MARCH MADNESS PERFECTION | GOOGLE DOODLE DUSTUP | PHIL JACKSON VENTS
PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
THE HUFFINGTON POST MAGAZINE
APRIL 7, 2013
GUNS & POLITICS
An Uneasy Union Where Does the Battle Go From Here?
04.07.13 #43 CONTENTS GUNS & POLITICS
CLOSE TO THE HEART
The debate that’s still too sensitive to touch. By SAM STEIN, HOWARD FINEMAN, CHRISTINA WILKIE & EMILY SWANSON
Enter POINTERS: Leno Out, Fallon In ... Syria’s Troubling Death Toll JASON LINKINS: Looking Forward in Angst DATA: The Worst Soda Drinkers in the World Q&A: Phil Jackson on Gays in the NBA HEADLINES MOVING IMAGE
Voices DAVID FONTANA: When Morality Left the Gay Marriage Debate JON RONSON: The Story of a Man Who Faked Insanity QUOTED
Exit SPORTS: The Most Enthusiastic Man in the World (of Basketball) STRESS LESS: Mix Patterns Without Feeling Overwhelmed TASTE TEST: Canned Tomato Soup JOE RAEDLE/GETTY IMAGES
TFU FROM THE EDITOR: No Regrets ON THE COVER: Photograph for
Huffington by Wendy George
ADVERTISEMENT
Get the NEW HuffPost App for iPad速 & iPad mini速
Download Now
iPad is a trademark of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. App Store is a service mark of Apple Inc.
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
No Regrets N THIS WEEK’S Huffington, several of our reporters consider the past, present and future of gun control measures in the wake of December’s mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. Despite polls showing that a majority of Americans support stricter gun laws, and that Democratic lawmakers have little to fear from backing gun policy proposals, the possibilities continue to shrink in Washington. As Sam Stein puts it in his introduction, noting the dwindling momentum for change as Newtown fades from memory, “Lawmakers once hopeful of crafting bills with broad bipartisan support have been reduced to scheming out procedural means for passing watered-down legislation through their chambers.” Sam also takes us back to the
ART STREIBER
I
fall of 1994, when Dan Glickman, then a Kansas congressman, experienced the fallout from his support for a ban on assault weapons. Even though Glickman had recently passed a popular aviation jobs bill, his office began receiving angry letters from constituents. When November came around, Glickman, who had represented Kansas for 18 years, was defeated. “I didn’t know I was in the epicenter of this controversy until I started going door to door in my district,” he said. “The NRA had made this issue Armageddon.” More than 18 years later, Newtown and a rash of other mass shootings have prompted calls for action, including the passage of a renewal of the assault weap-
Join the conversation on Twitter and Facebook
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
ons ban that expired in 2004. But while a growing majority of Americans clamors for stricter and safer gun laws, a few powerful holdouts have an alternate take on what made possible the rampages in Newtown, in Aurora, at Virginia Tech, etc. etc. etc. That dissenting view is abundantly clear in Howard Fineman’s interview with NRA president David Keene. Keene’s matter-of-fact statement is that, after the outcry that followed Newtown, “we had to change the subject.” To do that, the NRA rolled out a PR blitz that included calling for armed guards in schools, blasting President Obama as an “elitist hypocrite” for employing armed Secret Service agents, and blanketing Connecticut with robocalls to push its progun message. As Howard writes, “Keene told me that the NRA had no regrets or second thoughts and that gun control advocates had seized on the Newtown tragedy to pursue their own unconstitutional political agenda.” Elsewhere in the issue, Christina Wilkie looks at the Second Amendment Foundation, a nonprofit that has backed a flurry of
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
lawsuits designed to expand gun rights. It’s a story that delves deeply into one of the less-discussed facts of guns in America — that gun advocates are far from being a single, monolithic group. The NRA generally takes a gradual approach to expanding gun rights
While a growing majority of Americans clamors for stricter and safer gun laws, a few powerful holdouts have an alternate take.” — one professor calls its leaders “extraordinary minds for the long ball and the big picture” — while other groups, like the SAF, are bolder and more aggressive. As Christina puts it, “Depending upon whom you ask, the SAF is either a brave defender of the Second Amendment or a sketchy upstart with the potential to significantly damage gun rights in the long term.”
ARIANNA
POINTERS
SPENCER PLATT/GETTY IMAGES
Enter
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
NEW GUN LAWS PROPOSED 1 IN CONNECTICUT
Connecticut lawmakers passed a sweeping package of gun reforms this week, more than three months after a shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School left 26 dead. While some relatives of Newtown victims were dismayed that the legislation does not ban all high-capacity magazines, it does include a ban on sales of magazines with more than 10 bullets. Those who already own such magazines will face new registration requirements. “Nobody will be able to say that this bill is absolutely perfect, but no one will also be able to say that this bill fails the test when it comes to being the strongest in the country and the most comprehensive bill in the country,� state Senate President Donald Williams Jr. said.
FROM TOP: AP PHOTO/NBC, ANDREW ECCLES; AP PHOTO/NBC, ANDREW ECCLES
Enter
POINTERS
2
LENO OUT, FALLON IN
3
PROSECUTORS WANT DEATH PENALTY FOR JAMES HOLMES
4
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
After months of rumors surrounding NBC’s late-night talk shows, the network announced this week that Late Night host Jimmy Fallon will take over The Tonight Show from Jay Leno in 2014. Leno wished Fallon congratulations, saying, “I hope you’re as lucky as me and hold on to the job until you’re the old guy. If you need me, I’ll be at the garage.” NBC last tried to pull off a host transition in 2009, when Conan O’Brien took over The Tonight Show. But it became a messy PR battle when the network chose to reinstate Leno after just seven months. Colorado prosecutors announced that they will seek the death penalty for James Holmes, who is accused of killing 12 people and wounding 58 others during a shooting rampage at a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises last July. “It’s my determination and my intention that in this case for James Eagan Holmes, justice is death,” the district attorney said. The defense recently proposed a plea deal that would have given Holmes life in prison without the possibility of parole, but prosecutors rejected it.
ACTIVISTS SAY MARCH WAS DEADLIEST MONTH IN SYRIA
More than 6,000 people were killed in Syria last month, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, making it the deadliest month in the country’s two-year long conflict between those loyal to President Bashar al-Assad and rebel forces. The observatory has recorded a total of 62,554 deaths since the start of the conflict, but it estimates that the actual total is around 120,000, the head of the opposition group told Reuters. The United Nations has said that more than 70,000 people have died in the conflict.
Enter
5
POINTERS
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
EUROZONE HIT WITH RECORD HIGH UNEMPLOYMENT
Unemployment in the eurozone has hit 12 percent, a record high since the currency was created 14 years ago, according to official European Union figures. In February, more than 19 million people were unemployed in the eurozone, almost two million more than a year before. “Such unacceptably high levels of unemployment are a tragedy for Europe and a signal of how serious a crisis some eurozone countries are now in,” said Laszlo Andor, the employment commissioner of the European Union. Unemployment across the EU as a whole in February was 10.9 percent. After sustaining a gruesome injury to his leg that stunned onlookers and brought many to tears, Louisville guard Kevin Ware is expected to join his team at the Final Four this weekend. Coach Rick Pitino told ESPN that the 20-year-old will “travel with the team to Atlanta” to watch the end of the NCAA tournament. Doctors performed surgery less than 24 hours after Ware broke his leg, and it didn’t take long for photos to reach Twitter of Ware up and about on crutches and posing with the team’s Midwest Region championship trophy.
FROM TOP: AP PHOTO/VIRGINIA MAYO; SHANE KEYSER/KANSAS CITY STAR/MCT VIA GETTY IMAGES
6 KEVIN WARE EXPECTED TO WATCH FINAL FOUR THAT’S VIRAL BUCKWILD STAR DEAD AT 21
A selection of the week’s most talked-about stories. HEADLINES TO VIEW FULL STORIES
WHY YOU NO LAUGH GOOGLE READER FANS?
COME SMELL THE INTERNET
HOW THE RED EQUALS SIGN TOOK OVER FACEBOOK
A 6-YEAR-OLD DRUM PRODIGY’S ‘HOT FOR TEACHER’
ARTHUR SCHATZ//TIME LIFE PICTURES/GETTY IMAGES
Enter
LOOKING FORWARD IN ANGST
JASON LINKINS
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
GOOGLE DOODLE’S EASTER DUSTUP PORTRAYS THE FAITHFUL AS FECKLESS WING TO THE FACT that I use the Google Chrome extension to do all my web searching, I rarely have occasion to visit Google’s main page, and consequently, I miss out on all of the fun and whimsical Google “doodles”
O
the search company regularly places there. Unless, of course, those doodles “make news.” And over the Easter holiday, one of those doodles did, diddling the domes of conservative Twitter trawlers, outraged that the Easter Sunday doodle celebrated the birthday of labor leader Cesar Chavez, as opposed to, I guess, something Eastery. And so now we have this whole
A portrait of activist and United Farm Workers leader Cesar Chavez.
Enter “Google’s War on Christianity” thing, even though as far as I can tell, everyone who visited the Google home page was mere seconds from being able to visit, you know ... the Bible. The whole kerfuffle was like an early version of the annual “War On Christmas,” in which we are led to believe that faithful Christians are somehow being attacked or maligned during the Yuletide season. It really does a disservice to people around the world — including many Christians — who suffer at the hands of actual persecutors. In reality, those who are privileged enough to live in America get a month of celebration in which every piece of media — from television shows, to the music at the coffee shop, to the lights on the street — inevitably leads back to the Gospels and their telling of the birth of Jesus Christ. This includes an enormously popular children’s cartoon called A Charlie Brown Christmas, in which the Gospel of Luke is recited aloud on network television. If there’s one thing that the Christmas season demonstrates, it’s that American Christians enjoy top cultural standing among their peers in other faith traditions. And yet, the central notion that gov-
LOOKING FORWARD IN ANGST
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
erns the so-called “War On Christmas” is that this seemingly unshakeable firmament of religious privilege can be destroyed utterly the moment a single clerk working the Target checkout line utters the words “Happy Holidays,” instead of “Merry Christmas.” Given that Christmas is the most successful branding campaign in the history
All of those angry at Google seem to be implying that Google is specifically obligated to provide Christians with a helping of validation that they shouldn’t actually need.” of the universe, I find all of this deeply puzzling. But I’m doubly puzzled about this whole Easter Sunday Googledoodle contretemps, because all of those angry at Google seem to be implying that Google is specifically obligated to provide Christians with a helping of validation that they shouldn’t actually need. Don’t get me wrong! It’s a really interesting irony — Google is, first and foremost, an instant-gratification engine. We are literally trained to
Enter expect it to provide us with “The Answers,” and to do so in a way that’s not laborious or time-intensive. But there are more things in heaven and earth than are trawlable by Google’s search spiders, folks. And as near as I can tell, churches were open on Easter Sunday, providing a venue for that sort of contemplation. So why on earth did a drawing of Cesar Chavez anger people so much? What did it matter? Well, the truth is that it didn’t matter to 99.9999999999999999999 percent of Christianity’s 2.2 billion adherents. Rather, it seems to have mattered most to those who worship at the altar of Tribal Political B.S., the great Golden Calf of our civic discourse. And to that flock, Google’s sin was not actually ruining the Easter holiday (the Easter holiday was not ruined, after all), but honoring the birthday of a labor rights activist traditionally associated with the left. (At least, that was the second round of braying, after they all realized that the doodle was not, in fact, of former Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, a matter that took more time than was otherwise necessary to sort out, given that they could have Googled it
LOOKING FORWARD IN ANGST
right then and there.) I’ll give the complainants this: It’s entirely possible that they were victimized by a neat bit of “trollgaze” — something on the Internet designed to engineer outrage. But the more realistic possibility is that Google opted to celebrate Chavez’s birthday ... on Chavez’s birthday. It’s a weird concept, I know! Naturally, I am open to suggestions as to alternate days on which Google could have run the “Happy Birthday Cesar Chavez” doodle, but I have this strange feeling we’re just going to keep on coming back to March 31 as the ideal date. When you get right down to it, what Google did has nothing at all to do with a drawing that they ran on a religious holiday (that didn’t end up interfering with the holiday in any material way for its celebrants). This is simply a debate in which you either believe that Cesar Chavez, who died in 1993, is worthy of some tribute in the public sphere (even one as fleeting as a Google doodle) or you believe otherwise. In all likelihood, if you oppose Chavez’s labor activism out of a sense of political
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
Google’s March 31st doodle of Cesar Chavez.
