As San Diego mayor heads for therapy, city faces big mess (+video)

Confusion is mounting about correct city procedures as San Diego Mayor Bob Filner is about to undergo counseling after accusations of inappropriate behavior toward women.

By Daniel B. Wood,?Staff writer / July 31, 2013

San Diego Mayor Bob Filner speaks during a news conference at City Hall, July 26, 2013, in San Diego.

Gregory Bull/AP

Enlarge

San Diego Mayor Bob Filner ? faced with a sexual harassment lawsuit filed by his former communications director ? is not only embarrassing his city, but is also presenting it with confusing legal choices, political and legal analysts say.

Skip to next paragraph

' + google_ads[0].line2 + '
' + google_ads[0].line3 + '

'; } else if (google_ads.length > 1) { ad_unit += ''; } } document.getElementById("ad_unit").innerHTML += ad_unit; google_adnum += google_ads.length; return; } var google_adnum = 0; google_ad_client = "pub-6743622525202572"; google_ad_output = 'js'; google_max_num_ads = '1'; google_feedback = "on"; google_ad_type = "text"; // google_adtest = "on"; google_image_size = '230x105'; google_skip = '0'; // -->

Subscribe Today to the Monitor

Click Here for your FREE 30 DAYS of
The Christian Science Monitor
Weekly Digital Edition

He has agreed to undergo two weeks of counseling as seven other women have come forward to accuse him of inappropriate behavior. The therapy is to take place Aug. 5-19, during which the mayor has said he will receive twice-a-day briefings about city operations.

But seven of the nine city council members say he should resign. California Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D), House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, and Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz have also indicated as much.

In addition, two potential recall efforts are afoot. One recall group filed an affidavit Monday indicating its plans, and another published an ad over the weekend indicating similar intentions.

It?s all adding up to a confusing situation, and questions are multiplying by the moment. Among the questions:

? Who is in control of the city while the mayor is in rehab?

? Can two recalls go on at the same time?

? Are the city?s recall measures at odds with those of California?

? Who will pay Filner?s legal fees?

?The City Council and other civic leaders throughout the city are responding to the politics of the situation and the outrage that stretches far beyond the region's borders,? says David McCuan, a political scientist at Sonoma State University in Rohnert Park, Calif., in an e-mail. ?Citizens, comedians, state and national leaders ? everyone has the same message for the Mayor: get out and get help. Yet, the Mayor is hunkering down and preserving all his legal options. This sets up a monumental battle through a recall effort and if there is more than one effort, the Mayor could potentially survive.?

Filner declared Monday that he thinks the city should pay his legal fees, and the city council rejected that in a late Tuesday vote. The council also voted unanimously to indemnify itself against all damages and legal fees it might incur as a result of the lawsuit.

?If Bob Filner engaged in unlawful conduct and the city is held liable, he will have to reimburse us every penny the city pays and its attorney fees,? City Attorney Jan Goldsmith said.

In a statement, Councilmember Kevin Faulconer said: ?Bob Filner can?t pay back San Diegans for the damage he?s done to our city?s reputation.?

Another figure who says Filner should resign is city council president Todd Gloria, who would become acting mayor in the event of a resignation.

?I applaud his action to seek help, but it only underscores what a lot of us are saying, which is you cannot seek help and run the city at the same time,? Mr. Gloria said in an interview with KPBS TV. ?That?s why myself and so many others have said, Mayor, you need to resign.?

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/politics/~3/L4LvymihqVc/As-San-Diego-mayor-heads-for-therapy-city-faces-big-mess-video

new nfl uniforms derbyshire the matrix oceans 11 ferris state hockey mary poppins john derbyshire

The Trouble With ESPN's Big Johnny Football Story

The most interesting passage in Wright Thompson's new and much-discussed profile of minor league football player Johnny Manziel comes about three-quarters of the way into the story, which is long and rich with detail, so that you could forgive a reader whose eye ran past it. At this point in the piece, Manziel's parents, Michelle and Paul, are worried because their son, whose every whim they have apparently always indulged, has just been in Toronto visiting with Drake, the sort of thing on which Michelle feels the need to pray.

"They're concerned," Thompson writes. "Paul thinks Johnny drinks to deal with the stress. After his arrest, Johnny's parents and Sumlin mandated he visit an alcohol counselor; Johnny saw him six or seven weeks during the season."

