Yale University is in trouble again over its misrepresentation of the truth about its football team.
In the fall, quarterback Patrick Witt was a candidate for the Rhodes Scholarship. It was widely reported and celebrated at the time that he withdrew his application for the Rhodes in order to play in “The Game” (Harvard vs. Yale). But it turns out that he was no longer a candidate at that point. From the New York Times:
But Witt was no longer a contender for the Rhodes, a rare honor reserved for those who excel in academics, activities and character. Several days earlier, according to people involved on both sides of the process, the Rhodes Trust had learned through unofficial channels that a fellow student had accused Witt of sexual assault. The Rhodes Trust informed Yale and Witt that his candidacy was suspended unless the university decided to re-endorse it.
The media hoopla over Witt reinforces the disappointment of this revelation:
During the fall, Witt had been lionized as the hero of a badly needed feel-good sports saga — the “perfect antidote,” one newspaper said, to the allegations of child sexual abuse at Penn State. Bloomberg News described his as a Hamlet-like choice. A glowing NBC Nightly News profile called him “an extraordinary individual.” On ESPN, Witt said he would pray on the decision.
When Witt withdrew his application from contention, he made no mention of the allegations, and allowed the media to conclude that he was withdrawing in favor of his team:
Yale had not told Rhodes whether it was re-endorsing Witt when he released a statement through the athletic department the next day.
“I will be playing in the Yale-Harvard game this Saturday,” it said. “I have withdrawn my application for the Rhodes scholarship.”
The quarterback did not tie the two sentences, but journalists did, reporting that he had given up on the scholarship so that he could play. Neither Witt nor Yale corrected the misimpression.
After the loss to Harvard, when reporters asked whether he was now sorry to have skipped the Rhodes interview, Witt said, “My decision wasn’t based on winning or losing this game.”
The cover-up at Yale extends beyond Witt and the University to include the Yale Daily News.
The editors of the Yale Daily News, the nation’s oldest college daily and a bastion of college journalism, knew about the sexual assault charge as early as November.
Multiple current and past members of the newspaper’s managing board, all deeply involved in the day-to-day work of the paper, have confirmed that the News has had the story for over two months. In fact, the Times story that broke last night featured reporting from last year’s editor-in-chief, Vivian Yee. She too approached the paper with a tip-off, but its editors chose not to follow the story. The paper even knew that the sexual assault claim had lost Pat an offer to join the Boston Consulting Group after graduation. Even then, they wrote nothing. For reasons personal, social, or political — who can ever tell on a college campus? — the News’ management chose to ignore the bombshell, protecting Pat’s reputation.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office has serious doubts about a woman’s claims that she was raped by Greg Kelly, the TV-anchor son of Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, and is leaning toward not filing criminal charges, sources told The Post.
Investigators “don’t buy her story,” a source said yesterday of the woman, a law-firm paralegal who told probers that Greg Kelly got her pregnant during the alleged attack and that she had an abortion.
“It sounds like a bunch of BS.”
Another source said, “It sounds like she got caught [cheating] by her boyfriend, and then he forces her hand: ‘If you’re not lying, you better report.’ ”
The DA’s office is suspicious of the accuser for several reasons, including a three-month lag in reporting the alleged rape to police. Sources told The Post last night that the woman doesn’t remember some details of what Kelly did to her — because she was so intoxicated — but claims she knows they had sex and she didn’t consent.
Investigators also have doubts that a rape victim would stay in contact with her supposed attacker, as the woman claims she did, the sources said.
“The length of time” the woman took to complain “is a problem,” the source said.
And “you don’t communicate with someone who raped you.”
Another law-enforcement source echoed the suspicion: “The fact pattern is very suspicious . . . It just reeks of BS.”
Police Commissioner Ray Kelly’s newsman son, Greg, is being investigated for allegedly raping a woman, law-enforcement sources told The Post early today.
The woman filed an official complaint Tuesday against the younger Kelly, claiming the co-host of Fox 5’s “Good Day New York” attacked her last October, the sources said.
