More than Trump, the Republican Party was the biggest loser in last night’s debate

Washington Post

Donald Trump showed during last night’s second presidential debate in St. Louis that he is willing to go down in flames, and he is happy to take down-ballot Republicans with him.

Blood is the metaphor of the morning. There is an incredible amount of talk about “bleeding” in the post-debate conversation. Literally dozens of news stories ponder whether The Donald slowed or stopped the bleeding. The emerging conventional wisdom seems to be that Trump but did not cauterize the wound.

Indeed, the GOP nominee threw just enough red meat to convince hardcore loyalists to stick with him and thwarted efforts to push him off the ticket.

With dozens of high-profile defections over the weekend, it now feels inevitable that he will lose the election. The short-term question is how badly. The long-term question is how much damage Trump does to the brand of his adopted party.

The previous chairman of the Republican National Committee tweeted this half an hour into the debate:

 Follow

Michael Steele 

✔

@MichaelSteele

GOP at this moment. #debate

4:26 AM - 10 Oct 2016

 
•  18,92718,927 Retweets
  

 24,609
• 24,609 likes

-- Conservative Washington Examiner columnist Byron York argues that “Trump's performance will shut down Republican defections from his struggling campaign, at least for now”: “Say you were a Republican lawmaker contemplating breaking with Trump. You didn't do it Saturday, when several GOP officials jumped, because you wanted to see how Trump would do in the debate Sunday night. Now you've seen it — a more aggressive, hard-hitting, and focused effort than Trump's losing performance in Debate One — and you're probably not going to abandon Trump now.”

Weekly Standard Executive Editor Bill Kristol concurs but describes this as a fatal mistake: “Here's the problem: Some Republican leaders could well make the mistake of thinking that because Trump wasn't destroyed at the debate, there isn't now a dire need to act. They could decide that because Trump didn't dissolve into a puddle in the center of the town hall, the situation has stabilized, and the status quo is sustainable. That would be a fatal mistake. The Declaration of Independence identified the problem: ‘All experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.’ Republicans may be disposed to suffer, rather than take bold action, contrary to the forms to which they are accustomed, to shove Trump aside. Republican leaders may think, or hope, that Trump is a sufferable evil. They will be cruelly disappointed in that judgment.” [....]

-- The result of all this is that the GOP is in a state of total paralysis: “One member of the House Republican leadership, conceding its majority was now in jeopardy, compared the situation to the 2006 scandal involving a Florida congressman’s inappropriate conduct with congressional pages. If that scandal was a house fire, this lawmaker said, Mr. Trump had brought on the political equivalent of a nuclear attack,” Alex Burns, Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman report in the New York Times. As Steven Law, a longtime confidant of Mitch McConnell who runs the main GOP super PAC focused on saving the Senate, put it: “The Republican Party is caught in a theater fire; people are just running to different exits as fast as they can."

-- Last night was proof point number 4,358: Trump cannot change. Even if he tried. Even if he wanted to. And he does not want to…

-- Wavering party leaders said they needed to see Trump show real contrition for the crude and predatory comments he made about women in 2005. Trump showed none. Instead, he went on the attack. “I’m very embarrassed by it,” Trump said in a classic non-apology (being embarrassed something appeared in the newspaper is different than being embarrassed about the substance of what was said.) “I hate it. But it’s locker-room talk. It’s one of those things. I will knock the hell out of ISIS. If you look at Bill Clinton, far worse. Mine were words and his was action. What he did to women, there’s never been anybody in the history of politics in this nation who’s been so abusive to women. . . . Hillary Clinton attacked those same women and attacked them viciously.”[...]

-- His scorched-earth tactics were the worst-case scenario that many GOP leaders had feared. Most chillingly, he promised he would try to send Clinton to jail if elected by appointing a special prosecutor to go after her. He called his opponent “the Devil.” And, as she spoke, he got in her personal space and lurked around the stage – making Rick Lazio look polite. He also repeatedly clashed with the moderators, insisting that he was not getting as much time as her (even though, by the final tally, he got more.)

Desperate, he threw the kitchen sink. He falsely accused HRC of “laughing” at a 12-year-old rape victim. He blamed her for her husband’s infidelity. “Trump even seemed to blame Clinton for the death of Capt. Humayun Khan — a Muslim soldier killed in Iraq in 2004 whose parents spoke at the Democratic convention — because as a senator she voted in favor of the Iraq War, which he himself also once supported,” Jenna Johnson notes. “He repeatedly accused Clinton of lying, being an ‘ineffective’ senator and making money off her political position. He said she had hate in her heart and didn’t care about those living in inner-city poverty.” [...]

-- Trump’s collapse has already ruined many political careers, and it will probably ruin more… The ambitious Republicans who submitted and capitulated to Trump after he personally insulted them and their families continue to be personally humiliated. Philip Rucker looks at some of the Republican leaders who stood by him and excused his behavior after attacks against women, the disabled, Latino immigrants, Muslim Americans, Syrian refugees, prisoners of war, Gold Star parents and others. Two examples from Rucker’s story:[...]

“Everything Trump touches dies,” said Republican consultant Rick Wilson, who is advising independent candidate Evan McMullin. “This is going to last forever,” he told Phil. For years now, Democrats will be able to roll out TV ads and say, ‘When John Smith says today he’s for a brighter future, remember who he stood by: Donald Trump. He stood by Donald Trump’s misogyny, racism, sexism and stupidity.’”

“The Republican Party will look like Berlin circa 1945,” added GOP operative Steve Schmidt. “The wreckage will take a substantial amount of time to pick up. There will be a restoration, but it is going to require a monumental feat of leadership by someone who has not yet revealed themselves to the American people.” [...]

Second Debate: Trump once again relied on many dubious and false claims that have been repeatedly refuted

It is important to note that some of the commentators to this blog have repeatedly used the same inaccurate allegations that Trump has - often repeating it word for word

Washington Post

In the second presidential debate, Donald Trump once again relied on many dubious and false claims that have been repeatedly been debunked. His Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, on occasion made a factual misstep, but it didn’t even compare to Trump’s long list of exaggerations.

