Dec. 31, 1895 

The top stories in the Norwalk Daily Reflector on this date 122 years ago:

Hunted with a ferret

Fred Miller of this city was arrested Monday by game warden Lawrence Broadbeck on the charge of employing a ferret to hunt rabbits and was taken before Justice Thomas Clark of Ridgefield. The hearing was postponed until January 2d and, in default of $50 bail, Miller languished in jail over night. This morning S.D. Martin signed his bail bond and he was released.

For delegate to the Republican National Convention

Announcements have been made of the candidacy of Republicans in various parts of the Congressional district for election as delegates to the National Convention at St. Louis next June. Huron County will present the name of Hon. L.C. Laylin for this honor, and inasmuch as no delegate has been selected from this county for nearly a generation, doubtless the claims of Huron County to have one of the two to be selected will be conceded by the rest of the district. Mr. Laylin is well known as a close and intimate friend of Governor McKinley’s and his selection would be eminently satisfactory to Ohio’s candidate for the presidency.

A success

At no time before in this city has there been so beautiful a play or one better rendered by any home talent organization and not excepting many traveling companies, as the one played by the St. Mary’s Dramatic Club at the Gardiner Music Hall Monday evening.

Miss Anna May Connell, who played the title role, did exceptionally well and as an emotional actress demonstrated that she is one of great ability.

Miss Lizzie Feeney as “Sadie Milton,” by her natural talent did much to make the play a success.

G.T. Wingert, who played the part of “Norton Heath,” had in this piece an opportunity to display his admirable ability.

E.A. Brown did justice to the heavy part of “Frank Lawton.”

G.T. Hayes, as the dude by the name of “Ferdinand Simpkins,” was excellent.

John Mack in the comedy part of “Denny O’Flarity” did much to amuse the audience.

Getting ready for the new school house

At a meeting of the city board of education Monday evening, all members were present. After authorizing the payment of $2,500 for C.E. Batron’s lot for use in the construction of the proposed new six room school building on South Pleasant Street, a conference was held with Mr. F.S. Barnum, the well known Cleveland architecht, upon the best and most approved modern methods of construction of school buildings.

During the evening, L.A. Palmer was elected janitor of the League Street building, B.H. Patch having resigned the position.

— Compiled by Andy Prutsok

By David Lauter

WASHINGTON — The clock is ticking on the Republican majority in Congress: The GOP has slightly more than 10 months to avoid a rout in 2018.

Republicans could do it. They have time and several important factors on their side: a good economy, low crime rates, achievements of significance to the party’s followers.

Nevertheless, as 2017 closes, almost all signs point to big Democratic gains next year, largely driven by President Donald Trump’s widespread unpopularity. And some of the pugnacious instincts that helped the president win election a year ago may now be worsening his party’s predicament.

Midterm elections “are a referendum on the party in power,” notes Sean Trende, political analyst for the RealClearPolitics web site. During the Obama years, Trende correctly forecast that Democrats had underestimated the potential of a surge of conservative white Americans voting Republican. Now, he says, Republicans are making a mistake in assuming that turnout will once again favor them in an off-year election.

Trump has “terrible numbers,” Democrats have a large advantage in polls, and “it all adds up to a really rough midterm” for the GOP, Trende says.

The trouble for Republicans comes despite some of the best economic conditions in years, which normally would boost the party in power. Unfortunately for Republican candidates, a majority of Americans continues to believe the country is headed in the wrong direction, despite the good economic news.

Much of that discontent appears to center on one person — the president.

Throughout the year, opposition to Trump has generated energy among Democrats. But something new has been added to the mix in recent months, said Joe Trippi, the veteran Democratic consultant who served as media strategist for Doug Jones’ upset Senate election this month in Alabama.

“The sense of chaos, the constant fight, fight, fight and alarm bells going off all the time” has deeply troubled voters, including many who backed Trump last year, Trippi said. “There’s this sense of being on edge,” which Alabamians talked about frequently, Trippi said. “That’s what they don’t want anymore.”

Alabama’s election had unique aspects, notably the flaws of the Republican candidate, Roy Moore. But that same voter anxiety has come up repeatedly in focus groups around the country.

If a year of Trump has put voters in the mood for less confrontation, that poses a big challenge for Republicans.

“I don’t know how you stop Donald Trump from putting people on edge,” Trippi said. “That’s what he does.”

Indeed, even if conflict weren’t so deeply ingrained in Trump’s personality, political calculation might lead him to continue seeking out battles at every turn. Voters as a whole may not like it, but to Trump’s most fervent supporters, his willingness to fight is a major part of his draw.

Former Trump strategist Stephen K. Bannon threatens to add to the political tension by backing challengers to several Republican incumbents.

Trump’s hard-core supporters remain loyal and probably always will. But for all the attention they get from the White House — and often from the news media — his fervent backers make up only about one-fifth of the public and are outnumbered about 2 to 1 by fervent opponents.

Indeed, the gap between the share of Americans who say they “strongly disapprove” of Trump and those who “strongly approve” has grown significantly this year. In polls by SurveyMonkey, for example, the margin now stands at 26 percentage points, up from 16 points at the start of the year.

Those numbers form just one of several indicators of problems for Republicans. The most basic indication comes from the so-called generic ballot — a question polls have used for decades that asks which party’s candidate a person plans to vote for in the next election. It has long proven among the most reliable forecasting tools in American politics.

For most of the fall, Democrats showed a healthy lead on that question — enough to suggest the midterms would be competitive. This month, the forecast took an abrupt jump in one nonpartisan survey after another — to a lead of 13 points for Democrats in a poll from Marist College, 15 points in Quinnipiac University’s poll, 15 in a Monmouth University survey, and 18 points, a previously unheard-of level, in a poll for CNN.

Exactly why the numbers for the GOP worsened is uncertain, although the timing suggests the unpopularity of the Republican tax bill played a role. What is knowable is that even discounting the biggest numbers, the Democrats’ lead on the generic ballot surpasses that of any party out of power in decades.

The average size of the Democratic advantage forecasts that if the election were held now, they would gain in the neighborhood of 40 seats in the House — considerably more than the 24 they would need for a majority.

For those who don’t trust polls, actual election results point the same way. Some of the contests have gotten wide attention, including the Alabama Senate race and the Virginia election in November, in which Democrats won the governorship and all but wiped out a huge Republican majority in the lower house of the Legislature.

Other, less heralded contests have shown the same pattern of high Democratic turnout, depressed Republican voting and double-digit shifts in partisan outcomes, particularly in suburban areas, where Trump fares worse than a typical Republican.

On average, Democrats have done about 12 points better than expected in races across the country this year, according to an analysis of more than 70 special elections by the website FiveThirtyEight.com. Looking just at federal contests, the swing has been larger — a 16-point shift toward Democrats. That’s a margin similar to that in 2006, the last time a pro-Democratic wave swept the party to control of the House as well as the Senate.

The current size of the Democratic advantage would overwhelm two of the protections Republicans have counted on — gerrymandering in the House and, in the Senate, a favorable lineup of state contests.

In the House, partisan gerrymandering has helped pad Republican majorities in the last three national elections. But a gerrymander works by taking a party’s voters and spreading them out over as many districts as possible — ensuring just enough to win — while packing the other party’s voters into as few districts as clever line-drawing will allow.

The result can allow a party to win a big majority of districts even with a small majority — or sometimes even a minority — of votes cast. But when a wave hits, a lot of those “just enough to win” districts suddenly get swamped at the same time.

Just that sort of wave brought the GOP to power in the House in 2010. Now, the indicators point to a Democratic surge.

In the Senate, where a third of the 100 seats are up for election in 2018, the selection favors Republicans.

Of the 34 contests, including a special election in Minnesota, Democrats have 26 incumbents to defend. Several hold seats in states Trump won last year. Defending all that territory gives Democrats a harder job.

To win a Senate majority, Democrats would have to hold onto all their current seats and take two from the Republicans. That’s not impossible — Republican seats in Nevada and Arizona are at risk — but clearly it is a tough road.

Republicans who think the map alone will save them have gotten a stern warning from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.

“The environment today is not great, the generic ballot’s not good, and I’d love to see the president’s approval rating higher,” he said in a year-end interview with The Washington Examiner, a conservative publication. “I think we should anticipate a real knockdown, drag-out — even on the Senate side.”

———

©2017 Los Angeles Times

Visit Los Angeles Times at www.latimes.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By Cathleen Decker

WASHINGTON — Change came to Washington in 2017, as the new president promised.

So did chaos, division and disruption, and a sense that the guardrails that usually had kept the capital and American politics on a normal path had collapsed under the weight of it all.

A year that started with a bleak inaugural address in which President Donald Trump spoke of “American carnage” and his angry insistence that he’d drawn the greatest crowd of supporters ever to watch a swearing-in ended with the president venting publicly at the FBI, his own Justice Department and, in what became a common refrain, his predecessor, President Barack Obama, and his defeated opponent, Hillary Clinton.

All year, the capital and, by extension, politics at large have been roiled by multiple investigations into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, questions of whether the Trump campaign was also involved, massive protests, a president whose moods could be transparently ascertained in 140-character bites, rancor on Capitol Hill and discontent in Trump’s own administration.

On Capitol Hill, Democrats and Republicans have been thoroughly alienated from each other, as Republicans forge ahead alone on goals long thwarted by Obama, only to find themselves cobbled by internal warfare, while Democrats watch and contemplate their own brewing civil war.

By the end of the year, for many there was a palpable fear of what was to come on matters as diverse as the Cold War-reminiscent dispute with North Korea and the specter of sexual harassment allegations tarring politicians of both major parties.

Trump’s presidency has echoed the curvature of his campaign, with a histrionic public facade that fronts an administration that does manage to get some things done.

Trump has begun to reshape the federal judiciary in conservative fashion, moves that will be felt for decades given judges’ lifetime appointments. He has curbed regulations on a variety of fronts, many of them aiding industries that have long complained about restrictions, and has benefited from an economy that, continuing the long trend begun under Obama, has soared.

He has begun walking back trade deals reached by his predecessors, including the Trans-Pacific Partnership. He has altered long-standing, bipartisan foreign policy goals, including his December announcement that he would move the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and his soft touch toward Russia.

But apart from the Pacific trade deal, those were nowhere near the top of the bullet points he fired off night after night in campaign rallies filled with adoring fans.

The wall meant to block illegal immigration? Nowhere near funded. Obamacare repealed? Nope. China labeled a money manipulator and punished? Not at all. The swamp of Washington drained? It’s deeper and more brackish. Wall Street punished for plundering middle America? To the contrary, it was rewarded with Cabinet positions and a promising tax plan.

As 2017 closes, America is no closer than it was at the year’s beginning to be able to answer some basic questions about the president’s approach, so often scattershot, and his odds of forging a presidency whose accomplishments might still some of the national discontent.

From the start of his campaign until now, Trump has succeeded thanks to an overt usage of us-versus-them, fueling the anger of his loyal base of roughly 35 percent of Americans against those he’s attacked: Muslims, Latinos, women who have accused him of sexual misconduct, Gold Star families, black athletes, Republicans who don’t genuflect to him, Democrats of all stripes, and always, always, Clinton and Obama.

But like chaos, anger blows past boundaries. Already, Trump’s presidency has set off a fierce backlash that has improved Democratic chances in the 2018 elections. The question — of enormous import for 2018 and Trump’s re-election odds in 2020 — is whether he can contain something he helped unleash.

———

©2017 Los Angeles Times

Visit the Los Angeles Times at www.latimes.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Physicists have long understood that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. What is true in the natural world is also true in human society. Little wonder then that in 2017, democracy found its voice in the streets.

Protesters marched, quarterbacks took a knee, scientists exclaimed and millions of Americans stood in awe of a darkening that came across the sky. Man buns and “pussy hats” were in vogue, superheroes were box office, and real-life heroes were found in the midst of heartbreak and tragedy.

The year opened with a sea of pink when roughly 5 million marchers around the world — inspired in part by the grass-roots activism of two Los Angeles feminists and their knit shop in Atwater Village — rallied for their right to protest the inauguration of the new president.

Barack Obama had just said goodbye (“I leave this stage tonight even more optimistic about this country than I was when we started”), and Donald Trump had just said hello. Under drizzling skies, his words charted a new course.

“At the bedrock of our politics will be a total allegiance to the United States of America,” Trump told his followers who had gathered at the Washington Mall, “and through our loyalty to our country we will rediscover our loyalty to each other.”

But loyalty proved elusive in a country where moderation was marginalized. Citizens gravitated to extremes: political, moral, even comedic. Just ask Kathy Griffin, who in a year of outrageous gestures and crude bombast managed to find the line and cross it, Salome-like, with a photo of herself brandishing a bloodied replica of the first executive’s head.

Battle lines — over immigration, health care, trade and climate change — seemed immovable. Diversity had become less a reason to celebrate than a point of antagonism.

Some debated free speech. Others challenged it with chants of “blood and soil” in the streets of Charlottesville, Va., where tiki torches, assault rifles and clubs set the stage for the death of a counterprotester.

Most disturbing, perhaps, was fear that some Americans welcome the disarray as if chaos was merely the unfortunate side effect of the cherished goal of “draining the swamp.”

Only the financial markets seem immune from such troubles.