This is given little more weight than any number of other details. (The writerly details here pile up like dandruff on a shoulder). If you go by word count, it gets less emphasis than the one about how Michelle was upset that her son got a tattoo. It's strange. A 20-year-old who drinks to deal with stress, who has been arrested in a booze-related incident, who has repeatedly found himself in embarrassing scenarios at least in part due to his drinking, and who has been forced by his employer and parents to see an alcohol counselor is pretty plainly a 20-year-old with a serious drinking problem. And yet at no point during a 6,000-word meditation on the meaning of Johnny Football does ESPN's premier longform writer, who can put you on the scene as his subject quaffs in an alarming variety of places, and who will name you the precise drinks his man prefers (Crown and Sprite, Stella), write anything like this plain English sentence: Johnny Manziel is a drunk.

It's an important omission, especially when you consider the second-most interesting passage in the piece, which has to do with Johnny Football and his father, here presented as a rich failure living vicariously through a son who hates him:

Not long ago, backstage at a country music concert, the two Manziels hung out with some of Johnny's friends. There was Uncle Nate, a high school teammate named Bryan and Johnny's buddy Colton from College Station. Everyone stood around, the band warming up. Without so much as a nod, the Crotch Shot Ninjas struck: Paul punched Nate in the nuts, and, simultaneously, Johnny kicked Bryan and hit Colton, both in the balls, both at the same time, and as the three dudes doubled over and the band howled in laughter, Johnny and Paul gave each other a fist bump. Mission accomplished.

In that anecdote you can see the future of America: a rich douchebag and his jackass son kicking their flunkeys in the balls, forever. It's a nice bit of reporting that buttresses some of the other nice reporting here. A man who would do this, and raise a son who would do this, is exactly the sort who would buy all the drinks for a son who's giving every sign of having a serious drinking problem. It kind of explains Johnny Football.

This story isn't really about alcoholism or horrific one-percenter stage parenting, though, even if its subject's life is, and if those riffs had been cut, their loss wouldn't much have affected the profile's thrust. The compelling parts of this #longread, in other words, are incidental, because it is a story principally about its own studious neutrality. To say straightforwardly that Johnny Football is a drunk who was raised by an asshole would be to compromise that pose of perfect objectivity. That's why the above nutpunching episode appears as a cute anecdote about the bond between father and son. As is, some people will come away from it saying, If they don't get that kid under control, it's going to cost him in the draft, and others will say, These damn moralists won't even let a kid be a kid. Debate will have been embraced, and the piece will have done its work.

The problem with this sort of scrupulous agnosticism, though, isn't just that you end up with a narrative that doesn't quite align with its details. It's that holding up ambiguity as inherently virtuous is essentially a rejection of journalism. It puts the hardest work?the work not just of saying, I saw this, but of saying, This is what it meant?on the reader. It's a confidence trick derived from modernist fiction.

Interestingly, there's a very different story tucked away in this one's pocket. Early on, for instance, we get a scene of Johnny Football watching himself being mythologized on a screen:

All day, he watched television as people ripped or defended him. They showed the montage of his jet-set offseason: courtside seats, beaches in Cabo, rounds at Pebble Beach. The montage led inexorably back to his arrest before last season, and he got to relive that too.

This is where a certain sort of reporter might note his own piece's complicity in the mythmaking it purports to critique. He might remind us that the television station paying for the piece we're reading, one with serious financial interests in minor league football narratives, routinely shows montages of its subject's jet-set lifestyle. This same reporter likely wouldn't call Manziel the "most important student" at Texas A&M (who's third?) or, after describing a young man's life as a sequence of binary questions, suggest that "This season will bring the answer." Of course, this reporter probably wouldn't have been assigned the story in the first place.

It is, of course, possible that Manziel is the very most important of the 50,000 unique souls who attend his school, and that what he does over the course of a few football games during the months before he turns 21 will prove to be what decides whether he'll spend his life as a boy or become a man. (Thinking of things this way will certainly keep us tuning in to ESPN to see how the story plays out.) It's also possible that he's just another kid with a drinking problem and an awful family who will take a long time to figure things out, getting fussed over because there is good money to be made fussing over young men who throw footballs well. Who can say? It's all very ambiguous.

What you can say is that there really are two stories here. One is about an unfairly put-upon celebrity on the verge of a crack-up and the flawed but loving family trying their best to protect him. It's a story about good people, people worth apologizing to when their words end up on the television, trapped in the gears of the machinery of fame. The other is about the construction of that machinery, and the engineers who make it so artfully that you can fail to see it working right in front of you, and how they never question their purpose.

