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Ted Rall v. LA Times et al. – Lawsuit Update

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Ted Rall
Remember this the next time someone tells you it’s too easy to file a lawsuit in American courts. We need tort reform, but not to make it harder. It needs to become easier to seek justice! As I wrote earlier, a judge in LA Superior Court ruled against me in the first round of anti-SLAPP motions filed against me by the LA Times. The Times is deploying anti-SLAPP — a law promoted as a way to protect whistleblowers and critics against wealthy corporations — against me because I am suing them for defamation and wrongful termination. (This was after they falsely claimed I had lied about being roughed up by an LAPD police officer in the course of a jaywalking arrest, and continued to lie after I used their own evidence to prove it. The Times and its publisher had a close financial and political relationship with the LAPD, which I had repeatedly criticized in my cartoons.) On November 20…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Sexual Harassment and the End of Team Politics

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Ted Rall
Until the 1990s, American electoral politics were divided ideologically, between the opposing ideas of liberalism and conservatism. Now we have Team Politics: Democrat versus Republican, my party right or wrong. Back then, Rush Limbaugh sometimes accused the Republican Party of betraying conservative principles. At the same time, the liberal op-ed writers at the New York Times occasionally took the Democratic Party to task for not being liberal enough. Those things don’t happen now. Americans back their party the same way they back their favorite sports team — with automatic, stupid loyalty. If you are a liberal, you support the Democratic Party no matter what. You vote for Democrats who vote for Republican wars of choice. You look the other way when they do things that only Republicans should do, like order political assassinations and regime change. You even make excuses for outright betrayal, like when Bill Clinton signed NAFTA and welfare reform. If you are a conservative, you support the…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: How Society Makes Victimhood a No-Win Proposition

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Ted Rall
            From Clarence Thomas to Jerry Sandusky to Bill Cosby to Harvey Weinstein, those who doubt their accusers always ask something similar to what Roy Moore said about those who accused him of sexual harassment and assault: “To think grown women would wait 40 years before a general election to bring charges is unbelievable.” What takes so long? Why don’t alleged victims head straight to the police? There are 17 good reasons in this great article. Let me add two more that we don’t talk about enough: shame and fear of disbelief. I’m not referring to the well-documented victims’ fear that they somehow brought the attack on themselves (for example, a woman who worries that she somehow sent mixed signals to a suitor who then raped her), but to something one rarely sees discussed in the media or talked about in typical conversations about victimhood. Society doesn’t like victims. Victims make us uncomfortable. It’s probably a vestige of our Darwinian…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Call H.R.? Why Not the Cops? The Weird Politics of Sexual Harassment

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Ted Rall
            When the Kevin Spacey story first broke, he stood accused of one act of wrongdoing: aggressively hitting on a 14-year-old boy. If true, this is wrong. Very wrong. Obviously. Adults shouldn’t proposition children. But this happened more than 30 years ago. The nature of the response — Netflix distanced itself from the star of its hit show “House of Cards” by announcing its previously secret decision to end the series next year — seems like the wrong response to the actor’s behavior…and one that has become all too typical. Bear in mind, this was before other people stepped forward to say Spacey had sexually harassed them. Some of Spacey’s accusers worked on “House of Cards.” After that, Netflix would have been derelict not to put Spacey on hiatus as the accusations get sorted out, and to fire him for creating a toxic work environment for its current employees. Which is what it did. Sexual harassers getting their just comeuppance…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: NYC Attack: Another Reason to Protect Bicycle & Pedestrian Paths

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Ted Rall
This week’s ISIS-inspired truck attack in lower Manhattan by Uzbek immigrant Sayfullo Saipov has prompted discussions on a number of fronts. There is blowback, the foreign-policy-chickens-come-home-to-roost indicated by an increasing number of radical Islamists emerging from the former Soviet republic of Uzbekistan, a Central Asian nation whose brutal dictatorship is financed and armed by our U.S. taxdollars. There is the ongoing verbal diarrhea of our mentally diseased president, whose tweets that Saipov deserves the “DEATH PENALTY” (caps his) were overshadowed by his even more outlandish suggestion that the suspect be reclassified as an “enemy combatant” (a Bush-era phrase undefined by American law) and sent to the U.S. torture-concentration camp at Guantánamo. Always the opportunist, Trump also said the “diversity visa” program ought to be abolished because Saipov came to the U.S. under what is more commonly known as the visa lottery. Seems to me that the biggest issue raised by the New York attack is the one we’re not talking…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: #MenToo? Even Under Matriarchy, Rape and Sexual Harassment Would Still Be a Big Problem

