It’s no secret that many think the fierce mood of partisanship is routinely crippling Washington. While most of the fur flies between the major parties in Congress — with the president weighing in occasionally to keep his party leaders on message — this week has seen an outbreak of hostilities in a less traditional venue: between the Supreme Court and the president.
In a controversy stretching back to January’s State of the Union Address, Chief Justice John Roberts told a group of law students at the University of Alabama that President Obama’s very public dissent from the Court’s Citizens United ruling, which effectively rolled back most existing restraints on corporate funding of political campaigns, was a provocation to the court’s cherished independence.
“On the other hand, there is the issue of the setting, the circumstances, and the decorum,” said Roberts. “The image of having the members of one branch of government standing up, literally surrounding the Supreme Court, cheering and hollering while the court — according the requirements of protocol — has to sit there expressionless, I think is very troubling.”
It’s true that Obama pulled few punches in characterizing the Citizens United ruling, which had been handed down just prior to the State of the Union speech.
“Last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests, including foreign corporations, to spend without limit in our elections,” Obama said. “Well, I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities.”
Some of the lawmakers on hand interrupted Obama’s remarks with cheers of support. But television cameras panned the Court members in attendance and caught Justice Samuel Alito mouthing the words “not true.”
In Washington and in public debate, response to the dust-up split down partisan lines. Conservatives took issue with Obama’s criticism of the court, and liberals decried Alito’s breach of protocol. Outside of Washington, though, recent polling has shown that the decision is widely unpopular with Americans across the ideological spectrum.
Of course, Roberts wasn’t always so hands-off with the Supreme Court. When he worked for the Reagan administration, he was an aggressive public advocate pressuring the Court and was privately highly critical of how it organized its own business.
And for all the hubbub, it’s worth recalling that smack-downs between the two branches of government, while rare, are not unheard of. In his memoir, President Clinton was critical of the 2000 Bush v. Gore decision that ended that year’s election; Nixon fumed about the Burger Court’s ruling that he couldn’t protect himself during Watergate with “executive privilege;” and way back in 1936, Franklin Roosevelt proposed an additional three justices to the Court so that he could appoint them himself and skew the Court’s decisions in favor of his New Deal proposals.
But it is somewhat rare that these battles are as public or intense as this one appears to be getting. That may be because the Court’s decision was an historic one justifying intense debate, or it may be because politics are getting more conflict-driven across the board.
Ernest Nitzberg says he immediately felt cheated when he received a statement from Chase in January that showed he owed $6,200 on a debit card — a card he said he’d signed up for but had not yet received. When Chase refused to refund his money, he sought publicity for his gripe by submitting a blog entry to HuffPost.
A man walks past the JP Morgan Chase building in New York City. RBS Sempra Commodities, part-owned by Royal Bank of Scotland, has agreed to sell its European operations to US investment bank JP Morgan for 1.7 billion dollars, the bank has announced. (AFP/Getty Images/File/Chris Hondros)
“Someone at Chase or a friend of someone at Chase — there’s no other way to explain it — had gotten hold of my never-received debit card and all my personal information including my PIN number and went on a spree, racking up $6200 in cash advances and credit card charges,” wrote Nitzberg, a 78-year-old resident of the Bronx. “Fourteen transactions were made on the same day that included three trips to an ATM to remove cash and 11 to such places as Juicy Couture, Shalom Dresses, Toys R Us [3x] and to be a bit more upscale, Macy’s and Saks Fifth Avenue.”
Nitzberg and Chase viewed each other with mutual suspicion.
“They kindly informed me that I would not get my money back because, according to their algorithms, I fit the profile of a credit card cheat,” Nitzberg wrote. “Mind you, I am, once again, a 78-year-old retired New York City public school teacher with no criminal record; but according to Chase, I was the most likely suspect.”
After Nitzberg posted his story on Friday, a HuffPost reporter forwarded it to a Chase spokesman, who said Chase had made its final decision regarding his account. But on Monday, Nitzberg said a Chase employee called him to say the bank was taking another look.
Meanwhile, HuffPost spoke to the New York Police Department, which had conducted a brief investigation after Nitzberg complained that he’d been robbed. Whoever was using Nitzberg’s debit card — and PIN number — had done an excellent job of covering his or her tracks.