“One of the women, who is a wonderful woman, at 12 years old, was raped at 12. Her client she represented got him off, and she’s seen laughing on two separate occasions, laughing at the girl who was raped.”

— Donald Trump

Trump mixes up a story about a long-ago criminal case. Clinton did not laugh at a rape victim.

In 1975, Clinton — then Hillary Rodham — was a 27-year-old law professor running a legal aid clinic in the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. After a 41-year-old factory worker was accused of raping a 12-year-old girl, he asked the judge to replace his male court-appointed attorney with a female one. The judge went through the list of a half-dozen women practicing law in the county and picked Clinton.

In her autobiography, “Living History,” Clinton wrote, “I told [prosecutor] Mahlon [Gibson] I really don’t feel comfortable taking on such a client, but Mahlon gently reminded me that I couldn’t very well refuse the judge’s request.” Gibson has confirmed that account in interviews with Newsday and CNN, saying Clinton told him: “I don’t want to represent this guy. I just can’t stand this. I don’t want to get involved. Can you get me off?”

Ultimately, the prosecution’s case fell apart for a number of reasons, including investigators mishandling evidence of bloody underwear, so in a plea agreement the charges were reduced from first-degree rape to unlawful fondling of a minor under the age of 14. Not until 2008 did the victim, Kathy Shelton, realize that Clinton had been the lawyer on the other side. She has since attacked Clinton for putting “me through hell” and she appeared at a news event with Trump before the debate.

The rape case re-emerged when Washington Free Beacon in 2014 discovered unpublished audio recordings from the mid-1980s of Clinton being interviewed by Arkansas reporter Roy Reed for an article that was never published.

In the recorded interview, Clinton is heard laughing or giggling four times when discussing the case with unusual candor; the reporter is also heard laughing, and sometimes Clinton is responding to him.

Here are the four instances:

“Of course he [the defendant] claimed he didn’t [rape]. All this stuff. He took a lie detector test. I had him take a polygraph, which he passed, which forever destroyed my faith in polygraphs.” (Both Clinton and the reporter laugh.)

“So I got an order to see the evidence and the prosecutor didn’t want me to see the evidence. I had to go to Maupin Cummings [the judge] and convince Maupin that yes indeed I had a right to see the evidence before it was presented. (Clinton laughs lightly between “evidence” and “before.”)

“I handed it [a biography of her expert witness] to Mahlon Gibson, and I said, ‘Well this guy’s ready to come up from New York to prevent this miscarriage of justice.’” (Clinton laughs, as does the reporter.)

“So [Judge] Maupin had to, you know, under law he was supposed to determine whether the plea was factually supported. Maupin asked me to leave the room while he examined my client so that he could find out if it was factually supported. I said ‘Judge I can’t leave the room I’m his lawyer!’ he said ‘I know but I don’t want to talk about this in front of you.’” (Reporter says, “Oh God, really?” And they both laugh.) [...]

“Hillary Clinton attacked those same women, attacked them viciously.”

— Donald Trump

Trump has used this line of attack throughout the campaign, sometimes saying Hillary Clinton was an “enabler” of her husband’s affairs, saying she would “go after these women and destroy their lives.”

One of the interviews that Clinton’s critics have pointed to is a Jan. 27, 1998 interview on the Today Show, saying it showed Clinton was discrediting allegations by then-White House intern Monica Lewinsky. This interview took place a week after her husband was accused of having an affair with Lewinsky, and Clinton blamed Republican foes for making false attacks against her husband.

Specifically, critics have pointed to this quote by Clinton:

“I mean, look at the very people who are involved in this, they have popped up in other settings,” Clinton told Matt Lauer. “This is the great story here, for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it, is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president.”

This interview, by many accounts, was certainly pivotal to saving Bill Clinton’s presidency, as his wife forcefully backed him. But by Hillary Clinton’s account at the time her husband had not yet admitted the Lewinsky affair to her. That did not happen until Aug. 15, 1998, according to her memoir.

Moreover, at the time of the interview, Lewinsky also denied there had been a relationship. Her lawyer had submitted an affidavit on Jan. 12 from her saying she “never had a sexual relationship with the president.” Lewinsky did not begin to testify before the independent prosecutor about the full extent of the relationship until July 27, six months after the Today Show interview. Lewinsky testified for 15 days, after which the president finally confessed to his wife.

See our in-depth fact-checks on this here and here.

“Bill Clinton was abusive to those women.”

— Trump

While Trump has ramped up the attacks on the Clintons and the sex allegations against Bill Clinton, the record shows that Trump dismissed or minimized these very allegations for many years. Trump dismissed the women involved as losers and not attractive. Trump even suggested that Americans would have been more forgiving if Clinton had slept with more beautiful women.

Here are some examples (see more here):

In 1998, Trump attacked Paula Jones, who had sued Clinton, alleging sexual harassment: “Paula Jones is a loser, but the fact is that she may be responsible for bringing down a president indirectly.”

In 1999, Trump faulted Bill Clinton for the way he handled the Lewinsky scandal, and complained about his choice in women: “He handled the Monica situation disgracefully. It’s sad because he would go down as a great President if he had not had this scandal. People would have been more forgiving if he’d had an affair with a really beautiful woman of sophistication. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe were on a different level. Now Clinton can’t get into golf clubs in Westchester. A former President begging to get in a golf club. It’s unthinkable.”

During a 2001 interview, Trump again expressed sympathy for Bill Clinton, arguing that the former president’s biggest mistake was answering questions about his sex life. Trump said he likes Clinton, and finds it all too easy to understand why the then president found it hard to answer the question: “Did you f… Monica?” “What he should have done is fought for years not to answer it,” Trump said in the interview. “I mean, isn’t it amazing and terrible that a guy — a president — is put in that position? He could have gone down as truly great and, instead, you know, he’ll be viewed somewhat differently, which is really a shame.” [...]