Enter tribalism, you’re going to lower the boom on Google, even if Easter isn’t somehow implicated. But it’s a pity that the Doodle Rage has, in this instance, accorded Google more power in the public sphere than it actually has. Google is, God knows, a powerful corporation. I’ve no doubt that there are people on its campus with messianic pretensions. But the company isn’t a countervailing force, rising in opposition to religion, any more than the Target checkout clerks at Christmastime. And it’s deeply weird to suggest that Google is. The whole concept of “faith” involves a firm, indefatigable belief in matters beyond the material sphere. And faith communities give those faith muscles regular workouts, by offering adherents the opportunity to pursue rigorous spiritual contemplation, participate in meaningful sacraments and traditions, and participate in fun and rewarding fellowship with other believers. The bottom line, I think, is that when you invest in these practices, it’s supposed to prevent you from completely falling to pieces when fate occasions a moment where you do not receive immediate, perfect validation of your beliefs.
LOOKING FORWARD IN ANGST
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
Look, Cesar Chavez was about as perfect a human being as the rest of us, which is to say, not at all. His embrace of the Marcos regime in the Philippines caused a rift within the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee, and latterday immigration reformers may not find his legacy entirely suited to the forging of alliances. Nevertheless, at the root of Chavez’s career as a civil rights activist, imperfect as it
If there’s one thing that the Christmas season demonstrates, it’s that American Christians enjoy top cultural standing among their peers in other faith traditions.” may have been, is a guiding principle that anyone who has spent any time in deep contemplation of the Christian faith may be familiar with — Matthew 25:40 — which reads in part, “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” So when you really think about it, for Christians on Easter Sunday, everything eventually led back to the Gospels. Even Google’s doodle.
Enter
JORGEBARRIOS/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS (PAP SODA); STOCK.XCHNG (DOOGH)
U.S. Leads the World in Poor Soda Drinking Habits
New York City’s ban on giant sodas was struck down by a judge last month, but Mayor Michael Bloomberg vowed to appeal the ruling. The obesity rate among adults in New York City stands at about 24 percent — up six points in the past decade, but lower than the national average of about 34 percent. Meanwhile, the city’s Type 2 diabetes rate outpaces the nation’s, according to city data. A 16-ounce Coke — the largest size allowed under Bloomberg’s proposal — packs 56 grams of sugar, nearly as much as two Snickers bars. On average, each American buys 180 liters of soda a year. We also spend about $245 billion each year treating diabetes. Of course, many factors can contribute to diabetes and other vices may plague countries where soda isn’t a multibillion-dollar industry. But our movie-theater Coke troughs probably aren’t helping anyone stay healthy. Scan the bubbles to the right for a visualization of how the U.S. stacks up against other nations. — Katy Hall
DATA
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13 PER CAPITA YEARLY SODA TYPE II PURCHASES (LITERS) DIABETES RATE
U.S. Mexico Guatemala Thailand Norway Brazil Peru Russia Finland South Africa Ireland Chile China Japan Denmark Iran Turkey Sweden South Korea Cameroon U.K. Saudi Arabia France Italy Greece Ukraine India Pakistan Canada Australia Netherlands Germany Spain Israel Czech Rep. Indonesia New Zealand TAP ICONS FOR ADDIONAL INFO
OBESITY RATE AGE 15 AND OVER
Q&A
FROM TOP: KEVORK DJANSEZIAN/GETTY IMAGES; DENNIS GROMBKOWSKI/BONGARTS/GETTY IMAGES
Enter
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
Phil Jackson on the NBA Being More Inclusive of Gays
“That’s a ridiculous question. I mean, none of us have probably ever seen it in all our careers. There’s no inclusiveness to be had, so it’s really a strange question.”
Above: Former coach of the L.A. Lakers Phil Jackson during a news conference in 2011. Below: Former NBA player John Amaechi came out as gay after he retired.
FOR THE FULL INTERVIEW, VISIT HUFFPOST LIVE
HEADLINES
Enter
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
The Week That Was
TAP HERE FOR PHOTO CREDITS
TAP IMAGE TO ENLARGE, TAP EACH DATE FOR FULL ARTICLE ON THE HUFFINGTON POST
03.29.13
04.02.13
04.02.13
03.28.13
Enter
MOVING IMAGE
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
Baikonur, Kazakhstan 03.29.2013
AP PHOTO/DMITRY LOVETSKY
In this photo taken with a fisheye lens and with long-time exposure, the Soyuz-FG rocket booster with Soyuz space ship carrying a new crew to the International Space Station blasts off at the Russianleased Baikonur cosmodrome.
PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
FRANCO ORIGLIA/GETTY IMAGES
Enter
Rome, Italy 03.29.2013 Pope Francis presides over the Way of the Cross procession at the Colosseum on Good Friday, a traditional procession that recalls the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
MOVING IMAGE
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
PASCAL LE SEGRETAIN/GETTY IMAGES FOR MBFW RUSSIA
Enter
Moscow, Russia 03.30.2013 A model prepares backstage at the Ria Keburia show during MercedesBenz Fashion Week Russia Fall/Winter 2013/2014. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
MOVING IMAGE
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
NOEL CELIS/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Enter
Manila Bay, Philippines 03.31.2013 A baby joins thousands of city slum dwellers as they take an Easter Sunday dip on the polluted Manila Bay, despite the ban on bathing in the bay. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
MOVING IMAGE
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
JONATHAN NEWTON / THE WASHINGTON POST VIA GETTY IMAGES
Enter
Washington, D.C. 03.29.2013 Washington Nationals left fielder Bryce Harper (34) runs onto the field for exhibition action against the New York Yankees. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
MOVING IMAGE
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
Enter
AP PHOTO/KEVIN FRAYER
Vrindavan, India 03.27.2013 An Indian Hindu widow walks with a cane as flowers fall from above during Holi celebrations. The festivities were organized by the NGO Sulabh, for widows who have been banished by their families after the death of their husbands for supposedly bringing bad luck. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
MOVING IMAGE
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
AP PHOTO/JAWAD JALALI
Enter
Kabul, Afghanistan 03.29.2013 A balloon-seller waits for customers on a hill overlooking Kabul. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
MOVING IMAGE
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
AP PHOTO/PETROS GIANNAKOURIS
Enter
Nicosia, Cyprus 03.26.2013 Cypriot students protest for social justice and against the government levies on private savings at the entrance of the presidential palace in the capital. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
MOVING IMAGE
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
AP PHOTO/SEBASTIAN SCHEINER
Enter
Jerusalem, Israel 03.31.2013 Nuns walk during the Sunday Easter mass at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, traditionally believed to be the site of the crucifixion of Christ, in Jerusalem’s Old City. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
MOVING IMAGE
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
AP PHOTO/DPA, RAINER JENSEN
Enter
Berlin, Germany 03.29.2013 Snow-covered beach chairs stand at the lido of Strandbad Wannsee on Good Friday, when bathing season at the lido traditionally starts. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
MOVING IMAGE
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
Enter
AP PHOTO/ARUN SANKAR K
Chennai, India 03.26.2013 A Hindu devotee, body pierced with skewers, participates in a religious procession during the Panguni Uthiram festival, celebrated in honor of the Hindu God Murugan. Devotees make offerings they believe will keep them away from evil spirits. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
MOVING IMAGE
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
AP PHOTO/HATEM MOUSSA
Enter
Khan Younis, Gaza 03.31.2013 Palestinian youths practice their parkour skills in the Khan Younis cemetery in southern Gaza. Parkour is a physical discipline of movement focused on overcoming obstacles. Tap here for a more extensive look at the week on The Huffington Post. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
MOVING IMAGE
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
Voices
DAVID FONTANA
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
MARK WILSON/GETTY IMAGES
When Morality Left the Gay Marriage Debate THE NATIONAL HEADLINES last week were dominated by the two days of oral arguments in the Supreme Court dedicated to the constitutional status of gay marriage. How the Court will decide these cases is difficult to predict. But it
is not too soon to draw another conclusion: the language that the Court used to talk about gay marriage this past week lacked the polarizing moral denunciations of homosexuality of the past. The language the Court uses to debate national issues matters — it can both frame public discussions and signal what the Court might be do-
Same-sex marriage supporters rally in front of the U.S. Supreme Court on March 27, 2013, in Washington, D.C.
