Guard the Trust

Minnesota teen Mike Stone can’t bring Megan Piper, or any other porn star, to prom, the school district said. Mike Stone won’t be able to attend his high school prom with Megan Piperor any other porn star, according to the North St. Paul-Maplewood-Oakdale School District in Minnesota.

Stone was called to the principal’s office at Tartan Senior High School this week and told it was inappropriate to bring an adult film star to a high school dance, the Daily Dot reports.

However, the 18-year-old student escaped disciplinary action and was not in any trouble with the school, Jennifer McNeil, a representative for the school district, told The Huffington Post.

After sending nearly 600 Tweets, Stone had recently received responses from at least two porn stars who said they were willing to attend his prom as long as he provided money for airfare.

In a statement issued to parents and obtained by HuffPost, the North St. Paul-Maplewood-Oakdale School District cited regulations to defend their decision to ban an adult film star from attending the event.

In short, the rules state that the district has the right to deny any person admission to a school-sponsored event if “the visit is not in the best interest of students, employees or the school district,” or if it “substantially disrupts the orderly operation of school or school activities,” McNeil said.

This will be the second time Piper misses out on attending a high school prom; she moved from Georgia to Kansas during her senior year of high school and couldn’t attend her own.

And although the 19-year-old porn star was disappointed about the decision, she acknowledged the school was acting in the best interests of the students.

“I’m not thrilled; I kind of wanted to go, but I understand,” Piper said in a telephone interview.

But Piper also said she was looking forward to meeting Stone’s parents, receiving a corsage, posing for pictures with his friends and doing “all the normal things kids would be doing for prom.”

According to the Daily Dot, Stone’s principal did bring the teen’s actions to the attention of his parents, who were “embarrassed” by the situation.

Piper said she wasn’t surprised by their reaction.

“I don’t know what I would think if I were them,” she said.

Despite rumors, the Tartan High School prom has not been canceled, McNeil confirmed. The dance will take place May 12 at the Landmark Center in St. Paul.

The following is an excerpt from the Bruce Springsteen cover story in the March 29th, 2012 issue of Rolling Stone, on news stands now.

Springsteen arrives at The Daily Show’s Manhattan studios on foot one icy day in late January, fresh from Jersey – he fought the wind for the dozen blocks from the Lincoln Tunnel along 11th Avenue, wearing only a thin leather jacket. “There was traffic,” says Springsteen, “so Patti dropped me off.” (“The Freehold is strong in that one,” Stewart says, picturing this journey.) Back from taping that night’s Daily Show, Stewart joins Springsteen in his cluttered office – where there’s already a photo of the two men together pinned to the wall – after exchanging his suit and tie for khakis and a long-sleeved T-shirt.

In recent years, Stewart has seen his decades-long Springsteen fandom turn into a friendship. “It’s in no way surreal,” Stewart says with heavy sarcasm. “It’s the most natural thing in the world. It’s very hard to reconcile sitting and fishing in a little pond in New Jersey with a guy you spent many years hitchhiking the I-95 corridor to see in Philadelphia back in the day. The only band I think I’ve seen more than Bruce Springsteen is the Springsteen tribute band Backstreets. I try not to let him know how pathetic I truly am.”

Bruce Springsteen Explains His Experimental New Album

Stewart grew up in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, 30 miles northwest of Springsteen’s Monmouth County hometown. “Every car he sang about you were like, ‘I’ve seen that up on blocks in the backyard right near where I live.’” He saw his first Springsteen show on 1978’s Darkness on the Edge of Town tour, when he was about 15. “The first time you hear Darkness, you begin to plan how to move out of New Jersey,” says Stewart. (Like Springsteen, Stewart eventually returned, and has a home in the Garden State: “You realize, hey, New Jersey’s all right, actually!”)

On Springsteen’s new album, Wrecking Ball, his characters aren’t looking for escape – they just want a job. With fiercely populist tunes like “Death to My Hometown” and “Jack of All Trades,” Springsteen paints a picture of an America where “the banker man grows fat/Working man grows thin.” Springsteen wanted the new songs to address “what happened to the social fabric of the world that we’re living in.”

