Journalist’s Journey Inside ISIS

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Author's journey inside ISIS: They're 'more dangerous than people realize'

By Frederik Pleitgen, CNN

updated 8:50 AM EST, Thu December 25, 2014

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

>   German journalist and author Juergen Todenhoefer journeyed deep into ISIS territory

>   He interviewed ISIS fighters, prisoners, and members of the public caught up in the battle for Iraq and Syria

>   One ISIS spokesman told Todenhofer: "slavery and beheadings [are] part of our religion"

>   ISIS "preparing the largest religious cleansing campaign the world has ever seen," says Todenhoefer

(CNN) -- Juergen Todenhoefer's journey was a tough one: dangerous, but also eye-opening. The author traveled deep into ISIS territory -- the area they now call their "caliphate" -- visiting Raqqa and Deir Ezzor in Syria, as well as Mosul in Iraq.

Mosul, Iraq's second largest city, was taken by ISIS in a Blitzkrieg-like sweep in June.

Todenhoefer managed to visit the mosque there where the leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Bagdadi, gave his only public address.

And he saw the realities of daily life under ISIS, with all shops having to close for prayers in the middle of the day.

"There is an awful sense of normalcy in Mosul," Todenhoefer said in an exclusive interview with CNN.

"130,000 Christians have been evicted from the city, the Shia have fled, many people have been murdered and yet the city is functioning and people actually like the stability that the Islamic State has brought them."

Nonetheless, he says, there is an air of fear among residents: "Of course many of the them are quite scared, because the punishment for breaking the Islamic State's strict rules is very severe."

According to ISIS's leadership, the group's fighters managed to take Mosul with only about 300 men, even though more than 20,000 Iraqi army soldiers were stationed there when the attack was launched.

Todenhoefer spoke with several ISIS fighters who took part in the operation.

"It took us about four days to take Mosul," a young fighter told him.

"So you were only about 300 men and you defeated 20,000 troops in four days?" Todenhoefer asked.

"Well, we didn't attack them all at once, we hit their front lines hard, also using suicide attacks. Then the others fled very quickly," the fighter explained. "We fight for Allah, they fight for money and other things that they do not really believe in."

Glow in their eyes

Todenhoefer told CNN the enthusiasm the ISIS militants showed was one thing that stood out.

"When we stayed at their recruitment house, there were 50 new fighters who came every day," Todenhoefer said. "And I just could not believe the glow in their eyes. They felt like they were coming to a promised land, like they were fighting for the right thing.

"These are not stupid people. One of the people we met had just finished his law degree, he had great job offers, but he turned them down to go and fight ... We met fighters from Europe and the United States. One of them was from New Jersey. Can you imagine a man from New Jersey traveling to fight for the Islamic State?"

He went on to say that one of ISIS's main points of strength is their fighters' willingness -- even their will -- to die on the battlefield.

Todenhoefer met one somewhat overweight recruit in a "safe house" who said he wears a suicide belt to every battle because he is too chubby to run away if he is cornered and would choose to blow himself up, rather than be captured.

ISIS also has a track record of abusing, torturing and executing prisoners of war. Todenhoefer was briefly able to speak to a Kurdish captive while in Mosul. The captive claimed he had not been tortured, but Todenhoefer said he found that hard to believe.

"This was a broken man," Todenhoefer said. "It was very sad to see a person in this state. He was just very weak and very afraid of his captors."

ISIS is preparing the largest religious cleansing campaign the world has ever seen
Juergen Todenhoefer, author

Todenhoefer conducted the interview with the prisoner while several ISIS fighters stood guard. He asked the man whether he knew what would happen to him.

"I do not know," the captive told him. "My family does not even know I am still alive. I hope that maybe there will be some sort of prisoner exchange."

Child ISIS fighters

Todenhoefer was also taken to see child soldiers outfitted with Islamic State gear and brandishing AK-47s. One of the boys seemed very young but claimed he had already gone to battle for ISIS.

"How old are you?" Todenhoefer asked.

"I am 13 years old," the boy replied -- though he looked even younger than that.

One of the most remarkable episodes of Todenhoefer's trip to the ISIS-controlled region came when he was able to conduct an interview with a German fighter who spoke on behalf of ISIS's leadership.

