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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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Below is the first tweet today, there are 3 others and will surely be more, so I link to his feed.
By John Bonazzo @ Observer.com, Aug. 30
President Donald Trump may hate Google, but he needs its ad reach. According to the company’s Transparency Report, Trump’s Make America Great Again Committee has spent over $720,000 on political ads since June 1.
That makes him the second biggest political spender on Google, behind only Karl Rove’s One Nation committee ($1.1 million). Other politicians who drop top dollar on Google ads include Rick Scott ($599,000), Beto O’Rourke ($342,000) and Ron DeSantis ($175,000).
The MAGA Committee’s Google cash goes almost entirely to YouTube ads. Trump has bought over 1,300 video spots in the last three months, with messages like “Tell Congress You Want the Wall!” The ads got about 13.4 million impressions in total.
Facebook is another of Trump’s frequent punching bags, but he drops big money on ads there too. A recent New York University study found the president was Facebook’s top political advertiser [....]
Op-ed by Robert W. Samuelson @ WashingtonPost.com, Sept 2
It’s wages vs. health benefits. On this Labor Day, just about everything seems to be going right for typical American workers, with the glaring and puzzling exception of wage stagnation [....]
[....] a major contributor — perhaps the major contributor — may lie elsewhere: health costs. Money once reserved for wage increases is now diverted to pay for employer-provided health insurance. A new study provides stunning estimates: For the bottom 60 percent of U.S. workers, wage gains have been completely wiped out by contributions for employer-provided health insurance.
“For many workers, rising health insurance premiums were eating up every last cent of their pay increases and more,” the study said. This affects how “people buy houses, save for retirement, launch their children into adulthood and otherwise try to get ahead in life.” [....]
@ Reuters.com, SEPTEMBER 3, 2018 / 12:13 AM / UPDATED 13 MINUTES AGO
YANGON - A Myanmar judge on Monday found two Reuters journalists guilty of breaching a law on state secrets and sentenced them to seven years in prison, in a landmark case seen as a test of progress towards democracy in the Southeast Asian country.
Yangon northern district judge Ye Lwin said Wa Lone, 32, and Kyaw Soe Oo, 28, breached the colonial-era Official Secrets Act when they collected and obtained confidential documents.
“The defendants...have breached Official Secrets Act section 3.1.c, and are sentenced to seven years. The time already served by the defendants from Dec. 12 will be taken into consideration,” the judge said [....]
@ Reuters, 3 September 2018 00:10 GMT
BRASILIA, Sept 2 (Reuters) - A 200-year-old museum in Rio de Janeiro was hit on Sunday by a massive fire, images from television station Globo showed, threatening its collection of more than 20 million items ranging from archeological findings to historical memorabilia.
According to Globo's website, there was no information yet on potential deaths, injuries, cause of the fire or extent of damage at Rio's Museu Nacional [....]
Book review by Lloyd Green @ TheGuardian.com, Sept. 2
On election day 2016, Hillary Clinton won more than 70% of the Jewish vote. But that number tells only part of a story. In some predominately Orthodox Jewish precincts, Donald Trump’s numbers were straight out of the rust belt or the deep south.
As in the rest of the electorate, religious commitment and educational attainment shaped how Jews voted. In the overwhelmingly religious Borough Park neighborhood of Brooklyn, Trump took 68% of the vote. In New Jersey’s Lakewood Township, he won with a 50-point margin. By contrast, the island of Manhattan was a sea of Democratic blue.
The political cleavages that mark the broader American landscape exist among America’s Jews. Just as Jews were to be found on both sides of slavery, secession and the civil war, they are again combatants in a political skirmish [....]
Welcome to The Chosen Wars, a narrative of the Jewish journey across the American landscape. Steven Weisman, who covered politics and economics at the New York Times for a quarter of a century, marshals an impressive array of facts to argue that the competing tugs of separatism and assimilation have been present ever since Jews landed in the New World in the 17th century [.....\]
Anastasia Vashukevich — the Belarusian escort who goes by Nastya Rybka and once claimed to be able to link Russian oligarchs to American election interference — now could face up to 10 years in a Thai prison
By Richard C. Paddock @ NYTimes.com. Aug. 31
PATTAYA, Thailand — Caught in a Thai police raid on her group’s seduction seminar, a Belarusian escort grabbed the world’s attention in February when she claimed to have audio recordings that might show a link between Russian officials and the election of President Trump, betting that it could turn into a get out of jail free card.
Six months later, her gamble appears to have badly backfired.
What began as a minor immigration charge has turned into a serious criminal case carrying the potential of 10 years of prison time in Thailand. And in a new interview with The New York Times, the escort, Anastasia Vashukevich, became coy about the content of her recordings — and said she now has no plan to make them public [....]
By Jason Horowitz from Rome @ NYTimes.com, Aug. 28
I've not read much on this whole thing and found this a good general 'splainer of what's going on, with nuance.
The government of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega has ordered a team from the United Nations Commission for Human Rights to leave. More than 300 people were killed during the recent political unrest..... the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights called on the government to stop the persecution of protestors and disarm masked gangs who it alleges are responsible for killings and arbitrary detentions. It also described the torture and use of excessive force using interviews with victims and local human rights groups.