“Hope and Dreams” and other songs on the album’s second half seem to move from the personal and political to a sense of the spiritual.
Well, on the first half of the record, you’re just pissed off. The first cut, “We Take Care of Our Own,” is where I set out the questions that I’m going to try to answer. The song’s chorus is posed as a challenge and a question. Do we take care of our own? What happened to that social contract? Where did that go over the past 30 years? How has it been eroded so terribly? And how is it that the outrage about that erosion is just beginning to be voiced right now? I’ve written about this stuff for those 30 years, from Darkness on the Edge of Town to The Ghost of Tom Joad through to today. It all came out of the Carter recession of the late Seventies, and when I was writing about that, my brother-in-law lost his construction job and went to work as a janitor in the local high school. It changed his life.

So these are issues and things that occur over and over again in history and land on the backs of the same people. In my music – if it has a purpose beyond dancing and fun and vacuuming your floor to it – I always try to gauge the distance between American reality and the American dream. The mantra that I go into in the last verse of “We Take Care of Our Own” – “Where are the eyes, where are the hearts?” – it’s really: “Where are those things now, what happened to those things over the past 30 years? What happened to the social fabric of the world that we’re living in? What’s the price that people pay for it on a daily basis?” Which is something that I lived with intensely as a child, and is probably the prime motivation for the subjects I’ve written about since I was very, very young.

Someone wrote in The New York Times that “We Take Care of Our Own” was “jingoistic.”
Whoever said that, they need a smarter pop writer.

Review: Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Wrecking Ball’

[Laughs] It takes you back to the days of “Born in the U.S.A.,” which was so widely misunderstood.
Yeah. I didn’t feel that so much from this particular instance, but you write the best piece of music you can, and you put it out there, and then you see what comes back at you. Lately, it seems as if the polarization of the country has gotten so extreme that people want to force you into being either a phony “patriot” or an “apologist.” Nuanced political dialogue or creative expression seems like it’s been hamstrung by the decay of political speech and it’s infantilized our national discourse. I can’t go for that and I won’t write that way.

To read the rest of this cover story, pick up the March 29th, 2012 issue of Rolling Stone, available on stands and in Rolling Stone All Access.

If the nineties were the decade of Prozac, all hollow-eyed and depressed, then this is the era of Xanax, all jumpy and edgy and short of breath. In Prozac Nation, published in 1994, Elizabeth Wurtzel describes a New York that today seems as antique as the one rendered by Edith Wharton. In the book, she evokes a time when twenty­somethings lived in Soho lofts, dressed for parties in black chiffon frocks, and ended the night crying on the bathroom floor. Twenty years ago, just before Kurt Cobain blew off his head with a shotgun, it was cool for Kate Moss to haunt the city from the sides of buses with a visage like an empty store and for Wurtzel to confess in print that she entertained fantasies of winding up, like Plath or Sexton, a massive talent who died too soon, “young and sad, a corpse with her head in the oven.”

This is not to say that clinical depression is ever a fashion statement—it’s not. In the nineties, just as now, there were people who were genuinely, medically depressed, who felt hopeless and helpless and welcomed the relief that Prozac can provide. But beyond that, the look and feel of that era, its affect, was lank and dissolute. It makes sense in retrospect that Clerks, that cinematic ode to aimlessness, and Eddie Vedder (in his loser T-shirt) came along as the country started its two-decade climb toward unparalleled prosperity. In 1994, all the fever lines that describe economic vitality—gross domestic product, median household income, the Dow—pointed up. Just as teenage rebellion flourishes in environments of safety and plenty, depression as a cultural pose works only in tandem with a private confidence that the grown-ups in charge are reliably succeeding on everyone’s behalf.

Anxiety can also be a serious medical problem, of course. It sometimes precedes depression and often gets tangled up with it (which is why Prozac-type drugs are prescribed for anxiety too). But anxiety has a second life as a more general mind-set and cultural stance, one defined by an obsession with an uncertain future. Anxious people dwell on potential negative outcomes and assume (irrational and disproportionate) responsibility for fixing the disasters they imagine will occur. “What’s going to happen?” or, more accurately, “What’s going to happen to me?” is anxiety’s quiet whisper, its horror-show crescendo the thing Xanax was designed to suppress. Three and a half years of chronic economic wobbliness, the ever-pinging of the new-e-mail alert, the insistent voices of prophet-pundits who cry that nuclear, environmental, political, or terrorist-generated disaster is certain have together turned a depressed nation into a perennially anxious one. The editors at the New York Times are running a weekly column on anxiety in their opinion section with this inarguable rationale: “We worry.”