Photo credit: Getty

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/deadspin/excerpts/~3/KPbS-5sjG70/the-trouble-with-espns-big-johnny-football-story-968777922

sherri shepherd arkansas razorbacks trisomy 18 ozzie guillen ozzie guillen buster posey eric holder

President Obama: NSA Surveillance Was Necessary To Make Sure Boston Bombings Weren't Part Of Bigger Plot

Huffington Post has an article about how President Obama is meeting with many of the biggest Congressional critics of the NSA surveillance programs to discuss their concerns. However, on Wednesday he also met with larger groups in the House and Senate, where he continued to stand behind the programs. At the very bottom of the article is this stunning tidbit:

Obama reiterated his call for a "balance" between privacy and national security, but also invoked the Boston Marathon bombings as an example of where data collected by the NSA helped "identify whether there was a great plot."

Right. So, after there was a bombing which no intelligence agency spotted beforehand, he's now claiming that the NSA got to jump into action to find out that there wouldn't be any more bombings because there was no bigger plot. We're not even in the silly debunked realm of "preventing terrorist events" anymore. Now we're at "Great work everyone! We found out that there's no larger plot to worry about -- sorry about the explosions and related mess." Using the discovery of a lack of further threats after a bombing happened undetected to justify spying on all Americans? That's crazy.

When that's the best you can do to defend this program, something is clearly wrong. The program didn't prevent the bombing. It may have allowed law enforcement to be more confident that there wasn't a larger plot behind it slightly faster than regular police work did, but that's not exactly a reason to violate everyone's privacy, now is it?

Source: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130731/18005724032/president-obama-claims-boston-bombings-reinforce-need-nsa-surveillance.shtml

Kensington Palace Carlos Danger geraldo rivera Carlos Hyde Baby I Ariana Grande Best Song Ever Deanna Burditt

Birmingham native, Georgia State University freshman founds 'White Student Union' at school

ATLANTA, Georgia -- A Georgia State University freshman from Birmingham created an informal White Student Union at the school, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

The White Student Union already has about a half dozen members, founder Patrick Sharp told the Journal-Constitution, but it's also stirred up plenty of controversy before the school year even begins.

Sharp said the goal of the group is for students of European descent to get together and discuss culture and issues that affect the group.

"All we want to do is celebrate white identity," he told the Journal-Constitution. "This is about being in touch with who you are as a white person and being proud of that."

Sharp declined an interview with AL.com/The Birmingham News Wednesday.

In a pair of opinion columns published last week in Georgia State's student newspaper, The Signal, two students expressed opposite views of the new organization. Both writers focused heavily on the racial tension surrounding the killing of Trayvon Martin in Florida and the recent acquittal of George Zimmerman in the case.

"With the induction of a White Student Union, I think it will not only be a very interesting social experiment, but it will bring to the surface a multitude of uncomfortable racial arguments that we as students will have to address," student Mitchell Oliver wrote in support of the group.

"Do white students need a unified voice? Are there needs that are not being met?" wrote Terry Harlin, who opposed the group. "Why not a European cultural club, if the emphasis is indeed on heritage?"

The White Student Union is not an official group, Doug Covey, the university's vice president for student affairs, told the Journal-Constitution. In order to become an official group, it would need a faculty or staff adviser, and Sharp said he doubted the group could find one. As an informal group, the union can meet in common areas on campus but cannot reserve meeting space or receive funding from student fees.

According to Creative Loafing Atlanta, the idea came from a similar student group formed at Towson University that was the subject of a short Vice documentary.

Source: http://blog.al.com/wire/2013/07/birmingham_native_georgia_stat.html

Sunil Tripathi Tavon Austin Ella Fitzgerald Kenny Vaccaro Kate McKinnon gwyneth paltrow Pink moon

Fixing Egypt?s Economy: No More Military Macaroni

Since July 3, General Abdul-Fattah al-Sisi has made it clear who runs Egypt: He does. He faces two great challenges. One is the Islamist element, spoiling for a fight to take back the power it so recently lost. The other, my focus here, is the economy.

The country once famous as the ?breadbasket of the Nile? now imports something like 70 percent of its food. To make matters worse, a depressed economy could mean that the money will just not be there ??other than gifts from Saudi Arabia and other governments ??to fend off starvation. Plus, the prospect looms of severe cuts in the country?s Nile water allotment. What to do?