The allegation is being investigated by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office because of the inherent conflict of interest in an NYPD probe, according to the sources.
Greg Kelly’s lawyer, Andrew Lankler, said his client “strenuously denied” the allegation.
“Mr. Kelly is aware that the New York County District Attorney’s Office is conducting an investigation,” Lankler told The Post.
“Mr. Kelly strenuously denies any wrongdoing of any kind, and is cooperating fully with the district attorney’s investigation. We know the district attorney’s investigation will prove Mr. Kelly’s innocence.”
A police spokesman referred all questions to the Manhattan DA. A spokeswoman for DA Cyrus Vance Jr. declined comment.
Rosanna Scotto, Kelly’s “Good Day New York” co-host, said today “I love Greg. That’s all I can say.”
Kelly was absent from this morning’s program.
The woman, in her late 20s or early 30s, went to the 13th Precinct station house with her sister sometime after 8 p.m. Tuesday to file the complaint, sources said.
She told police she met Greg Kelly, 43, on a street Oct. 8 and they went for drinks at the South Street Seaport, the sources said.
Then, she claimed, they went to the lower Manhattan law firm where she works — it was not clear if she’s a lawyer— and the alleged assault took place there.
Greg Kelly and the woman continued to communicate after the alleged incident, according to the sources.
She told police her boyfriend got furious when she related her story to him, and he approached the police commissioner at a public event.
It wasn’t immediately clear when that was.
The boyfriend told Ray Kelly that Greg had “ruined my girlfriend’s life,” according to The Post’s sources.
The commissioner asked him to explain and the man said he didn’t want to discuss it in a public setting.
Kelly then told him to put it in writing and send it to him, the sources said.
It wasn’t immediately clear if that letter was ever written.
It’s also not clear why the accuser waited three months to make an official report.
Gov. Jan Brewer’s book, Scorpions for Breakfast: My Fight Against Special Interests, Liberal Media, and Cynical Politicos to Secure America’s Border, is surging on Amazon today thanks to her confrontation with President Obama in Arizona on Wednesday:
I really don’t have a clue why Mitt Romney doesn’t have a good answer for the MSM-fueled Bain and income-tax questions. How hard would it have been for Mitt to say last night when Brian Williams asked if there were any surprises in his tax returns that he released today:
“Yes, Brian. There are some surprises. The biggest one is that I paid every cent I owed in taxes unlike Timothy Geithner, General Electric, Tom Daschle, Al Sharpton, Charlie Rangel, Cindy Sheehan, etc. Should I continue, Brian? Maybe you can ask those who wrote the tax laws I have obeyed what they were thinking when they wrote them, because, to be honest with you, they make no sense.”
Talk about unforced errors. Can anybody answer why Mitt didn’t clean all of this up in the past four years?
Iran has expanded its cultural war against “western influences” to include Barbie.
Iran’s religious rulers first declared Barbie, made by U.S. company Mattel Inc, un-Islamic in 1996, citing its “destructive cultural and social consequences.” Despite the ban, the doll has until recently been openly on sale in Tehran shops.
The new order, issued around three weeks ago, forced shopkeepers to hide the leggy, busty blonde behind other toys as a way of meeting popular demand for the dolls while avoiding being closed down by the police.
The Iranian regime has not only banned Barbie, but has also attempted to supplant her with its own range of toys.
A range of officially approved dolls launched in 2002 to counter demand for Barbie have not proven successful, merchants told Reuters.
The dolls named Sara, a female, and Dara, a male arrived in shops wearing a variety of traditional dress, with Sara fully respecting the rule that all women in Iran must obey in public, of covering their hair and wearing loose-fitting clothes.
As the president is going to Disney today to pitch tourism jobs, I took a look at what kind of jobs are available at Disney World. Here are the latest postings from Disney’s website:
All part time with no mention of health benefits.
Dear Mr. President: These are not the jobs Americans are looking for.
. . .and the least trusted name in news. The funny thing is MSNBC polls only in 6th place as the most trusted among Democrats. Public Policy Polling:
PPP’s 3rd annual TV news trust poll (2011 version here, 2010 version here) finds that Fox News tops the list for both the source Americans trust the most and the one they trust the least.