Xanax and its siblings—Valium, Ativan, Klonopin, and other members of the family of drugs called benzodiazepines—suppress the output of neurotransmitters that interpret fear. They differ from one another in potency and duration; those that enter your brain most quickly (Valium and Xanax) can make you the most high. But all quell the racing heart, spinning thoughts, prickly scalp, and hyperventilation associated with fear’s neurotic cousin, anxiety, and all do it more or less instantly. Prescriptions for benzodiazepines have risen 17 percent since 2006 to nearly 94 million a year; generic Xanax, called alprazolam, has increased 23 percent over the same period, making it the most prescribed psycho-pharmaceutical drug and the eleventh- most prescribed overall, with 46 million prescriptions written in 2010. In their generic forms, Xanax is prescribed more than the sleeping pill Ambien, more than the antidepressant Zoloft. Only drugs for chronic conditions like high blood pressure and high cholesterol do better.

“Benzos,” says Stephen Stahl, chairman of the Neuroscience Education Institute in Carlsbad, California, and a psychiatrist who consults to drug companies, “are the greatest things since Post Toasties. They work well. They’re very cheap. Their effectiveness on anxiety is profound.”

Benzos can also be extremely addictive, and their popularity can be gauged by their illegitimate uses as well. According to the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, rehab visits involving benzodiazepine use tripled between 1998 and 2008. Though benzos have come to signify the frantic ­overwhelmed-ness of the professional elites (they were discovered in the autopsies of both Michael Jackson and Heath Ledger), SAMHSA says the person likeliest to abuse the drugs is a white man between the ages of 18 and 34 who is addicted to another substance—alcohol, heroin, painkillers—and is unemployed. Last year, a 27-year-old man named Dominick Glowacki demanded that a Westchester CVS hand over all its Xanax while he held up the store with a BB gun. Jeffrey Chartier, the Bronx lawyer who represented Glowacki, says he’s seeing more and more cases of benzo abuse among young men who aren’t working. “Two pills and two beers make them as high as drinking the whole six-pack.”

In these anxious times, Xanax offers a lot. It dissolves your worries, whatever they are, like a special kiss from Mommy. “Often referred to as God’s gift,” reads the fifth definition of Xanax on Urban Dictionary. “You could come home with your house on fire and not even care,” reads another. “You don’t give a fuck about nothing.” So reliably relaxing are the effects of benzodiazepines that ­SAMHSA’s director of substance-abuse treatment, H. Westley Clark, says they’ve gained a reputation as “alcohol in a pill.” And their consumption can be equally informal. Just as friends pour wine for friends in times of crisis, so too do doctors, moved by the angst of their patients, “have sympathy and prescribe more,” says Clark. There are a lot more benzos circulating these days, and a lot more sharing.

Read the entire piece from the New York Magazine HERE.

From the New York Times, HERE.

Rick Santorum attended a revival-type church service on Sunday night in Louisiana, where the Rev. Dennis Terry, pastor of the Greenwell Springs Baptist Church, offered some fire and brimstone in a videotaped sermon that on Monday was going viral because of his fiery comments.

“I don’t care what the liberals say, I don’t care what the naysayers say, this nation was founded as a Christian nation,” Mr. Terry said.

“There’s only one God, and his name is Jesus,” he continued. “I’m tired of people telling me that I can’t say those words. I’m tired of people telling us as Christians that we can’t voice our beliefs or we can no longer pray in public. Listen to me. If you don’t love America, if you don’t like the way we do things I have one thing to say — get out!”

Thunderous applause interrupted him before he went on.

“We don’t worship Buddha! I said we don’t worship Buddha, we don’t worship Muhammad, we don’t worship Allah, we worship God, we worship God’s son Jesus Christ.”

He said that the church had to be the conscience of the nation and went on to rail against abortion and homosexuality. His goal, he said, is to “put God back in America,” in homes, schools and “in our state house.”

As the congregation gave Mr. Terry an enthusiastic standing ovation, Mr. Santorum also stood and applauded.