“In San Bernardino, many people saw the bombs all over the apartment.”

— Trump

There is no evidence this was the case in the 2015 terrorist attack that killed 14 people. There have been unconfirmed second- or third-hand reports — a friend of a friend of a neighbor — that a neighbor claimed to have noticed suspicious activity but did not report anything for fear of doing racial profiling. The religion of this supposed neighbor is unknown, but presumably a fear of racial profiling would suggest the neighbor was not Muslim.

“You [Clinton] get a subpoena, and after getting the subpoena, you delete 33,000 e-mails, and then you acid wash them or bleach them, as you would say, very expensive process.”

— Trump

Trump is technically correct on the timeline, but Clinton’s staff had requested the emails to be deleted months before the subpoena, according to the FBI’s August 2016 report. Moreover, there’s no evidence Clinton deleted the emails in anticipation of the subpoena, and FBI director James Comey has said his agency’s investigation found no evidence any work-related emails were “intentionally deleted in an effort to conceal them.”

PolitiFact compiled a helpful timeline of events relating to Clinton’s release of her emails, based on the FBI report. From their timeline:

On July 23, 2014, the State Department agreed to produce records pertaining to the 2012 attack in Libya, for the House Select Committee on Benghazi’s investigation. In December 2014, Clinton aide Cheryl Mills told an employee of the company that managed her server to delete emails on her server unrelated to government work that were older than 60 days.

On March 4, 2015, the Benghazi Committee issued a subpoena requiring Clinton to turn over her emails relating to Libya. Three weeks later, between March 25 and March 31, the employee had an “oh s—” moment and realized he did not delete the emails that Mills requested in December 2014, he told the FBI. The employee then deleted the emails and used a program called BleachBit to delete the files. [...]

Rewriting the History of Jerusalem For Unesco and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Israel’s capital is anything but Jewish.

Wall Street Journal

This week in Paris, the executive board of Unesco, the United Nations entity charged with looking after matters related to education, science and culture, will vote on a resolution called “Occupied Palestine,” which attempts to redefine the capital of Israel as a supranational city to which Muslims, Christians and Jews have equal claim.

Perhaps not coincidentally, an exhibition currently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City makes the same case. For the sake of Jerusalem, both need to be exposed as the attempts at historical revisionism that they are.

Jerusalem has been a busy patch of earth over the course of its history and a magnet for people of many faiths—first Jews, then Christians, then Muslims—becoming over the millennia a location of cultural fascination. The “Jerusalem 1000-1400: Every People Under Heaven” exhibition at the Met is a case in point. The show highlights the spectacular objects produced in and around the medieval city that continue to inform its modern aesthetic. It is in many ways a curatorial tour de force and must have entailed all manner of diplomatic wrangling to garner so many loans of such delicate, irreplaceable objects.

But there is an elephant in this tastefully curated gallery. At its heart, this is a show about the identity of Jerusalem, as contentious a topic a thousand years ago as it is today, as is evidenced by the Unesco resolution. The exhibition’s premise, as is encapsulated in its title, is that during the medieval period, all claims to the city were equal and inhabitants were uniformly defined by their participation in this unique community.

This interpretation is implicitly projected onto the modern Jerusalem as photographs of the contemporary city appear on the gallery walls next to the explanatory texts. The visitor is encouraged to conclude that if only adherents of the three major religions—Christianity, Judaism and Islam—would understand themselves as citizens of Jerusalem, a city transcending national boundaries, this utopia could be recaptured. The organizers are careful to mix up the order of the three religions as listed in written materials to avoid the appearance of preferential treatment.

An uneasy subtext to “Every People Under Heaven” is that during the exhibition’s time frame Jerusalem was completely dominated by Christians and Muslims, successively. These four centuries spanned one of the sparsest Jewish presences in Jerusalem’s history, beginning as they did with the wholesale slaughter of Jews at the hands of the Crusaders in 1099, after which their population dwindled to as few as 200. The Mamluk conquest of 1260 marginally improved conditions, but a significant increase in the Jewish population would have to wait for the 18th century.

This reality is apparent in the show’s makeup, with Jewish objects being largely confined to books and jewelry, and Jewish issues to their longing for the “absent” Temple of Solomon, a longing that is treated as a somewhat quaint anachronism not as an expression of the enduring spiritual connection of Jews to Jerusalem. Jews, we are told, prayed outside the old city walls. Occasionally a Jew appears in the labels for the Christian or Islamic objects, as when one “Stella” reportedly declared that the Dome of the Rock and the al Aqsa mosque are “as radiant and pure as the very heavens,” as if to give the Jewish stamp of legitimization to the structures built on the Temple Mount.

Again, visitors may well ask themselves from this evidence, why can’t we all just get along today as well as we seem to have done in 1000-1400?

And that is where “Every People Under Heaven” does a disservice to its beautiful contents by making them pawns to a contemporary political agenda to delegitimize Israel. Medieval Jerusalem was not a harmonious, multicultural melting pot that inspired great art. It is in fact quite remarkable that great art was created there in the midst of the endemic violence and religious bigotry that characterized the period. What is different now is the composition of modern Jerusalem, which, as the capital of Israel, has a Jewish majority—but it also, somewhat remarkably, has growing numbers of Christians and Muslims. There are challenges inherent in this dynamic, but they are not the same as the circumstances of Jerusalem in the Middle Ages.

Ultimately, “Every People Under Heaven” functions as a highbrow gloss on the movement to define Jerusalem as anything but Jewish, and so to undermine Israel’s sovereignty. A more aggressive approach will be on display at Unesco on Thursday during the vote on the resolution defining Jerusalem as a global city with a universal rather than a national identity. [...]

Juanita Broaddrick’s Rape Allegation Is A Story About Bill Clinton, Not Hillary

Huffington Post

Republican nominee Donald Trump told the world he would make former President Bill Clinton’s sexual history an issue in the 2016 presidential campaign. On Sunday, he did it.