What happened? Up was down, and down was up. Even the stolid accountants at PricewaterhouseCoopers botched the envelope-pass during the Academy Awards.

Had the country suddenly become addled by rising temperatures? NASA declared 2017 the third-hottest year on record, and as if to oblige, an ice sheet the size of Delaware broke free from Antarctica in July.

Fallout and blowback — stoked by the self-proclaimed “Ernest Hemingway of 140 characters” — became staples of the news cycle.

“Covfefe” became a word. “Little rocket man” squared off against the “U.S. dotard,” and the White House briefing room, thanks to Melissa McCarthy, became a venue for ridicule.

Only Congress seemed unable to appreciate the joke, and when some of its members stepped to microphones, they put politics above morality, platitudes above common sense. As the poet W.B. Yeats once opined of another divided time, “the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

Meanwhile, the investigation of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III burned like a quiet fuse through the back alleys of Washington and Moscow.

So when Puerto-Rican import “Despacito,” a four-minute encomium to dancing and a little more, surpassed 3 billion YouTube views, it felt right to bust a move. This battered world was ready for distraction.

In California, storms soaked the state to end the historic drought, and in outer space, Cassini, intrepid explorer of Saturn and its ethereal moons, threaded the needle between the planet and its rings.

Elsewhere, champagne corks popped at Caltech when two goateed physicists celebrated winning a Nobel Prize for proving Einstein was right once again about that EequalsMCsquared business, and a supernova 160 million light-years away provided the fireworks.

From Oregon to South Carolina, millions of Americans risked retinal burn for the sake of glimpsing the totality of a solar eclipse (or a fraction thereof). Some made pilgrimages to the heartland. They donned goofy glasses, peered into cereal box eclipse projectors and joined a fleeting culture of amazement and awe.

As satisfying as these reveries were, there was no escaping more terrestrial woes: hate crimes on the rise, “bump stocks” still on the market, and violence tearing through communities in Las Vegas, Sutherland Springs, Rancho Tehama and elsewhere.

Amid the memorials, heroes were rightly found and praised: the doctors and paramedics at a trauma center off the Vegas Strip; the next-door neighbor to the church in Texas; the teaching aide who locked down her elementary school.

And when wildfires devastated Northern California in October (and Southern California in December), the story of the couple who survived the night in a neighbor’s swimming pool seemed especially miraculous, as were the encores and comebacks that 2017 brought.

Never mind Taylor Swift dropping her first album in three years, the animal kingdom delivered the real surprises. There were sharks circling the Southland, a new wolf pack howling in Lassen County, and a second mountain lion skulking through the Hollywood Hills, company at last for the city’s other resident cougar, P-22, just across the 101.

Fictional heroes and superheroes played big as well, as audiences tuned into the timeliness of “The Handmaid’s Tale” on TV and cheered for “Wonder Woman” in the cinemas, never suspecting that a real power struggle between the good and the bad would emerge as the year came to an end.

Demonstrators, who marched in January, marched in November as well, only now #MeToo was the rallying cry, an exhortation to the courage of the women who stood up to speak truth to the predators who seemed to believe that their abuse and harassment would never come to light.

And now with a new year upon us, 2017 recedes with the promise of what lies ahead: The Dodgers, coming so close in October, ready for the spring. Los Angeles’ winning bid for the Olympics.

And with the midterm election approaching, the political action committee Emily’s List has recorded nearly 20,000 women interested in running for office.

If all else fails, marijuana will be legal in California on Monday.

Will we need it?

———

©2017 Los Angeles Times

Visit the Los Angeles Times at www.latimes.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By Robin Abcarian

For sexual harassers, 2017 has been a year of reckoning.

In October, the New York Times and the New Yorker published bombshell reports on movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, detailing numerous accusations of sexual abuse and secret settlements.

Days later, the Los Angeles Times published a report alleging that director James Toback had harassed at least 38 women, 31 of whom were willing to be named. In the days that followed, hundreds more women contacted staff writer Glenn Whipp to give similar accounts of harassment by Toback, bringing the total to 310.

The floodgates had opened.

For weeks, each day brought new revelations about powerful men who were accused of abusing subordinates and others. Occasionally, victims were men. Overwhelmingly, they were women.

The sheer number of familiar names was stunning: Joining Weinstein and Toback on the dishonor roll were Brett Ratner, Russell Simmons, Kevin Spacey, Louis C.K., Dustin Hoffman, Jeremy Piven, Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose, Mark Halperin, Leon Wieseltier, Republican (and losing U.S. Senate candidate) Roy Moore, Democratic Sen. Al Franken and Democratic Rep. John Conyers Jr. Franken and Conyers resigned under pressure in December.

Inspired by the outpouring, more than 140 women in the California state capital — elected officials, lobbyists, legislative staff — signed an open letter under the banner “We Said Enough.”

“Each of us has endured, or witnessed or worked with women who have experienced some form of dehumanizing behavior by men with power in our workplaces,” the women wrote, choosing words that resonated far beyond Sacramento. “Men have groped and touched us without our consent, made inappropriate comments about our bodies and our abilities.”

Three Democratic assemblymen from Southern California — Raul Bocanegra, Tony Mendoza and Matt Dababneh — soon faced accusations. Bocanegra resigned, Mendoza was stripped of committee assignments pending an investigation and Dababneh announced his resignation as well.

In retrospect, this cultural moment had been gestating for several years.

Bill Cosby’s long history of bad behavior, finally acknowledged in 2015, broke ground for this sordid national sweepstakes. The subsequent toppling of Fox News boss Roger Ailes by former Fox personality Gretchen Carlson indirectly led to Bill O’Reilly’s exit from the network.

By the time the Weinstein exposes came along, the country was realizing that powerful men might no longer be immune from the fallout of their own reckless behavior.

The male sexual prerogative — which confuses power with allure — is not a new feature of gender relations. Grabbers and gropers have always occupied every echelon of America. But in all walks of life men have often been protected by their institutions.

Now the avalanche of accusations, and secret settlements revealed by investigative reporters and courageous victims willing to speak out, put the institutions at risk. Skeptics no longer asked: Why did it take her so long to come forward? Why did she allow herself to be alone with him? How can we believe her when it’s his word against hers?

Out of the mists of denial, patterns were emerging. If a man had been accused of sexual harassment once, maybe it would be swept under the rug. But if a man had been accused by three women, or 10 women, or dozens, we finally came to accept that the sheer number of accusers weighed in favor of the accusers. It was no longer a he said/she said situation. It was he said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said.

Now our questions were directed at the accused and the institutions that protected them: How could the Weinstein Co. have paid settlements to Harvey Weinstein’s victims year after year? Why was Bill O’Reilly’s contract renewed after he paid an accuser $32 million to go away?

In the second week of December, three of 16 women who during the campaign accused President Donald Trump of sexual harassment or assault appeared on “Megyn Kelly Today” to renew their accusations. They had come forward in 2016 after hearing Trump boast to Billy Bush of “Access Hollywood” about grabbing women’s genitals, but faded from the spotlight after his election. Trump has said they are all lying.

It’s been at least 40 years since sexual harassment was recognized as an illegal form of gender discrimination, and 26 years since law professor Anita Hill accused Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexually harassing her, a wake-up call that led to the election of an unprecedented number of women to Congress.

In 2017, the illusion that sexual harassment was becoming a relic of a less equitable time crumbled.

Women won’t be silenced. Harassers are on notice. I’m looking forward to 2018.

———

©2017 Los Angeles Times

Visit the Los Angeles Times at www.latimes.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

The pain behind the euphemism — ianfu, or “comfort women” — has reverberated for more than 70 years. Forced servitude in Japanese wartime brothels ensnared as many as 200,000 women from across a wide swath of Asia, and although the surviving cohort is dwindling down to dozens, the historic wound refuses to heal.

An agreement two years ago was intended to formally settle the dispute between the governments of Japan and South Korea, where the bulk of the “comfort women” came from. But South Korea this week deemed the accord seriously flawed, while Japan insists that any attempt to revise the pact would be unacceptable.

Systematic sexual enslavement and abuse of women in times of conflict has many modern-day echoes: African girls seized by Boko Haram, Yazidis held captive by Islamic State, the widespread rape of fleeing Rohingya women by the Burmese military. But the “comfort women” issue takes on different dimensions because of the still-contested question of the Japanese government’s role, and the issue’s potential to inflame ties between two key U.S. allies at a time of high tensions over North Korea.

Here is some background on the decadeslong legal, political and moral struggle surrounding the women:

Q: How was the “comfort women” system created?

A: Tracing a trajectory of Japanese military aggression against its Asian neighbors, a vast network of brothels to serve troops and contractors operated from 1932 to 1945, when World War II ended. Most of the women were from Korea, which was under Japanese colonial rule from 1910 to 1945, but others came from China, the Philippines, Indonesia and elsewhere, including small numbers of Japanese and European women. Their numbers are not fully agreed upon; advocates and many historians place the figure at 200,000, but some estimates are lower.

Q: What did the December 2015 accord say?

A: In what was hailed at the time as a landmark pact, Japan agreed to set up a fund of 1 billion yen, nearly $9 million, to benefit the elderly South Korean survivors. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe expressed remorse and acknowledged the “immeasurable pain” suffered by the women. South Korea, for its part, agreed to refrain from public criticism of Japan over the issue, and to take steps toward removing statues commemorating the victims, most notably one in front of the Japanese Embassy in the heart of Seoul. South Korea’s foreign minister at the time, Yun Byung-se, said full implementation of the accord’s terms would represent a final resolution of the “comfort women” dispute.

Q: How has the issue affected domestic politics in South Korea and Japan?

A: The 2015 agreement was problematic from the start for leaders on both sides. South Korea’s then-president, Park Geun-hye, was forced out by a corruption scandal, and her successor, Moon Jae-in, — buoyed by opinion polls suggesting the public thought Japan had not gone far enough in accepting responsibility — made changing the “comfort women” agreement part of his campaign.

In Japan, Abe has long sought to appease conservative nationalists who bitterly oppose any government admission of wrongdoing in connection with the wartime brothels. Even while apologizing for the suffering of the “comfort women,” the Japanese leader has said the issue should not “drag on into the next generation,” suggesting little appetite for future expressions of remorse.

Q: What is the U.S. interest in the dispute?

A: Successive American administrations have worked to encourage better ties between South Korea and Japan, Washington’s two major Asian allies, in order to better deal with the influence of an assertive China and the growing nuclear ambitions of North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un. The 2015 accord was praised by the Obama administration as an important reconciliatory gesture.

Q: What was the Japanese government’s role in the wartime brothels?

A: After many years of silence and shame, victims finally began telling their stories, and by the 1980s, historians were piecing together accounts from soldiers and survivors, and uncovering documentation addressing the involvement of the wartime Japanese government. Despite longstanding official denials, a compelling picture emerged of direct dealings by wartime military authorities with contractors who recruited women through force and sometimes trickery, promising some form of legitimate employment.

At the end of 1991, a group of South Koreans filed a lawsuit in Tokyo seeking a formal apology and compensation. Japan issued a formal apology in 1993, but conservative Japanese politicians subsequently sought to undermine it. Adding to the rancor, Japan insists any compensation money must be designated as a humanitarian gesture, holding that all claims arising from wartime actions were settled by a 1965 peace treaty between Seoul and Tokyo.

Q: What happens now?

A: The current phase of the dispute erupted when a South Korean panel set up to look into the 2015 accord said Wednesday that the pact had failed to meet the needs of those affected. South Korea’s foreign minister, Kang Kyung-wha, said the government would use the findings of the task force to put together a new policy on the “comfort women,” one relying heavily on the sentiments of survivors and advocates. Moon’s office called the accord a “political agreement that excludes the victims and the public.”

The South Korean news agency Yonhap reported that three dozen of the former sex slaves who were alive when the agreement was reached in December 2015 had received, or expected to receive, money from the fund set up by Japan. But the head of the task force said that acceptance of the payments by elderly survivors did not mean that they, or their supporters, considered Japan’s expressions of remorse to be sufficient.

On the Japanese side, Foreign Minister Taro Kono said any changes to the deal would be “unacceptable,” and news reports in Tokyo said Abe told associates he would not agree to the pact being changed “even by a millimeter.” Signaling a potential diplomatic rift, Japan’s Kyodo news agency reported that a planned visit by Abe to South Korea in connection with February’s winter Olympics might be in jeopardy.

Q: How many “comfort women” are still alive?

A: At the time of the 2015 agreement, there were 46 known South Korean survivors; by July of this year that number had dropped to 37. But advocacy groups and researchers have amassed a trove of videotaped and written testimony from some of those who have since died — powerful and poignant statements that will likely figure in future debates.

———

©2017 Los Angeles Times

Visit Los Angeles Times at www.latimes.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By McClatchy Washington Bureau staff (TNS)

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s tweets have transformed political communications and defined his first year in the White House.

From threatening North Korea with nuclear annihilation and Mexico with a military invasion to taunting his critics and undermining members of his own Cabinet, Trump has used Twitter in ways that have riled Washington and unnerved America’s allies.

While his staff and Republican leaders have pleaded with him to rein in his Twitter use, Trump insists it lets him speak directly to Americans by bypassing “biased” news outlets. He has 45 million followers at @realDonaldTrump and 21.5 million at @POTUS, but connects with millions more as each tweet is shared repeatedly, and often serves as the source of news stories in the media outlets he criticizes.

