Michael P Senger @michaelpsenger, October 18, 2023: Yesterday, when @NYTimes published a fictitious story from Hamas about Israel bombing a hospital, NYT used a picture from a completely different location to make it look like a picture of the hospital that was “destroyed.” Astonishing disinformation and journalistic malpractice.
https://twitter.com/michaelpsenger/status/1714790758832898282
Bret Stephens in the New York Times, July 21, 2022: “To this day, precious few anti-Trumpers have been honest with themselves about the elaborate hoax – there’s just no other word for it – that was the Steele dossier and all the bogus allegations, credulously parroted in the mainstream media, that flowed from it.”
“To this day, precious few anti-Trumpers have been honest with themselves about the elaborate hoax – there’s just no other word for it – that was the Steele dossier and all the bogus allegations, credulously parroted in the mainstream media, that flowed from it.”
– Bret Stephens in the New York Times, July 21, 2022
Liberal media FINALLY admit they made a mistake dismissing Wuhan Lab leak theory just because Trump backed it: Washington Post, New York Times and ABC pundits say some ‘have egg on their face’
Liberal media FINALLY admit they made a mistake dismissing Wuhan Lab leak theory just because Trump backed it: Washington Post, New York Times and ABC pundits say some ‘have egg on their face’
Reporters and pundits for ABC and The New York Times admitted on television news that journalists were wrong to dismiss the lab leak theory
They claimed the journalists refused to consider the theory because it was being espoused by former President Donald Trump and Senator Tom Cotton
A columnist for the Washington Post, meanwhile, slammed the mainstream media for not ‘owning up’ to the fact they made an error in dismissing the theory
The lab leak theory has gained traction in recent weeks as more scientists and political officials question the origins of COVID-19
By Melissa Koenig
May 30, 2021
Liberal media reporters and pundits admitted over the weekend they were wrong to dismiss the Wuhan lab leak theory just because it was espoused by former President Donald Trump.
Mainstream reporters had pushed back at the idea that COVID-19 may have originated in a virology lab in Wuhan, China, and openly ridiculed the idea as Trump spoke openly about it in the early days of the pandemic.
But now, those same reporters have admitted that it is possible that the virus came from a lab leak — as more scientists and political officials openly question the virus’ origins.
‘I think a lot of people have egg on their face,’ ABC News’ Jon Karl told Martha Raddatz Sunday morning.
‘This was an idea that was first put out by Mike Pompeo, secretary of state, [and] President Donald Trump,’ he continued on ABC’s This Week, ‘and some things may be true even if Donald Trump has said them.’
He noted that the idea was widely dismissed at the time, but now ‘serious people are saying it needs a serious inquiry.’
New York Times reporter David Leonhardt also said on CNN that he thinks people ‘leapt to dismiss’ the theory too quickly because it was being espoused by then-President Trump and Republican Senator Tom Cotton, who has also said that the 2020 election was stolen.
‘I think a lot of people on the political left and people in the media made this mistake and said ‘Wow, if Tom Cotton is saying something it can’t be true,’ Leonhardt said. ‘Or they assumed that. And that’s not right.
‘Tom Cotton does deal in misinformation about things like election fraud, he’s said some things that are just wrong,’ Leonhardt continued.
‘But that doesn’t mean that everything he says is wrong, and it seems like a lot of people, including a lot in the media, leaped to dismiss the lab leak theory because of where it was coming from, and the reality is we don’t yet know how COVID started.’
In a series of tweets on Saturday, Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin slammed journalists for making a sudden U-Turn on their coverage of the lab leak theory.
‘Most MSM reporters didn’t ‘ignore’ the lab leak theory, they actively c****** all over it for over a year while pretending to be objective out of a toxic mix of confirmation bias, source bias (their scientist sources lied to them), group think, TDS [Trump Derangement Syndrome] and general incompetence,’ Rogin wrote in his first tweet Saturday morning.
He added that the lab leak theory has not changed and ‘suddenly become credible.’
‘The theory has always been the same,’ Rogin wrote. ‘The people who got it wrong changed their minds. They are writing about themselves, with zero self awareness.
‘All these reporters scrambling to defend their own records on the lab leak theory are exposing their own hypocrisy and ignoring their basic error,’ he continued. ‘Just report the facts. Don’t act like its your job to tell us what’s OK to think or talk about.
‘Own up to it when you fail your readers,’ he wrote.
The Twitter thread was re-tweeted more than 1,000 times, garnering several thousand likes.
The lab leak theory has gained traction over the past few weeks, as more and more politicians and scientists start to question the origins of the virus and how it mutated to infect humans.
The Huanan wet market, where scientists say the first cluster of infections were officially reported, is just a few hundred yards from the Wuhan Centers for Disease Prevention and Control and only a few miles from the the Wuhan Institute of Virology Lab, where scientists were reportedly conducting experiments on bats before the pandemic began.
The lab is one of only a handful in the world that is cleared to handle Class 4 pathogens — dangerous viruses that pose a high risk of person-to-person transmission.
Three researchers from the institute sought medical care in November 2019, before the virus began to spread, according to a recent report from the Wall Street Journal.
The newspaper said the report – which provides fresh details on the number of researchers affected, the timing of their illnesses, and their hospital visits – may add weight to calls for a broader probe of whether the COVID-19 virus could have escaped from the laboratory.
It reported that current and former officials familiar with the intelligence about the lab researchers expressed a range of views about the strength of the report’s supporting evidence, with one unnamed person saying it needed ‘further investigation and additional corroboration.’
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has since said he was ‘not convinced’ that COVID-19 developed naturally and called for an open investigation.
‘I think we should continue to investigate what went on in China until we continue to find out to the best of our ability what happened,’ he said at a PolitiFact event on May 11 entitled: United Facts of America: A Festival of Fact-Checking.
President Joe Biden has also called for an investigation into the origins of the virus.
The former head of the Food and Drug Administration said on Sunday that the likelihood COVID-19 originated in a lab is growing while the odds that the coronavirus was transmitted from animals to humans grow longer.
‘The challenge is that the side of the ledger that suggests that this could have come out of a lab has continued to expand,’ Dr. Scott Gottlieb, who served as then-President Trump’s FDA commission from 2017 until 2019, told CBS News.
‘And a side of the ledger that suggests that this could have come from a zoonotic source, come out of nature, really hasn’t budged.’
Gottlieb said that there is enough evidence to rule out the earlier theory that coronavirus originated from a ‘wet market’ in Wuhan.