At the end of the service, Mr. Terry held his hand over Mr. Santorum and Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, and asked God to “have favor” on him, to “watch over him, bless him and keep him safe.”

He added: “For all those men that are running for office tonight, I pray you’ll speak to their hearts.” At this point, Mr. Santorum demonstrably nodded his head in agreement. Mr. Terry also asked, “I pray tonight for our president,” and Mr. Santorum nodded again.

Afterward, Mr. Santorum was pressed in Moline, Ill., on Monday, by reporters from Politico, The Associated Press and other news outlets whether he agreed with the full extent of Mr. Terry’s remarks. Mr. Santorum has spoken many times of his own belief that people of faith are being driven from the public square, but he has not called for those who “don’t love America” to “get out” of the country.

“If the question is, do I agree with his statement that America shouldn’t do that?” Mr. Santorum asked in response to the reporters’ questions. “No, if he was speaking for himself he’s obviously allowed to believe what he wants to believe but, obviously I believe in freedom of religion and all religions are welcome and should be. I think I’ve made that pretty clear throughout my campaign that I believe very much in freedom of religion, and folks should be able to worship whoever they want to worship and bring their thoughts in the public square.”

As a cancer survivor who is concerned about health care for all of us, Monday is a big day. On Monday the Supreme Court will take up the question of the constitutionality of the Obama health care reform act.  Read about what the law really means for you and me HERE, and read this opinion piece from the New York Times.  Stay smart, America.

THE Obama administration has made a curious strategic choice in its defense of the constitutionality of the health care reform act. The central issue before the Supreme Court, which will begin hearing oral arguments on Monday, is whether the act’s requirement that everyone buy health insurance — the so-called individual mandate — exceeds Congress’s constitutional power.

The act’s other provisions regulating health insurance — like the requirement that health insurance companies take all applicants, regardless of pre-existing illnesses, and the prohibition against charging sicker patients higher rates — have not been challenged. And yet the administration is arguing that the individual mandate is not “severable” from these regulations; if the mandate falls, they must as well, and health insurance companies would once again be free to choose whom to cover.

But if the court were to strike down the individual mandate, it should stop there: that would be quite bold enough. The Supreme Court has long affirmed a “presumption in favor of severability,” meaning that when it rules that a statutory provision is unconstitutional, the decision should affect as little of the law as possible. As Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said, while speaking for the court in 2010, making more extensive changes would constitute “editorial freedom” that “belongs to the legislature, not the judiciary.”

It is Congress, not the court, that has the constitutional power and responsibility to make difficult legislative policy decisions like these. By arguing against severability, the Obama administration — and the law’s opponents, who are making an even more radical claim — is urging the Supreme Court to abandon its tradition of judicial restraint, to ignore longstanding precedents and to undermine the separation of powers.

Perhaps it comes as no surprise that the opponents of the law, which they call “Obamacare,” agree with the administration on this crucial point. They have even urged the Supreme Court to strike down the entire statute, including the act’s many provisions that have nothing to do with health insurance coverage, like those relating to doctor training and the regulation of certain drugs. They would like nothing more than for the court to save Congress the trouble of having to muster the votes to try to repeal the law.

To this end, the law’s opponents have advanced several specious arguments. Because the act is so complex, they say, the court does not have the expertise to decide whether only one provision can be excised from it. In addition, because the statute was the product of hard-fought political compromise, every provision was necessary to secure a majority of votes, and the removal of any one would upset the delicate deal that was struck.

But complexity is a key reason for the severability doctrine in the first place: it is Congress that has the expertise and responsibility to decide what should be kept absent the individual mandate. And virtually every statute reflects a bundle of political deals. If either of these arguments is accepted, it would destroy the doctrine of severability entirely.

Both the Obama administration and the law’s opponents have one argument in common. They express concern about what might happen to health insurance markets if the mandate is severed from the statute but the requirements that insurance companies cover sick patients and don’t charge them higher rates remain. If healthy people do not have to buy insurance and insurance companies are forced to cover the sick, they warn, insurance would be far more expensive. No doubt rates would rise as a result. But the size of that increase — whether it would be 10 percent or 20 percent, as some claim — is unknown, and the Supreme Court is in no position to make that judgment on its own.