Fox is the most trusted TV news source for 34% of voters, followed by PBS at 17%, CNN at 12%, ABC News at 11%, CBS News at 8%, MSNBC at 5%, and Comedy Central and NBC each at 4%.
68% of Republicans pick Fox as their most trusted source, with no one else even hitting double digits. Democrats split closely three ways with PBS at 21%, ABC News at 19%, and CNN at 17%. Despite having a reputation for appealing to the left MSNBC actually polls in only 6th place among Democrats at 8%, finishing slightly behind even Fox News’ 9%. Independents split almost evenly between Fox News (29%) and PBS (27%).
Fox is also the least trusted TV news source for 34% of voters, followed by Comedy Central at 16%, MSNBC at 15%, CNN at 11%, ABC News at 7%, CBS News at 5%, PBS at 2%, and NBC News at 1%.
Democrats (53-17 over Comedy Central) and independents (44-13 over Comedy Central) both overwhelmingly say Fox is their least trusted news source. Republicans go for MSNBC by a 28-23 margin over CNN, followed by Comedy Central at 18% and ABC News at 10%.
Today’s Internet blackout has already shown results — Sen. Marco Rubio, the co-sponsor of the anti-piracy bill in the Senate, PIPA, has withdrawn his support. He posted today on his Facebook page:
Earlier this year, this bill passed the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously and without controversy. Since then, we’ve heard legitimate concerns about the impact the bill could have on access to the Internet and about a potentially unreasonable expansion of the federal government’s power to impact the Internet. Congress should listen and avoid rushing through a bill that could have many unintended consequences. Therefore, I have decided to withdraw my support for the Protect IP Act. Furthermore, I encourage Senator Reid to abandon his plan to rush the bill to the floor. Instead, we should take more time to address the concerns raised by all sides, and come up with new legislation that addresses Internet piracy while protecting free and open access to the Internet.
Similarly, Sen. John Coryn has also announced his opposition to the current bill:
SOPA: better to get this done right rather than fast and wrong. Stealing content is theft, plain and simple, but concerns about unintended damage to the internet and innovation in the tech sector require a more thoughtful balance, which will take more time.
It’s both surprising and heartening when politicians actually listen to their constituents and not to lobbyists.
Earlier in the day the Turkish Foreign Ministry and Turkish embassy in the United States, respectively, issued strongly worded statements criticizing Perry. Turkey’s minister to the United States noted that his country “receives no significant sums of foreign aid dollars from the U.S.” and said Perry’s comments were “misplaced and ill-advised.” Similarly, the country’s foreign ministry said the Texas governor was not well informed.
Oddly, though, Turkey didn’t seem to mind nor did the media take notice when Anthony Weiner called Turkey “a former ally” in 2010. (This was back before we knew Weiner was a perv.)
First Lady Michelle Obama‘s much-hyped iCarly episode aired on Monday night, and she had some fun with the guest spot, participating in a game show where she has to guess if a character named Gibby is wearing a hat or criticizing his pet hamster, sharing secret robot-building plans, and dancing with the cast of the show.
Mrs. Obama, who turns 48 today, had appeared in an earlier segment, sharing her admiration for Carly’s father’s military service. Buoyed by her visit, they ask the Fist Lady to appear on their web show, which featured the Gibby game. She correctly answers three questions — a new record — and wins a bag of nuts and bolts.
I don’t care that she went on the show, but to sell this as “admiration for Carly’s father’s military service” is a little overboard. In the show, the father, an Air Force officer who finds himself temporarily stationed on a submarine, is never seen and he leaves his teenage daughter in the custody of her idiot older brother.
We’re in the middle of two wars where thousands of military families find themselves separated from their kids, and Michelle Obama singles out military service that is more plot device than actual service?
Today [Gore is] here to talk about Current TV, but also about the general state of TV news in the U.S. “We’re the only independent TV news organization on the entire television platform,” he says of Current TV. “And this is important to note. The country is in trouble. The dialogue about democracy is broken.”