There is only one choice if Egypt is to break the bonds of poverty: Pull the military out of the economy. As detailed by Shana Marshall and Joshua Stacher for MERIP and Nimrod Raphaeli for MEMRI, what?s sometimes known as ?Military, Inc.? controls somewhere between 25 and 40 percent of the economy. Its products

range from consumer goods such as laptops, flat-screen televisions, sewing machines, refrigerators, pots and pans, plastic table covers, butane gas bottles, olive oil, and bottled water to medical equipment, tourism, real estate, and gas and energy. The military owns and operates no fewer than nine factories for macaroni.

The military has grown so large because of preferential tax treatment, subsidized labor, an extra-legal status, old-boy networks, and many other privileges. As can be imagined, its enterprises run along socialistic lines and are steeped in nepotism and baroque forms of corruption.

Egypt?s economy can only take off if Sisi has the courage to tell his colleagues that the gig is up, that the armed forces are getting out of the pasta business so that Egyptians can build a proper economy. I can?t imagine he will do this of his own accord, for officers have become accustomed to the good life, with plenty of money and an abundance of free servants.

Hammering at this message is one of the more important actions that foreign governments can take when meeting with Sisi and the military leadership.?

Source: https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/354811/fixing-egypts-economy-no-more-military-macaroni-daniel-pipes

Valerie Harper White Smoke Kwame Kilpatrick New pope 2013 good morning america earthquake california earthquake california

Apple touts tax holiday savings for customers in 10 states

AppleInsider writes, Ten states in the Union will soon let their residents buy various products with no tax added for a limited time, and Apple is taking advantage of the tax holidays by informing customers in those areas how to save hundreds on their next Apple Store purchase. ????

Continue reading Apple touts tax holiday savings for customers in 10 states at AppleInsider

Source: http://machash.com/appleinsider/77396/apple-touts-tax-holiday-savings-for-customers-in-10-states/

mike d antoni nba trade rumors desean jackson 2012 ncaa tournament schedule laurent robinson dantoni black and tan

ERM Value: Building the Business Case - Manage Tomorrow's ...

The role of the enterprise risk manager has finally become clear: close the gap between strategic level risks and the operational risks faced at the activity level. Despite being a relatively new corporate discipline, expectations for ERM value are already very high. A recent poll shows us why corporations are desperate for?ERM managers to be successful.

The poll, conducted by Harris Interactive of 23,000 corporate full-time employees within key industries and in key functional areas¹?highlights some the challenges ERM is up against, namely, the inability of corporations to focus on and execute their highest priorities. Consider a few of their most stunning findings:

• - Only 37% have a clear understanding of what their organization is trying to achieve and why.
• - Only one in five was enthusiastic about their team's and organization's goals.
• - Only one in five said they have a clear "line of sight" between their tasks and their team's and organization's goals.
• - Only 15% felt that their organization fully enables them to execute key goals.?
• - Only 20% fully trusted the organization they work for.

If, say, a soccer team had these same scores, only four of the 11 players on the field would know which goal is theirs. Only two of the 11 would care. Only two of the 11 would know what position they play and know exactly what they are supposed to do. And all but two players would, in some way, be competing against their own team members rather than the opponent.

Getting an accurate pulse on strategic objectives is challenging, as these goals are cross-functional and effect oriented in nature, and as such are extremely useful for the board and senior executives, but are impossible to take action on without first breaking them down into root-cause, actionable, silo specific activities within an operational processes. This is where risk management plays a pivotal role.

To create value through ERM, organizations need to build a robust?risk taxonomy, which provides a holistic view of all information and relationships across the organization. The risk manager is responsible for setting the standards, practices and procedures for effective risk management and embedding them in all existing business processes. Formalized risk assessments allow risk managers to leverage existing activities in an objective, quantifiable, repeatable manner to show how risks and activities at the business process level are impacting business goals, along with the priority and importance of these risks, activities, and goals.

A formalized risk taxonomy framework is a mechanism to collect risk information at the activity level, where most operational risks materialize, and aggregate this risk information to a level and format senior management cares about. Watch our complimentary on-demand webinar, "Presenting ERM to the Board," to learn more about the value ERM can provide to your organization by aligning activity level risks to strategic goals.

¹?8th Habit?by Stephen R. Covey, Harris Interactive poll of 23,000 U.S. residents employed full-time within key industries and in key functional areas.

Source: http://www.ebizq.net/blogs/chief_risk_officer/2013/07/erm_value_building_the_busines.php

norfolk island michael brockers lisa marie presley florida panthers tannehill joel ward mock draft