Voices ing now and into the future. The change in the language of gay rights in the Court, therefore, was a major step forward regardless of how the Court decides these two cases. When the Court announced in December that it was going to hear these cases, many were nervous because they feared that the Court would rule against gay marriage. But there was also plenty of reason to fear that the discussion before the Court would feature the polarizing language of morality that had featured in past Court cases surrounding gay marriage. This fear was amplified when, only three days after the Court decided to hear these cases in December, Justice Antonin Scalia responded to a student question at Princeton University by remarking that society might have legitimate “moral feelings” against homosexuality. The last two times that the Court decided cases about gay rights, the discussions at the Court featured this kind of moral language — and moral condemnations. In 1996, in Romer v. Evans, the Supreme Court invalidated Colorado’s Amendment 2, which had prohibited Colorado state law from creating any civil rights protections for gay citizens. But even
DAVID FONTANA
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
a win for gay rights in Romer was full of public language skeptical of the morality of homosexuality. In its brief before the Court, the State of Colorado justified Amendment 2 as reflecting a judgment that gays are “less deserving” of the limited resources available under state law than other groups. C-SPAN recently
The language that the Court used to talk about gay marriage this past week lacked the polarizing moral denunciations of homosexuality of the past.” broadcast the oral arguments in that case, and the oral argument is full of counsel on both sides having trouble even speaking the word “homosexuality.” Justice Scalia’s dissent from the Court’s decision striking down Amendment 2 talked about Colorado’s legitimate interest in the preservation of “traditional sexual mores” and Colorado’s “moral disapproval of homosexual conduct.” A few months after Romer — and citing Romer as part of the reason for its actions — Congress
Voices passed the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). As Justice Elena Kagan pointed out last Wednesday, the report prepared by the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee justifying DOMA stated that in enacting DOMA “Congress decided to reflect and honor a collective moral judgment and to express moral disapproval of homosexuality.” Seven years later, in Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court invalidated a Texas statute criminalizing same-sex sodomy. It was another doctrinal win for gay rights, but another public condemnation of the morality of gay rights. In its brief, and in oral arguments, the State of Texas justified criminalizing same-sex sodomy as part of its “promotion of morality.” To be sure, the spectacle outside of the Court last week still featured demonstrators condemning homosexuality on moral grounds. Inside of the Court, though, things were different. Last Tuesday, Charles Cooper appeared before the Court to defend the constitutionality of California’s Proposition 8 banning gay marriage. Cooper argued that Proposition 8 was not based simply on “anti-gay malice.” His argument instead relied substantially on
DAVID FONTANA
the language of empirical uncertainty rather than moral condemnation. Cooper argued that “it is impossible for anyone to foresee the future accurately enough” to know the empirical consequences of legalizing gay marriage. Justice Scalia talked about gay marriage differently as well. One month ago he talked about the Voting Rights Act during oral arguments as a “racial entitlement.” Last Tuesday, by contrast, he asked whether there was a “scientific answer” to questions posed by “sociologist[s]” about the differences in families headed by same-sex couples. Justice Samuel Alito remarked “there isn’t a lot of data” about these families but that gay marriage “may turn out to be a good thing.” During Wednesday’s oral argument in the DOMA case, when Kagan read the statement from the House Report about morally condemning gay marriage, former Bush Administration Solicitor General Paul Clement stated that the defenders of DOMA in this case have “never invoked” those morality arguments. If anything, the most morally infused language from the week was the language supportive of gay marriage. Last Tuesday,
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
Voices Justice Anthony Kennedy wondered about “the voice of those children” with gay parents. On Wednesday, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wondered whether it was constitutional to have “two kinds of marriage” with only one being “full marriage.” It is still true that people’s support for or opposition to gay marriage is largely based on their moral worldview. But the public language we use to defend our positions is just as important as our ultimate policy positions. That is because language can both shape policy and serve as a lagging indicator of policy. The way we frame issues in our public debate can influence policy preferences. Since last week featured less moral condemnation of homosexuality in the Court, then perhaps the general public discussion of homosexuality will feature less moral commendation. This could lead to the decrease of morally negative views of gay rights, as has already been happening. Without moral discomfort with gay rights, policy support for gay rights will increase. Language not only can change behavior but can also serve as a lagging indicator of behavioral changes that are on the horizon.
DAVID FONTANA
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
If you cannot give reasons for a policy position in public, it is often a sign that you are uncomfortable with these reasons — in part because of your own conflicted feelings, and in part because you know people might really dislike your reasons and you don’t want to disagree with your audience. It is often just a matter of time, then, before private preferences catch up to conflicting public justifications.
Language not only can change behavior but can also serve as a lagging indicator of behavioral changes that are on the horizon.” We will all anxiously await the Court’s decision in these two cases. The decisions in these cases matter, but a major victory has already been won in how the Court talked about these issues last week. Language matters, and the language of last week in the Court was not as ugly as many feared it would be. David Fontana is associate professor of law at George Washington University Law School.
Voices
JON RONSON
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
PSYCHOLOGY
COURTESY OF TED
The Story of a Man Who Faked Insanity MY TEDTALK was for an experimental TED called TED Full Spectrum. Chris Anderson said he was tired of people getting up on stage with nothing but a Powerpoint. That’s why I’m not alone on stage. Behind me are Julian Treasure and
Evan Grant. They’re responding live to what I’m saying with audio and visuals stored on their computers. If I veer off, they have to veer off with me. They were great, although we do look like a synth-pop band doing one of those ‘80s nostalgia tours. My talk is based on my book, The Psychopath Test. It’s in part about a man called Tony. He swears he
JON RONSON EXPLAINS the nuances of insanity in his 2012 TEDTalk.
Voices faked madness to escape a prison sentence for GBH (grievous bodily harm) and is now stuck in a secure hospital because nobody will believe he’s sane. It was the Scientologists — brutally opposed to psychiatry — who introduced me to Tony. It’s also about the compelling theory that you are four times more likely to have a psychopath running your business than you are to have one as your underling. This is because items on the psychopath checklist include Grandiose Sense of Self Worth, Lack of Empathy, and so on — characteristics rewarded in our society, unfortunately. It’s a story about psychopath-spotting in high places, then, but also about how becoming a psychopath-spotter can turn you a bit psychopathic because it compels you to start reducing people to items on a checklist — to their maddest edges. It’s something we all do. Whenever someone comes onto the TV or the radio sounding potentially like a psychopath — Lance Armstrong, etc. — we all get drunk with our psychopath-spotting powers. I get millions of tweets asking me if they are one. I also get offers to be a talking head on TV. I try to always say no because whilst it would be nice to make hay while the sun shone,
JON RONSON
it’s quite morally corrosive (not to mention massively unethical) to diagnose someone off the TV. I tell you who would be even more unethical than me if they went on TV to diagnose someone from afar as a psychopath: any forensic psychiatrist or psychologist or anyone who works in that field as an expert. The Psychopath Test is a cautionary tale to not do that, in fact. It’s as much a book about confirmation bias as it is about psychopaths. (By the way, ever since I learnt about confirmation bias I’ve started seeing it everywhere.) When I started writing The Psychopath Test I read this book which diagnoses Lyndon Johnson from afar as bipolar. It might be right for all I know. Maybe Lyndon Johnson was bipolar. But it was so
TED and The Huffington Post are excited to bring you TEDWeekends, a curated weekend program that introduces a powerful “idea worth spreading” every Friday, anchored in an exceptional TEDTalk. This week’s TEDTalk is accompanied by an original blog post from the featured speaker, along with new op-eds, thoughts and responses from the HuffPost community. Watch the talk above, read the blog post and tell us your thoughts below. Become part of the conversation!
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
CREDIT TK
Voices high and mighty. So ivory tower. So reductive. And so from afar. And so I vowed never to do that. So in The Psychopath Test, as in my TEDTalk, I only recount conversations with people I met in person. That way all the ambiguities and nuances, the biases, the power play between the interviewer and interviewee, would be part of the writing. I was thinking about all of this listening to Julie Burchill’s brilliant recent interview on the BBC Radio 4 show Desert Island Discs. At times she could not have sounded more textbook Hare Checklist: JB: “I think I was born without something ... But if I was I’m glad I was because I don’t want to be one of those people who creep around trying to get people’s approval. I think they’re pathetic ... I’ve always been to some extent shameless, and I’ve always been an aggressive person. Not physically but the way I think and the way I go after other people.” Here’s one tweet I read just after she said this: “Julie Burchill is demonstrating psychopathy so clearly on #desertislanddiscs that I might use it as a teaching tool for my students.” I know what she meant. You
JON RONSON
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
only have to read the checklist. Anyway, a few minutes later she was talking very movingly and sincerely about missing her parents, and how much pain she would feel going back to Bristol because the accent would remind her of them:
You are four times more likely to have a psychopath running your business than you are to have one as your underling.” “If I was in Bristol and everywhere I turned someone would be going, ‘all right my lover,’ I’d feel sad and I’d really miss them.” I noticed that I felt weirdly disappointed for a moment when she said this. My fast and triumphant diagnosis off the radio was not her whole story. She was more confusing, less black and white. She was greyer. I had wanted the one aspect of her personality — the psychopathic-sounding one — to be more true and significant. So I had to kind of force myself out of one train of thought into another. I think this is part of the reason why there are so many miscarriages of justice in the psychopath-
spotting field. Here’s a paragraph from The Psychopath Test: “Bob Hare told me of an alarming world of globe-trotting experts, forensic psychologists, criminal profilers, traveling the planet armed with nothing much more than a Certificate of Attendance, just like the one I had. These people might have influence inside parole hearings, death penalty hearings, serial-killer incident rooms, and on and on. I think he saw his checklist as something pure — innocent as only science can be — but the humans who administered it as masses of weird prejudices and crazy dispositions.” Psychopaths (whatever you want to call them) exist. I believe in the veracity of the Hare Checklist. I believe Hare is right. And I think that psychopaths can be — maybe always are — terrible malevolent forces. And I totally sympathize with anyone who gets caught up with one. I am no RD Laing-esqe polemicist in my views on psy-
MORE ON TED WEEKENDS WHO CAN YOU TRUST?
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
JON RONSON
Voices
CALL ME CRAZY
chiatry. I think for some people — those who suffer from OCD, for instance — a diagnosis is nothing but positive. It can focus your mind to get better and make the world less terrifying and confusing. But the new DSM is about to come out and — as one of it’s chief critics, Allen Frances, says — the boundaries of what’s considered normal are getting narrower and narrower. This is what happens when you allow taxonomists — people who love to categorize people — to take over the world. I’m reminded too of something my friend, the documentary maker Adam Curtis said to me when I was writing my book: “It’s not easy to truly know another person.”
Jon Ronson is a journalist, documentary filmmaker and author of The Psychopath Test.
A selection of the week’s related blogs HEADLINES TO VIEW BLOGS ABOUT THIS WEEK’S THEME
MAD SCIENCE
WHERE HAVE ALL THE NORMALS GONE?
CAN YOU BE JUST A LITTLE ‘PSYCHOPATHIC’?
QUOTED
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: JEFF VESPA/WIREIMAGE/GETTY IMAGES; FRAZER HARRISON/GETTY IMAGES; GETTY IMAGES; GETTY IMAGES; NATHANIEL S. BUTLER/NBAE VIA GETTY IMAGES
Voices
“ I guess what I’m saying is I’d have sex with him.”
—Channing Tatum
said about George Clooney at a screening for his new movie, White House Down
“ Terry are you ok? Terry are you ok? Are you ok Terry? You’ve been dunked on by a smooth criminal.”
—HuffPost commenter raggja1, on LeBron James dunking over Jason Terry
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
“ The more appealing a condom is for a man to use, the greater likelihood of use there will be.”
—Stephen Becker,
deputy director of the HIV Program at the Gates Foundation, told MyNorthwest. com about the Gates Foundation’s “Next Generation Condom” challenge
“ Maybe our desire to live longer should change to our desire to live better.”
—HuffPost commenter Fencik45, on a study revealing one in three seniors are dying with dementia
Voices
QUOTED
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
“ It shouldn’t have to affect you directly before it matters.”
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: MARWAN IBRAHIM/AFP/GETTY IMAGES; SCOTT OLSON/ GETTY IMAGES; GETTY IMAGES/STOCKFOOD; DAVID LIVINGSTON/GETTY IMAGES
—Cleopatra CowleyPendleton, whose
The day that we invaded Iraq was the first time in my life that I was ashamed to call myself an American.
daughter was shot and killed a week after performing in President Barack Obama’s second inauguration, echoed the president’s plea for lawmakers to move a package of gun policy reforms forward
—HuffPost commenter question99, on Iraq attacks across Baghdad that killed 65 and wounded hundreds
“ They’re called ‘privates’ for a reason. I’m wearing pants, for f--k’s sake. Lay off.”