Gottlieb added: ‘And if anything, you can argue that that side of the ledger has contracted because we’ve done an exhaustive search for the so-called intermediate host, the animal that could have been exposed to this virus before it spread to humans.
President Joe Biden has ordered the government’s leading research laboratories to join the search for the true origins of the COVID-19 pandemic by sifting through a massive trove of previously unexamined data, according to new reports.
Biden on Wednesday ordered the 17 National Labs run by the Department of Energy to assist the intelligence community in a 90-day sprint to examine whether the virus leaked from a lab in China.
The labs have been tapped ‘because of their ability to crunch massive amounts of data’ with their advanced supercomputers, a White House official told CNN.
The government is not revealing exactly what kind of data is being submitted for analysis, but experts say it is likely previously gathered intelligence such as signal intercepts or biological evidence.
Intelligence agencies regularly collect more raw data than their analysts are able to effectively pore through, and the application of advanced algorithms to seek patterns in the massive data set could offer new breakthroughs.
‘We want the science to be a big part of this,’ the White House official told CNN. ‘We are going to use the full resources of our intelligence and scientific community to try to get to the bottom of this.’
Biden is also urging U.S. intelligence agencies and those of allies to hunt for new information that could shed light on whether China covered up a lab leak.
Senator Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican, said the Biden administration’s response was ‘better late than never, but far from adequate.’
‘Our intelligence community has been looking at this now for 15 months. They’ve done good work on it, but in the end the answer lies in the hands of Chinese communists, not people working for American intelligence agencies,’ he told the Arkansas Democrat Gazette.
Cotton said that officials in Beijing have not been forthcoming about how the pandemic began. ‘We should be insisting that they come clean, that they provide us a clear and unvarnished look at what was happening in the Wuhan labs,’ he said.
Circumstantial evidence has long raised questions about the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where researchers were known to be conducting experiments on bat coronavirus strains similar to the one responsible for COVID-19.
China insisted early and often that the virus did not leak from the lab, claiming that crossover to humans must have occurred at a ‘wet market’ in Wuhan that sold live animals.
Perhaps driven by animosity for Donald Trump, who embraced the lab leak theory early on, the mainstream U.S. media and academics heaped scorn on the possibility, calling it an unhinged conspiracy theory.
But new evidence, including reports of three workers at the Wuhan lab who fell seriously ill with COVID-like symptoms in November 2019, has forced a sober reassessment among doubters.
Frustration with China increased this week after Beijing said that it would not participate in any further investigations by the World Health Organization.
Biden rebuked China in his announcement of the new intelligence review, calling on allies to help ‘press China to participate in a full, transparent, evidence-based international investigation and to provide access to all relevant data and evidence.’
UK intelligence agencies are assisting in Biden’s new 90-day intelligence review, a senior Whitehall security source told The Telegraph.
The source told the publication: ‘We are contributing what intelligence we have on Wuhan, as well as offering to help the American to corroborate and analyze any intelligence they have that we can assist with.’
British intelligence agencies have generally been skeptical of the lab leak theory, while Australia’s spies have been more open to it.
While Britain and Australia already share intelligence with the U.S. as part of the Five Eyes partnership, Biden’s new probe could prod them to redouble their focus on sharing evidence related to a possible lab leak.
Meanwhile, House Republican Whip Steve Scalise and more than 200 of his GOP colleagues have also called for Speaker Nancy Pelosi to direct her Democrat-led committees to investigate China’s complicity in causing the COVID pandemic.
In a letter to the Democratic House Speaker, the Republicans said there is ‘mounting evidence the pandemic started in a Chinese lab’ and the Chinese Communist Party ‘covered it up’.
‘If that is the case, the CCP is responsible for the deaths of almost 600,000 Americans and millions more worldwide. These questions about the CCP’s liability are not a diversion, as you falsely claimed,’ the letter reads.
Washington Post and New York Times publish corrections after being fact checked by the Gateway Pundit
I just want to let all of you know that the Gateway Pundit convinced the Washington Post and New York Times to issue corrections in one of their recent articles.
CNN: “Washington Post, New York Times retract reports on Giuliani”
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/01/media/washington-post-new-york-times-retraction-giuliani/index.html
Gateway Pundit: “WashPost Complicit in Giuliani Smear, Alleges FBI Warning last fall that Rudy Completely Denies”
Gateway Pundit: “The Washington Post hit piece was previously debunked by a TGP Factcheck article posted at this link.”
New York State Supreme Court rules against the New York Times’s request to dismiss a defamation lawsuit that was filed by Project Veritas
By Daniel Alman (aka Dan from Squirrel Hill)
April 5, 2021
Project Veritas published this video about voter fraud in Minneapolis:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWK56l2VaLY
Afterward, the New York Times published a news article, which refers to the video as “deceptive.”
You can read the New York Times article at this link:
Project Veritas then sued the New York Time for defamation.
The New York Times tried to get the lawsuit dismissed by claiming that the writer was expressing her opinion, and that it was not a statement of fact.
However, The New York State Supreme Court ruled that because the New York Times accusation of deception was in a news article, and not an opinion column, the lawsuit can proceed.
Now, in order to defend itself, the New York Times must prove that the video is deceptive.
You can read the court’s ruling at this link:
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20518694-order_denying_motion_to_dismiss
And here’s an article about the court’s ruling:
I’m no legal expert. But I am curious to see what the New York Times will do in order to prove that the video is deceptive.
New York Supreme Court Judge DENIES NYT ‘Motion To Dismiss’ In Veritas Defamation Lawsuit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaYR4CBrqlc
Because of the abortion controversy, the mainstream media can’t reach a consensus over how many people were killed in a recent shooting in Indianapolis
These two news headlines are both about the same recent shooting incident in Indianapolis.
This New York Times article is called
“5 Killed in Indianapolis Shooting That Mayor Condemns as ‘Mass Murder’”
Meanwhile, this CNN article is called
“Indianapolis teen charged with six counts of murder for allegedly shooting pregnant woman and his family members”
So they can’t agree on how many people were killed.
I propose that DNA tests be given to each and every living being that was killed, in order to find out if they were human.
Video: New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman urges “everyone” in the U.S. to vote in Georgia’s upcoming runoff election
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WABvzzAXhPU
Here’s why it was legal to release Hunter Biden’s emails, but illegal to release Donald Trump’s tax returns
By Daniel Alman (aka Dan from Squirrel Hill)
October 20, 2020
Rudy Giuliani has named the person who showed him Hunter Biden’s laptop. His name is John Paul Mac Isaac.
By comparison, the New York Times never named the person who gave them Donald Trump’s tax returns.