Less than two hours before his debate with Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee, Trump held a press conference with several women who have accused former President Bill Clinton of various forms of sexual misconduct.

The most famous of these women is Paula Jones, whose sexual harassment lawsuit led eventually to Clinton’s impeachment in 1998. But the most serious allegation against Clinton comes from another woman who was at Trump’s side on Sunday.

That woman is Juanita Broaddrick, a retired Arkansas nursing home operator who says Clinton raped her nearly 40 years ago ― a charge that the former president has said is untrue. On Sunday night, Broaddrick and the other accusers sat in the debate hall in St. Louis, the cameras repeatedly panning to them.

“If you look at Bill Clinton ― far worse ― mine are words and his was action,” Trump said at one point during the debate. “His was what he’s done to women. There’s never been anybody in the history of politics in this nation that’s been so abusive to women.”

Trump claims that these women’s stories are especially relevant now because Hillary Clinton has at various times tried to bully or silence them. It’s a shaky assertion that looks a lot like an effort to distract attention from Trump’s own record of misconduct, which includes not just lewd behavior but instances where Trump has been specifically, credibly accused of sexual assault. Trump has denied those accusations, but they dovetail with his very public history of misogyny.

Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean Broaddrick’s rape allegation is untrue. Like so many allegations of sexual assault, Broaddrick’s story is both unproven and plausible. But its relevance to the 2016 election is a separate question.

Broaddrick’s tale ― which NBC’s “Dateline” first publicized in 1999 and BuzzFeed re-examined in August of this year ― begins in 1978, in Little Rock, Arkansas, when Bill Clinton was the state’s attorney general and running for governor. As Broaddrick tells it, she was volunteering for Clinton’s campaign and was supposed to meet him in a hotel coffee shop. At the last minute, she says, Clinton called her and suggested they meet upstairs, in a hotel room, because reporters were in the lobby. She agreed. When Clinton got to the room, she says, he raped her ― at one point biting her lip, causing it to bleed.

Two women have since said they saw Broaddrick in the hotel room, right after the alleged incident ― disheveled and, yes, with a blue, swollen lip. The women said Broaddrick told them she’d been raped by Clinton, but that she was afraid to say anything about it. She would remain silent until the late 1990s, when federal prosecutors were investigating Clinton’s personal history as part of the inquiry that exposed his now-infamous affair with Monica Lewinsky, a former White House intern.

It was not the first time lawyers had asked Broaddrick about the incident. Previously, when lawyers in the Paula Jones lawsuit approached Broaddrick directly, she had signed an affidavit in which she described being “hounded” by reporters about rumors of the rape.

“I repeatedly denied the allegations and requested that my family’s privacy be respected,” she said in that affidavit. “These allegations are untrue and I had hoped that they would no longer haunt me, or cause further disruption to my family.” But in response to the federal inquiry, Broaddrick said Clinton had raped her.

Clinton, who was by then president, denied the allegation, unambiguously and strongly, through his lawyer. Ken Starr, the lead federal prosecutor, ultimately deemed Broaddrick’s story “inconclusive.” When the tale came out in the media, and Broaddrick gave that 1999 interview to “Dateline,” the controversy got lost in the aftermath of Clinton’s impeachment and near-removal from office. And at that point the story faded ― until about a year ago, when Broaddrick began speaking out about it.

Broaddrick later told BuzzFeed’s Katie Baker that she was moved to speak out after hearing a series of comments that Hillary Clinton made about sexual assault ― specifically, about the importance of believing victims. Broaddrick has long claimed that Hillary tried to intimidate her, citing as proof a brief conversation the two women had during an Arkansas encounter shortly after the alleged rape. Here’s how Broaddrick remembers that conversation, as the BuzzFeed article described it:

Soon after, Broaddrick says, she ran into Hillary Clinton at a political rally Broaddrick had promised friends she would attend. Hillary shook her hand and thanked her for everything she had done for Bill. To Broaddrick, the gesture felt like a threat to stay silent. As attorney general and later governor, Bill Clinton was “the main person that regulated my business and my income,” Broaddrick said. “After she said what she did to me, I just thought, I will keep quiet.”

Broaddrick says that she went “ballistic” when she heard Hillary’s statements about sexual assault, and eventually sent out the following message on Twitter: “I was 35 years old when Bill Clinton, Ark. Attorney General raped me and Hillary tried to silence me. I am now 73....it never goes away.”[...]

Trump and his supporters insist they aren’t simply trying to distract attention from Trump’s problems, or to disparage Hillary by reminding everybody of Bill’s history of unfaithfulness. The issue, they say, is how the former first lady behaved.[...]

Whether any of this is relevant to Hillary’s campaign is another question entirely. Broaddrick’s claim that Hillary Clinton meant to intimidate her is based on a conversation the two women had ― and how Broaddrick perceived it. “I have to go by what I felt then and the look that she gave me,” she told Breitbart News in a recent interview. “I felt like she knew, and she was telling me to keep quiet.”

To think that Hillary was trying to bully Broaddrick into keeping quiet about a rape, you have to believe that Hillary knew Bill had committed the rape. But that would mean, presumably, Bill had told her ― something he was unlikely to have done. Cheaters and rapists don’t tend to tell their wives about their deeds in real time. (And sometimes rapists convince themselves their encounters were consensual.)

Meanwhile, to think this part of Broaddrick’s story is wrong, you don’t have to believe she is trying to deceive anybody, or that she’s wrong about the other charge she makes. You simply have to believe she misinterpreted visual and tonal cues during a quick conversation with a relative stranger ― which is something that happens all the time, in all kinds of circumstances. It would be even easier to understand in the circumstances Broaddrick was under.

As for the relevance to the 2016 election, the most telling aspect is that Trump ― cornered politically, struggling to keep his candidacy alive ― has chosen to compare his behavior to the husband of his opponent. But he’s not running against him. He’s running against her.