—Jon Hamm
tells Rolling Stone, on how he is sick and tired of everyone talking about his nether regions
“ Putting pot smokers in prison with thieves, rapist[s] and murderers is a waste of tax dollars, a miscarriage of justice and makes no sense.” —HuffPost commenter SouthernMan2, on Maryland’s Senate passing a bill to decriminalize marijuana
LIVE BY THE GUN DIE BY THE GUN 04.07.13 #43
FEATURES GUNS AND POLITICS ‘WE AREN’T GOING AWAY’ VOTE OF CONSCIENCE POLLING AMERICA DIVIDE OR CONQUER
GUNS AND POLITICS An Uneasy Union By SAM STEIN
T
HREE MONTHS after the shooting of 20 first-grade students at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the federal government’s response remains unclear. ¶ Nervous apprehension has replaced cautious optimism among gun control advocates. Lawmakers once hopeful of crafting bills with broad bipartisan support have been reduced to scheming out procedural means for passing watereddown legislation through their chambers. Support for a comprehensive reform remains high. But the urgency to act is fading as Newtown recedes from the conversation. Not all hope is lost, though. A proposal to expand background checks for gun purchases will be part of the legislation pushed by Senate Democrats. Gun control groups, meanwhile, have grown more politically active during the early months of 2013, funding and organizing campaigns against lawmakers who support the status quo. They recognize that the politics isn’t just hard, it’s complex and often unpredictable as well. The Huffington Post has explored the gun policy issue from
THE URGENCY TO ACT IS FADING AS NEWTOWN RECEDES FROM THE CONVERSATION. several vantage points — legislative, cultural, polling and economic — to better understand the nature of the debate. A selection of our work is presented here. Yes, the gun rights lobby has applied substantial pressure to lawmakers, opposing new bills unless they’re watered down to the
MARIO TAMA/GETTY IMAGES
GUNS AND POLITICS point of being ineffectual, or arguing that more guns may be needed to protect us from certain types of violence. But as Christina Wilkie reports, the gun rights movement is hardly a harmonious bunch. Groups have bickered over legislative and judicial strategies, with different visions over how best to advance their agendas. Even NRA members are broadly supportive of reforms like background checks. Yes, lawmakers are afraid to cast tough votes that place them in the political crosshairs. After all, the historic losses suffered by the Democratic Party during the 1994 elections are blamed, in part, on the passage of the assault weapons ban prior to then. But many who lived through ’94 say that narrative is largely folklore, designed to enhance the NRA’s image. Even those
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
whose congressional careers were upended urge today’s lawmakers not to be afraid of pursuing reform. There certainly is enough data to encourage that pursuit. A recent HuffPost/YouGov poll shows that Democrats face little-tono harm from backing the three major gun policy proposals in President Barack Obama’s reform agenda. In fact, the data suggest that opposing background checks, outlawing the sale of high-capacity magazines and banning assault weapons might hurt them. The politics of guns have always been sensitive to touch. As Congress continues to debate the proper legislative response to one of the most horrific episodes of gun violence in modern memory, real gun reform no longer seems like a winning bet.
Candles and mementos are laid out at a memorial for victims of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, on Dec. 17, 2012, in Newtown, Conn.
‘ WE AREN’T GOING AWAY’ After Newtown, the NRA’s President Hangs Tough By HOWARD FINEMAN
“ W
E HAD TO CHANGE the subject,” said David Keene, as if making an obvious, unobjectionable point. We were sitting at the back table of his favorite Italian restaurant. Keene, the 67-year-old president of the National Rifle Association, exuded a satisfied calm. His thick white hair was combed in Jack Kennedy fashion. He wore horn-rimmed glasses and a red Vneck sweater with his sports coat and tie, and he spoke in a soothing baritone. He looked and sounded like a college professor. But what he said wasn’t academic — or obvious and unobjectionable. In fact, his statement might have struck many American voters as cynical, politically cutthroat and even outrageous. For I had asked him whether he or the NRA regretted its first responses to the mass murder of children by a killer with an assault weapon at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. The answer was “no.”
Not long after the December 2012 shooting, Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the NRA, had said that the only way to prevent more Sandy Hooks was to place armed guards in every school. The NRA had posted a web ad calling President Barack Obama an “elitist hypocrite” because Secret Service agents are posted outside his daughters’
KEENE’S PRESENCE IN THE NRA INNER CIRCLE IS A MEASURE OF HOW DIVISIVE AND POLITICAL THE GUN DEBATE IS TODAY. school. More recently, the NRA has pushed its case via robocalls throughout Connecticut, including Newtown, ostensibly to fight a tide of new gun control measures pending in the state Legislature. Keene told me that the NRA had no regrets or second thoughts and that gun control advocates had seized on the Newtown tragedy to pursue their own unconstitutional
PETE MAROVICH/GETTY IMAGES
“WE AREN’T GOING AWAY”
political agenda. “We had to try to get some balance into the conversation,” he said. “And we are in better shape now than our critics and even some within our ranks believed possible when this battle started.” That seems to be true. Bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines — two of the most popular and talked-about reforms — are probably non-starters in Congress and may not even get a vote. An expansion of background checks for gun sales, the core of a Senate bill to be debated in April, is by no means certain to pass the upper chamber, where some in the
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
KEENE’S ROOTS ARE LIBERTARIAN, BUT HIS ARGUMENTS TEND TO BE MORE POLITICAL AND LEGAL THAN PHILOSOPHICAL. GOP minority are threatening to filibuster it. The Republican-controlled House of Representatives is likely to kill it, if it gets that far. Keene’s presence in the NRA inner circle is a measure of how divisive and political the gun debate is today. In the years before Columbine, Aurora and Newtown became synonymous with gun violence, the
David Keene, president of the National Rifle Association, speaks at the 2013 CPAC.
‘WE AREN’T GOING AWAY’ National Rifle Association chose hunters and sportsmen to hold what was regarded as a ceremonial post. “They had Charlton Heston, of course, but the presidents tended to be guys from Montana or Wyoming who knew very little about politics or Washington or the media,” said Craig Shirley, a political consultant and leading historian of the conservative movement. All of that changed in 2011, when the NRA chose Keene, a longtime board member at the gun rights group, for the two-year presidential assignment. He has a lifelong pedigree in conservative and Republican politics and has lived in Washington since the Nixon administration. As a student at the University of Wisconsin, he was president of the Young Americans for Freedom. He worked for Richard Nixon and his vice president, Spiro Agnew, and later in Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign. As longtime head of the American Conservative Union, Keene helped turn CPAC — the Conservative Political Action Conference — into the Sundance Festival of the GOP. “He’s the NRA’s first political president,” said Shirley. (Keene’s career also has been marked by trouble and controversy.
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
In a sad irony given his current role, his son David was sentenced to 10 years in prison for firing a gun during a road rage incident a decade ago. More recently, Keene’s former wife, Diana Hubbard Carr, pleaded guilty to embezzling funds from the American Conservative Union.) In his two years as NRA president, Keene has helped complete the organization’s transition. The NRA used to positioned itself as a nonpartisan piece of rugged Americana. Now it is frankly part
“THEIR QUESTION WAS NOT ‘WHAT CAN WE DO TO PREVENT GUN CRIME OR MASS MURDERS?’ BUT ‘WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT GUNS?’” and parcel of the Republican Party and the conservative establishment. Democrats such as Rep. John Dingell of Michigan and Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada consider themselves friends of the NRA, but their party as a whole is being pushed in the other direction by President Obama and nominally former Democrat Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New York. Keene, LaPierre and others
‘WE AREN’T GOING AWAY’ worked to put gun rights front and center during the 2012 GOP primaries (Mitt Romney lamely bragged about hunting “varmints”) and in congressional and local races. The NRA and the GOP have lost ground, of course. After Newtown, surveys show that nine in 10 voters favor “universal” background checks. But the NRA remains a fearsomely focused force on the Hill, and in late March GOP Sens. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Ted Cruz of Texas — two stars of the conservative movement — vowed to block even a background check measure from coming to a vote. “Wayne and I had both warned that if the president were to win a second term,” Keene said, “it would be but a matter of time before he launched an assault on private firearms ownership. And that is what has happened.” “Gun control advocates were ready,” Keene argued. “Newtown gave them the chance to do just that. They launched their current anti-gun campaign even before the kids and teachers who died in that tragedy had been buried. [Democratic] Senator [Dianne] Feinstein [of California], who had her new assault weapons bill in a
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
drawer, pulled it out. The president and vice president went after guns. Their question was not ‘What can we do to prevent gun crime or mass murders?’ but ‘What can we do about guns?’” Keene has helped plan and carry out the response to those efforts since December. The idea is to amp up gun rights support by stoking populist resentment of the supposedly “elitist” gun control advocates, to threaten members of Congress with campaignyear retaliation if they stray from the NRA-approved line, and to push for school security and mental health measures to show the organization’s concern. Keene’s roots are libertarian, but his arguments tend to be more political and legal than philosophical. “Gallup and other pollsters began to find that most Americans blamed not guns, but the lack of school security, a dysfunctional mental health care system and a culture of violence more than guns,” he said. “Still, to most people, the idea of something like a universal background check sounds logical, and it therefore has public support,” he conceded. “The problems lie in interpretation and execution. Should it apply to relatives, neighbors, friends or just to people who buy guns at a
ALEX WONG/GETTY IMAGES
“WE AREN’T GOING AWAY”
gun show? Should it be legal for a firearms owner to lend a shotgun to his neighbor when they go out to the duck blind or allow his nephew to use a .22 to shoot at tin cans?” Inside the NRA and on its web page, the rhetoric is heated and apocalyptic, and almost any proposed gun regulation is treated as the first step toward a government that will “take up the guns” from law-abiding citizens. Keene shrewdly focuses on mechanics. “If it were possible to provide an essentially instantaneous back-
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
ground check not just for purchases from licensed dealers or private parties at gun shows but for others, that didn’t impose an unreasonable burden on their right to exercise their Second Amendment rights, that would be one thing,” he said. “But many of the current restrictions and proposals for universal background checks would impose just such unreasonable burdens on that fundamental right.” At lunch and in later follow-ups by email, I asked Keene about assault weapons and other matters: I get guns and handguns. I get that the Constitution says the right to bear arms shall not be “infringed.” But it is not the right to bear any kind of arms, is it?
Sen. Dianne Feinstein speaks next to a display of assault weapons during a news conference, after announcing she will introduce a bill to ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.