Here are 17 of the most eye-popping Trump tweets of 2017:

1. “Don’t believe the main stream (fake news) media. The White House is running VERY WELL. I inherited a MESS and am in the process of fixing it,” Trump tweeted Feb. 18 following a combative news conference amid reports of problems in the West Wing.

2. “How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!” Trump tweeted March 4, comparing the alleged wiretapping to the criminal acts of Watergate. He never produced evidence.

3. “Can you imagine what the outcry would be if @SnoopDogg, failing career and all, had aimed and fired the gun at President Obama? Jail time!” Trump tweeted March 15 after rapper Snoop Dogg releases a music video of him shooting a clown dressed like Trump.

4. “either elect more Republican Senators in 2018 or change the rules now to 51 percent. Our country needs a good ‘shutdown’ in September to fix mess!” Trump tweeted May 2, blaming Senate rules, which require 60 votes to pass most legislation, for the exclusion of border wall funding from a spending bill.

5. “James Comey better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!” Trump tweeted May 12 appearing to threatening Comey after reports that Trump called for loyalty.

6. “This is the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history!” Trump tweeted May 18, decrying the investigation into Russian election meddling.

9. “I told Rex Tillerson, our wonderful Secretary of State, that he is wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man … Save your energy Rex, we’ll do what has to be done!” Trump tweeted in a series of Oct. 1 tweets, mocking North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

10. “ … We cannot keep FEMA, the Military & the First Responders, who have been amazing (under the most difficult circumstances) in P.R. forever!” Trump tweeted Oct. 12, threatening to pull federal emergency workers from the hurricane-ravaged island.

11. “Congratulations to all of the ‘DEPLORABLES’ and the millions of people who gave us a MASSIVE (304-227) Electoral College landslide victory!” Trump tweeted Nov. 8, the anniversary of his win, referring to Hillary Clinton’s name for his supporters.

12. “Why would Kim Jong-un insult me by calling me ‘old,’ when I would NEVER call him ‘short and fat?’ Oh well, I try so hard to be his friend — and maybe someday that will happen!” Trump tweeted Nov. 11 from an Asia-Pacific economic summit where he was seeking to rally global pressure against the rogue nation.

13. “Crooked Hillary Clinton is the worst (and biggest) loser of all time. She just can’t stop, which is so good for the Republican Party. Hillary, get on with your life and give it another try in three years!” Trump tweeted Nov. 18 to Clinton, urging her to run for office again.

14. “HAPPY THANKSGIVING to everyone — I love you all, even my many enemies (sometimes!),” Trump tweeted Nov. 21.

15. “It wasn’t the White House, it wasn’t the State Department, it wasn’t father LaVar’s so-called people on the ground in China that got his son out of a long term prison sentence — IT WAS ME. Too bad! LaVar is just a poor man’s version of Don King, but without the hair. Just think,” Trump tweeted Nov. 22 about the father of a UCLA basketball player after his son’s release from China for shoplifting.

16. “Don’t focus on me, focus on the destructive Radical Islamic Terrorism that is taking place within the United Kingdom. We are doing just fine!” Trump tweeted Nov. 29 at British Prime Minister Theresa May following her criticism of his retweets of anti-Muslim videos. He initially used the wrong Twitter handle for her.

17. “Lightweight Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a total flunky for Chuck Schumer and someone who would come to my office “begging” for campaign contributions not so long ago (and would do anything for them), is now in the ring fighting against Trump. Very disloyal to Bill & Crooked-USED!” Trump tweeted Dec. 12 after the New York Democrat said Trump should resign over sexual misconduct accusations.

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(Franco Ordonez, Anita Kumar, Brian Murphy and Jordan Lofaro contributed to this report.)

———

©2017 McClatchy Washington Bureau

Visit the McClatchy Washington Bureau at www.mcclatchydc.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By Kate Irby

WASHINGTON –– Radicalized individuals, not teams of trained operatives, are the terrorist threats that most worry federal law enforcement agencies in the coming year.

Stopping them is difficult, since many give little advance indication they are planning attacks.

FBI Director Christopher Wray has said the FBI considers the most pressing domestic terrorism threats to be homegrown violent extremists radicalized by Islamic State and other radical Islamist groups, and lone-wolf attackers who aren’t connected to any other people or groups. Cultists, “sovereign citizens” who don’t believe government constraints apply to them and those motivated by racial hatred are a lesser but persistent concern, the FBI says.

Matthew Heiman, a former lawyer with the National Security Division at the Justice Department, agrees with Wray that homegrown Islamist extremists are the top threat.

“If you look at the numbers, the repetition and the consistency, I think that’s No. 1 by a long stretch,” Heiman said, citing attacks in San Bernardino, Calif., Orlando, Fla., Fort Hood, Texas, and New York City. While there are other attacks every year, Heiman said other movements are not as consistent.

Some object to the categories as artificial and counterproductive.

“There’s this focus on categorizing ideology, rather than focusing on methodology for committing these acts of violence, said Michael German, a former FBI official who worked in counterterrorism. “It springs from this necessity to categorize in order to distribute resources in an organized way, but we then come to believe those categories are real. This whole concept of a radical Islam, which includes very different groups such as ISIS, Al-Qaida, Hezbollah … it has nothing to do with keeping Americans safer.”

Still, while there may be disagreement about the framing, no one questions that the United States needs to be on the lookout for potential attackers. And the FBI’s view will carry the day when it comes to allocating money and manpower to the task.

Here’s how the FBI sees the threats:

–– Homegrown violent terrorists: Violent extremists wanting to fight for Islamic State, or those who aspire to attack the United States from within, continue to be at the top of the FBI’s watch list, with the threats amplified by “a surge in terrorist propaganda and training available via the internet and social networking media,” Wray said in testimony to a House committee last month. Online recruitment and indoctrination mean that it’s no longer necessary for terrorist organizations to sneak operatives into the country to recruit others and act.

That’s a big change from the environment of a decade ago, Wray said.

In 2017, jihadist attacks killed more people than other domestic extremist groups, with five attacks in the U.S. in which 17 people died in total, according to Joshua Freilich, co-creator of the Extremist Crime Database. Figures on deaths attributable to terrorist groups vary slightly because of differences in the criteria for labeling something a terrorist act. Freilich said his database defines such attacks as ideologically motivated homicides, or “incidents where the offenders — either wholly or partly — committed the attack to further their extremist beliefs.”

Interspersed attacks with comparably low fatalities have become the norm for those committed under the umbrella of radical Islamic groups, according to Heiman, largely because Islamic State has overtaken Al-Qaida in prominence.

“Al-Qaida was planning these epic, dramatic attacks. You compare that to the Islamic State, and their approach is ‘here’s what we’d like, you go out and figure out how to do it,’” Heiman said. “So then you get individuals picking up whatever they can, bats or cars or firearms, without a lot of training in how to get those mass casualties.”

While that means it’s less likely we’ll see repeats of 9/11 with thousands or even hundreds of deaths, attacks by individuals are also much harder to pinpoint, Heiman said.

German, however, sees the depiction of radicalization put forth by the FBI as misleading. He said in most cases it’s far more likely that such terrorists are individuals already planning violent action and looking for an ideology to pin it on than it is that they are recruited. And law enforcement too readily categorizes people of color based on flimsy evidence such as a few internet searches, German said.

He compared Omar Mateen, the Orlando shooter who killed 49 people in 2016 at a gay nightclub, who pledged allegiance to ISIS, with James Holmes, the Aurora, Colo., shooter who killed 12 people in 2012 at a screening of “The Dark Knight Rises.” Mateen’s attack was seen as an obvious ideological attack against gay people, while “no one suggested Holmes was motivated by a hatred for Batman, or those who watch it.”

–– Lone-wolf attacks: “We are most concerned about the lone offender attacks, primarily shootings, as they have served as the dominant mode for lethal domestic extremist violence,” Wray said in November.

Lone-wolf attacks are a significant problem for law enforcement by their nature. If an American is planning an attack alone, it’s “almost impossible to detect that, unless they open up about their feelings to family and friends,” Heiman said.

“We might not have as many large-scale attacks, but we have a steady drip of these attacks with one or two actors that come in with a highly destructive weapon, or drive a car into a crowd, and it’s still a significant loss of life,” Heiman said.

The most destructive example of a lone offender in 2017 was Stephen Paddock’s shootings in Las Vegas that killed 58 people. While Paddock’s motive is unknown, meaning the attack it hasn’t been classified as terrorism, it’s emblematic of German’s critique of the emphasis placed on these categories. Regardless of whether Paddock was a terrorist or a criminal, his attack was still catastrophic.

Additionally, while mass shootings represent significant loss of life, the numbers still aren’t comparable to the number of non-terrorist homicides, German said. There were about 17,000 homicides in the U.S. in 2016, according to the FBI, and 40 percent of them are unsolved.

–– Other extremist movements: “Domestic extremist movements collectively pose a steady threat to the United States,” Wray said in November. “We anticipate law enforcement, racial minorities, and the U.S. government will continue to be significant targets for many domestic extremist movements.”

White supremacists, sovereign citizens, black nationalists, radical religious and other cultist groups fall into this grouping. The FBI recently leaked to the public a counterterrorism report that identified a “black identity extremist” threat, saying those extremists were likely to increasingly target police officers over perceived racial injustice. Many — including German — criticized the report’s definition as too broad and worried it was being used to target nonviolent protestors, such as members of Black Lives Matter.

Far-left domestic extremist groups (which include black nationalists) killed eight people in 2017, according to Freilich’s database, while nine people were killed in attacks by far-right domestic extremist groups (which include white supremacists and sovereign citizens) but the FBI has no category for “white identity extremists.”

———

©2017 McClatchy Washington Bureau

Visit the McClatchy Washington Bureau at www.mcclatchydc.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

WASHINGTON — 2017 was one of those seminal, once-in-a-generation years when Washington didn’t set its own agenda, when constituents rather than leaders drove the debate and dialogue.

Old rules of defining political success and influencing public policy were out. Organically driven movements, pushed by trending topics such as #MeToo, #TakeTheKnee and #lasvegasshooting drove the email traffic to congressional offices.

Congressional leaders and the White House struggled to adapt to the new political mandates. Speeches back home and town halls were out; connecting via social media was in. Taking cues from like-minded strangers bonding on Facebook mattered; the congressional schedule hardly did.

It’s a stunning result, if not maddening for Washington officials, considering the macro-political picture: One party controlling the White House and both houses of Congress for the first time in 10 years. And believing it could count on a Supreme Court leaning in its favor.

Instead, congressional leaders and the Trump administration struggled to adapt to the new political mandates, and never really did. At the White House, the traditional post-election presidential mandate was invisible. So was the effectiveness of the bully pulpit, which evolved into government by decree — executive orders — or early morning tweets offering not lofty pronouncements or agendas but often jabs at enemies.

Congress spent the year taking long breaks and stumbling through legislation that often went nowhere. Lawmakers committed much of the spring and summer to wrangling over the repeal and replacement of Obamacare, ultimately falling short. They spent the fall trying to craft a federal budget, and could only approve a series of stopgaps.

Only a last-minute tax overhaul gave Washington the veneer of a major accomplishment, but the issues most on the minds of people back home — immigration, guns, help for hurricane and wildfire victims, children’s health insurance — were kicked into 2018.

In short, Washington had trouble figuring out how to connect with constituents who were using 2017-vintage means of making themselves heard.

Under pre-2017 rules, the new Trump administration and emboldened GOP majorities on Capitol Hill should have had a year full of achievements. The economy roared through its more robust months in memory. Stock exchanges climbed into record territory. Consumer confidence soared. All this usually means Congress has an easier time crafting a budget, since revenues are up, allowing the new president’s initiatives to win easy approval.

None of that happened. Gallup approval numbers for the president — 35 percent on Dec. 19 — and Congress — averaging 19 percent this year — flirted with historic lows. The tax cut was quickly put together at the end of the year, without hearings or any effort to engage Democrats, largely so Republicans could get a win.

At a Dec. 20 White House victory lap, the president and congressional Republicans hailed what they said was a defining achievement. But it constituents now are more focused on and concerned with some very different matters.

Of the top five themes logged by Chartbeat, which tracks media traffic, harassment topped the list. Domestic terrorism and violence ranked fourth and disasters, such as this summer’s hurricanes placed fifth. Only one political topic, overall reaction to President Donald Trump’s first year, was in the mix at third.

The saga of the harassment debate illustrated the change in how political influence and dialogue had changed, and how Washington struggled to respond.

The outrage that ultimately fueled the #MeToo momentum first accelerated during the 2016 presidential campaign, when Trump ridiculed Republican rival Carly Fiorina’s appearance, broadcaster Megyn Kelly’s blood and finally, was revealed on the “Access Hollywood” audio tape boasting how a celebrity could “grab them (women) by the p---y.”

The defeat of Democrat Hillary Clinton, a crushing setback after a generation’s worth of incremental but steady progress, added to the mounting anger. In 1991, after law professor Anita Hill accused Supreme Court nominee of sexual harassment, women mobilized. 1992 was touted as the “Year of the Woman” after four women won U.S. Senate seats. It was the most women ever elected to the Senate in a single year.