The man -- clearly unapologetic about the group's transgressions -- vowed there was more to come; he also issued a warning to Europe and the United States.

"So you also want to come to Europe?" Todenhoefer asked him.

"No, we will conquer Europe one day," the man said. "It is not a question of if we will conquer Europe, just a matter of when that will happen. But it is certain ... For us, there is no such thing as borders. There are only front lines.

"Our expansion will be perpetual ... And the Europeans need to know that when we come, it will not be in a nice way. It will be with our weapons. And those who do not convert to Islam or pay

the Islamic tax will be killed."

Todenhoefer asked the fighter about their treatment of other religions, especially Shia Muslims.

"What about the 150 million Shia, what if they refuse to convert?" Todenhoefer asked.

"150 million, 200 million or 500 million, it does not matter to us," the fighter answered. "We will kill them all."

Beheadings

The interview became testy when they reached the topic of beheadings and enslavement, especially of female captives.

"So do you seriously think that beheadings and enslavement actually signal progress for humanity?" Todenhoefer asked.

"Slavery absolutely signals progress," the man said. "Only ignorant people believe that there is no slavery among the Christians and the Jews. Of course there are woman who are forced into prostitution under the worst circumstances.

"I would say that slavery is a great help to us and we will continue to have slavery and beheadings, it is part of our religion ... many slaves have converted to Islam and have then been freed."

The ISIS spokesman blamed the beheading of captured Western journalists and aid workers on the policies of the United States.

"People should really think about the case of James Foley," he said. "He did not get killed because we started the battle. He got killed because of the ignorance of his government that did not give him any help."

Even with recent gains by Kurdish forces against ISIS in northern Iraq, Todenhoefer sees the extremist group as entrenched, building state institutions, and that it shows no sign of losing its grip in the main areas it controls in Iraq and Syria.

"I think the Islamic State is a lot more dangerous than Western leaders realize," he said. "They believe in what they are fighting for and are preparing the largest religious cleansing campaign the world has ever seen."

http://www.cnn.com/2014/12/22/world/meast/inside-isis-juergen-todenhoefer/

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Obama’s Home Stretch

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 A Good Closer?

DEC 23 2014 @ 2:25PM

There has long been a pattern to Barack Obama’s political career on the national stage. There are moments of soaring moral clarity and inspiration; there are long periods of drift or laziness or passivity; and there are often very good fourth quarters. The 2008 campaign was an almost perfect coda: the sudden initial breakout, then a strange listlessness as he allowed the Clintons to come back in New Hampshire, turning the race into a long and grueling battle for delegates, then a final denouement when he made up with the Clintons and stormed into the White House. Or think of healthcare reform: a clear early gamble, followed by a truly languorous and protracted period of negotiation and posturing, and then a breakthrough. Or marriage equality: an excruciating period of ambivalence followed by a revolution. On climate: a failed cap and trade bill … followed by real tough fuel emissions standards, new carbon rules from the EPA and an agreement with China.

If you were to track this pattern – strong start, weak middle, winning final streak – throughout his entire presidency, you might have expected his worst year to be the one when he was just re-elected and had the wind at his back. And you would be right. 2013 was truly awful. But you’d also expect his final years to be strong. Until recently, much of the Beltway was engaged in a rather sour judgment on this score. He was an anachronism, shellacked for the second time by the midterms, a crippled fowl hobbling toward mediocrity. The future belongs to … Mitch McConnell!

Or not. The latest reports on economic growth suggest that Obama is now presiding over the strongest economy in more than a decade. Back in 2009, this was in no way predictable, or even likely. Compared with America’s international competitors, it’s powerful evidence that Obama’s early measures to save the US economy from the abyss were more successful than many will concede. The country, meanwhile, has experienced an energy revolution – a win-win (apart from the planet) which has also given both Putin and Khamenei the collywobbles. Sure, this was not an Obama initiative, but he didn’t get in the way. The potential for solar power has also never seemed brighter.

Crime remains at historic lows; the deficit has been slashed; healthcare costs – the key indicator of future debt – have been falling; inflation remains low; interest rates have not soared as many conservatives predicted; and unemployment is half what he inherited.