‘WE AREN’T GOING AWAY’ No, the Second Amendment does not extend to a private right to own bazookas, rocket launchers or RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades]. When the Constitution was written, the authors were concerned with making sure citizens would always have the right to own personal arms (long arms and sidearms). It didn’t extend to cannons then, or to ballistic missiles today. The Supreme Court recognized this distinction in the [District of Columbia v.] Heller case (in 2008), which is why severe restrictions on the private ownership of fully automatic firearms imposed in the thirties are seen as legitimate. The Court said the test was whether arms in the hands of the civilian population are widely owned and commonly used for legitimate purposes. It is the explicit language of the Court in its Heller decision that forces me to the conclusion that a ban on semi-automatic long arms such as Senator Feinstein supports will not meet constitutional muster if enacted. There are today more than 4.5 million AR-15s in private hands. They are the most used firearm in training and competitive shooting. They are widely
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
used by hunters (particularly for varmint hunting) and are often the firearm of choice for women seeking a long arm for home protection because of their ease of handling and light recoil. So the NRA’s educational and PR initiatives in effect make banning such weapons all the more difficult because they are becoming more “widely owned and commonly used for legitimate purposes.” We are developing several programs designed to reach beyond our base support because firearms are so much more popular today than they were a decade ago, that far more women, minorities and young people are getting involved in the shooting sports. We’re trying to reach them not simply to talk about gun rights, but to let them know of the many enjoyable activities in which they might want to engage. Where do you see all of this headed? I have said consistently that gun owners and the NRA are going to lose a battle or two as we have in the past. But we aren’t going to lose the war. Moreover, we aren’t going away. We have sometimes taken a decade or more to roll back obnoxious restrictions or pass legislation we believe enhances gun rights, but we have never rolled over or given up.
VOTE OF CONSCIENCE
The Vicious, Emotional Battle to Ban Assault Weapons By SAM STEIN
I
T WAS THE EARLY FALL of 1994 when Rep. Dan Glickman (DKan.) got his first piece of ominous news. An administrative aide in his district office reported an abnormal number of angry letters from constituents upset with his support for a ban on the manufacturing of assault weapons. Glickman sought counsel from his colleagues. “We are trying to work it out,” Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.) told him. “But it could be a problem for you, Dan.” It was a sobering, chilling statement. But Glickman largely dismissed it. After all, he had just helped pass aviation jobs legislation that would be a boon for his constituents. “I just figured my services and work on this aviation jobs bill, good looks and funny mannerisms would get me through,” he recalled in an interview with The Huffington Post. “I thought I was an F-ing hero, to be honest with you.” Instead, he became a cautionary tale for future lawmakers.
Despite 18 years of service, Glickman was ousted from his House seat that November. His support for the 1994 assault weapons ban made him a political casualty of the gun policy wars. “I didn’t know I was in the epicenter of this controversy until I started going door to door in my district,” he said. “The NRA had made this issue Armageddon.” More than 18 years since that watershed election, lawmakers are once again entertaining the passage of an assault weapons ban.
“IT WAS THE MOST EMOTIONAL VOTE I CAST IN 18 YEARS.” The provision is just one of many that President Barack Obama proposed this year as part of a comprehensive approach to stem the recent increase in mass gun violence. But political observers have already deemed it the most controversial, warning that it could derail the entire package and even
PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
VOTE ON CONSCIENCE risk Democratic seats in Congress. Their warnings are borne of the fact that the political wounds sustained by Glickman and others in 1994 have yet to fully heal. “I’ve been thinking a lot about that vote recently,” said former Rep. Earl Pomeroy (D-N.D.). “The political pressure to vote against was intense. But I felt like the issue had a moral dimension because military-style weapons had been used in the killing of innocent people.” “It was the most emotional vote I cast in 18 years,” he concluded. The 1994 assault weapons ban wasn’t a stand-alone bill. It was tucked into the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, a far more sweeping anti-crime measure. By public opinion standards, it wasn’t terribly controversial. Voters largely accepted the rationale for a ban on the production of assault weapons, according to news reports at the time. But the legislative process was a grind. Glickman may have been unaware of the political trouble brewing back home, but others could see it emerging. Rep. Vic Fazio (D-Calif.), along with other congressional leaders, lobbied President Bill Clinton’s adminis-
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
“THE NRA HAD MADE THIS ISSUE ARMAGEDDON.” tration “very hard to separate the assault weapons ban, knowing it would lose if unattached to the overall bill,” recalled Stan Greenberg, Clinton’s pollster at the time. But the White House didn’t budge. “We were very focused on his crime agenda and not seeming to wobble on what was a core principle,” said Greenberg. Some lawmakers tried to shield themselves from the potential damage. Rep. Jack Brooks (D-Texas), the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, had sponsored the crime bill, but the assault weapons provision concerned
Rep. Dan Glickman with thenPresident Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore.
JAMES K. W. ATHERTON/THE WASHINGTON POST VIA GETTY IMAGES
VOTE ON CONSCIENCE him. His East Texas district housed more gun dealers than the entire state of New York. As the legislation progressed through Congress, Brooks tried to strip out the ban and other controversial provisions. He brought them up for a vote in conference committee, expecting them to be voted down. It blew up in his face. His Republican counterpart on the committee, Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.), ended up supporting the provisions Brooks wanted removed, an aide recalled. The National Rifle Association, aware of Brooks’ efforts, initially urged its members to reelect the congressman. But other gun rights groups were apoplectic. Gun Owners of America, then (and now) led by Larry Pratt, attacked Brooks for not stopping the bill in its entirety. The NRA eventually joined the chorus. “Once we got back into the campaign, the bill passed and Jack had nothing to argue about,” said Dan McClung, a longtime Houston-based consultant who worked on Brooks’ 1994 campaign. “The sweep got him. That day in Texas, God, we lost everything. We lost [former Gov.] Ann Richards ... it was kind of the
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
start of the beginning of the end of the Democratic Party in Texas.” Brooks, who died this past December, still holds the distinction of being the longest-serving incumbent ever to be voted out of office. He served for 42 years and, according to McClung, had been an NRA member for much of that time. Others suffered similar fates. In Pennsylvania, Democratic Sen. Harris Wofford found himself, literally, in the crosshairs. Supporters of a young congressman named Rick Santorum sold target practice sheets with Wofford’s
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jack Brooks during a hearing in Washington, D.C., in 1982.
THOMAS COOPER/GETTY IMAGES
VOTE ON CONSCIENCE
name on the bullseye — a not-sosubtle reminder to voters of his support for the assault weapons ban. Santorum narrowly defeated Wofford in the 1994 election. In the House, Speaker Tom Foley (D-Wash.) had become the public face of the assault weapons ban, having spent the summer of 1994 arguing its merits. Privately, he lobbied Clinton heavily to axe the provision, arguing that it would endanger many members. He was one of them. On Election Day, Foley would be the first speaker in more than a century to suffer defeat.
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
“The NRA was an unforgiving master: one strike and you’re out,” Clinton would write in his 2004 autobiography, My Life. It was from the stunning defeats of Brooks, Foley, Wofford and others that the legend of the NRA’s political muscle grew. When the assault weapons ban lapsed in 2004, Congress didn’t renew it, because there wasn’t enough desire to revisit the issue. The same basic calculus held true through the first term of the Obama administration, during which not a single piece of gun control legislation was considered. It is only now, in the wake of the shooting deaths of 20 first-
An employee of Dave’s Guns holds a Colt AR-15, legal after the end of the assault weapons ban in 2004.
POOL/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
VOTE ON CONSCIENCE graders and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., that the gun lobby is again being politically challenged on this front. And as lawmakers look to draw lessons from the previous fight, several of those who lived through it argue that the political risk, much like the NRA’s power, has been overstated. “I think the all-powerful role of the NRA in ’94 has probably been exaggerated, or that they’ve cultivated that for their own benefit,” said Rep. David Price (D-N.C.), who voted for the 1994 bill. “That this was the key to taking over the House, I just don’t remember it that way. There were a lot of things in the mix.” Price would lose his election that year but return to Congress in the next cycle. The gun lobby’s influence wasn’t decisive, he said, but it did make life difficult. As he recalled, the NRA would “spread the word about every move we were making” so that their members were out in full force whenever a public gathering occurred. “I went to some of the NRA meetings in Arkansas and people would say, ‘I can’t believe you are here,’” echoed former Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) who,
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
at the time, was a one-term congresswoman forced to defend her assault weapons ban vote to a district filled with devout gun owners. “I would talk until I was blue in the face. There was just a lot of misinformation. There were those who were never going to see what you were trying to tell them.” The perseverance helped. Lincoln won reelection. So too did Pomeroy. And while Price and Glickman lost, both say they are encouraged by the prospect of trying to pass an assault weapons ban once more. “I think the [Obama] administration is right to push a big policy and not a little policy,” said
Clinton prepares to sign his first orders as president. Behind him, from left to right: Sen. Alan Simpson, Vice President Al Gore, House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt and House Speaker Thomas Foley.
CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY IMAGES
VOTE ON CONSCIENCE
Glickman, who became Agriculture Secretary weeks after his 1994 defeat. “But Obama has to build public support and he needs respected validators out there: people in the faith-based community, business people, military, police, law enforcement. That even may not be enough … This is a hard-ass political issue.” The White House is aware of this. An administration aide told The Huffington Post that both the president and vice president would travel outside of Wash-
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
“I WOULD TALK UNTIL I WAS BLUE IN THE FACE. THERE WAS JUST A LOT OF MISINFORMATION.” ington to sell the comprehensive package of reforms. The president’s campaign arm, recently converted to a non-profit 501(c) (4) organization, would be utilized to drum up public support. In addition, the White House would work hand-in-hand with mayors, governors, law enforcement,
David Price (left) who supported the 1994 bill, with Rep. Hal Rogers (RKY) in 2008.
DOUGLAS GRAHAM/ROLL CALL/GETTY IMAGES
VOTE ON CONSCIENCE
military leaders, faith and parent groups to ensure that individual lawmakers receive the cover they lacked 18 years ago. In the end, however, gun control’s fate will likely rest on a vote of conscience, as much as one of political survival. None of the former lawmakers interviewed said they regretted supporting the first assault weapons ban. But all said it was one of the hardest votes they cast in office.
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
“THIS IS A HARD-ASS POLITICAL ISSUE.” “As a legislator on this and any other controversial votes, it raises the question: Are you prepared to lose on this matter, and not be available on every other issue on which you want to advance the nation,” said Pomeroy. “That’s the question I faced.”
Former Rep. Earl Pomeroy (D-N.D.) said of the 1994 assault weapons bill: “The political pressure to vote against was intense.”
33%
29%
31% 33% 33% 28%
37%
33% 31 26%
43 48
40 32
THE REPUBLICAN
REPVUOTES IF BLIC ONLY AN S THE UPPO RTS. ..
SU INIT I WE A PPOR AL S T A H P O SA % MA IGH- NS B ULT G A CA P A N Z BA INES ACITY % C K BA GR N CH OUN % EC D KS
By EMILY SWANSON
NOTE: Undecided voters and those who abstained were not included in this graphic.
47 52%
Checks
...