The mood going into 2017 was very different. “The difference was the misogyny we saw in the campaign on the part of Donald Trump,” said Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University in New Jersey, a nonpartisan research group.

“It was the way he used gender as part of his power,” said Walsh, a center staff member since 1981.

Social media helped organize the Women’s March in Washington, which attracted an estimated 400,000 people, the day after Trump’s inaugural. Just as important, there were about 400 other such marches around the country the same day involving millions more.

The next month, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell interrupted Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. His criticism — “Nevertheless she persisted” — became a rallying cry for women tired of being silenced. #LetLizSpeak quickly became a top trending Twitter topic.

The marches and the Senate incident helped ignite a movement that would eventually lead to the extraordinary scene in the U.S. Senate 11 months later.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., was angry when her colleague, Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., was accused of sexual harassment from several women.

She didn’t rely solely on the traditional routes to effecting change — a hearing, a bill introduction or a statement on the Senate floor. She posted “Senator Franken should step aside” on her Facebook page at 8:26 a.m. Dec. 6. Other women senators, and eventually men, joined her. The next day, Franken announced he would resign from the Senate.

It was a telling moment. The outrage against sexual harassment had been building for weeks, and Congressional leaders had been slow to respond.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., confronted with allegations against veteran Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., vowed on Nov. 26 “zero tolerance” for anyone involved in such misconduct and called swiftly for an ethics investigation. Pelosi then worked behind the scenes to get Conyers to give up his position as top Judiciary Committee Democrat.

That move came after some pushback. Earlier the same day, she had called him “an icon in our country” while reiterating her call for an ethics probe and foreshadowing his announcement saying he “would do the right thing.” In fact, as more allegations surfaced, and Pelosi and other members of the Congressional Black Caucus urged Conyers, who had served for 52 years, to step down. On Dec. 5, he resigned his seat.

The rapid-fire developments were a stark lesson for Washington that leaders were no longer setting the congressional agenda. Constituents were driving the dialogue in fast-moving, modern ways.

For years, the path to Washington influence was to hire a lobbyist. On the grassroots level, it meant organizing and getting phone banks going. It could mean a meeting with a lawmaker or a key congressional staffer or two explaining the problem, the solution and the strategy.

Not anymore. “Now you can quickly have a thousand points of activism. You can click instantly and organize,” said Jenny Beth Martin, president of the Tea Party Patriots.

All this has left official Washington baffled and unsure about how to respond and proceed.

Lawmakers see millions of messages urging a fix to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which allows an estimated 800,000 young people brought to this country by undocumented immigrant parents to stay here. Yet Congress left for the year without any resolution.

Same with the other popular social media flashpoints: Climate change. Government surveillance. Aid to Puerto Rico. Guns.

Instead, Republican lawmakers headed home touting their overhaul of the nation’s tax system, changes that polls routinely show are highly unpopular and confusing.

After the Senate tax vote Wednesday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was confident he could sell the plan. “If we can’t sell this to the American people we ought to go into another line of work,” he said. But the simple acknowledgment by many Republicans that the major achievement of the new Congress and administration still must be sold to the public clamoring for action on other topics speaks to diverging agendas between elected leaders and their constituents.

Some lawmakers concede there is a significant disconnect.

Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., who faces a tough re-election next year in a state Trump won by 42 percentage points, said he struggles to answer social media groundswells. “I have a hard time,” he said.

The challenge for Manchin, and the members of Congress facing the voters next year, is they face a series of new political movements and rules that are still evolving:

— Millennials. They’re now the most populous voting age living generation, having passed the baby boomers last year.

They’re beginning to get more interested and involved in politics, said Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, director of CIRCLE at Tufts University, which studies youth voter trends.

Millennials have seen in just the past year or two how grassroots initiatives have impact in setting bottom-up agenda. The Black Lives Matter movement provoked dialogue about police practices in minority communities. The protests against Confederate flags and icons has led to the toppling of such statues and symbols around the country.

Openly transgender candidate Danica Roem, herself a 33-year-old millennial, in November won a Virginia legislative seat by defeating a veteran conservative. The effort to nominate Bernie Sanders as the Democratic candidate for president last year has continued with the potential to make him a viable 2020 candidate.

“They don’t feel they’re the only ones in the room under 50 anymore,” said Kawashima-Ginsberg of millennials.

— Fleeting movements. Organic political movements historically do not last long, and the lesson for the politics of the future is to act fast and decisively or lose the moment — and the support of constituents.

While the tea party crusade helped Republicans win control of Congress in 2010, it’s had only sporadic success maintaining any momentum. Tea party groups continue to push for a balanced federal budget, for instance, even as the Republican-controlled Congress approved a tax reform plan estimated to boost deficits by at least $1 trillion over the next 10 years.

Yet quick-moving movements are how political persuasion is likely to work in the future. Political parties lack the influence they once did and “there’s a lack of belonging to anything anymore,” said Will Rogers, former Polk County, Iowa, Republican chairman and now a lobbyist.

What 2017 has taught constituents is that the path to Washington influence is to instantly organize and demand quick action, as the #MeToo movement did to heighten awareness of sexual harassment and push out those who had been accused of misconduct.

— The Trump army. His overall approval ratings may be consistently dismal, but his followers remain a vocal, effective force.

Republicans in Congress remain largely reluctant to defy the White House. Trump supporters continue to make it clear they want a strong U.S.-Mexico border wall, for example. They provided social media support for Cabinet and judicial nominees who in most cases had little trouble winning confirmation in the Republican-led Senate.

Republican approval of Trump in the Gallup Poll earlier this month was 78 percent, down somewhat from the 83 percent average since he became president, but still strong.

— The rise of women. Women got the biggest boost from 2017’s rules of engagement. Walsh’s center’s nonpartisan political training program for women usually attracts about 180 people. This year attendance hit 300 and people had to be turned away. Partner programs in other states saw similar responses.

In Congress, those accused of misbehavior were quickly pressured to step aside, and immediately, dispensing with the old reliance on hearings and ethics probes. The allegations against Trump resurfaced. Lawmakers quickly passed legislation requiring all members of Congress and their staffs to have mandatory training in what constitutes sexual harassment.

But any idea that women will be a united force conflicts with the political trend that has paralyzed Washington for years: Polarization. Republicans got virtually no Democratic support for their big initiatives this year. Trump routinely blasts Democrats. GOP congressional leaders rarely seek Democrats’ input or counsel.

Penny Nance, president and chief executive officer at Concerned Women for America, a conservative group, warned the clout of women working together has limits. “The dividing lines are still the same,” she said, notably on abortion.

“We see it as life and death. The other side sees it as individual rights,” she said. And, she added, many conservative women do not see most issues through the lens of being “women’s issues.”

“I’m a woman, a follower of Jesus, a mother, wife and conservative. I don’t identify myself simply as one of those,” Nance said.

But here’s what’s different, and why 2017 will be seen as a line of political demarcation: Women are now unquestionably a powerful force in the national political dialogue. So are younger people, minorities, conservatives, liberals and everyone else. They don’t have to wait for a congressional leader or the president to promote their cause. They can instantly make their collective voices heard loudly. They can have influence.

“This all feels different,” said Walsh. “Something has changed.”

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©2017 McClatchy Washington Bureau

Visit the McClatchy Washington Bureau at www.mcclatchydc.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By Jeffrey Fleishman

One arm shot off and hat brim slanted low, Frank Griffin, an outlaw predisposed to frontier wisdom and Bible brandishing, rides with 30 hard men in a fury that can empty a town by sunset.

Played by Jeff Daniels in the new Netflix series “Godless,” Griffin is an alluring villain, a man shaped by a boyhood tragedy he carries with him like a sin turned sacred. He is reflective and cruel; intelligent and brutal, a man of intricate and unfathomable parts who can kill the innocent one day and the next soothe strangers blistered with smallpox. He knows more intimately than a coyote the unforgiving land he roams.

“This here’s the paradise of the locust, the lizard, the snake,” he says. “It’s the land of the blade and the rifle. It’s godless country.”

The Scripture-quoting Griffin is one of many standout villains in what has been a banner year for bad guys in movies and TV. In an era when men from Hollywood to Congress are being called to task for generations of discrimination, sexual harassment and holding power, our latest round of miscreants tend to be white, some born of privilege, others not.

They mark a notable evolution from films of the past that featured tomahawk-wielding “Indians,” shape-shifting Soviet spies, bandolier-laden Islamic terrorists and sharp-clawed aliens from distant galaxies.

Among the most resonant this year are Sam Rockwell’s racist, homophobic cop in “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri”; Michael Shannon’s menacing researcher in the foreboding and fantastical “The Shape of Water”; Alexander Skarsgard’s impeccably tailored, vicious husband in “Big Little Lies”; the council of men who imprison and impregnate women in “The Handmaid’s Tale”; the ape-hating Colonel in “War for the Planet of the Apes,” and the liberals and racists in the satire turned horror film “Get Out.”

Each has compelled audiences to reflect on the sins of these characters while also exploring what motivates them. How are notions of goodness — no matter how slight — blotted out by sinister impulses and premeditations that are the seeds of twisted spirits?

This recent group of tormented villains embodies a cultural war in an America anxious over its direction amid restive populations of women and people of color, and widening divides between liberals and conservatives and rich and poor. Frank Griffin, who perverts the Bible for his own malevolence, is emblematic of the toxic collusion of religion and politics. He’s as mesmerizing as an Evangelical preacher speaking in tongues and as corrupt as a senator tangled in graft.

And yet, as “Godless” creator Scott Frank notes, “you find yourself feeling strangely empathetic” toward the savage Griffin.

“He’s charismatic as a lot of narcissists can be,” says Frank, an Oscar-nominated screenwriter who wrote and directed “Godless.” “He’s familiar to us, especially if you look at what’s happening in the world right now. The notion that the ends justify the means has become extreme to a degree where you have religious figures back horrible human beings in order to accomplish what they see as pious goals. We’ve gone so tribal that way in religion and politics.”

The villain resides in our imaginations like a piece of darkness, rousing the hushed things deep within, part human, part something we’d rather not contemplate. Literature and film reach into our recesses to summon outsized and eerily accurate depictions of our world, which these days is a hyper-drive of suspicion and recrimination. News, depending on one’s persuasion, has conjured many real and perceived villains from President Trump to Hillary Clinton, and from Harvey Weinstein to Matt Lauer to Roy Moore. Scheming in the distant wings are the ever-reliable bogeymen of Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean President Kim Jong Un.

The flaw is what we most often remember in our malefactors. It makes their acts more heinous because they are in so many ways like us, the poison in our well. Shakespeare’s conniving Richard III is “rudely stamped” with a hunchback, a metaphor for his deformities of flesh and spirit. Perry Smith, a killer in Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood,” is an emotionally stunted man-child whose feet don’t touch the floor when he sits in a chair.

Rockwell’s layered depiction of police officer Jason Dixon in “Three Billboards” is of an authoritarian buffoon who can explode into violence and then return home, sit on the couch, eat sandwiches and watch TV with his mother. He is the personification of the small-town cop with too much power. The vagaries and complexities of life elude, mystify and enrage him, but he is vulnerable and open for redemption, if only he could tame his baser instincts.

“I wanted to show all of the character’s ignorance and hatred, but it was important not to judge Sam’s character,” says the film’s writer-director Martin McDonagh.

“I wanted to say there can be room for change and hope if you look at the humanity rather than the ‘ism.’” He added that the tone of the film is “kind of the way I see the world. You see the darkness, the sadness or the bleakness, but you can’t let it get you down, so you kind of laugh at it or with it or through it to get to a place, I don’t know, that’s cathartic or just livable.”

Daniels thought of Griffin as someone “spinning in all kinds of directions. He doesn’t know which way he’s going. Frank just keeps going from (reciting) biblical verses to revenge to rage to loving his son. He has these moments that overtake him like a drug. So I just made the decision to not understand him and just ride the wave.”

One glimpses little hope in Perry Wright (Skarsgard), the taut, vain, abusive husband of Celeste (Nicole Kidman) in “Big Little Lies.” He has wealth and twin sons perched like Ralph Lauren models.

But a speck of dust or a faint slight can set his fists alight. He beats Celeste (a gifted lawyer he will not let work) in their cloistered idyll by the sea, a home whose rage belies its sleek perfection. The cleverness of his character is that the animal fury that harms and bruises Celeste feeds in a perverse way their sexual passion.

Perry Wright was vilified on social media. He was evil in plain sight, the seducer, the perfect man with a heart of knives.

“People seem quite disturbed by it,” Skarsgard says of his character. “I tried to avoid playing the stereotypical abusive husband and to find someone who’s conflicted and tormented and who really struggles with this as opposed to playing a two-dimensional bad guy … It was important to find that dynamic (between Celeste and Perry) that was toxic but there’s also a lot of love there, a lot of desire. It’s intense. That makes it more difficult for Celeste as well because she blames herself a bit at least in the beginning, ‘Am I an instigator?’”

The instigators for the Colonel (Woody Harrelson) in “War for the Planet of the Apes” are past and present calamities. The maniacal Colonel is bent on exterminating apes and infected humans to stop the spread of a virus he believes will destroy mankind. He is a manifestation of war against “the other,” a trope revealing how our fears can lead to divisive politics and anti-immigrant fervor.