It’s not clear why the Obama administration has chosen this course. Perhaps it made a strategic choice to raise the stakes of striking down the mandate by asking the court to also invalidate the law’s more popular provisions. Or it may be concerned that, if the mandate alone is struck down, there would not be enough votes in Congress to pass new provisions to compensate the insurance industry for its loss. But as a legal matter, the court should reject the argument.

We believe that imposing the mandate was within Congress’s powers to regulate commerce and that the legislation should be upheld. But if the Supreme Court strikes the mandate down, the rest of the law should stand, and Congress should have to decide what happens next.

Why should an unelected court free the insurance industry from having to do its own political lobbying work in Congress? Why should the court choose whether or not to deny injured and sick Americans health insurance? These crucial decisions must be left to our elected officials, who — unlike the Supreme Court — can then be held accountable for them by the voting public.

Abbe R. Gluck and Michael J. Graetz are professors at Columbia Law School.

From the NYT, HERE.

The person who was to become St. Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland, was born in Wales about AD 385. His given name was Maewyn. His father was a wealthy alderman and a Christian. When Patrick was 16 years old, pirates captured him during a raid and sold him as a slave in Ireland.  He served as a shepherd of an Irish Chieftain in Ulster. During his captivity, he dedicated himself to religion. After 6 years of slavery he escaped and returned home to Britain.  He later returned to Ireland as a missionary, determined to convert Ireland to Christianity. He used the shamrock to explain the Holy Trinity.

Patrick was quite successful at winning converts. And this fact upset the Celtic Druids. Patrick was arrested several times, but escaped each time. He traveled throughout Ireland, establishing monasteries across the country. He also set up schools and churches which would aid him in his conversion of the Irish country to Christianity. He is said to have founded more than 300 churches and baptized more than 120,000 people. He brought clergymen from England and France for his new churches. He succeeded in his mission to Ireland, even though many British clergymen opposed him and the way he organized the churches. Patrick preached in Ireland for the rest of his life.

Here’s what Thomas Cahill said about Patrick in his book “How the Irish Saved Civilization”

At length, he is ordained priest and bishop, virtually the first missionary bishop in history. We understand that Jesus’s apostles preached his Good News—Good Spell or Gospel, to use the Old English term—after the descent of the Spirit at the Feast of Pentecost in Jerusalem and that they intended to preach “to the ends of the earth.” We are a little uncertain as to how far most of them actually got, though we think Peter was nailed upside down to a cross at Rome. Thomas—in legend, at least—got as far as India. But the first Christian missionary for whom we have extensive documentation is Paul, not one of the original apostles, but an apostle, as he puts it, “appointed not by human beings”—that is, appointed by vision. Patrick may be the second such appointment. What is remarkable is not that Patrick should have felt an overwhelming sense of mission but that in the four centuries between Paul and Patrick there are no missionaries.

In truth, even Paul, the great missionary apostle, though he endured all the miseries of classical travel for the sake of the Gospel, never himself ventured beyond the Greco-Roman Ecumene. Thomas, presumed apostle to India, though traveling perhaps beyond the official Ecumene, would have proselytized an ancient civilization with many ties to the Greek world. So Patrick was really a first—the first missionary to barbarians beyond the reach of Roman law. The step he took was in its way as bold as Columbus’s, and a thousand times more humane. He himself was aware of its radical nature. “The Gospel,” he reminded his accusers late in his life, “has been preached to the point beyond which there is no one”—nothing but the ocean. Nor was he blind to his dangers, for even in his last years “every day I am ready to be murdered, betrayed, enslaved—whatever may come my way. But I am not afraid of any of these things, because of the promises of heaven; for I have put myself in the hands of God Almighty.”

His love for his adopted people shines through his writings, and it is not just a generalized “Christian” benevolence, but a love for individuals as they are. He worries constantly for his people, not just for their spiritual but for their physical welfare. The horror of slavery was never lost on him: “But it is the women kept in slavery who suffer the most—and who keep their spirits up despite the menacing and terrorizing they must endure. The Lord gives grace to his many handmaids; and though they are forbidden to do so, they follow him with backbone.” Patrick has become an Irishman, a man who can give far more credibility to a woman’s strength and fortitude than could any classically educated man.