THE DEMOCRAT
HuffPost and its polling partner YouGov surveyed a sample of Americans who were randomly assigned to see two sets of questions. Respondents first answered a “generic ballot” question asking which party’s candidate he or she would vote for in the district he or she lives in. The next questions asked the respondent to imagine an election in which one candidate supported and one opposed three gun proposals: Universal background checks, a high-capacity magazines ban and an assault weapons ban. For one set of respondents, only the Democrat supported each proposal, while for the other set it was the Republican supported each one. The results show that being the only candidate to support background checks would be advantageous for either party’s candidate. For a high-capacity magazines or assault weapons ban, if the Democrat didBackground not Checks support those proposals and his opponent did, the Democrat saw a dramatic loss of support. The Republican who did support the proposals gained in both cases, leading to an evenly matched race when the Democrat initially held a sizeable lead. Background
SU INIT I WE A PPOR AL H A P O S SA T % MA IGH- NS B ULT G A CA P A N Z BA INES ACITY % C K BA GR N CH OUN % EC D KS
POLLING AMERICA
V DEMOTES IF OCRA ONLY T SU THE PPOR TS
JOE RAEDLE/GETTY IMAGES, PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY MARTIN GEE
DIVIDE OR CONQUER How the Gun Lobby Is Fighting for the Second Amendment — and Against Itself By CHRISTINA WILKIE
I
N THE INSULAR WORLD of gun rights groups, Alan Gottlieb is a man on the make. Over the past five years, his Bellevue, Wash.-based nonprofit, the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF), has raced to expand gun rights, building on one of the most significant court rulings in decades. Now, Gottlieb is hoping to open the legal floodgates by litigating dozens of cases nationwide. The December shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., galvanized the public in support of gun control measures, but so far, the national conversation has revolved almost entirely around legislation. Many of the most significant changes to U.S. firearms law today are happening not in Congress, however, but in the courts. Much of the SAF’s reputation in the courtroom can be attributed to a Northern Virginia-based litigator, Alan Gura, who is best known for successfully arguing District of Columbia v. Heller before the Supreme Court. That
landmark 2008 decision held that the Second Amendment protects the right of the individual, not just the state militia, to possess a gun. Gura and Gottlieb teamed up after the Heller victory and filed more than 40 lawsuits, quickly establishing the SAF as a prolific player in Second Amendment liti-
“IF THE SECOND AMENDMENT FOUNDATION MAKES A MISTAKE AT THIS STAGE, IT CAN STYMIE PROTECTIONS FOR GUN OWNERS FOR YEARS TO COME.” gation. In 2010, the duo scored a major win with a case they had initiated, McDonald v. Chicago, which extended the Heller decision to cover the states. In doing so, the Supreme Court overturned the Windy City’s handgun ban, on the books for 28 years. While the political world obsesses over the legislative muscle of the National Rifle Association, the outcome of the SAF’s lawsuits
BRENDAN HOFFMAN/GETTY IMAGES
DIVIDE OR CONQUER
could have an even larger impact on the future of Second Amendment rights — affecting everything from concealed carry laws, to background checks, to the liability that the firearms industry could face if their products cause harm. Not everyone in the gun rights movement is thrilled about Gura and the SAF’s recent flurry of lawsuits. Depending upon whom you ask, the SAF is either a brave defender of the Second Amendment or a sketchy upstart with the potential to significantly damage gun rights in the long term.
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
“If the Second Amendment Foundation makes a mistake at this stage, it can stymie protections for gun owners for years to come,” said Adam Winkler, a professor of constitutional law at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America. “That’s why it’s important to be strategic about your cases, and I think they are certainly being strategic — I’m just not sure it’s always the right strategy.” Because court cases can set long-lasting legal precedent, advocacy organizations are often careful about which cases they pursue, lest they risk unfavorable rulings
Otis McDonald (second from left) — lead plaintiff on McDonald v. Chicago — speaks at a news conference with his legal team, including Alan Gura (far left) and Alan Gottlieb (far right) outside the U.S. Supreme Court building in 2010.
DIVIDE OR CONQUER that harm their cause. “The typical strategy for any savvy advocacy group would be to say, ‘What are the most appealing cases that we have the best chance of winning, and where do we have the best chances of winning them?’” said Carl Bogus, a constitutional law expert and professor of law at Roger Williams University. In the wake of the Heller decision, the NRA pursued a strategy of expanding gun rights gradually. “This makes sense, because many courts are reluctant to offer broad constitutional rulings with regard to individual rights,” said Richard Broughton, a professor of law at the University of Detroit and a former Justice Department prosecutor. “The NRA takes on specific issues, and they’re not going for broad Second Amendment rulings. Instead, they’re asking the courts to narrowly interpret gun regulations and working to win smaller victories they can build on.” Ken Klukowski, a constitutional law professor at Liberty University and former NRA staffer, agrees. “The NRA takes the long view. They are extraordinary minds for the long ball and the big picture,” he said.
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
‘STRIKE WHILE THE IRON IS HOT’ The NRA offered a textbook display of its methods in February, when it announced it was considering a lawsuit against the Illinois State Police over a backlog in the processing of gun permit applications. Reached for comment, a spokesman said that the NRA’s litigation strategy “is designed to defend the fundamental constitutional right of our over 4.5 million members and tens of millions of supporters.” By contrast, the SAF’s strategy has been offensive, swinging
“THE SAF’S BLUEPRINT FOR LITIGATION IS ‘OVERLY AGGRESSIVE AND POTENTIALLY RECKLESS.’” for the fences and often making very broad constitutional arguments. “Our feeling is strike while the iron is hot and build as much case law as you can,” Gottlieb said in an interview with The Huffington Post. “Then weave [the case law] into a spider web that’s strong enough so our opponents can’t get through it.” Gottlieb makes no secret of his desire to push more gun rights
AP PHOTOS/DANA VERKOUTERAN,
DIVIDE OR CONQUER
cases before the Supreme Court as quickly as possible or his plan to file lawsuits across the country in the hopes that two federal appeals courts will issue conflicting rulings. Such a division in the lower circuit courts greatly increases the odds that the Supreme Court will decide to hear a particular case, in order to settle the issue. “We’ve gone out to plant the seed in all the various circuits,” Gottlieb said. “Maybe we’ll get a good Supreme Court decision, but we’re also going for as many good lower court rulings, 10 or 20, as we can get.” The SAF has won big on occasion — such as a 2011 case, Ezell
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
v. Chicago, in which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit struck down the city’s ban on firing ranges and set an important precedent on how to interpret the Second Amendment. But Gura and the SAF have also run the risk of losing big. A recent SAF case, Schrader v. Holder, is a good example. In it, Gura and the SAF sued the federal government on behalf of a Maryland man seeking to reinstate his gun rights, 40 years after he was convicted of a common-law misdemeanor which at the time rendered him ineligible to own a gun. Instead of arguing that his client was an upstanding citizen whose only crime (punching someone in a fight) took place four decades ago, Gura’s case was far broader.
An artist’s rendering of attorney Alan Gura (standing) arguing in opposition of the Washington gun-ban law before the Supreme Court on March 18, 2008.
DIVIDE OR CONQUER He claimed that the Maryland law violated not only his client’s Second Amendment rights, but also the rights of everyone who had ever been rendered ineligible to own a firearm because of a common-law misdemeanor. The D.C. Circuit rejected Gura’s argument, and the judge writing the opinion issued a scathing decision in which he said that if Gura had simply focused on reinstating his client’s gun rights, they would likely have agreed with him. “It’s the luck of the draw in the judges,” said Gottlieb, adding, “That’s true in a lot of these cases. But I think the ruling is stupid, and I’m 100 percent confident we’re going to win [in the end]. In fact, that’s going to be one of our easier wins.” The SAF is also being more aggressive than the NRA about which cases it takes on. As of midFebruary, the SAF was a party to at least 18 gun rights cases pending in trial and appellate courts, while the NRA was a party in just nine open cases. This is remarkable, considering that the SAF’s total operating budget was $4 million in 2010 (the most recent year for which figures are available), an amount that pales in
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
comparison to the NRA’s $243 million budget that year. Gottlieb insisted the SAF has the resources it needs to fight this many cases and said the group reinvests any legal fees it wins into more litigation. “Right now, we have about 10 attorneys working on our cases, and we’re paying them all,” he said. But according to professor Winkler, “there’s an element of SAF’s strategy that’s ‘spaghetti on the wall,’ in that they’re filing too
“THEY’VE SAID YOU CAN HAVE A GUN, AND YOU CAN HAVE A GUN IN YOUR HOME, SO THE LOGICAL NEXT STEP IS TO SEE WHERE ELSE YOU CAN HAVE ONE.” many lawsuits, and in a lot of these cases they’re getting bad results.” The SAF’s blueprint for litigation is “overly aggressive and potentially reckless,” said Klukowski, the former NRA staffer who emphasized that he does not speak on behalf of the NRA. In the long run, he said, “the SAF endangers the Second Amendment by going out on a limb and going into tangents and overdriving its headlights.”
CHRISTOPHER POWERS/BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES
DIVIDE OR CONQUER
“If you want to say we’re pushing the envelope on these things, then yeah, we are,” said Gottlieb. “But we’re doing it in a way that we’re confident we’re going to be able to win.” Prior to the 2008 Heller decision, the NRA’s Civil Rights Defense Fund was the only major player in U.S. gun litigation, with a multimillion-dollar budget and a team of top-flight lawyers ready to assist promising cases as they moved up through appellate courts. Litigation was never the NRA’s
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
top priority, however, and it still isn’t. Every year, the NRA pours tens of millions of dollars more into elections and influencing legislation at state and federal levels than it does into fighting court cases. Whereas the SAF has made a name for itself since Heller by proactively attacking gun regulations in court, the NRA has focused on preventing the passage of gun control laws in the first place. For the NRA, litigation is only one piece of an overall plan, Klukowski explained, one in which “legislative efforts, administrative efforts, grassroots communication, and participation in the
Paul Clement, the NRA’s appellate lawyer and former solicitor general of the United States, poses for a portrait in 2012.
ALEX WONG/GETTY IMAGES
Wayne LaPierre, CEO of the National Rifle Association, delivers remarks during the 2013 CPAC.