Griffin has his own demons in “Godless.” He is haunted by the rape of his sister and massacre of his family by a rampaging Mormon sect dressed up as Native Americans. He is raised by that clan and grows into a messianic leader of a band of killers, a gunman with a preacher’s white collar but no sheen of redemption.

“Frank’s been hiding behind the Bible and religion and doing all these terrible things and feeling justified in all he’s doing,” says Frank. “He doesn’t realize it. He’s so delusional like a lot of people like that are. They are motivated and blinded by their own righteousness. I didn’t write him thinking of him as the bad guy. I wrote him as a seriously screwed up good guy.”

But his contradictions — he nearly weeps after massacring one family and feels broken and betrayed by the adopted son who fled him — make him skilled at looking into the wounded souls of others.

“I’m just wondering what it was took the life out of your face,” Griffin asks a sheriff who his pursuing him. “Was it the weather, like most men who live out this way, or was it maybe things you’ve seen?”

———

©2017 Los Angeles Times

Visit the Los Angeles Times at www.latimes.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By Nicole Bitette

Lindsay Lohan was bitten by a snake during a hike in Phuket, Thailand, on Wednesday, she revealed on her Instagram story.

The “Mean Girls” star shared a video of her beautiful surroundings before zooming in on the red bite on her ankle.

“I love this, it’s so beautiful, amazing place … aside from my snake bite,” she said.

“Hi! I’m still in Phuket in Thailand, it’s beautiful here and yeah I got bit by a snake on a hike the other day,” she continued.

“The positive side of it is, I’m OK. Happy New Year and God bless. Ciao.”

Lohan, 31, said her shaman on the journey told her the snake bite was actually good luck.

Luck she might be in need of after she was hit with a $100,000 tax lien earlier this week for money she owed for the years 2010, 2014 and 2015, according to People.

Lohan and her family launched an investigation into the lien, claiming her team improperly handled her affairs, The Blast reported.

In 2010, Lohan made an appearance in the film “Machete” and in 2014, she had a cameo on the sitcom “2 Broke Girls.”

Lohan has been living between Dubai and London in the past few years, but made a rare public appearance in New York just a few weeks ago.

She spent the Christmas holiday in Thailand — sharing a video of the view from her hotel on Christmas Eve where she wished her followers happy holidays.

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©2017 New York Daily News

Visit New York Daily News at www.nydailynews.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Another movie year has come to an end — so it’s time for an annual tradition begun long ago by my friend and predecessor John Hartl. With a little help from my able freelance colleague Soren Andersen (who saw way more superhero movies this year than I did), here are the Dubious Achievements in Movies for 2017:

Best performance in a lost cause: Christine Baranski in “A Bad Moms Christmas”; Michelle Pfeiffer in “mother!”; Idris Elba in “The Mountain Between Us”; Goldie Hawn in “Snatched”; James McAvoy in “Split”; Kate Winslet in “Wonder Wheel,” Liam Neeson in “Mark Felt.”

Best chemistry: Gemma Arterton and Sam Claflin in “Their Finest”; David Oyelowo and Rosamund Pike in “A United Kingdom”; Kumail Nanjiani and Zoe Kazan in “The Big Sick”; Timothee Chalamet and Armie Hammer in “Call Me By Your Name”; John Boyega and Kelly Marie Tran in “Star Wars: The Last Jedi”; Emma Stone and Andrea Riseborough in “Battle of the Sexes”; Sally Hawkins and Doug Jones in “The Shape of Water”; Debra Winger and Tracy Letts in “The Lovers”; and, as odd and at-odds brothers, Channing Tatum and Adam Driver in “Logan Lucky.”

Worst chemistry: Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne in “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets”; Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan in “Fifty Shades Darker.”

Best food: Those sumptuous French lunches in “Paris Can Wait.”

Best hang: OK, so “Going in Style” wasn’t that great. But spending 96 minutes being buddies with Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman and Alan Arkin is time well spent.

Most heart-wrenching ending: “The Florida Project.”

Best breakout: Daniel Kaluuya in “Get Out”; Timothee Chalamet in “Call Me By Your Name” and “Lady Bird” (and “Hostiles,” coming Jan. 5); Tiffany Haddish in “Girls Trip”; Ansel Elgort in “Baby Driver”; Gal Godot in “Wonder Woman.”

Best reminder that he’s always been terrific: Sam Elliott, using that burnished voice to gloriously low-key effect in “The Hero.”

Best popcorn movies: “Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” “Baby Driver,” “Thor: Ragnarok,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “Girls Trip,” “Spider-Man: Homecoming,” “Wonder Woman,” “Blade Runner 2049,” “The Fate of the Furious.”Most swoonworthy costumes: “A Quiet Passion” (designed by Catherine Marchand), “Murder on the Orient Express” (Alexandra Byrne), “Lady Macbeth” (Holly Waddington), “The Greatest Showman” (Ellen Mirojnick), “The Man Who Invented Christmas” (Leonie Prendergast) and “Phantom Thread” (Mark Bridges; opening in Seattle Jan. 12).

Best performance by an animal: That dog trapped on a mountain with Idris Elba and Kate Winslet in “The Mountain Between Us”; the canine version of a third wheel.

Best potential double feature, history division: “Dunkirk” and “Darkest Hour” both memorably told of the same event — the historic evacuation of hundreds of thousands of Allied troops from the beaches of Dunkirk, France, during World War II — from entirely different perspectives (and in entirely different styles). (Add “Their Finest,” which also touches upon the Dunkirk events, for a pretty swell triple.)

Best potential double feature, superhero division: I wonder if anyone saw “Wonder Woman” and “Professor Marston and the Wonder Women” (the too-little-seen origin story of the Wonder Woman comic) back-to-back? I wish I had.

Weirdest potential double feature: It was entirely possible, for a while early this fall, to go to a multiplex and watch back-to-back screenings of “mother!” and “The Killing of a Sacred Deer.” After which, I imagine, one would need to go lie down, with a cold compress and maybe a drink.

Best superhero: Tom Holland in “Spider-Man: Homecoming.” As Soren noted in his review, of the three men who recently donned the Spidey suit, “Tobey Maguire was pretty good, Andrew Garfield was so-so, but Holland … Well, when you’ve got it, you’ve got it.”

Best villain in a good movie: Woody Harrelson’s rogue colonel in “War for the Planet of the Apes”; Jeff Goldblum’s silky, smiling Grandmaster and Cate Blanchett’s malevolently hair-smoothing Hela in “Thor: Ragnarok”; Helen Mirren’s evil Cockney-voiced matriarch in “The Fate of the Furious.”

Best villain in a bad movie: Katherine Heigl in “Unforgettable” (I still remember the spin she gave to the hissed line “Don’t you have anything organic?”), and whoever it was who thought “The Snowman” was ready for paying audiences.

Most disappointing villain: Steppenwolf in “Justice League.” A bore. A snore.

Best yelling: Halle Berry in “Kidnap.” Now, would somebody please find her a decent movie?

Best drunk: Bryan Cranston’s boisterous character in “Last Flag Flying.”

Most words: Aaron Sorkin’s “Molly’s Game,” whose stars, Jessica Chastain and Idris Elba, made an art of rapid-fire dialogue.

Least words: The dialogue-free animated film “The Red Turtle” beautifully demonstrated the eloquence of silence.

Most ubiquitous word: “Wonder,” “Wonderstruck” and “Wonder Wheel,” for some reason, opened within weeks of each other this fall; no doubt causing some box-office confusion.

Best sconces: “Murder on the Orient Express,” a film which briefly inspired me to redecorate my entire home in the style of a 1930s first-class train car.

Best evidence that the romantic comedy isn’t dead: “Fifty Shades Darker,” a hilarious boy-meets-girl romp, which made me giggle so much I nearly spilled my Diet Coke … oh, wait, it wasn’t supposed to be funny? Never mind. (OK, “Their Finest.” “The Big Sick.” “Paris Can Wait.”)

Best cameo: Well, it was in “Thor: Ragnarok” and if you haven’t seen it already, I’m not about to spoil it for you. Oh, and there’s a pretty good one in “Baby Driver,” too.

Now you see him, now you don’t: Ridley Scott, not wanting his drama “All the Money in the World” to be tainted by sexual-abuse accusations against his star Kevin Spacey, replaced Spacey with Christopher Plummer and reshot every scene he was in — and still made his Christmas release date.

Slyest scene-stealing: Taika Waititi in “Thor: Ragnarok”; Josh Gad in “Beauty and the Beast”; Tiffany Haddish in “Girls Trip”; Bill Nighy in “Their Finest”; Hilary Swank in “Logan Lucky”; Baby Groot in “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2.”

Most welcome sight: Michelle Pfeiffer and her velvet Slinky of a voice hadn’t graced a movie for nearly five years, but she returned with a vengeance, with deliciously wicked turns in “mother!” and “Murder on the Orient Express.” Also in the always-a-pleasure-to-see-you-on-the-big-screen department: Cicely Tyson (“Last Flag Flying”), Keith Carradine (“A Quiet Passion”), Kristin Scott Thomas (“Darkest Hour”).

Best dancing: I don’t know about “best,” but Armie Hammer’s dance-floor moves in “Call Me By Your Name” launched a thousand GIFs.

Saddest goodbye: Carrie Fisher’s final performance, as Gen. Leia Organa in “Star Wars: The Last Jedi.” A dedication in the final credits reads “In loving memory of our princess, Carrie Fisher.” May the Force be with her, always; now I need to go deal with, um, something in my eye.

Best reasons to look forward to 2018: Coming right up in January — Daniel Day-Lewis as a moody London couturier in Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Phantom Thread”; Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks finding their journalist groove in Steven Spielberg’s “The Post”; Margot Robbie becomes Tonya Harding in “I, Tonya.” (I know, she’s too tall. But still.) And, coming in March: Ava DuVernay’s star-studded “A Wrinkle in Time.” Happy New Year, everyone!

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©2017 The Seattle Times

Visit The Seattle Times at www.seattletimes.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

There were so many gigantic news events in 2017 that the merely huge, or yooge, got the dog-bites-man treatment. What happened while we were focused on the president’s tweets; the attempt to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act; the hurricanes in Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico; the tax bill; and #MeToo? Los Angeles Times Opinion asked two close observers of the media environment, Adam H. Johnson (from the political left of center) and Sean Davis (from the political right of center), to list the top 10 under-covered stories of the year. Read Davis’ contribution first and Johnson’s below.

By Sean Davis

1 “Russian collusion” charges were a dud

Despite a year’s worth of investigation into the matter, zero independently verifiable evidence of alleged illegal collusion between Donald Trump and the Russian government has been offered to the public. In fact, there’s far more evidence that President Obama’s Department of Justice colluded with a shady DNC-funded outfit — Fusion GPS — to cook up a pretext for spying on the administration’s political opponents. The anti-Trump collusion hand played by Trump’s detractors is so far a complete bust. The real story is a journalistic jackpot that for some reason nobody wants to claim.

2 The economy roared

The U.S. economy came roaring back in 2017. GDP growth is strong and steady, and the unemployment rate now approaches lows not seen since the early 2000s. The economy has added over 1.9 million payroll jobs this year. Consumer confidence is at a 17-year high. The 2017 economic recovery is nonetheless a major story widely ignored by the political press.

3 The stock market boomed

It’s not just the economy, though. The stock market, following a lost decade of equity returns, also came roaring back over the last year. Although New York Times columnist Paul Krugman predicted after Trump’s election that the stock market would “never” recover, the exact opposite has happened, with the Dow Jones industrial average repeatedly posting record highs throughout the year.

4 Islamic State was crushed in Raqqah and Mosul

A year ago, the Islamic State wasn’t just on the rise in the Middle East, it was firmly in charge, with wide swaths of the region under its control. But in October, U.S.-backed forces completed the total liberation of Raqqah, the Islamic State’s Syrian capital. That followed the liberation of Mosul, a major Iraqi city captured by the Islamic State in 2014. In less than a year, Trump and his national security team accomplished what the previous administration suggested was impossible.

5 Thanks to James Comey, the FBI’s reputation is in tatters

This year we learned that the FBI’s top ranks were infested with political actors eager to use the agency to settle scores. Not only did former Director James B. Comey abscond with confidential documents, he leaked them to his friends and the press, then refused to give those documents to Congress. In addition, his top deputies — those responsible for investigating both Hillary Clinton and Trump — were sharing text messages about how important it was to defeat Trump. One of these Comey deputies even mused about deploying a secret “insurance policy” to keep Trump out of the White House. Comey’s biggest accomplishment wasn’t equitable enforcement of the law; it was the corrupt politicization of the agency’s leadership ranks and the destruction of its reputation.

6 We still know nothing about what motivated the Vegas shooter

Months after the deadliest mass shooting in American history, we don’t know why a gunman fired on a crowd of innocent concertgoers. If law enforcement authorities have any leads or theories, they’re not sharing them with citizens eager for answers. Perhaps the feds don’t have a clue, either. Either way, it’s shocking that the country is still in the dark about what happened.

7 The Iran deal’s facade collapsed

Despite the Obama administration’s assurances that Iran would be a reliable partner for peace, the opposite has proved true. By deliberately funding and fomenting terrorism against the U.S. and its allies in the region, Iran has shown that it cannot be trusted, and the Obama administration’s claims about the peaceful intentions of the top terrorism sponsor on Earth had no basis in reality.