Millions more have reliable and portable health insurance coverage in a program performing somewhat better than anyone predicted a year ago. Although the right-wing media noise machine has done its best to obscure all of this, it will surely eventually sink in, even though polarization has made big shifts in opinion highly unlikely. And on the politics of it all, Obama’s coalition remains a demographically formidable one as you look ahead. His bold unilateral move on immigration turned out to be a political winner (against my judgment at the time). Latinos, African-Americans, gays, unmarried women all remain a powerful base for the GOP to counter. And Obama’s persona was and is critical to keeping that coalition together.

On foreign policy, we end the year with Putin reeling, Netanyahu facing re-election, Syria’s WMDs removed and destroyed, withdrawal from Afghanistan almost completed, and a nuclear deal with Iran still possible. Yes, we have one huge step backward – the decision to re-engage in the sectarian warfare in what remains of Iraq. But so far at least, the engagement has been limited, the Islamic State has been contained, a new Iraqi prime minister holds out more hope than Maliki, and the Kurds and the Shiites have a much better relationship. The new relationship with Cuba is also a mile-stone toward a saner, less ideological foreign policy.

Obama likes the final stretch. It’s liberating for him, quite clearly. And clarifying for the rest of us. My point is a simple one: the long game has always mattered to this presidency, and we are now very much in the fourth quarter. That’s when Obama has always been strongest. And the story of this presidency isn’t close to being told yet.

Know hope.

http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2014/12/23/a-good-closer/

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Respect for Good Cops

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The Cop Mind

by David Brooks

Dec. 8, 2014

Like a lot of people in journalism, I began my career, briefly, as a police reporter. As the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases have unfolded, I’ve found myself thinking back to those days. Nothing excuses specific acts of police brutality, especially in the Garner case, but not enough attention is being paid to the emotional and psychological challenges of being a cop.

Early on, I learned that there is an amazing variety of police officers, even compared to other professions. Most cops are conscientious, and some, especially among detectives, are brilliant.

They spend much of their time in the chaotic and depressing nether-reaches of society: busting up domestic violence disputes, dealing with drunks and drug addicts, coming upon fatal car crashes, managing conflicts large and small.

They ride an emotional and biochemical roller coaster. They experience moments of intense action and alertness, followed by emotional crashes marked by exhaustion, and isolation. They become hypervigilant. Surrounded by crime all day, some come to perceive that society is more threatening than it really is.

To cope, they emotionally armor up. Many of the cops I was around developed a cynical, dehumanizing and hard-edged sense of humor that was an attempt to insulate themselves from the pain of seeing a dead child or the extinguished life of a young girl they arrived too late to save.

Many of us see cops as relatively invulnerable as they patrol the streets. The cops themselves do not perceive their situation that way. As criminologist George Kelling wrote in City Journal in 1993, “It is a common myth that police officers approach conflicts with a feeling of power — after all, they are armed, they represent the state, they are specially trained and backed by an ‘army.’ In reality, an officer’s gun is almost always a liability ... because a suspect may grab it in a scuffle. Officers are usually at a disadvantage because they have to intervene in unfamiliar terrain, on someone else’s territory. They worry that bystanders might become involved, either by helping somebody the officer has to confront or, after the fact, by second-guessing an officer’s conduct.”

Even though most situations are not dangerous, danger is always an out-of-the-blue possibility, often in the back of the mind.

In many places, a self-supporting and insular police culture develops: In this culture no one understands police work except fellow officers; the training in the academy is useless; to do the job you’ve got to bend the rules and understand the law of the jungle; the world is divided into two sorts of people — cops and a — holes.

This is a life of both boredom and stress. Life expectancy for cops is lower than for the general population. Cops suffer disproportionately from peptic ulcers, back disorders and heart disease. In one study, suicide rates were three times higher among cops than among other municipal workers. Other studies have found that somewhere between 7 percent and 19 percent of cops suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. The effect is especially harsh on those who have been involved in shootings. Two-thirds of the officers who have been involved in shootings suffer moderate or severe emotional problems. Seventy percent leave the police force within seven years of the incident.

Most cops know they walk a dangerous line, between necessary and excessive force. According to a 2000 National Institute of Justice study, more than 90 percent of the police officers surveyed said that it is wrong to respond to verbal abuse with force. Nonetheless, 15 percent of the cops surveyed were aware that officers in their own department sometimes or often did so.