DIVIDE OR CONQUER electoral process all operate in tandem [with litigation], to create a synergistic effect.” The architect of the plan, he said, was Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s fiery CEO. To many on both sides of the gun debate, LaPierre embodies the NRA’s unique blend of savvy political skills and zealous opposition to gun regulations. To hear Alan Gura tell it, however, the NRA’s focus on lobbying elected officials has undermined its litigation efforts. “There is a failure [by the NRA] to understand that litigation is not lobbying, and it’s not politics by another name,” Gura said in a 2010 speech. He said that the SAF had succeeded in court where the NRA had failed and accused the latter group of using the victory in the McDonald case as “a fundraising gimmick” and of “trying to take some of the credit.” In fact, both the SAF, in the person of Alan Gura, and the NRA, in the person of Paul Clement — the NRA’s longtime appellate lawyer, a man widely recognized on both sides of the debate as one of the best in the business — argued elements of the winning McDonald case before the Supreme Court. “Gura’s argument would be
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
fine, except that it’s contradicted by reality,” said Klukowski, who called Gura’s comments about the NRA’s emphasis on lobbying “the preposterous bloviating of an insufferable narcissist.” “Paul Clement is not a lobbyist,” Klukowski added. “It’s true that the NRA’s top management are career lobbyists ... [but] they are also showing tremendous wisdom, realizing that they are
MANY OF THE MOST SIGNIFICANT CHANGES TO U.S. FIREARMS LAW TODAY ARE HAPPENING NOT IN CONGRESS ... BUT IN THE COURTS. lobbyists [and] retaining the best Supreme Court litigators in the country to represent the NRA’s legal issues.” Gura did not respond to requests for comment. ‘THE NEXT GREAT BATTLE’ Tensions between the NRA and Alan Gura date back to 2002, just as the case that would eventually become D.C. v. Heller was getting under way. In his book, Winkler describes how the NRA, hewing to its policy of avoiding risky litiga-
DIVIDE OR CONQUER tion, made it clear to Gura and to Bob Levy, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute who financed the Heller case, that it did not support their plan. From the NRA’s perspective, there were not enough reliable votes among the nine justices back then supporting an individual’s right to bear arms. “In that scenario, why would you take the risk of losing the Second Amendment case at the Supreme Court?” Klukowski asked. “Why wouldn’t you keep working towards a day when there were five reliably conservative votes on the court?” When Gura finally prevailed six years later in a 5-4 decision, two of those votes came from newly appointed conservative justices. Still, the relationship between Gura and the NRA never recovered. Klukowski said he believes the Heller and McDonald rulings mark the beginning of what could be decades of intense litigation over the scope of gun rights in America. “Whether the Second Amendment blossoms into something with the force and the scope of the First Amendment — or becomes a very narrow civil right without much practical significance — that entirely remains to be seen,” he said.
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
Either way, legal scholars agree that the next big gun case before the Supreme Court is likely to address the right to carry firearms in public, an issue that the high court has yet to rule on. “They’ve said you can have a gun, and you can have a gun in
“OUR FEELING IS STRIKE WHILE THE IRON IS HOT AND BUILD AS MUCH CASE LAW AS YOU CAN.” your home,” Winkler said of the court’s rulings to date, “so the logical next step is to see where else you can have one.” “The next great battle in the war over the Second Amendment is going to be who gets to argue concealed carry rights,” Winkler said. “Getting that case to the Supreme Court is going to be huge.” In February, the circuit courts teed up the issue for the justices by creating a split: The full 7th Circuit declined to preserve an Illinois law barring concealed carry, while the 10th Circuit declared concealed-carry bans to be constitutional. The Second Amendment Foundation is involved in both disputes.
ADVERTISEMENT
Get the HuffPost Live App for iPad速 & iPad mini速
Download Now
iPad is a trademark of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. App Store is a service mark of Apple Inc.
Exit
SPORTS
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
MITCHELL LAYTON/GETTY IMAGES
Broadcaster Dick Vitale, 73, will work ESPN’s live broadcast of the Final Four for the first time this year.
The Most Enthusiastic Man in the World (of Basketball) BY CHRIS GREENBERG
PHOTO GALLERY: MARCH MADNESS THROUGH THE YEARS: 11 PERFECT MOMENTS
F THE 1979 NCAA Tournament — which culminated in a matchup between Magic Johnson’s Michigan State and an underdog group of Indiana State Sycamores led by Larry Bird — marked the moment when March first went mad, then it wasn’t until this year that the Final Four finally becomes “Awesome, baby!” as broadcaster Dick Vitale would put it. Vitale has contributed to stu-
I
Exit dio programs and provided analysis during the Final Four over the years, but for the first time in his 34 years calling college basketball games for ESPN, the 73 year old will work the live broadcast of the Final Four in 2013. With CBS holding broadcast rights for almost the entirety of Vitale’s broadcasting career, the honor and responsibility of calling the most important games of the college basketball season generally fell to announcers like Billy Packer, Jim Nantz and Brent Musburger. Even this year, CBS and Turner hold the domestic television rights. While Nantz and Clark Kellogg narrate the action for most viewers, Vitale will make his Final Four debut with ESPN International, where he will be heard in 150 countries and territories. “Are they going to understand me in China and Italy and all? People have a tough enough time understanding me here,” Vitale said hours after the announcement in February. He was on the air in Ann Arbor calling a high-profile Big Ten tilt between Michigan and Ohio State when colleague Mike Tirico brought up the news. “I’m excited about it. I’ve worked with so many great guys. You know, I was telling someone today on Sportscenter. He
SPORTS
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
said, ‘Oh you’re going to the hall of fame in sportscasting.’ I said, ‘It’s been a great love. I’ve never looked at myself as a sportscaster. You’re a broadcaster. Dan Schulman, Brad Nessler, [Brent] Musburger, Rece Davis [are broadcasters]. I’m a jock, man. Somebody gave me a
Whether it’s Duke or Kentucky or Syracuse ... every single time it’s like Elvis or The Beatles have walked into the building.” mic and said talk about the game you love. And I’ve been a very blessed and lucky guy.’” It’s not the first time, however, that Vitale has had a Final Four dangled in front of him. In 2006, CBS Sports chairman Sean McManus attempted to have college basketball’s most ardent ambassador call a game during its signature event, but was rebuffed by ESPN. Thirty years earlier, Vitale had missed out on another potential chance at the Final Four — as an assistant at Rutgers University. With Mike Dabney and Phil Sellers, two players recruited by Vitale before the 1972-73 season, lead-
STREETER LECKA/GETTY IMAGES
Exit
ing the team in scoring, Rutgers reached the 1976 NCAA Tournament with an unblemished regularseason record and advanced to the Final Four. After beginning 31-0, the “Unforgettable Season” closed with a loss to Michigan in the national semifinal and then a loss to UCLA in the third-place game. “Dick was certainly instrumental, the key guy,” Dick Lloyd — the head coach at Rutgers when Vitale was hired and during the recruitment of Dabney and Sellers — told The Huffington Post. “His role primarily was recruiting. He went out on the road and got those two kids.”
SPORTS
After recruiting them, Vitale accepted the head coaching job at the University of Detroit in 1973. One year after Rutgers’ memorable run, Vitale would coach the Titans to the Sweet 16. But that would be his last foray into the tournament as a coach, and Vitale wouldn’t reach the Final Four until this year, by very different means. THE BEGINNING On Dec. 5, 1979, Wisconsin visited No. 10 Depaul at Alumni Hall in Chicago. A fledgling cable outfit headquartered in Bristol, Conn. — a town perhaps best known at that point for the manufacturing of spring-driven door bells — was broadcasting the game. For its first
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
Vitale surfs the crowd with the Cameron Crazies before the start of a game between the North Carolina Tar Heels and Duke Blue Devils in 2010.
Exit broadcast of a college basketball game, ESPN sent Joe Boyle to handle play-by-play duties. A veteran of calling the Twins and the Northstars in Minnesota, Boyle was teamed with Vitale, an out-of-work coach fresh off an NBA firing. “It should be a classic matchup,” Vitale said to begin his ESPN career. “College basketball excitement, enthusiasm.” In a matchup that proved less than classic, Depaul dispatched Wisconsin, 90-77. Vitale and ESPN proved a pairing worth remembering, however. Over the year’s Vitale’s excitement and enthusiasm would come to represent college basketball for fans around the country. The players came and went, but Vitale and his irrepressible style endured. Sacked by the underachieving Detroit Pistons just 12 games into the 1979-1980 season, Vitale was 39 years old when Scotty Connal offered him a gig calling games for ESPN. A New Jersey native who had cut his teeth coaching high school hoops in East Rutherford, Vitale’s rise through the coaching ranks — from an assistant at Rutgers to the NBA by way of the University of Detroit — had been as fast as his final season with the Pistons was brief.
SPORTS
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
“I’m very proud of the fact that I did the first game ever on ESPN, the 1979 game between DePaul and Wisconsin. And here it is 34 years later. I never thought that,” Vitale told The Huffington Post. “I thought I was gonna do this temporarily until I got back coaching where I belonged — in college.” Vitale was still seated at the broadcast table rather than patrolling the sideline by the time the
Let’s face it, some people don’t like people that are up tempo ... If someone who has worked with me [doubted] my knowledge, my preparation, then it would really tear up my insides.” 1983 NCAA Tournament arrived. The ’83 edition of the Big Dance proved significant for Vitale not just because his close friend, N.C. State coach Jim Valvano, would cut down the nets after an upset win over Phi Slama Jama, but because it brought the moment when he realized that his future was calling games rather than coaching them. “Scotty Connal ... used to always say to me ... and I didn’t
STREETER LECKA/GETTY IMAGES
Exit
know what he meant ... but he used to always say, ‘You connect, man. You gotta stay with this. You have a way of connecting with people. Whether they agree with you or disagree with you, you connect. Your words, they hit a button. That’s a gift that you have.’ I didn’t know what he was talking about until 1983,” recalled Vitale. “I went to the Final Four, my first Final Four ever as part of ESPN, part of our team. Then one day people were asking for autographs, pictures. Oh, it was unbelievable and I realized then, as Scotty told me, that’s what he
SPORTS
means about connecting, man. It’s given me an incredible life. So I’m very blessed that I stayed with it and very fortunate.” LOUD BUT PROUD As ESPN expanded its viewership, Vitale expanded the list of acronyms and terms that have become his signature. There were P.T.P.ers and M&Mers who could turn a knee-knocker into a N.C. (translation: primetime players and mismatches who could turn a knee-knocker into a no-contest). By 2000, ESPN.com produced a Vitale glossary. With his relentless enthusiasm for the game, expanding lexicon of slang and the rising volume of his Jersey-inflected voice, Vitale’s
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
Surrounded by Duke fans, Vitale reports from the sidelines before the Duke Blue Devils go up against the North Carolina Tar Heels in 2012.
Exit
SPORTS
style drew fans but also critics. “With Vitale, as with ABC’s Howard Cosell, you either love him or loathe him. But whereas Cosell can appeal to the intellect, Vitale only assaults the senses,” wrote William Taaffe for Sports Illustrated in 1984, during Vitale’s fifth season at ESPN. “You either like his act or, find yourself turning down the volume control (an L for the VC, no doubt).” Nearly 30 years later, millennial fans add a new critique to those spelled out by Taaffe before many of them were even “diaper dandies.” To fans who lived their entire lives with ESPN, Vitale’s exuberance and slang can seem like a too-familiar schtick. “Many in my generation loved guys like Dick Vitale and Chris Berman growing up,” Matt Yoder of Awful Announcing wrote to The Huffington Post in an email. “But when you reach your mid 20’s there’s only so many times you can be entertained when you hear about ‘Maalox Mashers,’ ‘diaper dandies,’ and ‘PTPers.’ After a while, there becomes a disconnect when Dickie V calls members in Club Trillion ‘AWESOME BABY
WITH A CAPITAL A!’” If there is any disconnect between Vitale and segments of the ESPN audience, his bond with students on campuses around the country — and with fans of all ages on Twitter — seems as strong as ever. “We’ve been to, whether it’s Duke or Kentucky or Syracuse, or wherever it is, we’ve been there lots and lots and lots of times, and every single time it’s like Elvis or the Beatles have walked into the building,” Andy Katz of ESPN told The Huffington Post about the reaction that Vitale receives. Vitale remains keenly aware of his critics. “I have never ever been criticized for knowledge, for my preparation. And that’s one thing I’m proud of. But, you know, let’s face it, some people don’t like people that are up tempo,” Vitale added. “That’s why we have different model cars, different kinds of wine. We have choices and I can deal with that. I understand. But if someone who has worked with me [doubted] my knowledge, my preparation, then it would really tear up my insides.”
