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MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Order today at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
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By David D. Kirkpatrick, Ben Hubbard, Mark Landler & Mark Mazzetti @ NYTimes.com, Dec. 8
By Christopher Rowland @ WashingtonPost.com, Dec. 9
The inquiry into alleged price-fixing and anti-competitive behavior is rattling an industry that is portrayed in Washington as the white knight of U.S. health care.
By Gregory Krieg @ CNN.com, Dec. 9, 10:33 pm
New York - Former FBI Director James Comey asked American voters Sunday night to end Donald Trump's presidency with a "landslide" victory for his opponent in 2020. "All of us should use every breath we have to make sure the lies stop on January 20, 2021," Comey told an audience at the 92nd Street Y on New York City's Upper East Side. He all but begged Democrats to set aside their ideological differences and nominate the person best suited to defeating Trump in an election. "I understand the Democrats have important debates now over who their candidate should be," Comey told MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace, "but they have to win. They have to win."
Over the course of more than an hour, Comey repeatedly derided Trump's character, again likening the atmosphere around the President to what he saw in prosecuting mafia figures and suggested that Trump's tweets could eventually amount to witness tampering. Asked if Trump might be an unindicted co-conspirator in some of the crimes recently described by special counsel Robert Mueller, Comey said he didn't know, "but if he's not there, he's certainly close."
Still, Comey said he hoped that Trump would be swept out of office without being impeached. Framing the rise of Trumpism as a political ill the country needed to exorcise at the ballot, he expressed a hope that Americans would "in a landslide rid ourselves of this attack on our values. Removal by impeachment would muddy that," he said, and potentially leave a third of the country feeling like their chosen leader had been removed in a "coup." [....]
I. Can't. Even.
According to her lawyers, there was no "legal duty" for Dr. Wells to alert Flint residents of the epidemic of Legionnaire's disease allegedly caused by the contaminated water supply.
Even if there was no "legal duty", isn't there a moral duty?
This is why I. Can't. Even. anymore.
By Sarah Maslin Nir @ NYTimes.com/Local section, Nov. 26
In some ways, they are a typical political power couple seeking to “Make America Great Again.”
They are throwing a $5 million fund-raiser for President Trump this winter, and are quick to make it known that they have the president’s sons’ cellphone numbers on speed dial. They have poured more than $50,000 of their own money into supporting the president, who smiles in photos on the bookshelves of their home.
But Bill White and his husband, Bryan Eure, are not red state evangelicals or die-hard right-wingers. In fact, for years, they were key players among a cohort that Mr. Trump loathes: Manhattan’s liberal elite.
Mr. Trump is an unconventional commander in chief who ran an unorthodox campaign. As such, he has cultivated unusual allies, including Kanye West and Roger Stone. Mr. White and Mr. Eure used to back strident, anti-Trump Democrats, but now dine with Fox News anchors and plan rounds of golf at Mar-a-Lago [....]
The company echoed tech ethicists and employees in its call for restrictions. As Microsoft president Brad Smith put it, “We must ensure that the year 2024 doesn’t look like a page from the novel 1984.”
By Maya Kosoff @ The Hive @ VanityFair.com, Dec. 7
[....] The St. Thomas system is just one of a number of data points that AI Now—a group composed of tech employees from companies including Microsoft and Google, and affiliated with New York University—says exemplify the need for stricter regulation of artificial intelligence. The group’s report, published Thursday, underscores the inherent dangers in using A.I. to do things like amplify surveillance in fields including finance and policing, and argues that accountability and oversight are necessities where this type of nascent technology is concerned. Crucially, they argue, people should be able to opt out of facial-recognition systems altogether. “Mere public notice of their use is not sufficient, and there should be a high threshold for any consent, given the dangers of oppressive and continual mass surveillance,” the organization writes. “These tools are very suspect and based on faulty science,” Kate Crawford, one of the group’s co-founders, who works for Microsoft Research, told Bloomberg. “You cannot have black-box systems in core social services.” Equally important, the group argues, is internal governance at tech companies—taking steps like installing rank-and-file employees on a company’s board of directors, say, and allowing third-party experts to audit and publish reports about A.I. systems. [....]
James Comey spent hours on Friday talking about Hillary Clinton’s emails before the House Judiciary Committee. In the end, he seemed bored—and annoyed.
By David A. Graham & Madeline Carlisle @ The Atlantic.com, Dec. 7
Whatever Republicans on the House Judiciary thought they were going to get from Friday’s deposition of former FBI Director James Comey, it doesn’t appear they got it. The proof will come when a transcript of the deposition is released on Saturday, part of a deal Comey struck to testify, having initially resisted a subpoena. But no one seemed especially satisfied on Friday [....]
Whatever Republicans on the House Judiciary thought they were going to get from Friday’s deposition of former FBI Director James Comey, it doesn’t appear they got it. The proof will come when a transcript of the deposition is released on Saturday, part of a deal Comey struck to testify, having initially resisted a subpoena. But no one seemed especially satisfied on Friday.
Republicans basically conceded the point, suggesting they’d gotten very little from Comey. They placed the blame on a Justice Department lawyer who had blocked the witness from testifying on some of their questions [....]
Talk of QAnon, George Soros and ‘retarded’ reporters at the American Priority Conference.
By Ben Schreckinger @ Politico.com, Dec. 7
At the first-ever Conservative Political Action Conference in 1974, California Gov. Ronald Reagan addressed a ragtag group of conservative insurgents by quoting John Stuart Mill and nobly declaring, “We are indeed, and we are today, the last best hope of man on earth.”
At the first-ever American Priority Conference on Friday morning, Anthony Scaramucci — who served a brief stint as the Trump White House’s communications director — addressed a married couple from Virginia, telling them that the author of the fantastical Internet conspiracy theory QAnon has “been dead accurate about so many things,” adding: “When you find out who he is, you’re not going to believe it.”
American Priority, which brings together an impressive roster of right-wing social media agitators and Trump world notables at a Washington, D.C., hotel, was envisioned as a Trumpist answer to CPAC. In reality, the three-day conference, which convened on Thursday, has been rife with conspiracy theorists, logistical snafus and empty seats.
It may also be the future of Republican politics [....]
@ Associated Press via Politico.com, 1 hr. ago
A man who drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters at a white nationalist rally in Virginia was convicted Friday of first-degree murder for killing a woman in an attack that inflamed long-simmering racial and political tensions across the country.
A state jury rejected arguments that James Alex Fields Jr. acted in self-defense during a “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville on Aug. 12, 2017. Jurors also convicted Fields of eight other charges, including aggravated malicious wounding and hit and run [....]
By Shannon Vavra @ Axios.com, 1 hr. ago
[....] Why it matters: These are the "principal" lies Manafort made that ruined his plea agreement with Mueller. The document shows how much Mueller knows about the investigation’s witnesses and their conduct, and could serve as a warning shot to other witnesses not to lie or tell partial truths — which includes the president, who has already submitted his written statement to Mueller’s team [....]
By Stanley Reed @ NYTimes.com, Dec. 7
The organization and other oil-producing countries, chiefly Russia, reached a deal to reduce worldwide oil production by 1.2 million barrels a day — more than had been expected
By Thomas Gibbons-Neff, Helene Cooper & Eric Schmitt @ NYTimes.com, 36 min. ago
By Greg Jaffe & others @ WaPo. I offer the below opinion only because Laura Rozen retweeted it:
Bound by rules, yet constantly changing, language might be the ultimate self-regulating system, with nobody in charge
By Lane Greene,language columnist and an editor at The Economist @ aeon.com, Dec. 6