8 Persecution of religious minorities continues across the globe

In Britain, Jews were targeted in record numbers in 2017. Just weeks ago, a synagogue in Sweden was firebombed. Throughout India, Christians continue to be targeted by violent religious extremists. In North Korea and China, totalitarian atheist governments regularly imprison and torture those who openly worship and proselytize. And in the Middle East, Muslims remain the No. 1 target of radical jihadists hell-bent on purging from the Earth anyone who rejects the authority of the Islamic State’s caliphate.

9 The worldwide leader in sports is in deep trouble

ESPN is in deep trouble, and it doesn’t have cord-cutting to blame. Unaffordable content deals, unpopular programming choices, and seemingly nonstop left-wing politics have severely damaged the network’s financial prospects and its relationships with viewers. The worldwide leader can recover, but only if its executives finally accept responsibility for the network’s mounting woes.

10 Due process and rule of law were restored to college campuses

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos finally restored the rule of law to college campuses and put an end to disastrous campus courts. Prior to her much-needed rule change, campuses across the country declared that secret proceedings, bereft of due process, were the best way to handle sexual assault allegations. That kangaroo system, justifiably gutted by DeVos, resulted in predators who were allowed to avoid law enforcement, victims who never received justice, and innocent people who were denied basic rights such as jury trials and access to attorneys.

ABOUT THE WRITER

Sean Davis is a cofounder of the Federalist. He previously worked as chief operations officer for a state-based journalism nonprofit, as chief financial officer of Daily Caller, and as chief investigator for Republican Sen. Tom Coburn.

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By Adam H. Johnson

1 Disenfranchisement of African American voters

While the outrage took place in 2016, the mainstream media’s indifference to voter suppression was deafening throughout 2017. Investigations by academics and journalists alike have revealed extensive civil rights violations on election day, the culmination of a long-term ploy by Republicans to reduce the number of African American voters through ID laws and other devices.

2 The South Korean peace movement

A sustained antiwar movement in South Korea has been pushing back against the Pentagon’s deployment of the provocative Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, missile system. Populating their stories with pro-THAAD quotes from defense contractor-funded think tanks and Western warmongers, the U.S. media have mostly ignored the fact that the majority of South Koreans oppose the “defensive” system, including their newly elected president who, this summer, suspended its deployment.

3 President Trump’s unprecedented non-Russia corruption

Time will tell the extent of President Trump’s connection to Russian officials and how it may have influenced his campaign but — regardless — Trump has led the most nakedly corrupt administration in modern American history, enriching himself, his family and friends and hiring a Cabinet of political cronies and billionaires. Many journalists have done great work revealing this corruption, but these stories have not turned into full-blown scandals, let alone harmed the president.

4 U.S. helped to starve and bomb Yemen

The U.S. has been fueling, arming and providing political cover to an almost three-year siege of Yemen by Saudi Arabia and others. The conflict has caused more than 10,000 civilian deaths and almost 1 million cases of cholera. But the media downplay the U.S. government’s part. For example, two editorials in the Washington Post and a CBS “60 Minutes” report last month on the bombing and humanitarian disaster left out the U.S. role entirely.

5 Hate crimes against transgender people

Queer activists, including members of the New Orleans-based BreakOUT, have noted an uptick in violence against the transgender community. A recent Human Rights Watch report documented 102 killings of transgender people since January. Eighty-eight of the victims were transgender women, nearly all of them black or Latina. The report suggested two related causes: poverty, which is 30 percent higher in the trans community than the population at large, and a lack of legal protections for trans people in general. (Most states having zero laws prohibiting discrimination against trans people.)

6 Trump’s aggression in Iraq and Syria

Despite dubious pledges to reduce America’s involvement overseas during his campaign, Trump has taken the wars in Iraq and Syria and expanded them beyond what even the most cynical analysts predicted. Trump managed to surpass President Obama’s civilian deaths total in the anti-Islamic State campaign just seven months into office.

7 Dark money to seat a right-wing Supreme Court justice

According to MapLight, a single anonymous donor gave $28.5 million to a dark-money organization, which, in turn, financed the PR campaign to block Obama’s Supreme Court nominee — Merrick Garland — and seat Neil M. Gorsuch. In past years this campaign probably would have caused a stir, but in the Trump era of perma-indignation it hardly registered a blip.

8 Rise in deaths at the U.S.-Mexico border

While U.S. media have covered the rise in missing persons in Mexico, it has mostly overlooked the missing person crisis on the border. A USA Today investigation found that immigrant deaths over the last five years have increased between 25 percent and 300 percent — a range that’s vague because, shockingly, local authorities don’t officially count border-crosser deaths. The groups No More Deaths and La Coalicion de Derechos Humanos, which are working to document the problem, argue that “the known disappearance of thousands of people in the remote wilderness of the U.S.-Mexico border zone marks one of the greatest historical crimes of our day.”

9 Ramping up war in Afghanistan

Other than the fawning over Trump’s use of the Mother of All Bombs on faceless bad guys, the massive increase in U.S. involvement in Afghanistan during the last year has rarely made headlines. The U.S. now has 15,000 troops on the ground — up from 11,000 last year. Additionally, civilians deaths are up 50 percent since 2016.

10 Protester prosecutions

Despite an uptick in coverage since the trial began three weeks ago, for almost 10 months major U.S. media ignored that the Department of Justice was going after more than 200 inauguration protesters — the vast majority for merely being in the proximity of broken windows — with sentences ranging from 10 to 65 years in federal prison. What would certainly be an outrage if it happened in Russia or Venezuela was met with almost uniform indifference by U.S. media when done stateside.

ABOUT THE WRITER

Adam H. Johnson is a media analyst for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting and co-host of the Citations Needed podcast.

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©2017 Los Angeles Times

Visit the Los Angeles Times at www.latimes.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By JOE GILROY

SHELBY — Despite a snowy trip south, the Norwalk girls basketball team felt right at home on Saturday.

The Truckers were facing host Shelby in a Sandusky Bay Conference Lake division game — and could do no wrong in a 20-7 first quarter that it was able to maintain in a 57-45 win.

Norwalk improved to 8-2 overall and 3-0 in the Lake division, setting itself up for an important stretch of league games over the next two weeks.

It was 10-0 in favor of the Truckers from the start, but it wasn’t easy from start to finish.

The offense went stagnant in the middle two quarters, and the Whippets (2-6, 0-3) began chipping away at the deficit.

“That is something that for whatever reason we have done quite a bit of this season,” Norwalk coach Brock Manlet said. “We have gotten off to some good starts and then we get kind of complacent and lose focus. We are working on those issues, and hopefully will get better at playing all four quarters.

“Shelby did some things that made it difficult and threw us off our game,” he added. “But, we weren’t executing the offense like we know we can and was doing a lot of standing around.”

In the third quarter, the Whippets made their strongest move to try to take a lead. They got themselves to within four points, thanks to a technical foul on the Norwalk bench, and then converted a three-point play that never should have been.

Bailey Walter pulled down a rebound and quickly put up another shot attempt that clanged off the bottom of the rim. But there was a foul call, and the referee inexplicably gave her credit for making the shot that she clearly missed and sent her to the line.

“We had to overcome some stuff today,” Manlet said. “There was a lot of ticky-tacky stuff getting called and it took us out of our game for a while, but the girls didn’t let the game out of hand even though there was some disagreement from our side.”

But Norwalk eventually settled back in, outscoring Shelby by a 17-9 margin over the final eight minutes to win comfortably.

“That says a lot about this team,” Manlet said. “They could have sulked or paid attention to what the referees were doing and let the game continue to slip away, or they could do what they did and play through it. I am very proud of them for showing that resiliency.”

Senior Bethany Cling had a big day, as she led Norwalk with 19 points on 7-of-11 shooting and grabbed six rebounds. She also put a lot of pressure on the Whippets’ offense, notching four steals.

Jasmine Thomas finished with 12 points and five rebounds, while Kaelyn Harkness finished with eight points, seven steals and five assists. Jada Thomas added 10 points.

“I think we let up a little defensively,” Shelby coach Natalie Lantz said. “We gave up some transitional buckets. Communication broke down a little bit and then we didn’t execute offensively like we had been doing in the second and third quarter.”

Norwalk was 22-of-51 shooting (43 percent) from the floor, and knocked down 9-of-18 free-throw attempts. Defensively, Norwalk had 17 steals as the Whippets struggled through 30 turnovers.

Bailey Walter led Shelby with 17 points and nine rebounds.

Norwalk is off until a Friday night home game vs. Sandusky (4-7, 0-5) on Jan. 5, followed by a highly-anticipated matchup vs. Bellevue (10-1, 3-0) on Jan. 9.

By Christopher Borrelli

CHICAGO — Sometime around Inauguration Day, I started to notice the tall slender man at the southern edge of Lake Shore Drive. He stood perfectly rigid, his head thrust backward, staring skyward, as if watching an airplane pass. The man — a sculpture from artist Tom Friedman — is long and silver, made of baking tins and scrap foil. He was installed last fall on the lakefront. He’s hard to miss, but only after Donald Trump entered the White House did I start to wonder what he was watching. Did he see an asteroid approaching?

Was the sky falling?

There is culture that speaks to the moment, and there are moments so loud and dissonant that it becomes hard to distinguish where the moment ends and the culture begins. Or vice versa.

What if nothing much happened in 2017? What if it had a been a year like any other? Some losses, some triumphs, an outrage or two, then the next year began, institutions intact, morality intact, status quo. Would that slender man have felt ominous then? Would the culture we occupy — much of it planned long before the 2016 election — have looked different? Or were things trending downward for a while, fed on an ugliness lying in wait? This time last year, I was finishing a story that was partly about whether 2016 was the worst year ever. Turns out — nope. If you’re in need of an episode recap of what happened in the United States, Season 241, Episodes 2,881 through 2,892:

Donald Trump became president. The president sought a ban on travel from seven predominantly Muslim countries. Then the president sought a ban on transgender soldiers. The president said there were bad people “on all sides” of a white nationalist rally in Virginia (that ended with a protester being killed). The president endorsed the Senate candidacy of a judge accused of sexually harassing teenagers. The president brushed aside accusations that he sexually harassed a number of women. The president attempted to roll back hundreds of regulations, affecting children’s health, education, national parks. Hurricanes hit Texas and Puerto Rico; the president threw paper towels at survivors. On Jan. 1, after taking a knee during the national anthem to protest racism, quarterback Colin Kaepernick played his last game in the NFL; months later, when other players kneeled, the president sought their firing.

The Trump presidential campaign was repeatedly connected with Russian efforts to undermine the 2016 election; the campaign became part of an ongoing investigation. A gunman in Las Vegas killed nearly 60 people and wounded 500 more. There were additional terror attacks, in New York and Texas. North Korea threatened nuclear war, then the president threatened back. Scores of powerful men in Hollywood and the media (and nearly every profession and governmental body) were accused of sexual harassment and removed; Minnesota U.S. Sen. Al Franken said he would step down after allegations were made against him. The president retweeted videos from white extremist groups, insulted the prime minster of Australia, pulled the U.S out of both free-trade and the Paris Climate agreements, embraced dictators and called the press the “enemy of the people.” He referred to the news that he didn’t like as “fake news.” Also, Time magazine asked, “Is Truth Dead?”

Other stuff happened, too.

But basically, culture changed. The air grew heavier, the foundations on which much rested — literally, morally — witnessed a slow rumble. One of my favorite podcasts of the year was “Where Should We Begin,” a series of actual couples-counseling sessions, which at times is like listening to pieces of a cliff break off a continental shelf, chunk by chunk. Landscape changed overnight, sometimes tentatively, sometimes with a crash. A lot of people liked the change; they were, electorally, demographically, statistically, in the minority. The rest felt a steep dive — what decay already existed now accelerated.

Winter arrived (as they said on “Game of Thrones”).

People started “saying stuff to each other, none of it actually becoming dialogue” (as Ali Smith wrote in “Autumn,” her brilliant novel set in a splintering, post-Brexit England).

The galaxy, at last, had “lost all hope” (as Gen. Leia said in “Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” having sent a distress signal to a universe that appeared, at best, indifferent).

But wait!

Like the Millennium Falcon swooping in at the last minute: Democrat Doug Jones, to the relief of Democrats and Republicans alike, beat Roy Moore, who has been accused of molesting teens, in the Alabama Senate race — then a few days later, a terrific new “Star Wars” arrived.

Merry Christmas, indeed.

And it wasn’t just the usual Stormtrooper parade: “The Last Jedi” is as much a product of its moment as any overtly political work released this year, containing both the downswings and hopes of its times in one package. Female leaders are second-guessed and mansplained. Fundamentals are questioned. We see sometimes it’s best not to meet heroes. There’s a trip to a planet characterized by income inequality, ruled by a One Percent; in bad-guy Snoke, we get the juiciest portrait of needling, soulless opportunism since “Saturday Night Live” portrayed Steve Bannon as the Grim Reaper.