Snopes: Trump supporters claim that Hillary Clinton freed a child rapist and later laughed about the case - is mostly false

Snopes

WHAT'S TRUE: In 1975, young lawyer Hillary Rodham was appointed to represent a defendant charged with raping a 12-year-old girl. Clinton reluctantly took on the case, which ended with a plea bargain for the defendant, and later chuckled about some aspects of the case when discussing it years later.

WHAT'S FALSE: Hillary Clinton did not volunteer to be the defendant's lawyer, she did not laugh about the case's outcome, she did not assert that the complainant "made up the rape story," she did not claim she knew the defendant to be guilty, and she did not "free" the defendant.

Origin:In May 2016, the image macro shown above began circulating on Facebook, holding that back in 1975 a young Hillary Clinton (then Hillary Rodham) had "volunteered" to represent a 42-year-old man (Thomas Alfred Taylor) who was accused of raping a 12-year-old girl, that Clinton told the judge in the case that the complainant "made up the rape story because [she] enjoyed fantasizing about older men, that Clinton "got [the] rapist freed," and that Clinton later admitted she knew the defendant was guilty and "laughed about" the outcome of the case. Although Hillary Clinton was indeed involved in a case of this nature, the aspects of the case presented in the image were largely inaccurate or exaggerated.

Finally, Hillary didn't "free" the defendant in the case. Instead, the prosecuting attorney agreed to a plea deal involving a lesser charge that carried a five-year sentence, of which the judge suspended four years and allowed two months credit of time already served towards the remaining year:

Additionally, according to Newsday it was the complainant and her mother who pushed the state to make a quick plea deal rather than have the former go through the ordeal of a court trial, with the mother actively interfering in the investigation to bring about that result:

The victim says it was her mother, who had recently been abandoned by her husband, who pushed for a quick plea deal to avoid the humiliation of having her daughter testify in open court. The mother, who died several years ago, was so eager to end the ordeal she coached her daughter’s statements and interrupted interviews with police, Sgt. Dale Gibson [the department’s lead investigator] recalls.

“We both wanted it to be over with,” the victim told Newsday. “They kept asking me the same questions over and over. I was crying all the time.”

Even now, that outcome is not unusual for violent criminal charges: 2014 statistics show that 97% of criminal cases (including rape) are resolved by plea bargain, and only 3% go to trial. The ratio of plea bargains to trials was similar in 1970 [PDF].

Additionally, that 1975 criminal case came before the widespread adoptions of rape shield laws that now protect rape victims in court from some forms of questioning. A case brought in 1975 would have been subject to much weaker legal protection for the accuser than today.

Trump's candidacy - despite being the choice of Daas Torah in America - is heading to total self-destruction

In an acceleration of revelations about intolerable crude and insulting remarks about others - especially women, Trump's candidacy is heading to a total melt down. Republican leaders are increasing disassociating themselves from him and withdrawing support - one month before elections. Even his wife has publicly stated that his comments are offensive - but she forgives him.

Up until now it was simply holding one's nose and voting for the least despicable candidate. However it has become obvious that Trump not only is not a fit candidate for president but is truly a disgusting and pitiful human being whose only concern in life is himself and pleasure. 

American gedolim who have stated that Trump is best for the Jews, hopefully will reconsider and not support someone who is a complete moral degenerate. There can not be any advantage for Jews to associate with an individual who is so completely clueless as to what a human being is.

Fortune

Donald Trump’s Lewd Comments Leave the GOP Scrambling

A day after Donald Trump’s vulgar boasts of groping women surfaced in a stunning video, Republican officials privately urged candidates to sever ties with the party’s presidential nominee to limit damage down the ballot, while a cascade of congressmen and women asked him to end his campaign and let running mate Mike Pence carry the party’s tattered flag into November.

The chorus of calls for the presidential nominee to take the unprecedented step of dropping out a month before Election Day reflected a growing sense that the GOP’s best hope of maintaining its congressional majorities was to cut Trump loose. But if distance was the new decree, Trump was having none of it. In multiple phone interviews, the beleaguered businessman insisted he would not quit the race. “The media and establishment want me out of the race so badly,” he tweeted Saturday afternoon. “I WILL NEVER DROP OUT OF THE RACE, WILL NEVER LET MY SUPPORTERS DOWN!”[...]

When Trump was disinvited from a Saturday campaign event in Milwaukee by House Speaker Paul Ryan, the businessman asked Pence to attend in his stead. But Pence decided he could not defend Trump and chose not to go. Holed up with his own political advisers on Saturday, he issued a harsh rebuke of his running mate. “I do not condone his remarks and cannot defend them,” Pence said in a statement that was not written on campaign letterhead. “I am grateful that he has expressed remorse and apologized to the American people. We pray for his family and look forward to the opportunity he has to show what is in his heart when he goes before the nation tomorrow night.”[...]

But the avalanche of elected officials breaking with Trump on Saturday suggested that down the ticket, the party has made its choice. “Distancing is no longer a calculation,” says one major fundraiser for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “It is the official Republican policy.”

It was no accident that vulnerable Senate Republican incumbents like New Hampshire’s Kelly Ayotte and Senate hopefuls like Nevada’s Joe Heck were among the first to say they could no longer support Trump. GOP strategists said Saturday that the party’s Senate majority could still be saved. “The presidential race is operating in an alternate universe this cycle,” says Scott Reed, chief strategist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which is spending heavily to re-elect Senate Republicans.

Within that alternate universe, a remarkable 24-hour period left Clinton’s campaign glowing and senior aides to the Trump campaign reconsidering their choices. One of Trump’s most loyal advisers couldn’t promise this was the last they’d see of crass comments. “Once you flush the toilet, you can’t really stop the water,” this adviser said. It suddenly seemed like the whole party might be headed down the tubes with Trump.

Can Dr. John Gottman Really Predict the Success of a Marriage in 15 Minutes?