He’s a bit steamed at the other all-news channels. Something that bugs him about CNN (one of his Current TV anchors, Cenk Uygur, would, at a later press conference, describe CNN as “drivel”), Fox News and MSNBC is the treatment of every issue as one with a 50/50 opinion context.
“What about the climate issue?” he says. “98 per cent of all the climate scientists in the world say that it’s real. Every national academy of science, every professional scientific society says it’s urgent. You gotta act. And then there are a couple of wackos who are on the payroll of large carbon polluters, so on TV it’s a 50/50 issue. It’s not a 50/50 issue, but both sides are given equal time.”
He also says that most all-news channel coverage is biased, not just politically, but because it aims to favour the rich.
“The dialogue that occurs on most of the other news networks is seriously tilted toward the top of the income ladder, the corporate point of view, the conglomerate view. Current TV isn’t part of any conglomerate.”
Now, Current TV isn’t a conglomerate, but its investors are. From the WSJ last year on the hiring of Keith Olbermann and Current’s failed 2008 IPO:
Current Media founders Al Gore, the former U.S. vice president, and Joel Hyatt — founder of Hyatt Legal Services — are majority owners of Current Media, according to the IPO filings. Ron Burkle’s investment firm, cable operator Comcast and satellite-TV company DirecTV also were also listed as significant stockholders in the company.
How can you be “independent” when your investors are Comcast and DirecTV?
Even better, to sum up man-of-the-people Al Gore’s business model, he wants to create a news channel owned by very rich people that delivers news to poor people and in the process, makes the rich people even richer Viva the 1 percent!
In a pre-planned stunt advertised on Facebook, captain of The Concordia, Francesco Schettino, sailed perilously close to the coast of Giglio so that the ship’s head waiter could salute his family on land.
Minutes before the cruise ship hit the rocks, the waiter’s sister Patrizia Tievoli had posted on Facebook that: ‘In a short period of time the Concordia ship will pass very close. A big greeting to my brother who finally get to have a holiday on landing in Savona.’
According to Italy’s Corriere della Sera newspaper, as the cruise liner approached the island’s coastline Captain Francesco Schettino, 52, said to the head waiter Antonello Tievolli: “Come and see, Antonello, we’re right in front of Giglio”.
He misjudged the stunt, however, with the result that the ship hit the rocks, tearing a huge gash in its hull and forcing the night-time evacuation of its more than 4,000 passengers and crew.
In his latest Weekly Address, the president highlighted the company that makes Master Lock padlocks as an example of manufacturing companies that are returning to the United States. Um, 100 jobs?
Longtime Milwaukee manufacturer Master Lock Co. has added nearly 100 jobs over the past 18 months at its factory in the central city, mainly as a result of moving some work back to the United States from China.
The growth prospects for Master Lock are even brighter now that the company is part of a new spinoff business, said Chris Klein, president and chief executive officer of Fortune Brands Home & Security, Master Lock’s Deerfield, Ill.-based parent company.
The work force at the local Master Lock factory, 2600 N. 32nd St., has grown to more than 400 employees since about mid-2010, Klein said.
In addition to the workers at the Milwaukee factory, Master Lock has about 200 employees at its Oak Creek headquarters, 137 W. Forest Hill Ave.
Long lead times and labor issues led Master Lock to shift some work from China back to its Milwaukee plant, Klein said in an interview with The Business Journal. Master Lock has been producing locks in Milwaukee since 1921.
Oddly, the president didn’t mention the labor issues that hampered Master Lock in the first place. Nor did he mention this, via Wikipedia;
In 1999, Fortune Brands began to abandon most operations in its Milwaukee Master Lock factory, and moved most of its manufacturing jobs to offshore plants in China and Mexico, putting an estimated 1,300 American workers (represented by the United Auto Workers) out of work. In 2011, it was announced that 36 jobs making combination locks were being returned from China to the heavily-automated Milwaukee plant, which would now employ 379 workers. It would continue to contract with three Chinese factories, twenty Chinese suppliers, and to operate its maquiladora near the Arizona border, where low-cost Mexican workers do non-automated, labor-intensive work, such as assembling made-in-Milwaukee components.[3][4]
So, the majority of the jobs will still be in China and Mexico. Success?!