Steven Spielberg’s “The Post,” which for months has been called the right movie at the right moment, felt relevant, if in less magical and obvious ways. It doesn’t have the engine of a classic fairy tale, but rather the power of a populist Frank Capra fairy tale. It tells the story of how the Washington Post printed the Pentagon Papers during the Nixon administration, as the administration actively sought ways to subvert the newspaper’s First Amendment rights. When Chicago actress Carrie Coon (playing journalist Meg Greenfield) reads the Supreme Court decision — saying the press exists to “serve the governed, not the governors” — I imagine it was hard for Coon to not look directly into the camera and wink. Unlike the years of development most movies take, “The Post” came together remarkably fast; it didn’t start shooting until Memorial Day.

You feel the clipped urgency to get it on screen immediately.

The result (opening here Jan. 5) is a call for resistance, though less an argument against a White House than an argument for journalism itself, the exhausting, intense reporting that goes into holding public servants accountable. Ironically then, Coon was also at the heart of the finale of HBO’s “The Leftovers,” as a woman wandering through a world pulling apart, where accountability no longer has much relevancy. The plot, if you recall, is about how the world was altered overnight when 2 percent of its people vanish. Right until the end (and maybe after), Coon’s Nora was struggling to find purpose in the remains, and as seen in a lot of culture this year — “Twin Peaks: The Return,” “Mother!” — what remained was a shred of empathy in a dream-state existence.

In other words, resistance took less evident forms.

For instance, I met the Resistance in June, at a music festival in Wisconsin. At least they called themselves the Resistance. They were registering voters; they kept a bowl of pins for people they liked, each with the insignia of the Rebels from “Star Wars” — not unlike the Rebel-insignia rings that children collect in “Last Jedi,” dreaming of joining the fight one day. The Resistance also found a place in your mailbox: Creators of Cards Against Humanity, the playfully abrasive Chicago-based party game, solicited $2.25 million in $15 donations, to legally tie up a small patch of land on the Mexico-U.S. border, to defend against the Trump administration’s attempts at building a border wall. With the money, the Cards folks also “redistributed” $1,000 each to 100 low-income people, retained a Texas lawyer and, charmingly, stuffed envelopes full of good news.

You know, to cheer you up.

It was kind of a prank, kind of art — and definitely an act of resistance.

The trouble with 2017 was that, as the relentlessness of significant, impactful news refused to slow — as bombarding us with way too much to process and react to became a political strategy — it became hard to tell if an act of resistance was a response to decay, or the decay was a necessary byproduct of the resistance. Take the biggest cultural story of the year: the sexual harassment charges against powerful men that tsunamied, taking with them Louis CK and Harvey Weinstein and Matt Lauer and Russell Simmons, among others. I can think of more than a few instances where the culture itself seemed presciently cued in: The Art Institute of Chicago had an insightful show on Gauguin, who has long been a kind of Exhibit A of our ongoing debate on what to do with great art made by bad people. Inversely, Kerry James Marshall painted a 132-foot-tall mural on the side of the Chicago Cultural Center that honored 20 Chicago women, some famous, some not. Did you pick up on the side-eye and smirk that Laura Dern throws a boundary-stepping Oscar Isaac in “The Last Jedi”? It looks well practiced. Just as Daniel Day Lewis’ impervious fashion designer in “Phantom Thread” (opening here Jan. 12), a man who treats women as canvases, matter-of-factly explains to a muse: It is his job to provide her breasts — that is, if he chooses to give them.

It’s not as if any of these movies or exhibits were hatched in the past two months; it’s not as if the arts community were somehow more woke on systemic misogyny. (If they were, they wouldn’t be among the biggest misogynists.) Yet each of these works, in its own way, arriving this year, became a comment on institutional rot. That foundational decay curdled at the center of so many works in 2017 — again, works not conceived and directed at Trump himself — suggests a country that’s been unraveling in elementary ways, a nation where no one even agrees anymore on the basic point of the country.

So, horror films had a blockbuster year, and Ken Burns’ epic Vietnam War documentary on PBS — a government lies to its people, and goes to the trouble of covering up the lies? — played almost quaint at times. “War for the Planet of the Apes” was a strong argument against humanity itself, and “The Florida Project” became a Huck Finn for the age of inequality. The alienation of a shrinking middle class fueled Steven Soderbergh’s return to directing, “Logan Lucky,” and “S-Town,” the hit podcast from the “This American Life” team, focused on the claustrophobia and collapse of shared values in a small town. The tiny Steep Theatre in Rogers Park didn’t seem concerned if “Earthquakes in London” — a sprawling, three-hour global collapse — fit on its stage, only that it had a stage. In Carmen Maria Machado’s indelible debut, the story collection “Her Body and Other Parties,” women read porn-star minds and charted sexual history by the apocalypse unfolding before them. Bruce Springsteen, our reliable foghorn of hope in the murkiest American moments, used his Broadway stage for a study of depression.

Superman himself, in DC’s “Doomsday Clock,” is unable to sleep.

None of which is quite protest. You also didn’t find much music in 2017 reminiscent of the heart-on-a-sleeve outrage from a half-century ago. Instead, the times seemed to strip off navel-gazing: Jay-Z rapped about never intending to mope around a mansion; Lana Del Rey, a seemingly vaporous pop presence by design, sounded eager to cast away nostalgia. In Kendrick Lamar’s “DNA,” there’s a desire to see super clearly:

Tell me when destruction gonna be my fate

Gonna be your fate, gonna be our faith

Peace to the world, let it rotate

Sex, money, murder — our DNA

Then again, in a country where white nationalism is seeing a resurgence, the act of creating art itself is political: When Perfume Genius — the stage name of performer Mike Hadreas, who is gay — sings, “How long must we live right/ Before we don’t even have to try?” he sounds long past caring for an answer. Compassion becomes a political act: There was a remarkable episode of Aziz Ansari’s “Master of None” that, for one episode, shifted the focus to a doorman and a cashier who is deaf — the sort of blink-and-you-miss background roles often treated like wallpaper.

Perhaps there was a fear of the didactic, a worry about creating work that dates quickly, a concern that the line between moral righteousness and moral grandstanding gets thin.

Smart things to worry about.

Perhaps it’s too early in a relatively new White House to expect much: But when the Resistance didn’t mince words this year, it created the culture’s best moments. Tina Fey devouring a cake, in real time, on “SNL,” working out Trump-era anxiety. PJ Harvey, in one of Chicago’s most discussed performances of 2017, reimagining the festival show as political dirge. The public voted clearly for Seth Meyers, Jimmy Kimmel and Steven Colbert’s political satire over an increasingly irrelevant Jimmy Fallon. The National Portrait Gallery filled an exhibit with images of laborers, even as Congress moved to extend tax cuts to primarily the richest Americans.

“Dunkirk” and “Darkest Hour” were not conceived as reminders of what true leadership resembles, but it’s hard to imagine either playing many other ways now. “Get Out” blasted through the racial-healing rhetoric of the Obama years, only to land like a cruel joke weeks after the Trump inauguration. Indeed, you could argue the Resistance was born the day after the inauguration, at the Women’s March, with its homemade banners and ubiquitous “pussy hats.” The opening salvos of an insurgent culture? Less than a month later, Vince Staples rapped in “BagBak” about the president using language we can’t print in a newspaper, but really all you need is the song’s refrain:

We on now

By summer, monuments to the Confederacy were coming down, while in Chicago, a 5-foot-tall gold message went up, pointed at Trump Tower, courtesy of the city itself:

Real Fake

The city says the sculpture wasn’t political: But then, we should not confuse the city of Chicago with the Resistance, and besides, it’s not the city’s place to say. “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” ends with an uncertain Resistance, hoping to persevere “not by fighting what we hate but by saving what we love.” That’s political in 2017. Things get worse before they get better. Asteroids hit the earth. Look up. “The Post” — the “Rogue One” of Nixon movies — ends not quite in triumph but with the Watergate scandal. Ali Smith’s “Autumn,” a book I returned often to this year, finds comfort in this inevitable falling apart, the way seasons pass and resilience rises to the top, the way everything is “bones in grass, bones in flowers, the leafy branches of the ash tree above them, Which is what, in the end, is left of us all, whether we carry a gun while we’re here or we don’t. So. While were here. I mean, while we’re still here.”

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©2017 Chicago Tribune

Visit the Chicago Tribune at www.chicagotribune.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By Jessica Schladebeck

Live from New York it’s … some of the most cringe-worthy and hilarious television moments of 2017.

Television viewers fell in love with no shortage of scripted shows this year, but it’s the live, on-air bloopers that have provided some of the year’s most laughable and heart-stopping moments.

Here are just a few of 2017’s best live television bloopers:

CAMERAMAN CONFUSION

Megyn Kelly’s new morning talk show, “Megyn Kelly Today,” worked its way through a rocky premiere week when it debuted on NBC in September.

Nothing captures that better than a flub from one of the anchor’s cameramen, who walked into frame during a Kelly’s live interview with soccer star Carli Lloyd.

He quickly realized his gaffe, but he still managed to make matters worse by shouting “s — t” before making his way out of the camera’s view.

Earlier in the week, Kelly faced backlash for comments she made during an interview with Debra Messing.

“Is it true you became a — and became gay — because of Will?” she asked one super fan.

Messing the following day said she “regrets” appearing on the show.

POOR PREPARATION

Ahead of the Alabama special election that ended with victory for Democrat Doug Jones, Ted Crockett — a spokesperson for his opponent, Roy Moore — made a massive flub during an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper.

In addressing why Moore believes Muslims should not be allowed to serve in Congress, Crockett said: “Because you have to swear on a Bible. I had to do it. I’m an elected official, three times I had to swear on a Bible. You have to swear on a Bible to be an elected official in the United States of America. He alleges that a Muslim cannot do that, ethically, swearing on a Bible.”

Tapper quickly corrected him — explaining you can “swear on anything, really” — prompting an extended, unsettling silence from Crockett.

BLOUSE BLOOPER

Australia news anchor Amber Sherlock had a meltdown during a live broadcast upon realizing her fellow journalist Julie Snook and their guest for the day, psychologist Sandy Rea, all showed up wearing the same color.

“I need Julie to put a jacket on because we’re all in white,” she can be seen telling someone off screen. “I asked her before we came on. Julie you need to put a jacket on.”

Amid their bickering, Rea offered to change, but Sherlock dismissed her and instead continued to sink her claws into her colleague.

Snook held up the newscast until her fellow 9 News co-worker zipped a black jacket over her white ensemble.

CHIPPER CHILDREN

A March BBC interview with Robert E. Kelly, a political science professor discussing the ramifications of the impeachment of the South Korean president, took a turn for the cheerful when his daughter danced into his home office.

Kelly continued, but then another child made their way into the room, this one in a squeaky walker.

Their mother, Jung-a Kim, slid into the room and managed to scoop up the youngsters before shutting the door behind her.

They’ve since been dubbed the “Viral BBC family,” and Kelly ahead of the holidays shared a Christmas card with the caption: “Merry Christmas. To all the people who follow me because of my video or my children, thank you.”

STREETCAR SLIP-UP

A “Wheel of Fortune” contestant named Kevin earned internet mockery after he unintentionally added a suggestive twist to a popular Tennessee Williams play title.

Rather than guess the letter “M” to complete the word “Named” in the phrase “A Streetcar Name Desire,” Kevin guessed “k” — leaving his opponent to take the prize.

“Although you got the right answer, I’d rather seen Kevin’s play,” host Pat Sajak responded, laughing.

FORECAST FAUX PAS

Mississippi weatherman Patrick Ellis was delivering a typical broadcast back in March when he was interrupted by an unnamed child who reportedly farted on him.

Ellis tried to play it cool and even let the boy make his own weather predictions.

“Yeah, there are farts everywhere and toots,” he said. “It’s crazy.”

MOONLIGHT MISTAKE

But no live television tumble in 2017 can compare to the Oscars Best Picture gaffe.

Faye Dunaway in the final moments of the biggest award show in the entertainment industry wrongfully announced “La La Land” claimed the night’s top prize after taking the card from her co-presenter, Warren Beatty.

The cast and crew from the Emma Stone-led movie made their way onstage and began their acceptance speeches before the error was corrected. The flick’s producer, Jordan Horowitz, announced to crowd that “Moonlight” was in fact the winner before showing the card off to the stunned world.

“It’s not a joke,” he told the crowd, Oscar still in hand. “I’m afraid they read the wrong thing.”

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©2017 New York Daily News

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My husband and I are watchful parents. We’ve always been protective of our sons, looking out for their health and well-being. Sadly, we didn’t see it coming when football took the life of our son Zack.

Zack was a star athlete and lived for football. Although I was never a big fan of the game, I supported my son and cheered him on when he played at Pittsburg State University from 2007 to 2010. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was watching him suffer countless sub-concussive hits and concussions. Years later, we found out that Zack suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, which eventually led to his death.

Zack’s health situation was not as uncommon as it may seem. About 70,000 college football players across the U.S. are at risk for concussions and even CTE. These children suffer hard hits on a regular basis during practice and in games. Although these hits might not have many visible consequences immediately, the long-term effects are clear and devastating: depression, mood swings and, later in life, severe neurological diseases.

As a mother, I can’t stand by any longer and stay silent. Football needs to change.

The NCAA, which leads the nationwide college football agenda, has known for decades about the long-term health risks of repeated head impacts in football but has failed to be proactive in enacting necessary changes that could prevent them.

Whereas the NFL has instituted mandatory return-to-play guidelines after concussions, the NCAA has no standardized rules for players to this day. What’s worse is that college football players need the guidelines even more than NFL players.