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Ted Rall
Post-Harvey Weinstein, the pitchforks are out — and with good reason. Women and girls have been diminished, objectified, exploited, terrorized, discriminated against, sexually harassed forever. Only fools thought sexism and misogyny at the hands of male oppression had been eliminated, but many people had reason to assume things had improved post-Gloria Steinem in the 1970s, when “male chauvinist pig” became a sit-com meme. Weinstein and Bill O’Reilly et al. demonstrate that, at the apex of the power structure, nothing really changed. And that’s the point of this column, which I was reluctant to write for fear of being accused of minimizing the righteous anger of the women stepping forward to say enough, no more. Rape culture — the insidious vapor that women wade through every day, whether it’s inappropriate sexist or sexual remarks, gauging whether it’s safe to take their boss up on an offer for drinks that could lead to a promotion, and/or an unwanted sexual advance, or hesitating…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Why Girls in the Boy Scouts Feels Weird

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Ted Rall
I’m not a traditionalist. Progress is good. The fact that we’ve always done something a certain way is no argument for continuing to do it the same way. I’m not a fan of single-sex environments, whether they be schools, workplaces or civic organizations. I’ve worked in all-male spaces (a Wall Street trading room, a taxi garage) and found the testosterone-fueled machismo toxic and thoughtless. I lived in a 99% female college dorm and worked in a 80% female office (banking consultancy); there was oppression there too, in a more groupthink conform-or-die way (like in the movie “The Beguiled,” but less murderous and more inane). The majority gender always discriminates against the minority. So after it was announced that girls will be allowed to join the Boy Scouts, I wondered: why does this decision feel so weird? Not so much a bridge too far — objectively, admitting transgender Scouts earlier this year, and gays in 2013, felt more radical but also…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: What Would the U.S. Look Like If We Built It From Scratch?

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Ted Rall
Imagine that there was another revolution. And that nothing big had changed. Demographics, power dynamics, culture, our economic system and political values were pretty much the same as they are now. If we Americans rolled up our sleeves and reimagined our political system from scratch, if we wrote up a brand-new constitution for 2017, what would a brand-spanking-new United States Version 2.0 look like today? A lot of stuff would be different. Like, there wouldn’t be an electoral college. (Only a handful of countries, mainly autocracies in the developing world, do.) There probably wouldn’t be a Second Amendment; if there were, it would certainly be limited to the right to own pistols and hunting weapons. And the vast majority of gun owners believe in regulations like background checks. Does anyone believe we would choose the two-party duopoly over the multiparty parliamentary model embraced by most of the world’s representative democracies? Our leaders fail us in innumerable ways, but perhaps their…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Hugh Hefner Said His Critics Were Prudes and Puritans. The Negative Obits Prove Him Right.

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Ted Rall
  No one has ever accused Ross Douthat of excessive astuteness. “Donald Trump isn’t going to be the Republican nominee,” he wrote in January 2016. Dude is paid to prognosticate politics. Even so, Douthat probably pulls down six figures at The New York Times, which doesn’t grant me the courtesy of a rejection letter. So people pay attention to him. Hugh Hefner’s death didn’t move me. Penthouse was my print media stimulus of choice. I only read Playboy after the magazine’s late delightful cartoons director Michelle Urry commissioned some samples during her campaign to update the magazine’s hoary cartoon section with edgier, more political work. (Alas, those weird Marxist sex cartoons are lost to history.) The worst cartoon editors are former aspiring cartoonists. Hef was one of those; he killed my stuff for being too edgy and political. But Hefner sure managed to rile up Douthat. “Hef was the grinning pimp of the sexual revolution, with Quaaludes for the ladies…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: The Pledge of Allegiance is anti-American

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Ted Rall
Right-wingers conflate nationalism with patriotism. But they’re not the same thing. Patriots love their country because it does good things; for nationalists it’s our country right or wrong. A lot of stuff nationalists call patriotic couldn’t possibly be more un-American. The singing of the national anthem before sporting events, and the reciting of the Pledge of Allegiance, are prime examples. The latest nationalism vs. patriotism controversy arrives courtesy of Colin Kaepernick, the African-American pro football player blackballed by the NFL for kneeling in silent protest over police shootings of blacks rather than stand for the signing of the national anthem alongside his teammates and fans before games. The “take a knee” movement has spread throughout the league, largely in response to President Trump’s crude remark that those who refuse to stand during “The Star Spangled Banner” are “sons of bitches.” At football games and similar events where the anthem is sung, standers far outnumber kneelers — and that’s weird. Because…
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