Hunter Biden’s laptop became the legal property of the repair shop 90 days after he abandoned it. He ignored multiple requests from the store to pick it up.
Source: https://sonar21.com/yes-the-hunter-biden-emails-are-authentic/
By comparison, whoever leaked Trump’s tax returns committed a crime.
Source: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/6103
If the New York Times was only going to publish one of these two things, it should have been the info on Biden, not Trump, because the Biden info is the one that was legally given out.
Why Are the Mainstream Media Ignoring Tara Reade’s Sexual Assault Accusation Against Joe Biden?
https://reason.com/2020/03/30/joe-biden-tara-reade-sexual-assault-media/
Why Are the Mainstream Media Ignoring Tara Reade’s Sexual Assault Accusation Against Joe Biden?
So far, it’s been silence from The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and others.
March 30, 2020
On September 14, 2018, The New York Times reported the existence of an unverified sexual misconduct allegation against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. The story cited three people who had read a letter sent by the accuser—Christine Blasey Ford—to Sen. Diane Feinstein (D–Calif.). Ford was not interviewed for the story; indeed, she wasn’t named.
Unconfirmed reports of a teenaged Kavanaugh assaulting a teenaged Ford evidently merited coverage from The Times. This prompts an obvious question: Why is the paper of record now declining to publicize a very troubling allegation against former Vice President Joe Biden?
The Times is hardly alone in this regard. The mainstream media have remained bafflingly silent about Tara Reade, a former member of then-Senator Biden’s staff who claims that he sexually assaulted her in 1993. Reade’s name has only appeared twice in The Washington Post, and both were quick asides: A news roundup from April of last year briefly acknowledged an earlier, milder version of Reade’s accusation, and a recent rapid-fire Q&A asked a Post political reporter to weigh-in on the political ramifications “of the Tara Reade bombshell.” (The nature of the bombshell is not described.)
And while the coronavirus pandemic is obviously dominating news coverage, CNN has made plenty of time for Biden. Chris Cillizza is still ranking Biden’s potential veep choices, and the network conducted a virtual townhall event with the candidate last Friday. Reade’s name didn’t come up, and it has never appeared at CNN.com. At NBC, it’s the same story: Chuck Todd interviewed Biden but didn’t ask about the allegation.
Reade’s story has garnered some coverage elsewhere, most noticeably from The Hill and The Intercept. Some left-leaning news sites—The Huffington Post, Vox—have written about it, and of course conservative media are all over the story. But the biggest mainstream print and TV outlets are, at present, silent.
I am not the only one to notice this. The Columbia Journalism Review notes that “media outlets on both the left and the right have covered Reade’s claim, yet mainstream news organizations have mostly avoided it.” That article links to a piece in The Guardian—part of a recurring feature called “The Week in Patriarchy”—that suggests the media may be ignoring the story because Reade’s accusations will be “difficult to prove.” To its credit, the Guardian piece acknowledges that this would be inconsistent with how the Kavanaugh accusation was handled.
That’s what’s most frustrating about this lack of mainstream coverage. Ideally, all media outlets—mainstream or otherwise—would tread carefully with respect to decades-old accusations. They would not rush to publish unverified rumors, instead carefully vetting them to the best of their ability. They would consider whether every salacious or scandalous detail of an important person’s past is worth revisiting.
Perhaps that’s what reporters at The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other outlets are doing. (I have heard it third-hand that various stories might be in the works, but nobody at those publications would confirm anything to me.) But Reade has already come forward. She has already identified herself and told her story. At this stage in the process of the Kavanaugh accusation’s public reveal, the mainstream press was already actively covering it.
As I wrote last week, there’s a case for taking Reade’s accusation more seriously than Ford’s, since the behavior described by Reade (penetrative sexual assault during Biden’s Senate years) is even worse than what was described by Ford.
And while it’s certainly true that there’s currently a global pandemic unfolding, that isn’t a good excuse to avoid discussing Reade. In fact, there’s some reason to proceed quickly: The Democratic Party will soon nominate Joe Biden to be its presidential candidate, but Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) is technically still in the race, and he is still making the case that he should be the one to face President Donald Trump in November. Whether or not Biden is credibly accused of sexual assault is extremely relevant to this rapidly approaching decision point. This seems only slightly less urgent than covering Kavanaugh’s alleged misbehavior during the period immediately before his confirmation to the Supreme Court.
If the media’s rule is this—We’re going to proceed extremely cautiously when revisiting unverified sexual misconduct allegations that are several decades years old—then fine. But that’s a new rule, isn’t it?
According to MSNBC’s Brian Williams and the New York Times’s Mara Gay, 500 million / 327 million = 1 million
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_i0QrK2814
The way that Planned Parenthood treats its pregnant employees is cruel, illegal, and extremely hypocritical
The New York Times just published this article, which is titled, “Planned Parenthood Is Accused of Mistreating Pregnant Employees.”
The article cites numerous examples of how Planned Parenthood has given absolutely horrible treatment to its pregnant employees.
Not only are these actions on the part of Planned Parenthood cruel, some of them are also illegal, and all of them are extremely hypocritical.
If there’s any one organization that should treat its pregnant employees with kindness and respect, as well as obeying the laws regarding pregnant employees, it’s Planned Parenthood.
Here are some excerpts from the article, along with my own comments:
Ms. Hairston told the human-resources department for Planned Parenthood’s clinic in White Plains, N.Y., that her high blood pressure was threatening her pregnancy. She sent the department multiple notes from her nurse recommending that she take frequent breaks.
Managers ignored the notes. They rarely gave her time to rest or to take a lunch break, Ms. Hairston said.
“I had to hold back tears talking to pregnant women, telling them to take care of their pregnancies when I couldn’t take care of mine,” she said. “It made me jealous.”
That is just downright plain mean.
Planned Parenthood… has been accused of sidelining, ousting or otherwise handicapping pregnant employees, according to interviews with more than a dozen current and former employees.
In interviews and legal documents, women at Planned Parenthood… described discrimination that violated federal or state laws — managers considering pregnancy in hiring decisions, for example, or denying rest breaks recommended by a doctor.
These are the exact same kinds of illegal treatment of employees that left wing feminists have always claimed to be against. The fact that Planned Parenthood did this to its own pregnant employees is inexcusable, illegal, and terribly hypocritical.
… at Planned Parenthood, the country’s leading provider of reproductive services, managers in some locations declined to hire pregnant job candidates, refused requests by expecting mothers to take breaks and in some cases pushed them out of their jobs after they gave birth, according to current and former employees in California, Texas, North Carolina and New York.