It is time for the NCAA to take action and protect student athletes. That is why my husband and I have joined a class action suit against the organization, on behalf of my son, to hold the NCAA accountable.

For many college football players like my son, playing football is a dream come true. These young student athletes will do whatever is asked of them. They will push themselves as hard and for as long as they’re told to meet the expectations of their coaches and teammates. They won’t throw in the towel because they’re dizzy or thoughts are cloudy. They’ll simply keep playing or “manning up.”

It’s the responsibility of those in charge, especially the NCAA, to educate both student athletes and their parents, and ensure that student athletes are following strict rules to protect them from the long-term risks of concussions. The NCAA failed to protect my son, and we can’t let that happen again.

Zack was a happy and smart person. He loved his time at Pittsburg State University, but when it was over he went on to start his career. He had a girlfriend and a young son, whom he loved more than anything. It wasn’t until a few years after college when we started to notice some changes in Zack. He had anger issues that he never had before and, although he hid it well, he also struggled with depression.

One day, he simply couldn’t take it any longer and took his own life. He was only 26.

Before he died, Zack shared with me that he felt football was the reason for his health problems. We weren’t fully informed of the risks involved in football, so we didn’t know the potential for long-term consequences. However, several months after Zack passed away, my sister was watching a documentary and pointed out to me that the issues Zack struggled with were the same as the symptoms of CTE. I didn’t know anything about CTE at the time, but we decided to have my son’s brain tested anyway. Several months after that, Zack’s CTE was confirmed.

We can’t go back and change anything for Zack. All we can do is honor our son by sharing his story with others. Many parents who send their children into the care of the NCAA and a university think that what happened to Zack will never happen to their sons. But that’s simply not true. More must be done to protect students and ensure their health and safety are not the price to be paid for playing college football.

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ABOUT THE WRITER

Nicki Langston is the mother of Zack Langston, who played as an outside linebacker for Pittsburg State University. She wrote this for the Kansas City Star.

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©2017 The Kansas City Star (Kansas City, Mo.)

Visit The Kansas City Star (Kansas City, Mo.) at www.kansascity.com

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Once and for all, a Cleveland Browns franchise that has known no bottom can finally say it.

It can’t get any worse.

With the resting Pittsburgh Steelers running out their junior varsity roster, the NFL’s version of the seventh-grade B team joined the 2008 Detroit Lions in winless infamy Sunday in Pittsburgh and took their inglorious place as the worst team in the history of the four major professional sports.

Yes, the worst.

With due respect to the Lions (0-16), the 1899 Cleveland Spiders (20-134) and 2003 Tigers (43-119), the 1972-73 Philadelphia 76ers (9-73), and the 1974-75 Washington Capitals (8-67-5), a franchise mismanaged worse than Enron is in a class of its own.

Remember, the Browns came within a missed field goal of going 0-16 last year, too. This year, they finished the job, assuring the “Perfect Season” parade will go on as planned Saturday.

In a league designed for parity, the Browns remained a parody to the end, poetically sealing the 28-24 loss after wide-open receiver Corey Coleman dropped a perfect fourth-down pass from DeShone Kizer in the red zone.

As you might recall, Coleman was the player they drafted with the Eagles’ first-round pick last year after passing on Carson Wentz.

How’s that Moneyball plan working out for you, Cleveland?

Now, despite owner Jimmy Haslam’s insistence otherwise, the reasonable next course — also known as the road never traveled — is for coach Hue Jackson to follow the old front office out the door.

I was a big fan of the Jackson hire two years ago, and to his credit, he never lost his beaten-down team. The Browns played hard for him. But that shouldn’t be the standard. When life gave Jackson lemons, he made ... beet juice, turning a bad roster on paper into a worse one on the field, most prominently mismanaging Kizer. (Yes, I’m still confident the 21-year-old Toledo native has an NFL future. Kizer no doubt mixes in a lot of bad decisions with the good, but he is bright and will get better from this. His career-high 314-yard passing day — which included a beautiful 56-yard deep ball in stride to Josh Gordon — and tough runs in this game again showed there is so much good to be mined.)

In a sport in which alignment between the front office and the coaching staff is important, it makes no sense to not allow new general manager John Dorsey to hire his own coach. Tanking or not, I just don’t know how you survive the worst two-year stretch in NFL history.

Especially at such a critical crossroads for the organization.

The opportunity for a fresh start is here, the misery of the past two years positioning the Browns well for the future, with mounds of draft picks — including the Nos. 1 and 4 selections in 2018 — and $118 million in salary cap space. Like the Lions before them, they can evolve from winless to winners in a short amount time. In fact, as long as Dorsey does his job competently, mark it down: Cleveland will be in the 2020 playoffs.

But I suppose that is talk for another day.

On Sunday, after almost two decades of digging, it was hard to see any light at all.

A franchise no stranger to wrenching depths finally hit bottom.

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©2017 The Blade (Toledo, Ohio)

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PITTSBURGH -- Browns owner Jimmy Haslam has heard all of the criticism about bringing coach Hue Jackson back with a 1-31 record in his two seasons.

"I'll say what I always say: we have the best fans in the NFL and when we win, Hue Jackson will be their hero,'' said Haslam. "I'm convinced of that. It's all about winning and losing, and until we start winning we're going to catch a lot of grief and we deserve it.''

Haslam made his remarks in the hallway outside the locker room here after the Browns lost 28-24 to the Steelers to fall to 0-16.

"I don't think there's a lot to say,'' he said. "I remember standing approximately here last year and apologizing to our fans for the poor job we have done as owners, and I would just reiterate that again. Our record is unacceptable, and we accept full responsibility for that.

"I don't think that I need to say it, but the way the world works today, I want to say this: Hue Jackson will be back as our coach next year in 2018. He and John (Dorsey) are already off to a good start and working well together. There weren't a lot of positives today, except we also secured the No. 4 draft pick, so we're excited to see what John can do with the draft picks we've accumulated as well as what we do in free agency.

"I heard Hue's remarks. I don't know that I have a lot to say to that. So we've got a long way to go, a lot of work to do and anxious to get after it."

He declined to specifically answer what might happen if the Bengals call about Jackson in the event Marvin Lewis leaves, which is expected to happen.

"We're delighted to have Hue Jackson as our head coach,'' said Haslam.

Does he believe Jackson can take them to the playoffs?

"I do. Absolutely,'' he said.

The Browns' owner has gotten a ton of pushback from fans and media for keeping a coach off to the worst start in NFL history. The Browns also became only the second team in NFL history along with the 2008 Lions to go 0-16.

But he's not wavering, and firmly believes Jackson is the man to turn it around.

"If you go back two years ago, I think Hue was one of the hottest assistant coaches out there, right?'' he said. "And I don't think Hue's lost his magic on how to call plays or how to run an offense or how to coach a team. And I think it's our job -- John and his group -- to get him the players to do so. OK? And I'm not saying this is going to be easy, but I'm confident we'll do this.

"Some of you don't know us that well. We do not give up easily. We're not going to give up. Is it disappointing? Hell yeah, it's disappointing. Is it discouraging? To a certain point. But we're going to get this done."

He said the fight in his team is proof that Jackson can right the ship. The Browns tied the game at 21 with 10:54 left, and failed to pull it out when receiver Corey Coleman dropped a pass a the Steelers' 11 with 1:46 remaining.

"You could say a lot of things about us this year, but down to the last minute or two minutes, our guys played hard,'' he said. "I think the primary thing an NFL coach has to do is provide leadership. I think Hue has provided great leadership."

He acknowledged that there has been little progress in these dark two years but attributes it to his failed attempt at an analytics-based front office without a football guy picking players.

"I don't think anybody predicted 0-16, so that was disappointing,'' he said. "I think we've got the ability or the opportunity to move substantially forward in this offseason for next year, and that's what we've got to do. Talk's cheap. So it's one thing for me to say it. We've got to go do it."

He confirmed reports that Dorsey and Jackson were eager to work together during the six weeks they were talking to Dorsey, and that they had a comfort level with each other.

"John had a lot of respect for Hue. The two did not really know each other. But John had a lot of respect for Hue. Hue had a lot of respect for John. And John understood Hue was going to be our head coach."

He said Dorsey never had a chance to say whether or not he wanted to hire his own man.

"The conversation was never that way,'' he said. "I told him that Hue was going to be our head coach. There was not a lot of debate going back and forth."

He said he's already seen evident they're getting along well.

"Well, I work with them every day,'' he said. "I mean, I sit with them every day. I see them going back and forth, I see them talking, I know they're in each other's offices constantly. I'm in two meetings a week with them where I can tell you there is one goal and one goal only, and that's to turn the franchise around.

"So they're working extremely well together. Now, there'll be give and take as we approach the draft, as there always is, but they're two football guys, they've got good football knowledge with top football background. They're off to a good start.''

As for reports that Jackson will hire an offensive coordinator, Haslam indicated it's not a mandate from him.

"That's Hue's call,'' he said.

Haslam has come to the conclusion that Jackson couldn't win with the quarterbacks he's had, especially this year when he went into the season without one who had ever won an NFL game as a starter. The Browns now have the No. 1 and No. 4 picks in the draft, and will likely take a quarterback at No. 1.

"It's tough to win with this many young players,'' he said. "It is so ... particularly in the quarterback room,'' he said.

He wouldn't attribute it solely to personnel decisions, but it's clear he believes that's what's been the major problem.

"I think it's all of the above, ownership, personnel, coaching,'' he said. "We can all do better, OK? And I don't think there's anybody that would tell you any differently. I know I could do a helluva lot better.''

As for trying to go out of the box with Sashi Brown, he said, "I'm not going to get into that. I'm excited about having John Dorsey here, John Dorsey lead our team. and I'm excited to see he and Hue work together."

He also reaffirmed that Chief Strategy Officer Paul DePodesta will be back.

"I think Paul and John are off to a good start, and as I said on Dec. 8, we look forward to Paul being a part of our organization going forward.''

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©2017 Advance Ohio Media, Cleveland

Visit Advance Ohio Media, Cleveland at www.cleveland.com

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The outlook is sunny for Amara Leggett, both figuratively and literally.

As Ohioans shiver in single-digit temperatures, the 16-year-old Leggett and her mother, former central Ohioans, are unpacking to start a new life on the Florida coast, an hour southeast of Orlando.

On Jan. 8, Leggett will start as a junior at the Florida Institute of Technology, majoring in computer science.

"The high is probably 78 degrees here," Leggett said on Wednesday morning.

In mid-December, she graduated from New Albany High School with her diploma and from Columbus State Community College with her associate degree.

"She sets her eyes on something and she keeps going," said her mother, Nadia Leggett. "She's always been like that."

Amara Leggett was able to knock several years off of her education and saved thousands of dollars on college using Ohio's College Credit Plus dual-enrollment program. She planned from the beginning of ninth grade to replace as many high school classes with college courses as possible.

It took a lot of trial and error, the teen said, working with school counselors to figure out what could count for what.

"I liked college more than I liked high school," Leggett said. "It's more about the real world ... I like learning. I like doing homework."

She said the other students at Columbus State didn't judge her for liking school or for her ambition.

"I'm also pretty lucky that my mom's a Realtor, and was able to drive me back and forth all the time," Leggett said. "I realize not all parents are able to do that."

Leggett isn't the first local student to graduate years early because of College Credit Plus. In May, a 15-year-old from Canal Winchester, Danya Hamad, graduated from both Reynoldsburg's BELL Early College Academy high school and from Columbus State.

Hamad started at Capital University in Bexley in the fall to finish her bachelor's degree, in hopes of becoming one of the youngest law students in modern history.

With the exploding popularity of earning high-school and college credits simultaneously, these two young college graduates are unlikely to be the last, said Steve Dackin, an official from Columbus State who helps to manage partnerships between schools and the community college. He was at the ceremony when Leggett graduated.

Before College Credit Plus was officially launched in 2015-16, Ohio had the similar Post-Secondary Enrollment Option, but it never caught on the way that this program has. A few major differences are that traditional school districts are required to hold at least one well-publicized informational session for parents and students, and districts are not allowed to deter students who are interested and deemed college-ready.

Some school districts employ teachers with the credentials to teach college classes directly in the high schools. Seventh- and eighth-graders also can participate if they can pass a college-entrance test in the subject area.

Leggett started a blog, www.ayounglegend.com, to offer parents and their teenagers advice about how to navigate College Credit Plus and aim for early graduation. She also throws in entries about investing and business, biographies of role models and inspirational quotes.

"We started talking college in third grade," her mother said. "I just wanted to expose her to the things that I was never exposed to. I told her to write out her goals ... It's always been my philosophy that the standards we set for our kids are usually lower than what they can accomplish."

Amara Leggett said she's not nervous about starting school so far from Ohio. Instead, she's excited to not be hamstrung by having to align high-school and college credits. Now she can really dig into her major, she said.

A doctorate might be in the cards one day, but that's a long way off. She might take a break after her bachelor's degree, she said. She might start a business. The future is wide open.

When choosing their new home in Florida, Leggett said, they didn't have to think too hard about whether they were moving into a good school district. Those considerations are over.

"We decided to live next to the beach," she said. "We're just going to live here and enjoy the beach."

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©2018 The Columbus Dispatch (Columbus, Ohio)

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