And through the years, departments have worked to humanize the profession. Over all, police use of force is on the decline, along with the crime rate generally. According to the Department of Justice, the number of incidents in which force was used or threatened declined from 664,000 in 2002 to 574,000 in 2008. Community policing has helped bind police forces closer to the citizenry.

A blind spot is race. Only 1 in 20 white officers believe that blacks and other minorities receive unequal treatment from the police. But 57 percent of black officers are convinced the treatment of minorities is unfair.

But at the core of profession lies the central problem of political philosophy. How does the state preserve order through coercion? When should you use overwhelming force to master lawbreaking? When is it wiser to step back and use patience and understanding to defuse a situation? How do you make this decision instantaneously, when testosterone is flowing, when fear is in the air, when someone is disrespecting you and you feel indignation rising in the gut?

Racist police brutality has to be punished. But respect has to be paid. Police serve by walking that hazardous line where civilization meets disorder.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/09/opinion/the-cop-mind.html?emc=edit_th_20141209&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=65886944&_r=0

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Police Violence with Impunity

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Police Violence Seems to Result in No Punishment

by Ginia Bellafante 

Dec. 4, 2014 

The police stopped protesters from entering the Lincoln Tunnel after a grand jury did not indict an officer in the death of Eric Garner on Wednesday.

When a grand jury on Staten Island declined, on Wednesday, to indict Officer Daniel Pantaleo in the killing of Eric Garner, some critics blamed Staten Island itself, easily equating it with a culture of police coddling and conservatism. But grand juries, so willing to issue indictments in so many instances, rarely do so in cases involving police officers who have killed civilians. And they have failed to do so in far more liberal environments — in Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx.

The year 1999 was a horrific one for police shootings in New York City. On Feb. 4, Amadou Diallo was killed in the doorway of a Bronx apartment building after the police, mistakenly believing he was reaching into his pocket for a gun, fired 41 shots. Several months later, at the end of August, Gidone Busch, a mentally disturbed Orthodox Jewish man, was shot a dozen times in Borough Park in Brooklyn by four police officers, after he struck one on the arm with a hammer. A few days later, in September, an unarmed man named Richard Watson was fatally shot by the police in Harlem after he fled on foot in the wake of an accusation that he had evaded a taxi fare.

Mr. Watson’s death represented the fifth fatal shooting by police officers in four weeks. The new millennium would get underway with the killing of Patrick Dorismond in March 2000 after an undercover narcotics agent shot him outside a Midtown Manhattan bar; he too was without a weapon. None of the police officers involved in the Busch, Watson or Dorismond cases faced criminal charges. Officers in the Diallo case were acquitted. Thirteen years after the shooting, the Police Department gave one of them, Kenneth Boss, the right to use his gun again.

In the current moment, police violence, like campus sexual assault, seems to be in a pandemic phase. Last month, the Federal Bureau of Investigation reported that 461 felony suspects had been killed by police officers across the country last year, the highest figure in two decades. We are possibly, if not surely, experiencing a crisis of manhood in which the young respond to their fears in a time of rising insecurity with a concomitant blast of brutality. Darren Wilson, who shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.; Officer Pantaleo; and Peter Laing, the police officer who killed Akai Gurley last month in the Pink Houses in Brooklyn, are all in their 20s.

Whatever the collective psychological causes, it is almost certain that the absence of real repercussions impedes restraint.

“If you believe in deterrence theory,” as Jeffrey A. Fagan, a Columbia University law professor who specializes in policing, put it to me, “then you believe that people will refrain from wrongdoing if they believe that punishment is real. But the legal system is incapable of creating the same kind of deterrent effects for police officers.” Right now, there would appear to be no obvious downside to the use of excessive force beyond personal upset and dislocation.

Apart from that are the broad latitude and deference that prosecutors give police officers in these cases. “The way the questioning often goes, it allows the officer to set forward a narrative that gives a series of justifications for his actions,” Professor Fagan said. That narrative has to be challenged, and in many cases it isn’t.

As anyone who has watched “Law & Order” knows, the relationship between police officers and prosecutors is typically steeped in fealty, which is why advocates of police reform have called for independent prosecutors to be assigned to cases involving potential criminal misconduct on the part of the police.

“Is there hand-in-hand complicity? I believe there is,” Jeffry L. Emdin told me. Mr. Emdin, a former assistant district attorney in the Bronx, represented the family of Ramarley Graham, an unarmed teenager who was shot and killed by a police officer, Richard Haste, two years ago. “The district attorney’s office works daily with members of the N.Y.P.D.,” Mr. Emdin said. “I’ve had A.D.A.s vouch for the credibility of officers coming under civil rights violations,” he told me, referring to prosecutors who could be expected to bring charges.

In one instance he had a client who alleged that a police officer broke his nose in a precinct house. “The D.A.’s office said, ‘No, no, he couldn’t have done that.’ ”

The city believes that requiring police officers to wear cameras, a program that is to begin immediately, will help reduce instances of transgression. It’s hard to absorb the logic of that after the Garner decision, given that the existence of a video demonstrating the use of a chokehold on Mr. Garner failed to persuade the grand jury that Officer Pantaleo’s actions even demanded a criminal trial.

In a television appearance on Wednesday night, the city’s public advocate, Letitia James, called upon Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to push for independent prosecutors in these cases. Asked about this the next day, Governor Cuomo, whose initial response to the Garner decision was relatively dispassionate, deflected. “I think we should look at the whole system,” he said. “I don’t think there’s any one answer.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/07/nyregion/police-violence-seems-to-result-in-no-punishment.html?emc=edit_th_20141207&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=65886944

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Justice & Police Abuse

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“One of my white fellow officers once told me that if he saw a white individual with a gun, he took extra care for himself and the individual. When he saw a black individual with a gun, he took care only for himself.”

We Must Stop Police Abuse of Black Men

by Eric L. Adams *

Dec. 4, 2014 

I CAN recall it as if it were yesterday: looking into the toilet and seeing blood instead of urine. That was the aftermath of my first police encounter.

As a 15-year-old, living in South Jamaica, Queens, I was arrested on a criminal trespass charge after unlawfully entering and remaining in the home of an acquaintance. Officers took me to the 103rd Precinct — the same precinct where an unarmed Sean Bell was later shot and killed by the police — and brought me into a room in the basement. They kicked me in the groin repeatedly. Out of every part of my body, that’s what they targeted. Then I spent the night in Spofford juvenile detention center.

For seven days after that, I stared into the toilet bowl in my house at the blood I was urinating. I kept telling myself that if it didn’t clear up by the next day, I would share this shame and embarrassment with my mother, although I could never bring myself to start that conversation. When clear urine returned, I thought I was leaving that moment behind me. I never told anyone this, not even my mother, until I was an adult.

As I attempted to put that shame and attack on my manhood away, new horror stories kept compelling me to relive those memories: the nightmare experiences of Randolph Evans, Patrick Dorismond, Abner Louima and countless other young men have reminded me of my own secret. Think of all the secrets that young men of color are hiding. How many are concealing some dark truth of the abuse they endured, and what is that darkness doing to them?

In order to finally bring this darkness into the light of day, our nation must address the foundation of this crisis. That starts with acknowledging that the training taught in police academies across the country is not being applied in communities of color. After six months in the police academy, that instruction is effectively wiped out by six days of being taught by veteran cops on the streets.

I learned this myself firsthand. I didn’t want any more children to go through what I endured, so I sought to make change from the inside by joining the police department.

Hours after coming out of the police academy, I was told something as a new rookie officer: You’d rather be tried by 12 jurors than carried by six pallbearers. In my impressionable first days, I saw officers leave the precinct every day touching the lockers of their fallen brothers. They started their shift on the defensive, thinking about protecting themselves, as opposed to the communities they served, regardless of the complexion of those communities. One of my white fellow officers once told me that if he saw a white individual with a gun, he took extra care for himself and the individual. When he saw a black individual with a gun, he took care only for himself.

These are the lessons to which I was exposed, and the reality of what policing communities of color has been, not just in New York City but across America. There is a legacy of inequity that did not just appear overnight, but was carved into the culture of law enforcement over decades.

There is reluctance on the part of police leadership, which has long believed in the nightstick and quick-trigger-finger justice, to effectively deal with officers who have documented and substantiated records of abuse. These individuals need to be removed from the force. That is an essential component of the larger response we must have to address this history of abuse.

We cannot continue to approach policing in an antiquated fashion, and that certainly includes technology. Technology has been used as a crime-fighting tactic, but not as a tool to determine what happens during a police action. New York City has taken the right step in putting body cameras on police officers, but what about cameras on guns themselves? While I was a state senator, I introduced a proposal to allow such devices, which would not interfere with the function of the weapon; this proposal deserves to be revisited. In fact, we can go further, with cameras on police vehicles as well. Not only will technology shine a light on the darkness of these police encounters, it will be significant in advancing community trust that accountability does in fact apply.

Equally important, especially in the wake of what has taken place after the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, is reform to our grand jury system. Grand juries were established in England in the 12th and 13th centuries, a vestige of a time when people needed to be protected from unfair prosecution from the king and others. There was a necessary element of secrecy — one that need not apply in cases involving police misconduct.

Open, preliminary hearings in court can and should determine if a case should be stepped up to a trial. Additionally, the handling of police shootings should be wholly separated from local grand juries. These bodies cannot handle cases involving local police officers on whom they rely every day.

Special grand juries should be convened for police-related incidents, and independent agencies must gather evidence even before they convene, at the time of police encounters where a death has occurred; the evidence gathered at that moment is the evidence that will shape whether there is an indictment, as well as whether there will be a fair trial based on the facts.

All of these ideas need to be moved forward under the leadership of our president, our governors, the mayors of our major cities and our law enforcement leadership. If we fail to take advantage of this moment that history has laid on our doorstep, we are doomed to more abuse, more division and more chaos.

When my son was 15, he was stopped by the police in a movie theater for no apparent reason. He showed his ID and explained that his father was a retired police captain and a state senator. The response was “So what?” It doesn’t and shouldn’t matter who he is. He shouldn’t have had that experience at all. And until that changes, for all men of color, real reform will never come.

* Eric L. Adams is the Brooklyn borough president, a retired New York Police Department captain and the co-founder of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/05/opinion/we-must-stop-police-abuse-of-black-men.html?emc=edit_th_20141205&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=65886944

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Derek Jeter’s Farewell Walk-Off – Orioles @ Yankees – 9/25/14

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http://youtu.be/zYFNXHQaCBA

Derek Jeter – Made in NY (Gatorade)

http://youtu.be/xfgS1lvqX8I

Derek Jeter – RE2PECT (Nike)

http://youtu.be/X03_bNuihLU

^^^

Night’s Hero: Who Else?

Derek Jeter, in Fitting Farewell to Yankee Stadium, Drives In Winning Run

By DAVID WALDSTEIN

SEPT. 25, 2014

One Last Celebration

He almost started crying as he drove himself to Yankee Stadium in the afternoon. He had to turn away from his teammates before the game when they presented him with gifts, so overcome was he by the emotion. In the first inning, he said, he barely knew what was happening, and later, in the top of the ninth, his eyes welled with tears to the point that he worried that he might break down in front of the crowd of 48,613.

But when the time came for Derek Jeter to get a game-winning hit, to add another signature moment to a long list of achievements over his 20-year career, he knew exactly what to do, and seemingly no one doubted that he would.

“Everyone in the dugout and the Stadium knew it was going to happen,” said David Robertson, whose blown save paved the way for one of the most dramatic endings to a game at the new Stadium.

With one out in the bottom of the ninth, Jeter stroked the winning hit and ended his Yankee Stadium career the way he had ended so many games — with both arms raised in celebration. The 6-5 win over the Baltimore Orioles was his 1,627th regular-season victory as a Yankee.

The 3,463rd hit of Jeter’s career sizzled into right field, and Antoan Richardson slid home with the winning run, and the normally stoic Jeter said the ending was almost too much even for him to believe.

“An out-of-body experience is the best way to put it,” said Jeter, who was uncharacteristically expressive after the game.

It was a night when everything seemed to happen specifically to allow Jeter to be Jeter in front of his home fans for the last time. The rain stopped, the Orioles pushed the game to the bottom of the ninth by hitting two home runs, a Yankees runner got to second base, and Jeter came to the plate again with his name ringing in his ears. He then did exactly the kind of thing that had made him so adored by his fans.

Jeter was so overcome with emotion both during and after the game that he shed his usual cautious approach with reporters.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” he said. “Write what you want and put my name at the bottom of it.”

For the record, Jeter went 2 for 5 with a double, three runs batted in and a run scored.

What may have been the best blown save in Yankees history provided him the platform to be a hero once again.

The Yankees were leading, 5-2, heading into the ninth inning, but Adam Jones hit a two-run homer off Robertson, and Steve Pearce hit a bases-empty shot to tie the score. Jeter was at shortstop at the time, and he slumped his head momentarily. But on the bench, his teammates looked at the scoreboard and saw who was batting third in the bottom of the inning.

Soon, they were jumping all over Jeter on the infield as if they had won a big playoff game.

“I went from all-time low to all-time high,” Robertson said.

After the game, Jeter was greeted on the field by his former teammates Mariano Rivera, Andy Pettitte, Jorge Posada and Bernie Williams, as well as his longtime manager Joe Torre, and he hugged them all.

When the congratulations were over, and with the Orioles standing in their dugout watching, Jeter walked out to shortstop for a solitary moment of reflection.

“I wanted to take one last view from short,” he said.

When the team goes to Boston for its season-ending series, he said, he will play in one or two games, but only as the designated hitter.

 “I’ve played shortstop my entire career,” he said, “and the last time I wanted to play was tonight.”

Throughout the game the fans chanted his name, including when he hit a run-scoring double off the left-field wall in the first inning. The salutes only grew louder as the game progressed. As the fans stood and cheered in the ninth, mixing in chants of “Thank you, Derek,” Jeter appeared to grow misty-eyed while standing at shortstop, something he had never done.

Hours earlier, there was concern that rain might wreak havoc on the game, but by game time the rain had ended, and a lively sellout crowd — many fans had planned for months to attend Jeter’s final home game — was as much a part of the evening as Jeter himself.

The list of attendees included Mets pitcher Matt Harvey and the Miami Marlins’ owner, Jeffrey Loria. There were tributes and ovations and moments when it seemed as if the Yankees had actually made it to October.

But the game was the first Jeter had played at Yankee Stadium when his team had been eliminated from the postseason. Still, with the large crowd and cool weather, it was reminiscent of the 158 postseason games Jeter had played in.

It was the loudest and most energetic crowd of the season. Without the element of a playoff race, the focus of the game was squarely on Jeter, which he said made him uncomfortable.

But the fans came to celebrate his five World Series titles, his impressive hit total — 3,463, sixth most on baseball’s career list — his 14 All-Star selections and his 2,745 games, all as a Yankee. From the moment Jeter first stepped into the box at the old Yankee Stadium on June 2, 1995, until Thursday night, his 1,391st home game, he has been the darling of Yankees fans.

“You almost feel as if you’re watching your own funeral,” he said. “People are telling you great things, and they’re showing highlights and reflecting. I understand that my baseball career is over with. But people are giving you well wishes like you’re about to die. I’ve appreciated it all, but internally it feels like part of you is dying, and I guess that’s true because the baseball side, it’s over with.”

The game began with consecutive home runs off Hiroki Kuroda, the Yankees’ starter, by the Orioles’ Nick Markakis and Alejandro De Aza. Some of the air left the Stadium, but the crowd’s energy returned in force in the bottom of the inning after Brett Gardner hit a leadoff single.

With the crowd buzzing in anticipation, Jeter stood in the batter’s box and took four pitches from Kevin Gausman, the Orioles’ starter, before ripping a 95-mile-per-hour fastball deep toward left field.

The fans unleashed a collective gasp as they followed the path of the ball, hoping it would clear the fence for another signature Jeter moment. It did not go out, but it hit the wall on the fly, barely two feet from a home run, and Jeter trotted into second base and clapped his hands as Gardner scored ahead of him.

Jeter scampered to third base on a wild pitch and scored on a ground ball to the right side by Brian McCann, making it a 2-2 game.

Jeter arrived at the Stadium in the afternoon after battling what he called a little bit of traffic, which multiplied when he got to his locker, where he was immediately surrounded by perhaps three dozen reporters. Jeter deflected most of their questions, saying he could not anticipate how he would feel until it was all over.

Although Jeter has always been stoic, Manager Joe Girardi said it would be difficult for him to restrain his emotions.

“It will be difficult for me,” Girardi said. “I got a little choked up yesterday after his last at-bat and the way the fans reacted. You start thinking that you’ve been around someone for so long, and he’s not going to be there.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/26/sports/baseball/derek-jeters-finale-yankee-stadium.html?emc=edit_th_20140926&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=65886944&_r=0

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Surviving an ISIS Massacre

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Escaping Death in Northern Iraq

[Warning: Video Includes Graphic Images]

http://nyti.ms/1qzfNCW

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Be Kind. Always.

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Corporations Find Religion and SCOTUS Agrees

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A corporation having religious beliefs. Who knew? The Court's decision created a slippery slope as seen by this attempt to discriminate against gays due to a corporation's "religious beliefs". We all know that corporations run America and they've been given way too many rights by our current Court formerly reserved for people. So far it's been freedom of speech in Citizens United and now religion in the Hobby Lobby case. We've barely begun to see the repercussions of awarding rights to corporations – the same corporations that own Congress. 

Limiting Rights: Imposing Religion on Workers

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

JUNE 30, 2014

The Supreme Court’s deeply dismaying decision on Monday in the Hobby Lobby case swept aside accepted principles of corporate law and religious liberty to grant owners of closely held, for-profit companies an unprecedented right to impose their religious views on employees.

It was the first time the court has allowed commercial business owners to deny employees a federal benefit to which they are entitled by law based on the owners’ religious beliefs, and it was a radical departure from the court’s history of resisting claims for religious exemptions from neutral laws of general applicability when the exemptions would hurt other people.

The full implications of the decision, which ruled in favor of employers who do not want to include contraceptive care in their company health plans, as required by the Affordable Care Act, will not be known for some time. But the immediate effect, as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted in a powerful dissent, was to deny many thousands of women contraceptive coverage vital to their well-being and reproductive freedom. It also invites, she said, other “for-profit entities to seek religion-based exemptions from regulations they deem offensive to their faiths.”

The case involved challenges by two companies, Hobby Lobby, a chain of arts and crafts stores, and Conestoga Wood Specialties, a cabinet maker, to the perfectly reasonable requirement that employer health plans cover (without a co-payment) all birth control methods and services approved by the Food and Drug Administration. The main battleground was the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, which says government may not “substantially burden a person’s free exercise of religion” unless the burden is necessary to further a “compelling government interest” and achieves it by “the least restrictive means.”

As a threshold matter, Justice Samuel Alito Jr., read the act’s religious protections to apply to “the humans who own and control” closely held companies, an interpretation contradicted by the statute’s history, context, and wording. He then found that the contraceptive coverage rules put a “substantial burden” on the religious owners, who objected to some of the items on the F.D.A.’s list based on the incorrect claim they induce abortions.

It’s hard to see that burden. Nothing in the contraceptive coverage rule prevented the companies’ owners from worshiping as they choose or advocating against coverage and use of the contraceptives they don’t like.

Nothing compels women to use their insurance on contraceptives. A woman’s choice to use or not to use them is a personal one that does not implicate her employer. Such decisions “will be the woman’s autonomous choice, informed by the physician she consults,” as Justice Ginsburg noted. There also is no requirement that employers offer employee health plans. They could instead pay a tax likely to be less than the cost of providing insurance to help cover government subsidies available to those using an insurance exchange. That did not convince Justice Alito and his colleagues on the court’s right flank, who bought the plaintiffs’ claim that providing health coverage to employees was part of their religious mission.

The majority’s finding that the government’s contraception coverage rules were not the “least restrictive” way to carry out the broad and complex health reform was also unpersuasive.

Mr. Alito’s ruling and a concurrence by Justice Anthony Kennedy portray the decision as a narrow one without broader application, like denying vaccine coverage or job discrimination. But that is not reassuring coming from justices who missed the point that denying women access to full health benefits is discrimination.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/01/opinion/the-supreme-court-imposing-religion-on-workers.html?emc=edit_th_20140701&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=65886944

See also:

What the Hobby Lobby Ruling Means for America

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/27/magazine/what-the-hobby-lobby-ruling-means-for-america.html

 

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