If we’re going to talk about manufacturing policy, a little bit of honesty is necessary. Outsourced contract manufacturing, whether done in the U.S. or overseas, is here to stay. A manufacturing company that doesn’t have the ability to “turn-off”or “turn-on” its production line in response to demand can’t be successful in today’s economy.
When a U.S. company turns-off its production line in say China, there’s no concern for the hundreds or thousands of Chinese workers now displaced by the move. A U.S. company that tried to do this in the United States would be pilloried in the media for the same business decision.
Another example is what’s going on at the Foxcon plants in China. As the MSM lauded now-dead Steve Jobs, there was near total ignorance of the working conditions that made his products:
When 150 workers at Foxconn climbed to the roof of one of its factories in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in a labour dispute earlier this month, it was a chilling reminder of the suicide series that shook the world’s largest contract electronics manufacturer less than two years ago.
There were no suicides in Wuhan on January 3, and workers who were present that day said no one was actually threatening to jump. But the drastic protest reflects new labour woes plaguing the company which makes the lion’s share of the world’s iPhones, iPads and other electronic gadgets.
How many Liberals who care deeply about labor unions or the working man have given a second’s thought to how their iPhone was manufactured?
I’ll leave you with this. If the president cares so much about insourcing, he certainly didn’t show said concern when commenting on the death of Jobs:
Michelle and I are saddened to learn of the passing of Steve Jobs. Steve was among the greatest of American innovators – brave enough to think differently, bold enough to believe he could change the world, and talented enough to do it.
By building one of the planet’s most successful companies from his garage, he exemplified the spirit of American ingenuity. By making computers personal and putting the internet in our pockets, he made the information revolution not only accessible, but intuitive and fun. And by turning his talents to storytelling, he has brought joy to millions of children and grownups alike. Steve was fond of saying that he lived every day like it was his last. Because he did, he transformed our lives, redefined entire industries, and achieved one of the rarest feats in human history: he changed the way each of us sees the world.
The world has lost a visionary. And there may be no greater tribute to Steve’s success than the fact that much of the world learned of his passing on a device he invented. Michelle and I send our thoughts and prayers to Steve’s wife Laurene, his family, and all those who loved him.
The spirit of American ingenuity, according to the president, is manufacturing your product in China?
Over the weekend, the Amazon-owned Zappos online-store was hacked, resulting in 24 million compromised customer accounts.Forbes reports:
Twenty-four million Zappos customers are getting an unpleasant Sunday-evening surprise.
The Amazon-owned e-commerce firm has revealed that it was the target of a cyber attack that gained access to its internal network, including the accounts of 24 million of its users. Though the company says that no complete credit card numbers were revealed in the breach, the intruders may have accessed customers’ names, e-mail addresses, phone numbers, addresses, the last four digits of their credit card numbers, and encrypted passwords. Zappos says it’s taken the precaution of resetting the passwords of all its customers and directing them to set a new password upon visiting the site.
“We were recently the victim of a cyber attack by a criminal who gained access to parts of our internal network and systems through one of our servers in Kentucky,” chief executive Tony Hsieh wrote to Zappos employees in an email posted to the site, declining to offer more information about the breach. ”We are cooperating with law enforcement to undergo an exhaustive investigation.”
But this is what’s actually on the consumer site when you try to log-in:
We apologize for the inconvenience however a recent security update has resulted in the need for you to reset your password. By resetting your password, you’ll have a more secure experience on our website.
Yeah, a security update necessitated by Zappos’ incompetence. Back to the Forbes piece:
Even after choosing a new Zappos password, users should be careful to also change their passwords on any site where they’ve used a similar or identical password, in case Zappos’ intruders are able to decrypt the scrambled passwords they’ve stolen. Zappos is also warning affected customers to watch out for phishing emails that will use their stolen email addresses to spoof official Zappos emails and ask for account credentials or financial details.