“They did obtain some footage from one of the ATMs,” said the NYPD spokesman on Monday. “The person is all hooded up… The person is all bundled up… There’s no way to identify the individual.”
Without a lead, the NYPD gave up on the investigation.
But on Tuesday, after taking a second look, the bank reversed itself. Nitzberg said a bank rep called him to say he’d get his $6,200 back: “We examined the account and we saw no reason we should have disbelieved you and the money will be in your account this afternoon.”
A Chase spokesman confirmed the refund to HuffPost: “We reviewed the case again and we were able to make a refund of the customer.”
Nitzberg is glad to have his money back, but not exactly gleeful.
“[The bank rep] expected me to thank her profusely and prodigiously, and I did not,” Nitzberg said. “I said, ‘You have caused me enormous aggravation.’”
Walmart Says Lower Sales of Ballerina Theresa Barbie Prompted the Price Cut
Walmart is raising eyebrows after cutting the price of a black Barbie doll to nearly half of that of the doll’s white counterpart at one store and possibly others.
A photo first posted to the humor Web site FunnyJunk.com and later to the Latino Web site Guanabee.com shows packages of Mattel’s Ballerina Barbie and Ballerina Theresa dolls hanging side by side at an unidentified store. The Theresa dolls, which feature brown skin and dark hair, are marked as being on sale at $3.00. The Barbies to the right of the Theresa dolls, meanwhile, retain their original price of $5.93. The dolls look identical aside from their color.
Editors at Guanabee.com said the person responsible for the photo told the Web site that it was taken at a Louisiana Walmart store. The person did not return e-mails from ABCNews.com.
A Walmart spokeswoman, who could not verify the exact store shown in the photo, said that the price change on the Theresa doll was part of the chain’s efforts to clear shelf space for its new spring inventory.
“To prepare for (s)pring inventory, a number of items are marked for clearance, ” spokeswoman Melissa O’Brien said in an e-mail. “… Both are great dolls. The red price sticker indicates that this particular doll was on clearance when the photo was taken, and though both dolls were priced the same to start, one was marked down due to its lower sales to hopefully increase purchase from customers.”
“Pricing like items differently is a part of inventory management in retailing,” O’Brien said.
But critics say Walmart should have been more sensitive in its pricing choice.
“The implication of the lowering of the price is that’s devaluing the black doll,” said Thelma Dye, the executive director of the Northside Center for Child Development, a Harlem, N.Y. organization founded by pioneering psychologists and segregation researchers Kenneth B. Clark and Marnie Phipps Clark.
“While it’s clear that’s not what was intended, sometimes these things have collateral damage,” Dye said.
Other experts agree. Walmart could have decided “that it’s really important that we as a company don’t send a message that we value blackness less than whiteness,” said Lisa Wade, an assistant sociology professor at Occidental College in Los Angeles and the founder of the blog Sociological Images.
Last year, Wade posted a blog entry on another case where a black doll was apparently priced less than its white counterpart at an unidentified store. Wade said that when white dolls outsell black dolls, it’s usually because black parents are more likely than white parents to buy their children dolls of a different race.
“Most white parents wouldn’t think to buy a black doll for their child, even if they believe in equality and all those things,” she said.
Overcoming ‘Decades of Racial and Economic Subordination’
Decades after segregation and the civil rights movement, studies show Americans — both black and white — continue to internalize the heirarchical notion that lighter skin tone is considered “better than” darker, Wade said.
One landmark study revealing color hierarchies among black children took place in the 1940s. Run by the Clarks, Northside’s founders, the study asked a group of black children to choose between playing with white dolls and black dolls; 63 percent chose the white dolls.
Last year, following the inauguration of the country’s first black president, “Good Morning America” revisited the experiment. This time, at least some of the results were markedly different: of the 19 black children surveyed, 42 percent said they’d rather play with a black doll compared with 32 percent for the white doll. But when asked which doll was prettier, nearly half of the girls in the group chose the white doll.Walmart priced a dark-skinned Barbie cheaper than a light-skinned Barbie
“Black children develop perceptions about their race very early. They are not oblivious to this. There’s still that residue. There’s still the problem, the overcoming years, decades of racial and economic subordination,” Harvard University professor William Julius Wilson told “Good Morning America.”