Most Planned Parenthood offices do not provide paid maternity leave
How many zillions of times have left wing feminists said they were in favor of paid maternity leave? And can anyone name an organization that is more left wing feminist than Planned Parenthood? I dare say that these pregnant employees would have been treated far better if they had been working at one of the conservative, right wing, for-profit corporations that left wing feminists are always accusing of being “sexist” and “misogynist.”
A dozen lawsuits filed against Planned Parenthood clinics in federal and state courts since 2013 accused managers of denying workers rest periods, lunch breaks or overtime pay, or retaliating against them for taking medical leave.
Managers have discriminated against pregnant women and new mothers, according to interviews with the current and former Planned Parenthood employees and with organizers from the Office and Professional Employees International Union, which represents some Planned Parenthood workers.
In Miami, one current and two former employees said that women at a Planned Parenthood office were scared to tell managers they were pregnant. One of them said that, in conversations with supervisors, colleagues would often volunteer that they were not planning on having children or were gay or single.
“It was looked down upon for you to get pregnant,” said Carolina Delgado, who worked in the Miami office until 2012. “I don’t think that any supervisor had to literally say it for us to feel it.”
Apparently, Planned Parenthood would rather spend money fighting lawsuits than treat its pregnant employees with respect. Absolutely disgusting.
A former hiring manager at a Planned Parenthood in California said that when internal promotions came up, supervisors openly debated whether candidates were likely to get pregnant in the near future and preferred those who were not. They declined to hire one pregnant woman and to promote one new mother, the employee said. (Under the federal Pregnancy Discrimination Act, it is illegal to consider whether a job candidate is or will become pregnant.)
The former manager said her colleagues felt they couldn’t afford to promote someone only to lose them for several weeks.
Completely despicable. It was left wing feminists who fought so hard to pass the Pregnancy Discrimination Act in the first place. How dare they violate the very same law that they expect everyone else to obey.
49 of Planned Parenthood’s 55 regional offices — which each manage a set of local clinics — do not provide paid maternity leave
89% of Planned Parenthood’s regional offices do not give paid maternity leave to their employees. So why do they even call themselves “Planned Parenthood” in the first place?
Tracy Webber, the former director of clinical services in White Plains, sued the organization for pregnancy discrimination in 2009, saying she had been fired four weeks after giving birth. Planned Parenthood settled for undisclosed terms.
Planned Parenthood fired an employee because she became a parent? That’s mean, and it’s illegal, and especially, it’s the height of hypocrisy.
A woman who worked at Planned Parenthood’s New Rochelle, N.Y., clinic and who declined to be named said in an interview that, when she got pregnant last year, managers ignored her doctor’s note recommending frequent breaks. Her manager asked her to delay her maternity leave and, after she gave birth, pressed her to return early.
The fact that Planned Parenthood ignored a doctor’s note from one of its own pregnant employees makes me wonder about the quality of the medical care and advice that Planned Parenthood gives to its own clients.
A medical assistant at the same clinic was fired in May 2018, the day she returned from maternity leave, according to a former human resources manager who oversaw the clinic. Jonas Urba, the woman’s lawyer, said she reached a confidential resolution with Planned Parenthood.
Once again, Planned Parenthood fired one of its employees because she became a parent. This kind of behavior by Planned Parenthood is extraordinarily hypocritical.
When Ms. Hairston asked for regular breaks, including 30 minutes for lunch, her supervisors brushed her off. Ms. Hairston said she sent multiple notes from her nurse at Full Circle Women’s Health to the regional office’s human resources department, stating that the extra breaks were medically necessary. No one responded, and nothing changed, according to Ms. Hairston and the former human resources manager.
Ms. Hairston’s hands and feet swelled; the clinic’s plastic gloves no longer fit. Her blood pressure got so high that her doctor put her on bed rest when she was seven months pregnant.
She returned to work on strict orders to not work more than six hours a day and to take regular breaks. One day in March, she worked a much longer shift. She soon became so sick that her doctor told her to go back on bed rest. A few days later, on March 23, she went to the hospital. Doctors performed an emergency C-section. She was 34 weeks pregnant.
When she had been on maternity leave for eight of the 12 weeks guaranteed by the Family and Medical Leave Act, Planned Parenthood’s human resources department called her multiple times and urged her to return to work early, Ms. Hairston said. She emailed the department and said she felt “discriminated against.” She resigned in June.
So this is how Planned Parenthood treats pregnant women. This is astoundingly horrendous. Shame on Planned Parenthood for treating women the exact opposite of the way Planned Parenthood tries to depict itself in its publicity material.
So, there you have it. Planned Parenthood is mean to its pregnant employees, it breaks the very laws that it claims to support, and it apparently has no interest in helping its female employees who “plan” to become “parents,” despite that being the organization’s very name.
New York Times: Planned Parenthood Is Accused of Mistreating Pregnant Employees
Not only are these actions on the part of Planned Parenthood cruel, some of them are also illegal, and all of them are extremely hypocritical.
If there’s any one organization that should treat pregnant employees with kindness and respect, as well as obeying the laws regarding pregnant employees, it’s Planned Parenthood.
Planned Parenthood Is Accused of Mistreating Pregnant Employees
Employers that champion women face accusations of discriminating against their pregnant workers, showing how widespread the problem is in American workplaces.
December 20, 2018
As a medical assistant at Planned Parenthood, Ta’Lisa Hairston urged pregnant women to take rest breaks at work, stay hydrated and, please, eat regular meals.
Then she got pregnant and couldn’t follow her own advice.
Last winter, Ms. Hairston told the human-resources department for Planned Parenthood’s clinic in White Plains, N.Y., that her high blood pressure was threatening her pregnancy. She sent the department multiple notes from her nurse recommending that she take frequent breaks.
Managers ignored the notes. They rarely gave her time to rest or to take a lunch break, Ms. Hairston said.
“I had to hold back tears talking to pregnant women, telling them to take care of their pregnancies when I couldn’t take care of mine,” she said. “It made me jealous.”
Discrimination against pregnant women and new mothers remains widespread in the American workplace. It is so pervasive that even organizations that define themselves as champions of women are struggling with the problem.
That includes Planned Parenthood, which has been accused of sidelining, ousting or otherwise handicapping pregnant employees, according to interviews with more than a dozen current and former employees.
In interviews and legal documents, women at Planned Parenthood and other organizations with a feminist bent described discrimination that violated federal or state laws — managers considering pregnancy in hiring decisions, for example, or denying rest breaks recommended by a doctor.
In other cases, the bias was more subtle. Many women said they were afraid to announce a pregnancy at work, sensing they would be seen as abandoning their colleagues.
