I received this email from the Healy campaign.

Dear Steven, “Unbecoming.” It means unattractive, indecorous. It’s not a word you hear men on Beacon Hill use about each other. But that’s the word Warren Tolman used during today’s Boston Globe debate when Maura asked him to shed light on his hedge fund work, his online gambling company, and his work as a lobbyist. Rather than answer the question, he said, “Maura, it’s just unbecoming.” That’s right. “Unbecoming.” As a prosecutor and a civil rights attorney, Maura understands that tough questions are how you get at the truth. Can you join me in making a donation to keep Maura’s fight going? Calling a woman “unbecoming” just because she’s asking tough questions is demeaning, sexist, and certainly no way to celebrate Women’s Equality Day. I, for one, won’t stand for that. I hope you won’t either! Sincerely, Marty Walz President, Planned Parenthood Advocacy Fund of Massachusetts

Maura Healey for Attorney General
PO Box 440223
West Somerville MA 02144 United States

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What I could find in The Boston Globe was the article Attorney general candidates spar in feisty debate. Here is an excerpt from the article.

Healey, a former top deputy to Attorney General Martha Coakley, spoke of being a tough litigator who has protected the vulnerable. “You are the people’s lawyer, that is the role of the attorney general,” she said.

Tolman, a former state senator who pushed significant tobacco and ethics reform through the Legislature, spoke of leading outside the courthouse on issues like sexual assault on college campuses.

“It’s a visionary kind of role that I see, where you look at issues, you tackle them — it could be in the courtroom, it could be outside the courtroom, it doesn’t matter,” he said.

There is not too much more to the article. Not very informative about why they chose the headline they did. Without the email from the Healy campaign who would know what Warren Tolman has been doing since he left office.

I am pretty sure i don’t want an Attorney General off having visions and neglecting the basic work of going after the (white collar) criminals. (It would be great if he could do both aspects of the job effectively.) The only thing that could partially rescue Warren Tolman in my eyes would be if he addressed his work since he has been out of office. He needs to explain what he has learned about the miscreants he met that he should be prosecuting when he gets elected.

Can you picture Elizabeth Warren, who wants to put some bankers and hedge fund managers in jail, working closely with our state’s Attorney General, who worked for a hedge fund and owns a gambling company? It would also make all the difference in the world to know what kind of lobbying he did.

August 28, 2014

See my subsequent post Tolman apologizes for calling Healey’s questions ‘unbecoming’ to see a video clip of the relevant section of the debate and to see why I think Tolman has dug himself an even deeper hole than I at first thought.

Here is Maura Healey’s first television ad.

Is it just me or do others think that experience running a large part of the Attorney General’s office successfully ought to count for something? Other candidates might have merits too, but when you have someone who has proved that she can do the job well, why take a chance by looking elsewhere?

Maura Healey even has some ideas for running the Attorney General’s department across the state even better than it has been run so far. She knows that there is more to the state than what is inside Route 128.

Naked Capitalism has the article Move Along, People, Move Along: There’s No Health Care Corruption to See Here and it is not about Obamacare.

Summary

As we have said before, when health care corruption is actually discussed in polite circles, including the scholarly literature about medicine and health care, the discussion usually refers to corruption elsewhere. In particular, in developed countries, discussion of health care corruption usually focuses on less developed countries.

Now we see that when the issue clearly is the possibility of health care corruption, even the news media will avoid using such a term. Articles may describe what amount to health care corruption. They may refer to it as corruption. But they will not pair that term with health care (or medicine, or anything similar). The subject of health care corruption remains taboo. As long as we do not discuss it, some can preserve the illusion that it does not exist. Thus the anechoic effect continues.

So to repeat an ending to one of my previous posts on health care corruption…. if we really want to reform health care, in the little time we may have before our health care bubble bursts, we will need to take strong action against health care corruption. Such action will really disturb the insiders within large health care organizations who have gotten rich from their organizations’ misbehavior, and thus taking such action will require some courage.

The article is also a good reminder of why the Rick Perry issue of abuse of power is not just some political game of a disgruntled district attorney. There is serious health care corruption at issue here.

The remarks about Perry’s support for HPV vaccination of every Texas girl is quite revealing. It wasn’t an out-of-character move by Perry, after all.