It would be, you know, helpful, if Zappos told their customers this on their website.
I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you. Dan Primack writes at Fortune:
It turns out there is a way to determine how many jobs Mitt Romney helped to create or destroy while running Bain Capital. Unfortunately, we aren’t allowed to do it.
A handful of academics – including Harvard’s Josh Lerner and the University of Chicago’s Steve Davis – last year published a working paper titled Private Equity and Employment. It basically defied conventional wisdom on both sides, arguing that private equity investment only has “a modest net impact on employment.”
To arrive at that conclusion, the researchers constructed a dataset that relied on U.S. Census Bureau’s Longitudinal Business Database (which is derived from IRS records). It then used Capital IQ and other financial sources to match up the LBD employment records with thousands of private equity transactions. In other words, while Bain Capital and other PE firms didn’t keep track of their portfolio payroll data, the government did. And some academics connected the dots.
Unfortunately, it seems that access to the LBD is highly conditional. Lerner and Davis were required to use the data only in the aggregate, promising not to report any identifying information about any specific organization – even if that organization was not specifically included in the LBD (i.e., financial sponsors). In fact, Census and the IRS screen all such working papers before they can be released, in order to make sure no identifying data is disclosed.
And, since neither Lerner nor Davis seems interested in going to jail, we remain unable to specifically determine the jobs record of Bain or any other PE firm.
A previous story incorrectly reported that Mitt Romney’s former firm, Bain & Co., was part of a team of consulting companies that advised President Barack Obama on a decision to shutter car dealerships during the auto bailout.
Bain & Co. said it has no connection to the “Bain Consulting” firm referenced in government documents.
It seems Rep. Lamar Smith, the author of the terrible “Stop Online Piracy Act,” is himself a copyright violator. His bill, which would destroy the Internet in an attempt to end online piracy, would hilariously lead to the shutdown of his own website. At Vice.com, they’ve discovered that the background image on his website was stolen:
I managed to track that picture back to DJ Schulte, the photographer who took it.
And whaddya know? Looks like someone forgot to credit him.
I contacted DJ, to find out if Lamar had asked permission to use the image and he told me that he had no record of Lamar, or anyone from his organization, requesting permission to use it: “I switched my images from traditional copyright protection to be protected under the Creative Commons license a few years ago, which simply states that they can use my images as long as they attribute the image to me and do not use it for commercial purposes.
“I do not see anywhere on the screen capture that you have provided that the image was attributed to the source (me). So my conclusion would be that Lamar Smith’s organization did improperly use my image. So according to the SOPA bill, should it pass, maybe I could petition the court to take action against www.texansforlamarsmith.com.”
Perhaps Congressman Smith will reconsider the ramifications of his bill. Either way, let’s hope the bill is defeated.
The public editor at the New York Times, Arthur Brisbane, published a strange article today on whether the NYT’s reporters should be concerned with discovering the truth.
I’m looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge “facts” that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.
Unfortunately, Mr. Brisbane’s idea of working to discover the facts merely consists of inserting more bias into the NYT’s regular articles:
On the campaign trail, Mitt Romney often says President Obama has made speeches “apologizing for America,” a phrase to which Paul Krugman objected in a December 23 column arguing that politics has advanced to the “post-truth” stage.
As an Op-Ed columnist, Mr. Krugman clearly has the freedom to call out what he thinks is a lie. My question for readers is: should news reporters do the same?
If so, then perhaps the next time Mr. Romney says the president has a habit of apologizing for his country, the reporter should insert a paragraph saying, more or less:
“The president has never used the word ‘apologize’ in a speech about U.S. policy or history. Any assertion that he has apologized for U.S. actions rests on a misleading interpretation of the president’s words.”
Mr. Brisbane asks his readers, “how can The Times do this in a way that is objective and fair? Is it possible to be objective and fair when the reporter is choosing to correct one fact over another?” The obvious answer is no. Hopefully, the NYT will leave its opinions on its editorial page, because, like Joe Friday, “all we want are the facts.”