PHOTO GALLERY: SWIPE DOWN FOR A GALLERY OF PERFECT MARCH MADNESS MOMENTS.
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
Exit
SPORTS
March Madness Through the Years: 11 Perfect Moments AP PHOTO
1966: Texas Western Win Texas Western College head coach Don Haskins (second from left) and players celebrate after winning the tournament, becoming the first team to win with five black starters, defeating an all-white Kentucky team. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
1973: Bill Walton’s Performance
AP PHOTO
UCLA center Bill Walton dunks one during the semifinal game of the NCAA championship in St. Louis. He delivered nearflawless games, leading UCLA to win its seventh straight national championship.
Exit
SPORTS
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
1979: Magic Johnson and Larry Bird
AP PHOTO
Indiana State’s Larry Bird helps Michigan State’s Magic Johnson up during the final game of the NCAA championship in Salt Lake City, which Michigan State ended up winning. The story of Bird and Johnson’s friendship and rivalry was turned into a Broadway play, Magic/Bird.
1982: Michael Jordan’s Gamewinning Shot
GEORGETOWN/COLLEGIATE IMAGES/GETTY IMAGES
Michael Jordan, of the University of North Carolina, prepares to block a shot from Patrick Ewing of Georgetown University. Jordan ended up making the game-winning shot to edge out Georgetown in the championship game.
1983 Lorenzo Charles’ Buzzer-Beating Dunk
AP PHOTO
North Carolina State’s Lorenzo Charles dunks the ball at the buzzer, giving N.C. State a 54-52 win over Houston in the championship game.
1985: Villanova Upset
AP PHOTO/BOB JORDAN
Villanova coach Rollie Massimino is boosted to cut down the net after winning the championship against defending champion Georgetown. The 6664 win is known as one of the greatest upsets in NCAA history.
Exit
AP PHOTO/RON HEFLIN
1987: MVP Keith Smart Indiana’s Keith Smart cuts the net after defeating Syracuse, 74-73, to win the NCAA Championship in New Orleans, La. Smart hit the game-winning shot, and was named Most Valuable Player for the game. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
SPORTS
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
Exit 1992: Christian Laettner in Overtime
AP PHOTO/AMY SANCETTA
Duke’s Christian Laettner runs down the court after making his iconic buzzerbeater in overtime for Duke, defeating Kentucky in the Elite Eight, 104-103.
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
AP PHOTO/JOHN GAPS III
Exit
1998: Bryce Drew’s Three-Pointer Valparaiso head coach Homer Drew hugs his son, Bryce, after he hit a game-winning threepoint shot to beat Mississippi 70-69 in the first round of the NCAA Midwest Regional game. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
SPORTS
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
2006: George Mason University Reaches Final Four
TRAVIS LINDQUIST/GETTY IMAGES
The unheralded team from George Mason had an incredible run when they made it to the Final Four. Here, Folarin Campbell (left) celebrates a threepointer with teammate Wendell Preadom during their game against the Wichita State Shockers in the regionals of the tournament.
AP PHOTO/MATT ROURKE
Exit
2013: Chase Fieler’s Alley-Oop Florida Gulf Coast’s upset of Georgetown included Chase Fieler’s alley-oop dunk during a second-round game of the NCAA college basketball tournament. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
SPORTS
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
Exit
STRESS LESS
How to Mix Patterns à la Solange (Without Feeling Overwhelmed) BY CHRISTINA ANDERSON
hen it comes to wearing patterns, we subscribe to the “more is more” school of thought. Fashion-forward celebrities like Solange Knowles, Olivia Palermo and J. Crew president Jenna Lyons provide excellent (and easy to copy) examples of how to wear patterns. The trick is to pile on the prints, while keeping the silhou-
W
PHOTOGRAPHS BY RAYDENE SALINAS
ette traditional and streamlined (think slim pants and a sleek button-down blouse, or a simple top paired with a pencil skirt). We challenged HuffPost Beauty Editor Dana Oliver to channel her inner Solange Knowles with a print-astic shoot. And did she ever! Check out Dana as we dressed her to the nines in the brightest prints out there.
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
STRESS LESS A weekly feature that highlights ways to handle the pressures around us. HuffPost Beauty Editor Dana Oliver.
STRESS LESS
Exit
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
LOOK ONE
“ I feel like a ‘50s retro character; it must be the the full skirt. I don’t normally do retro-inspired styles, but I like this because I always want curves and this plays up my nonexistent figure.” TIP: Keep the color palettes in the same family. The top and dress both showcase the cobalt blue hue, while the orange in the top and the red in the skirt are complementary. Accessories should be really simple since this outfit is loud; the white open-toed pumps are perfectly subdued.
Marc by Marc Jacobs Annabelle Satin Dress $698 available at Marc by Marc Jacobs Stores, Gap blouse $54, Pierre Hardy pumps
TAP CIRCLE TO SHOP SIMILAR ITEM
STRESS LESS
Exit
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
LOOK TWO
“ I love this because I feel like it gives me a bust. Typically I like to show off my long legs in mini-dresses and skirts but I feel like this long skirt actually accentuates my legs and the pattern is fun.” TIP: The shape of the top and skirt are simple and sleek so that the patterns can really steal the show, without competing for attention with a loud silhouette.
Topshop top $64, J. Crew skirt, Zara heels, LOFT necklace
TAP CIRCLES TO SHOP SIMILAR ITEMS
TAP CIRCLES TO SHOP SIMILAR ITEMS
LOOK THREE
“ First of all, I don’t think I’ve worn a pantsuit since elementary school, so this is a fun re-introduction to the pantsuit, and I’m a big fan of neon so I’m really excited about these pants. This is quintessential Solange, so I’m a happy girl.”
TIP: This is not a look for the faint of heart. But the jacket and pants are body-conscious, so Dana’s shape isn’t lost amongst the loud patterns. Her glasses and bold red lips are just the right accents to a fun outfit. Tibi blazer $685, Tibi pants $450, Ann Taylor top $78, Forever 21 necklace, Reed Krakoff pumps
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
Exit TAP CIRCLES TO SHOP SIMILAR ITEMS
LOOK FOUR TIP: Balance out the large polka dots with a smaller pattern and neutralhued accessories.
“ I would never think to put this together — I just wouldn’t put polka dots on top of polka dots on top of polka dots.”
Pierre Balmain jacket, Pierre Balmain pants, Gap shirt $54, Zara shoes, Bidermann earrings
“ I’m a huge DIY nail art fan, so I figured I’d get my hands in on the print play with these red and gold nail stickers.” Essie Sleek Stick in So Haute!
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
Exit
TAP CIRCLES TO SHOP SIMILAR ITEMS
LOOK FIVE
“ This look is funky fresh! I love the shoes; they give the ultra feminine top and skirt some edge.” TIP: The playful top and skirt are grounded thanks to the addition of sporty sneakers. Wary of a short hemline? Just add sneakers to take down the femininity a notch.
Ann Taylor top $78, Alpinestars by Denise Focil skirt $121, Streets Ahead clutch $325, Nike No. 6 Shoes, Bidermann earrings
Exit
TASTE TEST
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
Tomayto, Tomahto. All Canned Soups Are Not Created Equal. BY KRISTEN AIKEN
E LOVE TOMATO SOUP. There is absolutely nothing in the world that’s better at cozying up to grilled cheese, and we’re fans of making it in big, hearty batches on our stovetops at home. But no one’s perfect. The flu hits. You’ve had a rough week at work. You’re starving and need to make dinner in five minutes. None of those situations permit a leisurely hour of simmering and blending, so you’ve got to do it.
W
PHOTOGRAPHS BY DAMON DAHLEN
When things get dire, you’ve got to go to the pantry (which as food lovers we equate with “going to the mattresses”). Lucky for you, some canned (or boxed, now that we’re in 2013) tomato soups are actually pretty delicious. We blind-tasted 10 popular brands and flavors of tomato soup, judging on flavor and texture. We were betting on the traditional Campbell’s as an easy winner, but alas ... ahead, find out which brands are the tops.
As always, this taste test was in no way influenced or sponsored by the brands included.
TASTE TEST
GETTY IMAGES/DORLING KINDERSLEY
Exit
TAP ON THE SOUPS FOR THE TASTERS’ VERDICTS
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
01
TFU
Exit
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
ROBERTO SERRA - IGUANA PRESS/REDFERNS VIA GETTY IMAGES (BIEBER); MANDEL NGAN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES (PERRY); GETTY IMAGES (RAZOR); THE SINGAPORE FAIRY TALE (FERTILITY) ; BARRETTFOX /REDDIT (LOOKING FEE)
School Plays Justin Bieber Song on Loop All Week
2
Singapore’s Fairy Tales Try to Scare Women Into Focusing on Their Fertility
3
AUSTRALIAN GROCERY CHARGES A $5 LOOKING FEE
05 4
Rick Perry: ‘Gay Rights Activists Lack Tolerance’
School Allows Special Needs Students to SelfHarm Under Supervision, Hands Out Razor Blades
06 Exit
HUFFINGTON 04.07.13
TFU
AP PHOTO/CHRIS CARLSON (LIMBAUGH); DANIEL ACKER/BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES (GMAIL); GETTY IMAGES (VIRUS); ALEXANDER TAMARGO/GETTY IMAGES FOR ANHEUSER-BUSCH (BUD LIGHT); GETTY IMAGES (DOCTORS)
Rush Limbaugh Calls Lesbians Fat Substance Abusers
7
The FBI Wants to Spy on Your Gmail Account in Real Time
8
VIRUS GOES MISSING AT U.S. LAB
10 9
Alcohol Industry Promoting ‘Drunkorexia’?
Doctors in Training Are Making More Mistakes
Editor-in-Chief:
Arianna Huffington Editor: John Montorio Managing Editor: Gazelle Emami Senior Editor: Adam J. Rose Editor-at-Large: Katy Hall Senior Politics Editor: Sasha Belenky Senior Voices Editor: Stuart Whatley Pointers Editor: Marla Friedman Quoted Editor: Annemarie Dooling Viral Editor: Dean Praetorius Editorial Assistant: Jenny Macksamie Editorial Intern: Emma Diab Creative Director: Josh Klenert Design Director: Andrea Nasca Photography Director: Anna Dickson Associate Photo Editor: Wendy George Designers: Martin Gee, Troy Dunham Production Director: Peter Niceberg AOL MagCore Head of UX and Design: Jeremy LaCroix Product Managers: Mimmie Huang, Gabriel Giordani Architect: Scott Tury Developers: Mike Levine, Carl Haines, Terence Worley, Ron Anderson, Sudheer Agrawal QA: Joyce Wang, Amy Golliver Sales: Mandar Shinde, Jami Lawrence AOL, Inc. Chairman & CEO:
Tim Armstrong
PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK