It’s a simple question: if Ray Rice knocked his fiancee unconscious… what more is there to know? The fate of Roger Goodell seems to hang on the old cliche of what he knew and when he knew it and this twists upon the separate videos taken before and behind closed doors. Did Goodell see the elevator video?
Does that matter if he, and all of us, knew that she was unconscious? What’s so special about the elevator video if the victim in question is clearly unconscious? Does having seen the interior video allay some notion that Rice, perhaps, knocked her out gently? That he was a gentleman about rendering her unconscious?
Recently, Charlie Baker stepped in it, pleading for more data. Why, Charlie, is the fact of unconsciousness not data enough?
Apparently, even in our enlightened post-sexist utopian paradise of equality and fairness ™ the unconscious woman is not testimony enough. More data is needed. Why? Because the data provided, however compelling and shocking in another context, is gendered.
If I ever find myself in an elevator with either Charlie Baker or Ray Rice I’m going to be tempted to knock them out. Cold. I bet they throw the book at me, if I do, video or no.
kbusch says
SomervilleTom says
If someone knocked out Mr. Rice or Mr. Goodell in an elevator, I’ll wager 10-1 that the perpetrator would be removed from the building in handcuffs, would be immediately charged with criminal offenses, and would face lengthy incarceration.
The double standard of our culture is appalling, and no amount of handwaving or rationalization can make that go away.
farnkoff says
I don’t think very many defendants get “lengthy incarceration” for a first offense a & b. Otherwise I agree with the gist of the comment.
John Tehan says
…but you would certainly have a lengthy incarceration staring you in the face:
https://malegislature.gov/Laws/GeneralLaws/PartIV/TitleI/Chapter265/Section13a
Would a first offender be sentenced to the max penalty? Probably not – but he would certainly “face” it.
whoaitsjoe says
to further penalize you, fire you, or something? would we go after your employer if he or she did not? If we fired every boss who didn’t incur his wrath on employees who got caught in a domestic violence incident, we’d be living in a boss-free utopia.
So, a double-standard within a double-standard. Ray Rice gets special treatment for who he is, and we apply a difference standard of behavior to Roger Goodell than we would the manager of a used car dealership.
merrimackguy says
by Democratic judges and prosecutors? Were they stupid, corrupt, or both? It’s a simple question.
Peter Porcupine says
Like movie stars, rock and roll musicians, and members of Congress, Red Sox players are exempt from being held responsible for domestic violence.
Football is an evil game, so their players must be held to a different standard.
merrimackguy says
far more than a comment by Baker tangentially connected to what his responsibilities would be as governor.
sabutai says
That anyone would use murder primarily as a means to attack the Democratic Party.
Just kidding. Not surprised at all to see this.
merrimackguy says
but just putting the Charlie Baker question into context.
I realize everyone just wants to post “Baker is an A-hole” but they have to think up creative verbiage to express that.
kirth says
Unless you know something I don’t, former baseball player and current Red Sox TV color man Jerry Remy was not “punching women for years.” That was his son Jared, who was not a baseball player, and was only briefly a low-level Red Sox employee. What Jared did had nothing to do with baseball.
It is inexcusable that the son of a celebrity was repeatedly relieved of responsibility for his reprehensible acts.
merrimackguy says
and of course all about celebrity.
kbusch says
Women who press charges face a risk. So the pattern of pressing charges and then not pressing charges gets repeated often. Abused women also frequently hope that things can work out because they’d be so much better if they did. Abused women are often financially tied to their abusers and having the guy imprisoned wrecks another kind of havoc.
One might add to this that prosecutors are perhaps motivated to take on cases they can settle and cases they can win — the former because it’s less resource intensive and the latter likely because that’s how they’re measured. Domestic violence cases with he said/she said and with potentially uncooperative witnesses likely get ignored too easily.
And just as certainly, the Jared Remys of the world get away with stuff in red states as they do in blue ones.
Christopher says
…where these things can be prosecuted without the testimony of the victim. That’s tough to be sure, but there’s a reason that as criminal offenses these cases are officially “State vs. Defendant” rather than “Victim vs. Defendant” as civil cases would be. It needs to be up to the DA to press charges.
petr says
… apparently a real li… err… actual… dead body does, indeed count, as data. Thank you for bolstering my point… One does wonder if Ray Rice had dragged a corpse out of that elevator, would we still need to see the video?
SomervilleTom says
If the GOP had dominated the government, then Mr. Remy would have been given numerous second chances by Republican judges and prosecutors. It’s been my experience that stupidity and corruption are bipartisan vices.
Mr. Remy was given one pass after another because too many judges and prosecutors value celebrity and the connections of celebrity more than they value women.
Massachusetts has just one daily newspaper that even aspires to be a national-quality paper of record. That newspaper is owned by the same person who owns the Boston Red Sox. That should tell you something about the culture that produces the stupidity and corruption that we each abhor.
merrimackguy says
While my point about Democrats is 100% fact. You’d have to concoct a multi-decade hypothetical to put the Republicans in the same category as our Democratic state and county (a few sheriffs excepted) law enforcement hierarchy. Can you even name the last time a Republican was a District Attorney?
jconway says
Where Atlantic City, it’s county, and all it’s elected law enforcement officials are Republicans. They seemed about as awed by his celebrity as any of the people who gave Remy a pass.
merrimackguy says
The prosecutor is a Christie appointee. It seems that they had trouble pressing the case without the finance testifying, but of course they could have tried harder.
SomervilleTom says
It is true that since the government is nearly 100% Democrat, then corrupt government officials are nearly all Democrats. It was also true that during the time that the GOP held substantial majorities in Congress (during the Reagan years), most of the corrupt representatives and senators were Republican.
The insinuation you offer is that these “judges and prosecutors” were corrupt because they were Democrats.
Let me try an insinuation. How about this: The Massachusetts GOP has not had significant representation in the Massachusetts legislature for decades. Is that because it is stupid, incompetent, or both?
Both insinuations are equally absurd.
jconway says
To him Democrats=corrupt and Republicans=taxpayer watchdogs. To far to many of us here, its the reverse. In reality, there is pervasive levels of corruption, of the legal post-Citizens United variety and the illegal Last Hurrah variety-in both parties . The same people bashing Marian Ryan for Remy are hoping to inoculate Baker from his tone deaf defense of Goodell, the same people bashing Baker for pay to play with Christie write ‘free poor Sal posts’ once every few months when the question comes up. How about we just back honest,clean, good government and candidates who actually live up to their promises on achieving it? This team blue vs team red stuff gets awfully tiring as a substitute for honest analysis, particularly when there are plenty of politicos with their hands in the wrong pockets or the wrong skirts all across this country.
jconway says
Lately, centrism and bipartisanship are usually the leading cause of bad, Wall Street driven corrupt bargains, from repealing Glass-Steagall and passing NAFTA with Democratic majorities under Clinton to the Medicare Part D Big Pharma Welfare package passed under Bush to TARP under Bush and Obama. When ‘our’ side has Larry Summers and ‘their’ side has Hank Paulson it’s really not a contest, but a race to the bottom of the moral barrel.
merrimackguy says
This:
has anything to do with the Remy case
and this:
Let me try an insinuation. How about this: The Massachusetts GOP has not had significant representation in the Massachusetts legislature for decades. Is that because it is stupid, incompetent, or both?
has nothing to do with anything.
You basically are negating the effect of party because it you feel that bad behavior is situational (it that a word? Chrome doesn’t think so) and party doesn’t matter. I would contend (and I’m working on a longer post of this) that MA is rife with cronyism and as such all branches of government here have ceased functioning as one (an objective resident) might expect. This cronyism has developed over time because of the lack of competition between the parties, and it’s not just the parties. Those that want to get something just have to throw in with one gang, and those that need have a broader field to gather from.
merrimackguy says
should be block quote.
jconway says
His point is not that the Democrats are ideologically committed to corruption, but that cronyism and corruption are inevitable results of one-party rule in any state. From Rick Perry to Blago to Bob McDonnell and to Sal DiMasi, we have seen a bipartisan parade of cheats and charlatans investigated and sent to the big house for various crimes against the people. You seem now to be agreeing with this point, er go, if MA was ruled by the Republican party without much competition from the Democrats we would be seeing much the same thing (as we are in Kansas, Texas, Alaska, North Carolina, Bob McDonnell’s Virginia, and a host of places).
merrimackguy says
in most of the states where cronyism can get you the furthest, they are all blue. TX and FL have very little to give versus IL, NY. MA and of course CA. I’m not talking about run of the mill “I took some $$ from someone and got caught” corruption. I’m saying day in and day out a system exists here where cronyism is evident. AG doesn’t investigate. DA’s don’t investigate. State Auditors and Inspector Generals don’t investigate. Investigations when they do get going (because of outside pressure) stop short. No committee investigations. No hearings. Elected officials unable to supervise employees because of political ties (or worse, review boards). Judges appointed based on politics. Even parole boards don’t function properly. Everyone proceeds along without any fear of oversight or scrutiny. That’s the system that allowed Remy to continue his long long trail of domestic violence.
SomervilleTom says
All these are symptoms of one-party domination. In Massachusetts, that party is the Democratic Party.
During most of the Big Dig construction, while oversight of the Big Dig was the responsibility of the governor, the corner office was held by the GOP. Virtually ALL of the Big Dig corruption involved Republican officials. It was certainly corrupt. I argue that the claim that being Republican somehow made those officials corrupt is nonsense.
I agree with everything you say about the pervasive culture of corruption in this state. I even agree that it is a direct result of one-party dominance.
The difference between us is your apparent claim that only Democrats are susceptible to this corruption. That strikes me as simply absurd.
merrimackguy says
Conceived and planned during the Dukakis administration. You’ll have to do better than that.
SomervilleTom says
The Big Dig corruption didn’t begin until the project moved from the conception and planning phases into the execution phase.
Do I really have to cite the lengthy list of names, deals, and public documentation? Do you really want to remind readers (during an election campaign) of just how slimy William Weld really was? Do you really want to read, again, the VERY long list of backroom deals made between Mr. Weld and various big-money Big Dig players while Mr. Weld was hoping to benefit from assisting CA governor Pete Wilson’s presidential bid?
Do you really BELIEVE that Republicans are inherently pure and Democrats inherently corrupt? This exchange is getting bizarre.
whoaitsjoe says
God, it’s like watching a frog and a salamander argue.
sue-kennedy says
Remember Virginia Buckingham, the Massport Director on 9/11?
And she wasn’t the only one at Massport:
And then there were the government loans to campaign contributors:
I could keep going all day or we could accept individuals in both parties have contributed to a system that favors wealthy donors and lobbyists at the expense of the rest of us. The rise of the Tea Party and Occupy show both the left and right have the frustration of being sold out for special interests. The problem is money in politics.
jconway says
You put it together far more concisely than I did. I just had a lengthly back and forth with a conservative friend over this. He actually liked OWS for exposing Wall Street indignities before Democratic mayors sent their police departments to shut them down, and I told him I liked the pre-Koch co-opted Tea Party that protested TARP and crony capitalism. Getting money out of politics has to be our first priority. He actually agrees! If we can get that movement together, we can do a lot of good. Stopping casinos together is a great first step.
ykozlov says
Casinos are just another symptom. Stopping them is just another step in a losing game of whack-a-mole. Something like the Government By the People Act, at least at a state level, is a good first step. Something like the American Anti-Corruption Act is a greater one. And then constitutional changes.
merrimackguy says
Level the playing field.
Peter Porcupine says
Barnstable County has never had a DEMOCRAT as a District Attorney. All have been Repubicans
petr says
… the un-fab four.
As much as this conversation has devolved into an attempted hijacking (thanks merrimackguy… you’re a real pistol!) twisting on the pivot in the political spectrum there is one commonality and that brings us back to the beginning: the need to see ‘more data.’ Ray Rice almost got away with knocking a woman unconscious because there was, apparently, the wiggle room of “not enough data”. The presence of the elevator video removed that wiggle room. The simple fact of unconscious, hospital-bound, woman wasn’t enough data. Jared Remy, it was pointed out, punched a lot of women but his predations weren’t taken all that seriously until he produced data in the form of a dead women. It doesn’t matter Republican or Democrat there’s sexism and blindness aplenty to go around. That’s why it’s the so big and so everpresent problem that it is: everybody, indeed, is part of it, in it, of it…
Roger Goodell should resign, not because of the particular things he’s done wrong or poorly, but because he’s so deep in it he can’t, under any circumstances, see properly. There’s no more data that he needs to see. The wave of data would only wash away, rounds out and smooth over edges like the sea takes glass shards and makes them blunt and harmless baubles… taking away their danger.
This is Charlie Baker’s sin, and it’s a grievous sin, the smoothing over of the sharp edges, the parts of the truth that hurt and cause injury. He does it with data because a health care executive who has ‘data’ doesn’t have to think of the shards of glass as dangerous and so, the people hit with it, who have to walk through it, or fend it off alone, aren’t therefore people to him: just data. And what does he do when hit with a data point so ferocious and inescapable, like an unconscious woman being dragged out of an elevator by her victimizer… that it’s raw indictment of those (Goodell) who’ve done too little? He asks for more data. The edges are too rough. The jagged shards not having been blunted by ‘the data’ he asks for more that the job get done: smoothed over, rounded out… harmless.
merrimackguy says
You’re using a random event that occurred in another state to make your point. You’re preaching to the echo chamber as I am the only BMG poster voting for Baker. What you fail to realize is that your side is worse than any speculative alternative. You can piss on phantom Repbulicans all you want, but it’s your crew that allows domestic violence, up to and including murder to be part of our culture right here in MA. maybe Coakley would be a better choice because it’s documented that she is okay with innocent people being put in jail, so that should resolve any questions. I doubt it though because she is 100% about politics and I don’t trust her to do what’s right, just what she finds politically expedient.
petr says
… and secondly I use the event, and Charlie Bakers egregiously stupid remarks upon the event, precisely because it illustrates the point so squarely and neatly. Would that it were ‘random’ — even if only to let you off the hook — but it is not so…
Actually, I’m pissing on one, quite real, and — at the moment — rather prominent, Republican: Charles Baker. He said something both phenomenally stupid and particularly a demonstration of the problem: some men don’t care what happens to women until they are satisfied that the data — and not the testimony or the condition of the women — either tells them to care or smooths away the rough edges of it… The fact of unconscious female is only a lesser data point than the fact of the interior elevator video if you think the testimony, or condition, of the femaie is irrelevant. Frankly, that’ s just one step away (and not a big step at that) from thinking it shouldn’t be a crime to hit a women. It is this attitude that allowed both Ray Rice and Jared Remy to almost get away with it. It is this attitude that lets Roger Goodell think he’s doing the right thing by resting his decision upon the fact of not having seen the elevator video…. And it is this attitude that makes Charles Baker think he is worthy of our attention, much less our vote, when in fact he’s just another male born on third thinking he hit a triple…
You mistake me when you insinuate that I don’t like Charlie Baker simply because I’m a Democrat and he’s a Republican. That’s an amoral position you’re accusing me of holding based upon perceived power dynamics and some form of inchoate tribalism: a knee jerk us-versus-them animosity that’s baked into our antagonisms. I suspect you accuse me of it to make your own adoption of such simpleminded antagonism all that much more palatable to your ethical sense, whatever that might be. But whatever your pathology, It’s not true that I’m a Democrat because I don’t like Republicans: Republicans have earned my enmity all on their own and without regard to the political spectrum. Ronald Reagan saw to that…
merrimackguy says
“Charlie Baker is a dodo face” hehehe
“No, he a poo-poo head” giggle.
“What’s up with him being so tall? That’s weird” chuckle.
Just the fact that you lump all Republicans together shows how small minded you are.
You can throw around your fancy words and cherry pick your examples, but if there’s any question about character between the two main candidates, that question is about Martha Coakley, not Charlie Baker.
jconway says
You have been lumping all Democrats together as well. I’ve repeatedly said it is wrong for us to lump Baker in with Michelle Bachman, precisely because it’s factually wrong, its a scare tactic, and it won’t work on our electorate. Similarly, there is a significant strata between a Sal DiMasi or a Jon Hecht and an even wider difference between a Jamie Eldridge and a Timilty. Everyone who pays attention knows this.
And don’t be surprised if Baker wins and suddenly you find himself singing old Irish tunes at the breakfast with DiMasi like Weld and Bulger used to do.
fenway49 says
If they’re letting DiMasi out!
jconway says
Though DeLeo is just one indictment away…
SomervilleTom says
🙂
merrimackguy says
that if you’re looking to point fingers, there’s a more accurate direction. I typically don’t do that.
merrimackguy says
You’re using a random event that occurred in another state to make your point. You’re preaching to the echo chamber as I am the only BMG poster voting for Baker. What you fail to realize is that your side is worse than any speculative alternative. You can piss on phantom Repbulicans all you want, but it’s your crew that allows domestic violence, up to and including murder to be part of our culture right here in MA. maybe Coakley would be a better choice because it’s documented that she is okay with innocent people being put in jail, so that should resolve any questions. I doubt it though because she is 100% about politics and I don’t trust her to do what’s right, just what she finds politically expedient.
SomervilleTom says
In 2005, a 23-month old child was raped with a hot curling iron. Then-District Attorney Martha Coakley was faced with a choice between protecting a Somerville police officer and punishing the perpetrator. She chose the former. Even after a grand jury returned indictments against Mr. Winfield, Ms. Coakley freed Mr. Winfield on personal recognizance with no cash bail. It was her successor who successfully prosecuted Keith Winfield, and convicted him on all four criminal charges brought by the grand jury.
It’s easy to be for “protecting children” or “protecting women” when nothing is at stake. It’s much harder — and demands genuine courage — to do the right thing when it means potentially damaging personal alliances or career prospects.
The sad truth is that neither major party gubernatorial nominee has demonstrated such courage.
JimC says
I didn’t know this.
I skimmed the link, and it’s just awful. TOO awful really — I can’t believe she was motivated just by politics. Politics would dictate the opposite response. I have to believe she acted in good faith. I’d like to hear her side of this.
SomervilleTom says
The sad truth is that whatever motivated her (and pretty much all the players, in fact), it was clearly NOT the evidence.
Indictments were brought only because the family of the victim aggressively pursued them. The apathy from Ms. Coakley was so intense that it provoked an attorney from the victim’s family to run against her. It was ONLY after that attorney joined the race that Ms. Coakley responded, and it was her successor (Gerry Leone) who actually got the convictions.
The evidence in this case was open and shut. My interpretation of the politics of the case was and is that Ms. Coakley values her reputation as a “cop-friendly” prosecutor more than her dedication to truth, justice, and even the welfare of children.
This is an example of what motivates my opposition to her candidacy — her value system has been apparent going all the way back to her involvement with Fells Acres.
JimC says
I know you believe what you believe, but for me, it doesn’t compute. There has to be another reason that she waited. “Cop-friendly” doesn’t adequately explain it because the crime is just too awful; I imagine the cops themselves would have acted quickly. Again, I’d like to hear her explanation.
SomervilleTom says
My interest in her motivation is academic.
The facts remain that a grand jury, prodded by the victim (after Ms. Coakley chose not to pursue an indictment), returned four verdicts. Ms. Coakley herself belatedly pursued the case after it became a political issue. Her successor, Mr. Leone, prosecuted and convicted Mr. Winfield.
In my view, the only thing that doesn’t “add up” is the popularity of Ms. Coakley, the candidate, after her behavior in cases like this. Except that the popularity of Ms. Coakley the candidate appears limited to a plurality of Democratic Primary voters after a sleepy campaign. She was not particularly popular in her 2010 campaign against Scott Brown, and it is not at all clear what the electorate will say this November.
Of course, Mr. Baker seems to be making his own valiant effort to repel any voter who believes that men who beat women unconscious belong, immediately, behind bars.
centralmassdad says
As Yoda said, “No, there is another.”
petr says
…A master, and an apprentice.