tuesday, and also called for a demonstration in front of the Nodaway County courthouse on Oct. 22.
A representative from Rice’s office told the Los Angeles Times on Tuesday that the prosecutor was not giving interviews or making any comments about the case, beyond a statement sent to the media. The statement said it had been determined there was insufficient evidence to prove a case against the suspects beyond a reasonable doubt. “The state’s witnesses refused to cooperate, and invoked their 5th Amendment privilege to not testify,” the statement said.
The Coleman family has denied that anyone ever invoked their right not to testify or refused to answer questions, but County Sheriff Darren White also said witnesses’ failure to cooperate had hampered the investigation.
“The prosecutor went after this with a fervor,” White told The Times. “It was only when the victims refused to cooperate and assist in this case that he ultimately had to drop the case.”
Before the charges were dropped, White said, Daisy twice invoked her 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination and declined to answer questions about the alleged rape. A 13-year-old girl who also was allegedly raped during the same incident “never showed up any time,” White said.
Daisy Coleman appeared Tuesday on CNN with her mother, who denied any refusal to cooperate. “We did not refuse to testify with the felony case, we were not given any information about it, and we were not asked to testify,” she said.
(The Times does not normally name victims of sexual assault, but is naming the elder girl because she has openly identified herself and publicized her case.)
In an interview with The Times, Daisy’s mother, Melinda Coleman, called both officials’ claims “a total lie.”
Coleman said the sexual assault and videotaping charges were dropped before her daughter ever gave a deposition about the alleged rape. She said her daughter never invoked her right not to incriminate herself–to the contrary, she said, Daisy refused to sign a document saying she planned to invoke her 5th Amendment right.
She said her daughter was facing recriminations for coming forward. A college-age sister of one of the five boys in the home where the rapes allegedly occurred had started a Twitter campaign, Coleman said, which was aimed at humiliating her daughter. A victim’s advocate, she said, expressed concern that Daisy would get “torn apart” by pushing ahead with the case.
Still, she said, both she and her daughter decided to push forward.
Coleman said her daughter testified at a June 2012 deposition on a separate charge unrelated to the rape case, but the prosecutor, she said, spent two hours grilling the mother not about the incident, but about a woman who had publicly criticized the prosecutor’s handling of the case.
“I don’t remember him asking anything about the case at all,” Coleman said, adding that at one point Rice told her daughter she was “lying.”
“This is the prosecuting attorney who was supposed to be protecting us, and he was chiming in with the defense attorney toward my daughter,” Coleman said.
Coleman vigorously disputed Sheriff White’s assertion that she had refused to answer questions from fire investigators about a fire that destroyed the family’s home in Maryville after they had moved away. (The cause has not been determined.)
Coleman said that officials from the city of Maryville, Nodaway County and the Missouri State Highway Patrol came to oversee the scene of the blaze.
“I called Highway Patrol, because I was honestly afraid of the sheriff and what they might do, so I wanted to have someone else there,” Coleman said. “I talked to all of them, answered questions from all of them, and the fire chief as well, and I called my insurance company for an additional forensic specialist to look at it.”
Coleman said she welcomed the possibility of a new look at the case, though she said she felt a little overwhelmed.
“They [local officials] said it over and over again that it could never be reopened,” she said. “So now I don’t know … what could really happen legally at this point.”
White, meanwhile, had his own criticism for the hacker group Anonymous, saying that authorities had detected a “pretty credible threat” that someone had attempted to infiltrate the Sheriff’s Department’s computer server, forcing the department to temporarily take it down.
“They are truly a bunch of cowards, hiding behind–even their name, ‘Anonymous.’ What do you do with people like that?” he said. “They all need to get jobs and quit living with their parents.”
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July 19, 2015 at 2:01 pm
Unicorns, show ponies, where’s the beef? lmao :)
Am sorry about the young girl. Very sad.
Love the group Anonymous. Not saying I like everything they do but they do have their ways of getting things done.