Don Berwick posted this on his Facebook page.

How can we create an economy that works for everyone? What can be done to lower gun violence in our Commonwealth? How do I feel about the Kinder-Morgan gas pipeline?

This is the video from the article on Masslive.

This is what makes me think that maybe Don Berwick is a politician in the Elizabeth Warren mold. I’ll vote for him if I can. At least I can vote for him in the primary.

Elizabeth Warren has posted this on her Facebook page.

Five years ago today, we lost our champion Senator Ted Kennedy. Not a day goes by that we don’t miss his passion, his enthusiasm, and – most of all – his commitment to working families. A few months ago, I told the story of the day I met Senator Kennedy back in the 1990s during our fight against a bad bankruptcy bill. Take a look.

These are the kinds of things that made me think Elizabeth Warren might be a different kind of politician.

Ready For Elizabeth Warren for President 2016.

Network World has the article Is massive DNS hack responsible for Charter Internet outage?

On DownDetector as well as on Reddit, some customers said that changing the DNS servers to Google’s public DNS IP addresses of 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 for IPv4, or 2001:4860:4860::8888 and 2001:4860:4860::8844 for IPv6 fixed their problems. Some people claimed that didn’t work, but most comments claim that changing the DNS restored their Internet. People who are not fans of Google reportedly changed their DNS to OpenDNS IPs of 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220 to restore service.

As I was experiencing the outage last night, I experimented with what I could and couldn’t reach on the internet. Because of those experiments, I suspected it was a DNS problem. However, since I couldn’t reach very much on the Internet, I couldn’t find instructions on changing my DNS settings.

I have followed the link above to OpenDNS IPs. At first, I set up DNS on one Windows-7 machine. Then I found the instructions to set up the DNS on my router, so I set that too. Now, all three wired connections and any wireless connections will use the OpenDNS IPs for its Dynamic Name Servers.

I supposed I could use a DNS from my web server host company to get some diversity of servers. I’ll do that if OpenDNS doesn’t prove to be extremely reliable.

The Real News Network has the interview The Powers Behind The Islamic State.

AHMED: On the one hand, I think the first thing is, do we–in terms of–like, we need to cut off the source. So there’s been a lot of press reports about the Islamic State have basically got in and they’ve looted cities and they’ve got loads of money and they’re kind of self funding, and I’ve got no doubt that they were looting cities and they’ve boosted their economic power. But the fact is is that what’s been kind of suppressed by that kind of what–I would say kind of somewhat banal reporting, which actually has relied on some questionable anonymous sources, what they’ve not looked at is that money trail which is coming from the Gulf states. We have abundant evidence, the U.S. military has abundant evidence–the State Department’s been tracking this for years, so has the FBI–we know very well where the funding is coming from. That funding is coming from the Gulf states. We have not moved to stop that funding. Since 9/11, there have been political obstacles, bureaucratic obstacles, and intelligence officials, very sincere guys who’ve been tracking this have been complaining that we’ve been blocking that for political reasons, blocking real action to cut that down. So the regulatory mechanisms to sort that out have been–they’re not being pursued. And that’s on the British scene, on the American scene, on the European scene. So that needs to be done. Where’s the will to stop that? And why has it not being stopped? If we don’t stop these guys, why are we not doing that? So that raises a fundamental question: if we’re not willing to cut off the source of funding for these kind of movements, that raises questions about what we’re doing. So that would be the first step, I would say.

I would be very wary of the propaganda coming from our own government, right and left, trying to drum up the reasons for going to war against the forces that we have been arming and funding. All that talk of refusal to back the opposition to Asad in Syria by Obama, and the counter story from Clinton, may very well be a complete smokescreen. The money and support may not be flowing directly from us, but it seems we have been facilitating it all along.

Talking Points Memo published the article New Video Shows Immediate Aftermath Of Michael Brown Shooting on August 18.

Here is the video in question as shown by CNN.

At the time I saw this, I didn’t know that there was going to be a claim that the officer had been seriously injured in the alleged tussle with Michael Brown. I had to search Google to find this video that seemed to cast doubt on the story reported by Faux Noise.

