|
MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Order today at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
|
RIP, Herbert M. Sandler, 1931–2019
By Richard Tofel & Stephen Engelberg @ ProPublica.org, June 5
[....] He and Marion built a hugely successful business, and when they sold it, they turned full time to philanthropy, committing to give away the vast bulk of their wealth. (You can read more about Herb’s remarkable life here.) One of the first major projects they launched in this next phase of their lives was an initiative to support investigative journalism. They understood as early as 2006 that the inevitable demise of newspapers’ business model threatened a crucial pillar of our democracy — accountability reporting. The couple recruited Paul Steiger, the just-retired managing editor of the Wall Street Journal, as ProPublica’s first editor and backed his vision for a nonprofit newsroom publishing original deep-dive investigations in partnership with leading legacy media.
Why did that vision appeal to Herb Sandler? Why did he have so much respect and even affection for investigative journalists? He always gave the same answer: “I hate it when the bad guys win.”
And while he read what seemed like every story this site ever published, and pointed out even the smallest typographical error, he was always insistent that our editorial operation be completely independent [....]
By Jonathan Easley @ TheHill.com, June 5
My comments: Presidential race polls in important swing states appear to be turning towards the Dem candidates and away from Trump as they get to know some of the candidates. If one is something of a cynic, this could be a major reason for the sudden outbreak of independence by Congressional GOP from Trump. If one is a true cynic, one might also expect Trump to adjust his rhetoric and policy preferences, perhaps wisely, perhaps not so wisely, as he is not know to listen well to political advice, but he does care a great deal about "ratings."
By Zach Budryk @ TheHill.com, June 5
CNN has sued the FBI under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to produce documents relating to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia interference in the 2016 election, the network announced/ The documents in question, called 302 memos, record the answers Mueller and his team received from about 500 witnesses during the two-year probe [....]
CNN filed the case in a district court in Washington, D.C., to be handled by Judge Royce Lamberth after the FBI failed to fulfill a March FOIA request for “FBI memoranda from any and all” of the witness interviews. It follows similar lawsuits from BuzzFeed News, which is also seeking the 302s, and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which is seeking a broader trove of documents relating to the probe. The Washington Post, meanwhile, has asked a court to remove redactions in the memo concerning a January 2017 interview between Flynn and the FBI, which he later pleaded guilty to lying during [....]
The memos are also at issue in a subpoena from the House Judiciary Committee to Attorney General William Barr [....]
The key role played by three agencies, Ap, AFP, and Reuters, means Western media often report on the same topics, even using the same wording. In addition, governments, military and intelligence services use these global news agencies as multipliers to spread their messages around the world.
The evidence from both our own politics and from other countries with Trumpian leaders suggests that impeachment can be morally right, legally justified, and still politically irresponsible. The pro-impeachment wing of the Democratic Party is focused on the first two considerations at the expense of the third. The idea of treating impeachment as a duty—and, by extension, deliberately ignoring its politics—might be morally satisfying. But it’s dangerous for Democrats and for the nation.
...
Evidence from around the world makes a compelling case that fighting right-wing authoritarians and populists on the grounds of their personal corruption or lawbreaking doesn’t get the job done. Figures from Silvio Berlusconi to Viktor Orbán to Benjamin Netanyahu to Nigel Farage have all been attacked on those grounds—and still won election victories in the face of scandals on the scale of Trump’s. To their supporters, “our guy’s” corruption is excusable or even laudable.
The GOP-led Senate is relishing the chance to derail the nomination of Trump’s immigration pick.
By Burgess Everett & Eliana Johnson @ Politico.com, June 4
Ken Cuccinelli has spent years attacking Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans. Now, it’s time for payback.
President Donald Trump wants Cuccinelli, who most recently led the anti-establishment Senate Conservatives Fund, to be director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. But there may be nobody in Washington whom McConnell and his allies would take more pleasure in defeating, and the bottom line is Cuccinelli has little chance of getting approved for the job, Republican senators said [....]
By Catie Edmondson & Maggie Haberman @ NYTimes.com, June 4
WASHINGTON — Republican senators sent the White House a sharp message on Tuesday, warning that they were almost uniformly opposed to President Trump’s plans to impose tariffs on Mexican imports, just hours after the president said lawmakers would be “foolish” to try to stop him.
Mr. Trump’s latest threat to impose 5 percent tariffs on all goods imported from Mexico, rising to as high as 25 percent until the Mexican government stems the flow of migrants, has prompted some of the most serious defiance in the Republican ranks since the president took office.
Republican senators emerged from a closed-door lunch at the Capitol angered by the briefing they received from a deputy White House counsel and an assistant attorney general on the legal basis for Mr. Trump to impose new tariffs by declaring a national emergency at the southern border.
“I want you to take a message back” to the White House, Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, told the lawyers, according to people familiar with the meeting. Mr. Cruz warned that “you didn’t hear a single yes” from the Republican conference. He called the proposed tariffs a $30 billion tax increase on Texans [....]
By Catie Edmondson @ NYTimes.com, June 5
WASHINGTON — A bipartisan group of senators will try to force nearly two dozen votes rebuking the Trump administration’s decision to declare a national emergency to circumvent Congress and sell billions of dollars of munitions to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
The legislation, led by Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, and Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a Trump ally and once a staunch defender of the kingdom, underscores lawmakers’ fury at the administration’s support for the Saudis after the killing of the dissident Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. And it could grind business in the Senate to a crawl while allowing rare public criticism of President Trump’s administration from members of his own party [....]
By Eliza Shapiro & K.K. Rebecca Lai @ NYTimes.com, June 3 (long form interactive piece with lots of graphs and other illustrations)
[....] Black and Hispanic enrollment in the specialized schools has plummeted over the last 40 years [....]
White enrollment has also fallen while Asian enrollment has ballooned. Among the most drastic shifts: Brooklyn Technical High School’s black population dropped to 6 percent in 2016 from 51 percent in 1982.
The city has designated five additional test-in specialized high schools since 2002, bringing the total to eight, in an attempt to integrate the elite schools. But even those schools have seen a decline in black and Hispanic enrollment over the last decade, which undercuts the idea that simply adding more elite schools will shift demographics. Black and Hispanic students currently represent 70 percent of the school system, but make up just 10 percent of the enrollment in the specialized schools. [....]
Social networks built on public status markers are now starting to hide them.
By John Hermann @ NYTimes/Style, May 31
In late April, at F8, Facebook’s annual event for developers, the company’s head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, announced some updates. Plenty of things would be added to the photo-sharing app: new ways to post Stories, new ways to buy stuff, an updated camera. Some things might also be taken away. Follower counts, Instagram’s main status marker, would become “much less prominent” in users’ profiles. “A bigger idea,” he told the gathered crowd, was “private like counts,” meaning no more numbers under your friends’ posts.
Earlier that month, during an interview at a TED conference, the Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey shared a big idea of his own. “If I had to start the service again, I would not emphasize the follower count as much,” he said. “I would not emphasize the ‘like’ count as much. I don’t think I would even create ‘like’ in the first place.” A few weeks later, in a post on its community blog, YouTube announced a small but notable change to the way it would display subscriber counts on channels — in more cases, the company said, numbers would be rounded.
Following years of increasing scrutiny, leaders at each company seem to be gathering around the same small solution: adjusting or eliminating metrics. This would represent a notable turn for services so strongly identified with public, comparable and newly valuable numbers. It also raises the question: If this is their solution, what do these people think is the problem? [....]