Some of those employers saw accommodating expecting mothers as expensive and inconvenient. Others were unsympathetic to workers seeking special treatment.
At Natera, which sells genetic tests for pregnant women, two former employees, Melissa Blain Johnson and Judit Rigo, said they were demoted while on maternity leave. Ms. Johnson, who has sued Natera, also said that she was left feeling like a “guinea pig” when her boss suggested that she and another pregnant employee pose as patients and get genetically tested by a rival company.
“Ms. Johnson’s employment at Natera was not influenced inappropriately by her pregnancy or subsequent maternity leave,” said Anna Czene, a Natera spokeswoman. “The same was true for Ms. Rigo.”
At Avon, which calls itself “the company for women,” two employees in a cosmetics-testing lab have sued for being forced to handle toxic chemicals while pregnant. A marketing executive, Caroline Ruiz, also said she was fired four days after announcing her pregnancy.
Paige Cali, a spokeswoman for Avon, said the company “strongly denies claims of discrimination.”
At Mehri & Skalet, a progressive law firm suing Walmart for pregnancy discrimination, three lawyers have accused a founding partner, Cyrus Mehri, of mistreatment. Heidi Burakiewicz said Mr. Mehri pressured her to return early from maternity leave. Sandi Farrell was told to participate in a performance review during her leave, and when she asked to postpone it she was fired. Taryn Wilgus Null said Mr. Mehri questioned her child care arrangements in a performance review after she returned from leave.
Mr. Mehri said he strongly denied the accusations and that no one was mistreated after giving birth. He said that Ms. Burakiewicz’s allegation “is a lie, plain and simple,” that Ms. Farrell had performance problems and that Ms. Null, now a lawyer at the Justice Department, misinterpreted his comments.
And at Planned Parenthood, the country’s leading provider of reproductive services, managers in some locations declined to hire pregnant job candidates, refused requests by expecting mothers to take breaks and in some cases pushed them out of their jobs after they gave birth, according to current and former employees in California, Texas, North Carolina and New York.
Most Planned Parenthood offices do not provide paid maternity leave, though many let new mothers take partially paid disability leave.
“I believe we must do better than we are now,” Leana Wen, the president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said in a statement. “It’s our obligation to do better, for our staff, for their families and for our patients.”
Ms. Wen said the organization was investigating the allegations of pregnancy discrimination reported by The New York Times. The organization also is conducting a review to determine the cost of providing paid maternity leave to nearly 12,000 employees nationwide.
Vincent Russell, the regional chief executive who oversees the office where Ms. Hairston worked, denied her accusations.
While Planned Parenthood’s clinics and regional offices brought in about $1.5 billion in fiscal year 2016 — half from private donations and half from the government, to reimburse treatment provided to Medicaid patients — conservative lawmakers routinely threaten to kill its taxpayer funding. With their finances precarious, the clinics pay modest salaries to the employees who provide health care — abortions, cancer screenings, prenatal care, disease testing — to 2.4 million mostly low-income patients every year.
The Planned Parenthood Federation of America has its headquarters in Manhattan. The clinics that serve women are run by 55 regional affiliates with their own chief executives and human resources policies. They receive some money and support from headquarters.
Tight budgets sometimes created punishing workplace conditions, employees said. A dozen lawsuits filed against Planned Parenthood clinics in federal and state courts since 2013 accused managers of denying workers rest periods, lunch breaks or overtime pay, or retaliating against them for taking medical leave.
Managers have discriminated against pregnant women and new mothers, according to interviews with the current and former Planned Parenthood employees and with organizers from the Office and Professional Employees International Union, which represents some Planned Parenthood workers.
In Miami, one current and two former employees said that women at a Planned Parenthood office were scared to tell managers they were pregnant. One of them said that, in conversations with supervisors, colleagues would often volunteer that they were not planning on having children or were gay or single.
“It was looked down upon for you to get pregnant,” said Carolina Delgado, who worked in the Miami office until 2012. “I don’t think that any supervisor had to literally say it for us to feel it.”
Dannette Hill, Planned Parenthood’s head of human resources, said that most parents who work in the Miami office have been promoted after returning from leave.
A former hiring manager at a Planned Parenthood in California said that when internal promotions came up, supervisors openly debated whether candidates were likely to get pregnant in the near future and preferred those who were not. They declined to hire one pregnant woman and to promote one new mother, the employee said. (Under the federal Pregnancy Discrimination Act, it is illegal to consider whether a job candidate is or will become pregnant.)
The former manager said her colleagues felt they couldn’t afford to promote someone only to lose them for several weeks.
Financial pressures also explain why 49 of Planned Parenthood’s 55 regional offices — which each manage a set of local clinics — do not provide paid maternity leave. Employees in about 20 of those regions can use short-term disability to earn a portion of their salaries while on leave. The New York headquarters provides six weeks of paid parental leave.
Last year, Christine Charbonneau, who runs the regional office in Seattle, asked her human resources department to find out how much it would cost to cover maternity leave for the region. The estimate: $2 million a year. That is the entire annual budget of some clinics.
Ms. Charbonneau’s office, which oversees 27 clinics in the Northwest, generates $77 million a year in revenue. But states like Washington and Idaho have cut government funding in recent years. Paying for maternity leave, Ms. Charbonneau said, could force her to close clinics.
“It is easy to accuse someone of hypocrisy if you’re not the one trying to find $2 million out of thin air,” she said. “You try to be the Planned Parenthood that donors expect, and yet it is unattainable.”
Planned Parenthood’s policies, though, can make it hard for employees to scrape by after giving birth.
In August, Marissa Hamilton, an employee at Planned Parenthood in Colorado, gave birth to a baby boy. He was eight weeks premature, weighed less than four pounds and spent weeks in neonatal intensive care. The office doesn’t provide paid maternity leave.
In September, she started a fund-raiser on GoFundMe. On the appeals page, Ms. Hamilton wrote that she was under financial strain because “On top of medical bills I cannot work.” She set the goal at $15,000. So far she has raised $1,995.
Multiple Planned Parenthood executives said in interviews that they were eager for The Times to publish an article about the lack of paid maternity leave because they hoped it would lead to changes in the organization’s policies.
Ms. Hairston, the former medical assistant, took the job in 2015 because she believed in the group’s mission. “Planned Parenthood helped me give women a voice to do what they wanted with their bodies,” she said.
Ms. Hairston, 27, counseled women who wanted abortions and checked up on those carrying to term. She said she rarely took lunch and often spent 10-hour shifts on her feet.
She figured that there would be no better place to work while pregnant than a clinic that dealt with expecting mothers every day.
But Planned Parenthood’s Westchester County clinics, overseen by a regional office in Hawthorne, N.Y., had a history of issues with pregnant employees.
Tracy Webber, the former director of clinical services in White Plains, sued the organization for pregnancy discrimination in 2009, saying she had been fired four weeks after giving birth. Planned Parenthood settled for undisclosed terms.
A woman who worked at Planned Parenthood’s New Rochelle, N.Y., clinic and who declined to be named said in an interview that, when she got pregnant last year, managers ignored her doctor’s note recommending frequent breaks. Her manager asked her to delay her maternity leave and, after she gave birth, pressed her to return early.
A medical assistant at the same clinic was fired in May 2018, the day she returned from maternity leave, according to a former human resources manager who oversaw the clinic. Jonas Urba, the woman’s lawyer, said she reached a confidential resolution with Planned Parenthood.
The former human resources manager, who requested anonymity, said that executives assumed that when a pregnant worker brought in a doctor’s note, it was an excuse to work less. People who took sick days were perceived as lacking commitment.
“All the individuals identified in the article were treated fairly and equitably, free of any discrimination,” said Mr. Russell, the head of Planned Parenthood’s Hawthorne office.
When Ms. Hairston asked for regular breaks, including 30 minutes for lunch, her supervisors brushed her off. Ms. Hairston said she sent multiple notes from her nurse at Full Circle Women’s Health to the regional office’s human resources department, stating that the extra breaks were medically necessary. No one responded, and nothing changed, according to Ms. Hairston and the former human resources manager.
Ms. Hairston’s hands and feet swelled; the clinic’s plastic gloves no longer fit. Her blood pressure got so high that her doctor put her on bed rest when she was seven months pregnant.
She returned to work on strict orders to not work more than six hours a day and to take regular breaks. One day in March, she worked a much longer shift. She soon became so sick that her doctor told her to go back on bed rest. A few days later, on March 23, she went to the hospital. Doctors performed an emergency C-section. She was 34 weeks pregnant.
When she had been on maternity leave for eight of the 12 weeks guaranteed by the Family and Medical Leave Act, Planned Parenthood’s human resources department called her multiple times and urged her to return to work early, Ms. Hairston said. She emailed the department and said she felt “discriminated against.” She resigned in June.
“I didn’t get into the medical field to be treated like this,” she said.
The last she heard from Planned Parenthood was a letter asking her to donate money. She threw it in the trash.
Trying to figure out the real reason Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez bans reporters from her town hall events
The New York Times reports that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has banned the media from two of her town hall meetings.
Ocasio-Cortez tweeted the following explanation for the ban:
“Our community is 50% immigrant. Folks are victims of DV, trafficking, + have personal medical issues.”
“This town hall was designed for residents to feel safe discussing sensitive issues in a threatening political time.”
“We indicated previously that it would be closed to press.”
Ben Jacobs, a reporter for The Guardian, responded with the following tweet:
“And how does the presence of reporters make people feel unsafe?”
I think Jacob’s question is an excellent one.
I’d also like to point out that all of the other Congressional districts also have constituents who are “victims of domestic violence” and who have “personal medical issues,” but that the Congressional representatives and candidates of those other districts haven’t banned the media from their town hall events.
In the video below, YouTuber Styxhexenhammer666 says that one possible reason for Ocasio-Cortez’s media ban is that any illegal aliens in attendance would – justifiably – worry about being filmed by the media. However, he then goes on to say that Ocasio-Cortez could ask the media to keep their cameras focused on her and not the audience, and that they would likely comply.
Styxhexenhammer666 then goes on to say that he thinks her real reason for banning the media is that there might be a constituent in attendance who asks her a tough question about economics that she can’t answer. Specifically, he says that she doesn’t seem to understand that the only reason that democratic socialism in countries like Norway works is because there is a strong, healthy private sector to pay the taxes to fund it. Take away that strong, healthy private sector, and your country ends up like Venezuela.
I agree with him on both of these points.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkk1_J6tucQ
The Democratic Socialists of America supports the same policies that have destroyed Venezuela’s ability to feed itself
The New York Times just published this article, which is titled “The Millennial Socialists Are Coming.” The article talks about the growing popularity of socialism among Millennials, and points out several examples of socialist candidates beating long term Democrats in primary elections.
The New York Times article includes this link to the constitution and bylaws of the Democratic Socialists of America. Here is a brief excerpt from it (the bolding is mine):
“We are socialists because we reject an economic order based on private profit, alienated labor, gross inequalities of wealth and power, discrimination based on race, sex, sexual orientation, gender expression, disability status, age, religion, and national origin, and brutality and violence in defense of the status quo. We are socialists because we share a vision of a humane social order based on popular control of resources and production, economic planning, equitable distribution, feminism, racial equality and non-oppressive relationships.”
Let’s take a look at what those two bolded parts manage to achieve when they are adopted in the real world. Specifically, let’s take a look at what’s currently going on in Venezuela, which I have previously described in great detail in this lengthy and well sourced blog post, which I have titled, “The Maduro diet: How most Venezuelans lost an average of 19 pounds in 2016, plus another 24 pounds in 2017.”
The Democratic Socialists of America claim that they “reject an economic order based on private profit.” That’s exactly what Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez was doing when he started implementing price controls on food in Venezuela in 2003. These price controls caused shortages of food. Anyone who understands Economics 101 knows that price controls cause shortages.
The Democratic Socialists of America claim that they support “popular control of resources and production.” This is exactly what Hugo Chavez did when he had the government seize more than 10 million acres of farmland from private owners. As a result of these land seizures, food production fell substantially.
Before Chavez died, he appointed Nicolas Maduro to be his successor. After Chavez died in 2013, Maduro continued Chavez’s policies.
In 2018, all of Chavez’s food policies are still in effect. The profit motive has been taken away from food production. Ownership of the means of producing food has been collectivized.
Because the Venezuelan government adopted the exact same polices that are supported by Democratic Socialists of America, most Venezuelans lost an average of 19 pounds in 2016, plus another 24 pounds in 2017.
And you don’t have to take my word for this. My blog entry that I mentioned earlier contains a very large number of links to sources which document exactly how this happened.
One thing that’s interesting about the links in my blog entry on Venezuela is that many of my sources are links to articles in the New York Times. And yet the current article form the New York Times on the Democratic Socialists of America makes absolutely no mention of the the kinds of horrible disasters that happen when such policies are adopted in the real world.
And before anyone goes and mentions the Scandanavian countries, I would like to point out that those countries have by no means adopted the polices supported by the Democratic Socialists of America that I quoted and bolded above. They have not abandoned the profit motive, and they have not turned their means of production over to collective ownership.
On the contrary, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark all have thriving private sectors with huge corporations that make massive profits.
New York Times falsely said there was a “direct” link between Sarah Palin and the shooting of Gabby Giffords
http://nypost.com/2017/07/07/linking-palin-ad-to-shooting-was-honest-mistake-ny-times/
NY Times says blaming Palin for shooting was ‘an honest mistake’
July 7, 2017
Sarah Palin’s defamation lawsuit against The New York Times should be tossed because the paper made “an honest mistake” when it said she incited a 2011 shooting that severely wounded Arizona Rep. Gabby Giffords and killed six people, a lawyer for the Gray Lady said on Friday.
“There was an honest mistake in posting the editorial,” lawyer David Schultz told Manhattan federal Judge Jed Rakoff.
Last week, Palin sued the Times over a June 14th editorial that stated there was a “direct” link between one of Palin’s PAC ads and the shooting by Jared Lee Loughner.
But there’s no evidence he ever saw the ad, which placed Gifford’s district in stylized crosshairs. The Times issued a correction.
On Friday, Palin’s lawyers argued that the Times knew the story was false.
“It was literally acknowledged the same day in another story in their paper,” said Kenneth Turkel.
Apparently, New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman has never heard of the Boston Marathon bombing, the shoe bomber, the underwear bomber, the D.C. snipers, etc.
New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman recently tweeted the following question:
https://twitter.com/maggieNYT/status/825212767498027009
“Other than San Bernardino shootings, has there been a terrorist attack involving a non-US-born attacker since 9/11?”
I usually say that asking questions is a good thing, because I am very much in favor of curiosity and learning.
However, for a New York Times reporter to ask such a question in the year 2017 is actually a bad thing, not a good thing. For this person with this job to ask this question in this year proves that this New York Times reporter is completely clueless as to what has been happening in this country for the past decade and a half, and thus, is not qualified to hold the job of a New York Times reporter.
For the record, here are some terrorist attacks that happened in the U.S. after the 9-11 attacks, and involved at least one perpetrator who was an immigrant:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_failed_shoe_bomb_attempt
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Los_Angeles_International_Airport_shooting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._C._sniper_attacks
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_UNC_SUV_attack
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Airlines_Flight_253
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Times_Square_car_bombing_attempt
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Virginia_military_shootings
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Marathon_bombing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Chattanooga_shootings
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Minnesota_mall_stabbing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_New_York_and_New_Jersey_bombings
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Ohio_State_University_attack
Stupid front page headline from the New York Times: “Democrats, Students and Foreign Allies Face the Reality of a Trump Presidency.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=93&v=6qNDJnMkjdI
http://legalinsurrection.com/2016/11/new-york-times-headline-epitomizes-msm-myopia-over-trump/
NY Times Headline Epitomizes MSM Myopia Over Trump
November 10, 2016
Want to understand the bubble in which the elite, liberal media lives? Check out the banner headline of today’s New York Times: “Democrats, Students and Foreign Allies Face the Reality of a Trump Presidency.”
On today’s Morning Joe, Mark Halperin nailed it: “Look at the headline of this story. This is the day after a surprising underdog sweeping victory and their headline is not “disaffected Americans have a champion going to the White House” or “the country votes for fundamental change.” The headline is about how disappointed the friends of the people who run the New York Times are about what’s happened.
Scarborough also reported that Halperin and Nate Silver had been savaged by leading-but-unnamed MSM reporters and major news anchors for asserting—not that Trump would win—but that he even had a chance to win.
MARK HALPERIN: Look at the headline of this story. Look at the headline of this story. This is the day after a surprising underdog sweeping victory and their headline is not “disaffected Americans have a champion going to the White House” or “the country votes for fundamental change.” The headline is about how disappointed the friends of the people who run the New York Times are about what’s happened. It’s amazing. It’s amazing to me that this is the headline of the New York Times.
JOE SCARBOROUGH: Look at this. Look at this. This is staggering. It really is, Mark. I’m glad you brought this up.
HALPERIN: It’s The Onion.
JOE: This shows that the editors of the New York Times–I have the greatest respect for. They don’t get it.
MIKA BRZEZINSKI: This is about them!
JOE: This is a Saturday Night Live skit. You went to a cocktail party the night before and you decided to write this.
HALPERIN: When I thought Trump had a chance to lose, which I did. But I thought he had a chance to win it. I said to liberals, he’s going to get 42 million votes. 42 million people are going to vote for him. What are they voting for? And that this is their headline.
MIKA: That’s their newsroom [Ed.: i.e., not the editorial page, but the supposedly objective news side of the paper.]
HALPERIN: If a Democratic candidate who was said to have a 10% of winning by the New York Times had ended up winning and winning red states as Trump won blue states, I don’t think that would have been the headline.
JOE: No.
HALPERIN: And I’ll just say again, the responsibility of journalists is to not report on their biases. It’s to go out and understand the country through the prism of the election and say why are people feeling the way they’re feeling? I am just stunned at how people are reacting.
The New York Times says the tape of Alicia Machado having sex is NOT a sex tape
In 2005, consenting adult Alicia Machado had sex when she knew that she was being recorded for a Spanish reality TV show called “La Granja VIP.” The recording of her having sex was later broadcast on that show.
Now, the New York Times claims that the tape of Machado having sex is not a sex tape:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/01/us/politics/donald-trump-alicia-machado.html
Donald Trump Bashes Alicia Machado Again, Alleging a ‘Sex Tape’ (Without Evidence)
September 30, 2016
Donald J. Trump went on a morning Twitter tirade on Friday, denouncing the former Miss Universe winner he once shamed for gaining weight and directing the American public to seek out a sex tape that he said she participated in as evidence of her sordid past.
The attack, in a flurry of tweets on the topic posted from 5:14 to 5:30 a.m. Eastern time, was the latest effort by Mr. Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, to discredit the beauty queen, Alicia Machado, after Hillary Clinton used her as an example of his sexism during the debate on Monday night. Fact-checkers have found no evidence that Ms. Machado, who was featured in Playboy, appeared in a sex tape. Her critics may be referring to a risqué scene that she appeared in on a reality television show.
Mr. Trump maintained this week that Ms. Machado’s weight and attitude were problematic after she won the 1996 pageant and his campaign circulated information about her previous brushes with the law.
On Friday, Mr. Trump suggested that there was more to be revealed about Ms. Machado and offered the theory that Mrs. Clinton, his Democratic opponent, helped her attain American citizenship.
Donald Trump tweet: “Did Crooked Hillary help disgusting (check out sex tape and past) Alicia M become a U.S. citizen so she could use her in the debate?”
Mr. Trump had been modulating his tone in the weeks before the debate, but his uneven performance appears to have caused him to lash out. He has increasingly flirted with leveling more personal attacks on Mrs. Clinton’s history of marital problems and he has doubled-down on his charges that the news media is rigging the election.
While Mr. Trump had little to say when Mrs. Clinton brought up Ms. Machado on the debate stage, he said in his Friday tweets that she “duped” Mrs. Clinton. He called this a sign of bad judgment.
“Wow, Crooked Hillary was duped and used by my worst Miss U. Hillary floated her as an ‘angel’ without checking her past, which is terrible!” Mr. Trump wrote.
Ms. Machado, who told CNN this week that she is “not a saint girl,” was also accused in the late 1990s of abetting an attempted murder committed by her then-boyfriend, who shot a family member in Caracas, Venezuela.
She was said to have been seen driving a getaway car, but did not face charges.
Since he reshuffled his campaign’s leadership in August, Mr. Trump’s team has tried to instill a more disciplined approach that has been heavier on scripted speeches and policy. Twitter, however, has continued to be an outlet for Mr. Trump to vent without a filter, and rants such as the one unleashed on Friday undermine his efforts to appear presidential.
Backers of Mrs. Clinton seized on Twitter storm as more evidence that Mr. Trump is unfit to be president.
Correct the Record, a “super PAC” that supports the Democratic nominee, suggested that Mr. Trump was showing frustration about a recent batch of weak polls.
And John Podesta, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman, advised that Mr. Trump might want to resist the urge to grab his phone when he wakes up “in the middle of the night.”
Mrs. Clinton responded later in the morning on Twitter by calling Mr. Trump “unhinged” and said his treatment of Ms. Machado was unwarranted.
New York Times Mislabels Aleppo Twice While Chastising Gary Johnson’s Gaffe
New York Times Mislabels Aleppo Twice While Chastising Gary Johnson’s Gaffe
September 8, 2016
The New York Times incorrectly cited Aleppo as the capital of the Islamic State while skewering Libertarian Presidential nominee Gary Johnson for his embarrassing lack of knowledge regarding the city.
NYT journalist Alan Rappeport described Johnson’s gaffe as a being a potentially “serious blow” to his hopes of making the debate stage, as he himself labeled Aleppo as ISIS’s de facto capital. To make matters worse, NYT had to run a correction to the correction after describing Aleppo as the capital of Syria.
To clarify the matter, Damascus is the capital of Syria and Raqqa is the de facto capital of ISIS. Aleppo, the war-torn city at the center of the ongoing Syrian conflict, was the country’s largest city before the civil war began in 2011. Today, many of the city’s residents have either been killed or forced to flee.
The series of fumbles regarding Aleppo began Thursday morning, when Johnson was asked by MSNBC’s Mike Barnicle what he would do to solve the crisis in Aleppo.
“And what is Aleppo?” replied Johnson.
As Rappeport put it, Johnson then “struggled to recover,” much in the same way NYT did after publishing the piece.
MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry criticized the New York Times because it actually had the nerve to publish a photograph of a person that it wrote an article about
MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry criticized the New York Times because it actually had the nerve to publish a photograph of a person that it wrote an article about.
Can you imagine such an atrocity? A newspaper actually published a photograph to accompany one of its articles!
Has the New York Times no shame?
Newsbusters reports:
Harris-Perry: By Showing Malik in Hijab, NYT Suggesting ‘This Is What Terrorism Looks Like’
December 5, 2015
They would have used a photo of her in an NRA cap, but none was available . . . Man, it’s getting hard to navigate the nuanced shoals of political correctness. Now, even the ineffably sensitive New York Times has run afoul of the rules, as propounded by Melissa Harris-Perry. On her MSNBC show today, Harris-Perry griped that the Gray Lady had run a photo of Islamic terrorist killer Tafsheen Malik wearing a hijab. As per H-P, the Times was sending a message that “this is what terrorism looks like.”
Damn those anti-Muslim bigots of the New York Times! But seriously, what was the poor paper supposed to do? Should the Times have photoshopped the hijab off Malik? Harris-Perry might have complained that the paper was suggesting there was something offensive about the garment. Sometimes you just can’t win with the PC crowd.
The New York Times accidentally admitted that affirmative action hurts black college students
By Daniel Alman (aka Dan from Squirrel Hill)
November 29, 2015
This recent New York Times article talks about a black student at Amherst College whom the New York Times claims is “unprepared academically” for the particular college that she is attending.
So I’m trying to think of all the reasons why someone who is “unprepared academically” for this particular college would get admitted to this particular college. Here are the reasons that I can think of:
1) Their parents made a big donation to the college.
2) They were admitted for their athletic ability.
3) They were admitted as a result of affirmative action.
If anyone here can think of any other reason, please post it in the comment section.
Anyway, it’s that third reason that I’m interested in for this discussion.
Without specifically mentioning affirmative action, the New York Times article makes a good case against affirmative action.
The student in question even says “I always feel like I need to prove to other people that I do belong here.”
I would respond to that by saying that anyone who is “unprepared academically” for this particular college does in fact not “belong” at this particular college.
Please note that no one said this student was “unprepared academically” for college in general. Instead, this student is “unprepared academically” for this particular college.
But there are thousands of other colleges in the U.S.
If affirmative action did not exist, then instead of getting admitted to this particular college, this student would have been admitted to a different college – one for which she was “prepared academically” instead of one for which she was “unprepared academically.”
Attending a college that is too difficult, is far worse than attending a college that matches your abilities. Affirmative action is causing terrible harm to these students. Colleges should get rid of affirmative action, so that each student will be matched up with a college that matches his or her own abilities.
Here is the relevant text from the New York Times article:
One young woman said she went to sleep at night wishing she would not wake up. Imani Marshall, a senior pre-med student from Chicago, who is black, felt a shudder of recognition and started to cry.
Ms. Marshall, who went to a selective public school in Chicago and came to Amherst on full financial aid, said she had felt unprepared academically and socially for Amherst. Yet she felt that by asking for help, she would undermine not just her own standing but that of her entire race.
“I feel like an impostor,” Ms. Marshall said the other day over lunch at the central dining hall. “I close myself off a lot of times from help. I always feel like I need to prove to other people that I do belong here.”
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