The Boston Globe has the article Afghanistan orders expulsion of New York Times correspondent.

KABUL — The attorney general of Afghanistan on Wednesday ordered the expulsion of an American correspondent for The New York Times, Matthew Rosenberg, and banned him from re-entering the country.

Where do you suppose The Boston Globe got this article? “By Rod Nordland | New York Times   August 21, 2014”  This ought to be rich.

Nothing like running an unbiased news story about an expulsion of a reporter from the very organization that published the original story in question.  “The article was based on high-ranking Afghan government sources…”  It should have read “The article was allegedly based on …”

“Rosenberg declined to name them and noted that editors at the Times have internal  checks on the use of sources…”  Was it just the fact that the news didn’t fit that the story omitted any mention of the notorious cases where these checks failed.  As a matter of fact, the whole invasion of Iraq was fostered by such false stories in The New York Times.  To refresh your memory, The New York Times published stories about the Iraqi threat to the U.S.  from high ranking, anonymous sources in the US Government.  Dick Cheney used these reports to bolster his claims, but failed to mention that he was the source of the stories in the first place.

When I didn’t find my comics section in the paper today, I thought it was an omission.  I didn’t realize that the humor had been moved to the news pages.

The Daily Kos has an article “I’m a cop. If you don’t want to get hurt, don’t challenge me” that quotes a Los Angeles police officer.

Regardless of what happened with Mike Brown, in the overwhelming majority of cases it is not the cops, but the people they stop, who can prevent detentions from turning into tragedies. […]

Even though it might sound harsh and impolitic, here is the bottom line: if you don’t want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton or thrown to the ground, just do what I tell you. Don’t argue with me, don’t call me names, don’t tell me that I can’t stop you, don’t say I’m a racist pig, don’t threaten that you’ll sue me and take away my badge. Don’t scream at me that you pay my salary, and don’t even think of aggressively walking towards me. Most field stops are complete in minutes. How difficult is it to cooperate for that long?

The article then invites a discussion. Here is what I contributed.

To understand this issue from all sides you have to imagine yourself in the other person’s shoes. There are a wide variety of shoes you have to consider.

As a white male who gets stopped by the police once every 5 or 1o years, I have no problem giving utmost deference to the police officer (who has a gun) and showing that officer every respect whether he or she deserves it or not. As a result, almost every interaction I have had with a policeman has ended quite well for me and for the policeman.

The other set of shoes I can imagine is that of a black man who may get stopped for similar reasons that I get stopped every 5 or 10 years, but it happens maybe several times a year, or a month, or a week, or even a day. I know, and he probably knows what the right way to handle the situation would be, but can we expect him to have the saintly control to keep his emotions in check? Of course the other advantage that this black man may not have is that I can expect the police officer to treat me civilly if I show the proper deference. It works nearly 100% of the time for me. I doubt a black man could get that percentage of success. Also I have never had to contemplate the loss of a job because I was delayed by an unwarranted police stop, nor the issue of protecting my family from the results of such a stop. If a person is faced with that situation, their ability to control themselves might get compromised.

Putting myself in the shoes of the policeman or woman, I can see that he or she is dealing with a different population of people than I have to regularly deal with. I can tolerate a lot of disrespect, because I am pretty sure of myself and my own value as a human being. One would hope a policeman could also tolerate that disrespect. As a parent, I can tolerate some angry words from my child, because I know that things can get said that are not really meant in the heat of an argument. Apparently some police officers cannot even tolerate that in their own families. On the other hand, I don’t have to tolerate the constant level of disrespect that some officers might face depending on the particular job they find themselves in. The odds of the dangers for me of allowing disrespect may be a lot lower than what a police officers faces.

So, in the face of all of what we have learned by standing in different sets of shoes, we need to figure out what set of standards we want to set for both the police and the public.

Let me add that there are probably many police officers who get the respect they want because they show respect to the people they deal with. There are also police officers who get some disrespect because they show disrespect.

I am also reminded that for most of my working life I got the proper respect on the job from my peers and from my bosses. When I didn’t, I had the option (and I took it) of getting another job. Not everyone finds themselves in such a lucky situation, and therefore can afford a higher tolerance level for disrespect in a few other situations.