Wade said that Walmart could have chosen to keep the dolls at equal prices in an effort not to “reproduce whatever ugly inequalities are out there.”
But Sociological Images co-author Gwen Sharp, a sociology professor at Nevada State College, said that inequality might not necessarily be what’s behind Ballerina Theresa’s lagging sales.
Black parents, she said, may simply choose black dolls whose physical features hew more closely to those of themselves and their children. Barbie has weathered critcism in the past for producing dolls that bear little resemblance to the ethnicities they represent.
“Maybe for both parents and kids, it seems more real and less symbolic of a change to have a doll that actually presents a range of attractive features rather than ‘Oh we’ve changed the skin tone slightly,’” Sharp said.
A Better Line of Black Barbies?
Last year, Barbie manufacturer Mattel debuted a new line of African American dolls, “So In Style,” designed to better resemble black women’s facial features with wider cheeks, broader noses and fuller lips.
“I wanted to make sure that the makeup and face and skin tone was true to girls in my community,” doll designer Stacey McBride-Irby said in a video on the So In Style Web site.
A Mattel spokeswoman said that the So In Style dolls have met with a “great response” and are part of the toymaker’s 2010 catalogue.
Whatever Ballerina Thesesa’s lagging sales may say about society, retail analyst Lori Wachs said Walmart may ultimately regret their pricing choice. The discount giant, which reported a quarterly profit of $4.7 billion last month, could have absorbed whatever loss it might have suffered had it kept Ballerina Theresa’s price the same as that of Ballerina Barbie.
“I fully respect retailers rights to mark things down as they see fit but I also think they need to look at the bigger picture,” Wachs said. “I think there are certain things companies have to be sensitive about and clearly this was one of them.”
Federal regulators said Wednesday that they had received 10 reports of Toyota vehicles accelerating unexpectedly after they were repaired at dealerships.
The complaints have not been verified, but they add to questions about whether Toyota’s big recalls will resolve its problems with unexpected
“If Toyota owners are still experiencing sudden acceleration incidents after taking their cars to the dealership, we want to know about it,” the agency’s administrator, David Strickland, said in a statement.
Toyota said its United States dealerships had repaired more than a million vehicles since early February out of six million vehicles that have been recalled to fix problems with the accelerator pedal. More than two million vehicles in other countries have also been recalled.
In some cases, Toyota says the accelerator pedal can become hard to depress or stuck partly depressed, and in others the pedal could become trapped under the floor mat, causing the vehicle to speed out of the driver’s control.
“We are confident that Toyota vehicles are safe, and we’re doing everything we can to ensure that our customers are satisfied with the rigorously tested recall remedies,” Brian R. Lyons, a Toyota spokesman, said in an e-mail message. “We are taking steps to quickly investigate these complaints.”
Several of the new complaints about problems in cars that have been repaired involve Camry sedans. The owner of a 2009 Camry said that on Feb. 25, two days after the car received the recall repair, it suddenly sped up and went into a ditch. The owner of a 2010 Camry repaired Feb. 12 wrote that the car accelerated into a snow bank five days later. Both drivers said they had tried to brake, but were unable to stop the car before going off the road.
As of this week, regulators said they had received reports of 52 fatalities and 38 injuries in incidents said to have been caused by unexpected acceleration of a Toyota. Three-quarters of the incidents were reported in the last four months, since Toyota began recalling vehicles for possible pedal entrapment.
Toyota executives testified this week to a Senate panel investigating the recalls that they were confident, as they had said since the recalls began, that the problem was caused by either the pedal or floor mats and not by the vehicles’ electronic throttle control systems.
“I want to be absolutely clear: As a result of our extensive testing, we do not believe sudden unintended acceleration because of a defect in our E.T.C.S. has ever happened,” Takeshi Uchiyamada, an executive vice president for Toyota, said. But Mr. Uchiyamada said Toyota would “continue to search for any event in which such a failure could occur.”
The complaints about repaired cars were reported Wednesday by The Los Angeles Times, which was alerted to them by Safety Research and Strategies, a Massachusetts consulting firm that has been compiling reports of unexpected acceleration in Toyotas.