Slate   My goal is to be like the guy who invented Velcro," marriage researcher John Gottman once told an interviewer. "Nobody remembers his name, but everybody uses Velcro." Gottman's own road to Velcro-level fame started with a 1998 article in the Journal of Marriage and the Family. He and his colleagues at the University of Washington had videotaped newlywed couples discussing a contentious topic for 15 minutes to measure precisely how they fought over it: Did they criticize? Were they defensive? Did either spouse curl his or her lip in contempt? Then, three to six years later, Gottman's team checked on the same couples' marital status and announced that based on the coding of the tapes, they could predict with 83 percent accuracy which ones were divorced.

Soon reporters had dubbed Gottman's research facility the "love lab," and his powers of prognostication had increased: In another published report, he said he could pick out future divorcees 91 percent of the time based on coding a mere five-minutes of tape. Over the next decade, Gottman's narrow, bald head, fringed by a neat, gray beard and topped by a discreet yarmulke, began to appear everywhere—on 20/20 and The Today Show, in the New York Times Magazine and the Atlantic, and in hundreds of newspapers across the country. Malcolm Gladwell devoted most of a chapter to him in his huge best-seller Blink. In a 2007 survey asking psychotherapists to elect the 10 most influential members of their profession over the last quarter-century, Gottman was only one of four who made the cut who wasn't deceased. "Many in the field now believe that most of what we know about marriage and divorce comes from his work," states an article accompanying the Top 10 list.

As Gottman's acclaim has grown, I've many times thought that if we were brave enough, all of us marrieds and, most importantly, would-be marrieds, would take a trip to the love lab. We'd sit facing each other, video running, pulse sensors attached to our fingertips, discuss a problem for 15 minutes or so, and come away knowing the awful or joyful truth. We'd know whether to marry or—no matter how good the relationship seemed at the present—whether to pull away and save ourselves (and any children, for God's sake) the future heartbreak. I imagined a chain of love labs around the country, scanning couples' marital chances as mammograms screen for breast cancer.

Then, while researching my book The Husbands and Wives Club, I looked into Gottman's research and saw that there were reasons other than a silly attachment to romance to think twice before trusting his formula—or anyone else's—to predict the outcome of your marriage. Gottman's "predictions" are not exactly what most of us think of as real predictions. And the way he reports them in all likelihood makes them seem much more robust than they really are.[...]

So what does it mean to predict divorce? For the 1998 study, which focused on videotapes of 57 newlywed couples, I assumed that Gottman had, in the first instance, sorted them into three groups—will divorce, will be happy, will be unhappy but still married—based on the conflict-variables he believed distinguished marriages that last from those that don't (contempt, little positive affect, elevated male heart rate, etc.). Then, at six years, he'd checked to see how right, or wrong, his predictions had been. That isn't how it worked. He knew the marital status of his subjects at six years, and he fed that information into a computer along with the communication patterns turned up on the videos. Then he asked the computer, in effect: Create an equation that maximizes the ability of my chosen variables to distinguish among the divorced, happy, and unhappy.

The upshot? What Gottman did wasn't really a prediction of the future but a formula built after the couples' outcomes were already known. This isn't to say that developing such formulas isn't a valuable—indeed, a critical—first step in being able to make a prediction. The next step, however—one absolutely required by the scientific method—is to apply your equation to a fresh sample to see whether it actually works. That is especially necessary with small data slices (such as 57 couples), because patterns that appear important are more likely to be mere flukes. But Gottman never did that. Each paper he's published heralding so-called predictions is based on a new equation created after the fact by a computer model.[...]

Kaminetsky-Greenblatt Heter: "Sabbah I learned not to speak lashon harah. Even if a goniv was in my house I won't tell the police." The perils of a Chareidi education

I was recently having a conversation with one of my precocious five year old grandchildren about what he had learned in Cheder. He proudly told me that he learned not to speak lashon harah. "Even if a thief was in the house I won't tell the police."

While the Dark Ages of cover-ups in the Chareidi world is behind us, it is clear that the control and censoring of thought and information is still alive and well. In fact it is still a central pillar  of our society and learning what not to think about and what not to know about - starts at an early age.

I am now rereading Dr. Marc Shapiro's book, "Changing the Immutable", and was reminded of Rav Schwab's comment regarding censoring Jewish history to exclude unpleasant information about gedolim and only leave that which is inspirational.

Rabbi Shimon Schwab(Selected Writings (Lakewood, 1988) page 233-234)

There is a vast difference between history and storytelling. History must be truthful, otherwise it does not deserve its name. A book of history must report the bad with the good, the ugly with the beautiful, the difficulties and the victories, the guilt and the virtue. Since it is supposed to be truthful, it cannot spare the righteous if he fails, and it cannot skip the virtues of the villain. For such is truth, all is told the way it happened. Only a נביא mandated by his Divine calling has the ability to report history as it really happened, unbiased and without praise. 

Suppose one of us today would want to write a history of Orthodox Jewish life in pre-holocaust Germany. There is much to report but not everything is complimentary. Not all of the important people were flawless as one would like to believe and not all the mores and lifestyles of this bygone generation were beyond criticism. A historian has not right to take sides. He must report the stark truth and nothing but the truth. Now, if an historian would report truthfully what he witnessed, it would make a lot of people rightfully angry.  He would violate the prohibition against spreading Loshon Horah which does not only apply to the living, but also to those who sleep in the dust and cannot defend themselves any more. 

What ethical purpose is served by preserving a realistic historic picture? Nothing but the satisfaction of curiosity. We should tell ourselves and our children the good memories of the good people, their unshakable faith, their staunch defense of tradition, their life of truth, their impeccable honesty, their boundless charity and their great reverence for Torah and Torah sages. What is gained by pointing out their inadequacies and their contradictions? We want to be inspired by their example and learn from their experience. 

When Noach became intoxicated, his two sons Shem and Japhet, took a blanket and walked into his tent backwards to cover the nakedness of their father. Their desire was to always remember their father as the Tzaddik Tomim in spite of his momentary weakness. Rather than write the history of our forebears, every generation has to put a veil over the human failings of its elders and glorify all the rest which is great and beautiful. That means we have to do without a real history book. We can do without. We do not need realism, we need inspiration from our forefathers in order to pass it on to posterity."

Of course we have more recent examples of removing unpleasant information from discussion. That of course is that deafening silence about the Kaminetsky-Greenblatt heter which is currently causing a couple to be transgressing the horrific sin of adultery. 

We also need not to forget the immortal words of Rav Aaron Feldman, that if he had known that his emails about the perverted heter would become public - he would not have written anything about it. After all he claimed, the degradation of a gadol (resulting from that public discussion) is significantly worse than the crime of adultery which the heter produced.

Translation of Rav Feldman's letter against the Heter

Rav Feldman's regret for sending emails about the Heter

Rav Malinowitz rejects Rav Feldman's statement

Committee to save the Jewish people - correspondence with Rav Feldman

Baltimore Beis Din's revised letter against the Heter

Torah Revolutionaries by Professor Cyril Domb F.R.S.

  Torah Revolutionaries 

Zero Tolerance: The Unintended consequences of taking a hard line on school discipline

NY Times

It did not take long for school safety agents in New York to find their first gun of the new school year. Day 1 had barely begun at a Brooklyn high school last month when the officers stopped a 15-year-old student who had stowed a loaded .22-caliber pistol in his backpack and thought he could pass it through a metal scanner.

In short order, the boy was led away by the police. Also in short order, the city’s Department of Education issued a statement invoking a two-word phrase that has virtually been holy writ in classrooms around the country for the past quarter of a century: “There is zero tolerance for weapons of any kind in schools.”

It is hard to imagine many law-abiding citizens disagreeing that the acceptance level for students carrying guns, knives, drugs or other harmful items should be nonexistent. But the concept of zero tolerance has come to encompass such a broad range of disruptive actions that roughly three million schoolchildren are suspended each year, and several hundred thousand are arrested or given criminal citations. Many students are hauled off to police station houses for antisocial behavior that, a generation or two ago, would have sent them no farther than the principal’s office.

Have get-tough policies gone too far? Predictably, opinions are divided. Nonetheless, as the accompanying video shows, the pendulum in some jurisdictions is swinging away from hard-nosed book-’em certitudes toward softer let’s-try-to-reason-with-’em approaches.

It is a shift that was encouraged by Eric H. Holder Jr. toward the end of his tenure as attorney general. He figures prominently in a new offering from Retro Report, a series of video documentaries examining major news stories of the past and their lasting consequences. This report was prepared in collaboration with the Center for Public Integrity, an investigative news organization based in Washington that has written a series of articles on harsh school discipline.

A central figure in the video is Joe Clark, who built a national reputation in the 1980s as the no-nonsense principal of violence-plagued Eastside High School in Paterson, N.J. (Some people may know him better for having been played by Morgan Freeman in the 1989 film “Lean on Me.”) Patrolling the hallways with bullhorn and baseball bat in hand, Mr. Clark cast himself as the scourge of troublemakers, a Rambo making classrooms safe for pursuits like the works of Rimbaud.

In 1982, his first year, he expelled a reported 300 failing students, some of them well beyond normal school age, and went on to ban dozens more whom he described as “leeches, miscreants and hoodlums.”

On his watch, test scores did improve. The gains were hardly breathtaking, though. Mr. Clark also ran afoul of the school board, which accused him of usurping its authority over expulsions. But many defended Mr. Clark for getting rid of disruptive students, among them a veteran teacher at Eastside who says in the video that “you can’t educate unless you have order in your school.”

As the 1980s yielded to the high-crime early ’90s, “zero tolerance” became a mantra in school districts across the United States. “There was a real concern,” Mr. Holder acknowledged to Retro Report, “that we were just losing control as a society.”

It was an era of near-panic over violence by young people. Fears gave rise to the notion of a generation of “superpredators,” a word that has resurfaced in the current political season, including last week’s presidential debate. It was invoked in the ’90s by, among others, Hillary Clinton, who now renounces its use.

And so, back then, suspensions and arrests began to soar. Local authorities were emboldened by the Gun-Free Schools Act of 1994, a federal law that required states receiving federal education money to expel for at least a year any student found bringing a weapon to class.

But the zero-tolerance net came to be thrown ever wider, ensnaring far more than gun toters, knife wielders and drug dealers. Infractions once deemed the province of school disciplinarians — tardiness, say, or mouthing off to a teacher — often made their way to police blotters. There were eyebrow-arching moments like the arrest of a 12-year-old girl for doodling on her desk with a green marker, of an autistic child who had kicked a trash can, of teenagers who got into fistfights (as teenagers have done probably since Neanderthal days).

To some degree, school administrators were like generals who go to battle relying on tactics from the last war. Zero tolerance kicked into high gear, and stayed there, after youth violence had already entered what would become a steep decline. Homicides involving juvenile offenders, for instance, peaked in 1994, Justice Department figures show. By 2014, their numbers had fallen by two-thirds. Even occasional mass murders in schools, horrifying as they are, have not materially altered the overall pattern of reduced mayhem.

It is not lost on researchers that students expelled, suspended or arrested on charges like disorderly conduct are disproportionately black and Latino, or disabled mentally or physically. In kindergarten to 12th grade, blacks were 3.8 times as likely as whites to receive out-of-school suspensions, according to the United States Department of Education. Youngsters in those grades with disabilities were more than twice as likely as others to be suspended.

Researchers talk about a “school-to-prison pipeline” that runs like this: Young people are suspended from classes for long stretches, or are handed over to the police. As a result, they become prime candidates for quitting school entirely. Dropping out, in turn, makes them less likely to find jobs and more likely to become part of the criminal class.

Perhaps not surprisingly, a sense that school systems and police departments went overboard has begun to take root. An outspoken critic is Steven C. Teske, the chief judge of juvenile court in Clayton County, Ga., just south of Atlanta. Teenagers, Judge Teske has cautioned, will be teenagers.

“Zero tolerance as a philosophy and approach is contrary to the nature of adolescent cognition,” he told a Senate subcommittee in 2012. For all the arrests, suspensions and expulsions that he had observed, “school safety did not improve,” he said. If anything, “the juvenile crime rate in the community significantly increased.”

“These kids lost one of the greatest protective buffers against delinquency — school connectedness,” the judge said.

To foster that connectedness, some schools are shunning harsh punishment in favor of talking things through with rule breakers. They are places like Furr High School in Houston. Its principal, Bertie Simmons, prefers consequences that are “academic,” as with two students who forged a permission slip. Rather than being suspended or put on detention, they were required to write a paper about their offense.

“If you just treat people with kindness, it’s far better than being so punitive,” Ms. Simmons told Retro Report.

No public school system in the country is bigger than New York City’s, with 1.1 million students. It, too, has moved away from harsh discipline as an automatic response. Suspensions in the second half of 2015 were down by one-third from the same period the year before.

At the same time, safety improved. Major crimes — like rape, felony assault, burglary and robbery — were reported at their lowest level since the police started tracking them in 1998.

For many months, the administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio has even raised the possibility of removing metal detectors from some of the scores of school buildings where they are fixtures. Many students regard them as “intrusive and denigrating,” a mayoral panel concluded last year.[...]

New generation of Israeli ultra-Orthodox challenge old guard

Times of Israel

“We are looking into the future, what will become of the next generation,” said Avigayil Karlinsky, a 28-year-old social activist. “I am part of the larger Israel and I want my voice to be heard.”

She said the ultra-Orthodox leadership’s aversion to progress and integration is mostly about maintaining political power rather than serving their constituents. Until recently, such open criticism was unheard of, but it is gaining traction as people like Karlinsky try to change their world from within.

Experts have long warned that the ultra-Orthodox community’s high birthrate and poverty levels, along with low rates of employment and education, could doom Israel’s economic prospects.

Many ultra-Orthodox acknowledge this, but they reject any outside effort to enforce changes and insist the process has to happen at its own pace.

Critics inside and outside the community say a more comprehensive reform is needed, including greater emphasis on teaching children math, English and computer literacy. There also are growing calls for outreach to Israel’s secular majority.[...]

Gilad Malach, a researcher who specializes in the community, said reform was already underway. He said a majority of haredi men now work, compared to just a third in 2003. Women continue to be the primary breadwinners, and their employment rates of close to 75% are comparable to the general public, he said.

The number of ultra-Orthodox joining the military and pursuing degrees has also quietly grown, but “modern” haredim like Karlinsky still only make up about 10% of the community, he said. He says the leadership hopes it stays that way.

“Their approach is ‘nothing has changed,'” said Malach. “But regular people are more sophisticated than that. Every mainstream haredi knows he has to make adjustments.”

The state offers specialized training programs, study grants and other incentives to haredim, but they have to be handled with care so as not to come off as patronizing. While leading rabbis and their representatives in parliament have given their blessing to some projects, they have offered none of their own.

“There is no vision. That’s the real problem,” said Malach. “They don’t have any plans and it would be best if the push came from them.”[...]

In Elad, a central Israeli city of 50,000 mostly haredi residents, the ultra-Orthodox are seeking a happy medium. It boasts the highest rates of employment, salaries and high school matriculation of all haredi communities in Israel. It also prides itself in having clean streets, close ties to neighboring secular and Arab towns, and ample public services like libraries, theaters and community centers.

Mayor Yisrael Porush, a 35-year-old father of six and scion of a prominent haredi family, said his main objective was to develop the city and provide opportunities for residents.

“I’m opening the door for them and it doesn’t come at the expense of study,” he said. “The world is moving forward and everyone wants to feel equal.”

He deferred larger questions about haredi society to the rulings of the great rabbis, but clearly reveled in the companies and colleges that had opened branches in his city and accommodated haredi needs, such as separate working spaces for men and women, and flexible hours for working mothers. He said such an approach would be much more effective than open confrontation.

“Everyone understands that you have to provide for your family,” he said. “But if you come at us with a gun, or with a whip, or threats, we have a problem.”

A case of wife- beating - Is a 5 year jail sentence an appropriate punishment?

The following is an actual case that happened in Israel - reported by Justice Menachem Elon's book (page 196)– The Status of Women Facts:

Case: An appeal concerning the guilt and punishment of a husband who admitted beating his wife intentionally and had been sentenced to five years imprisonment out of a maximum of 20 years . In the appeal the husband acknowledged that he had beaten his wife for years on many occasions. In general he beat her when he came home drunk.  The last episode was when he returned home drunk at 11:30 at night and they got into an argument concerning his drinking. During the argument he punched her in the face and she fell down bleeding badly. The husband then locked the door of the apartment to prevent her from leaving to get treatment the entire night. When she was finally treated the next day she had broken bones in her face and under one eye as well as a bruised face and she needed to be hospitalized for treatment.

Discussion  – the appeal of guilt was simply tossed out as having no basis. The main discussion revolved around the punishment. His attorney pointed out that he was genuinely regretful for hurting his wife and that the punishment was causing significant harm to the family.  He pointed out that the wife was in fact being punished by the sentence and that she had accepted that he was sincere and wanted him to be allowed to return home. She would now have a significant burden of supporting herself and their 3 children without his income as well as having to raise the children herself for the next 5 years. He said it was clear that he had learned his lesson and that the relationship could be repaired and improved without a jail sentence. On the other hand aside from beating his wife he had also sexually abused his daughter.

Conclusion: The court said that while there was no question that the wife wanted her husband home and that she believed his promises to reform – there was no way to ascertain or guarantee that he would in fact reform. It was equally likely that she – as many battered women – are always hopeful that this time it will be different – despite the fact that they are typically disappointed. Taking everything together the court ruled that the sentenced was justified.