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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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with live updates @ CNN.com, July 31
What we're covering here
- Manafort trial begins: A jury has been sworn in for the trial of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
- What's next: Opening statements are on deck in the first case that special counsel Robert Mueller's team is bringing to trial.
- The charges: Manafort has pleaded not guilty to federal charges of bank fraud and tax crimes. (He also faces federal charges, including money-laundering conspiracy, in a case due for trial in September.)
- What to expect: Prosecutors plan to call as many as 25 witnesses, and their arguments could last two weeks.
Let’s say you and I are neighbors. You’re an emergency room doctor, and I don’t work, thanks to a pile of money my grandparents left me.
You spend your days and nights stitching up gunshot wounds and helping children survive asthma attacks. I’ve gotten really good at World of Warcraft, winning EBay auctions, and frying shishito peppers to just the right crispiness.
Let’s also say we both report $300,000 in income to the Internal Revenue Service this year. Who pays more in taxes?
You do, by a lot. You owe the IRS about $38,500 more, assuming each of us pays the maximum with no special deductions. I also have more flexibility to lower my burden with tax planning strategies and other tricks, and I get to skip about $24,000 in payroll taxes that you and your employer must fork over each year.
Steve Mnuchin is “looking into” giving another $100,000,000 tax break to the richest among us without having to go through Congress.
In the mean time, we must get these out-of-control ‘Entitlements’ reduced. Because we have a big deficit. Because we already gave a $1,000,000,000 tax break to the richest among us. Because it would create jobs. But it didn’t.
Emma Best, a freedom of information activist, has published a large cache of Twitter direct messages between Wikileaks and some of its most fervent supporters, including ones showing antisemitic sentiment from Wikileaks.
By Joseph Cox @ "Motherboard" vice.com, July 30
Wikileaks is possibly the most opaque transparency organization. The group, founded by Julian Assange, sometimes hides its true motives, and has not published any information about its own finances in years, despite amassing tens of millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency.
Now, an activist who has developed an adversarial relationship with the group has published over 11,000 Wikileaks Twitter direct messages. “The idea was that the attitudes and behavior of WL [Wikileaks] behind closed doors is relevant, especially their coordination of PR, propaganda and troll ops through assets that are public supporters but not publicly known to take cues from WL,” Emma Best, the freedom of information activist, told Motherboard [....]
Various outlets have reported on leaks from this group chat before, including The Intercept and The Daily Beast. But now anyone can scroll through the lightly redacted messages themselves. In an accompanying post, Best says the redactions were made to protect the privacy and personal information of “innocent, third parties.” [....]
Micah Lee, a technologist and journalist at The Intercept, and one of the reporters who worked on the publication’s earlier coverage of the DMs, told Motherboard that Best’s DM cache is the same as his [....]
By Tim Samples @ Columbia Journalism Review, July 30
[....] Morenco’s tweets seemed professional—there were graphics, memes, and hashtags—and prolific enough to be someone’s day job. He worked hard to discredit Western media outlets and mainstream politics. He advocated for nationalism and raged against American presidents of both parties. In a meme that Morenco promoted, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama were labeled “scumbags” and part of a globalist elite out to “destroy America.” That meme, called “28 Years of Hell, 1989-2016,” was based on a photograph of the four presidents together in the Oval Office. In another meme, featuring a photograph of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, Morenco framed Donald Trump’s opposition in the GOP as the “Goldman Sachs/Media/Defense Contractors arm of the Republican party who will benefit from HRC as POTUS & support her.” Another post implied that Dick Cheney and George Soros were terrorists.
Many of Morenco’s fans were loyal, and in a similar way, somewhat suspicious. [....]
By Jeremy B. White @ Politico.com, July 29
SAN FRANCISCO — If there’s a point of universal agreement in California politics, it’s that the state’s housing crisis has spiraled to urgent proportions. But a ballot initiative designed to tackle the prohibitive cost of housing stands to fracture Democrats here, pitting some of the state’s top elected officials against one another and placing some of the party’s most influential donors and interest groups at odds.
It’s a conflict that resonates beyond California’s borders as more and more major cities struggle to do something about the skyrocketing cost of finding a place to live. And the issue is likely to surface in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries since it afflicts some of the biggest and most influential blue states, ranging from California to Illinois to New York.
Already, the initiative has split two prominent California politicians with national aspirations and bases in the urban hubs where the housing crunch is particularly acute [....]
‘And here’s the program: Ground game to support Trump’s presidency,’ Bannon said in an interview.
By Alex Isenstadt @ Politico.com, Updated 07/29/2018 09:48 PM EDT
Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon tore into the powerful Koch political network Sunday, accusing it of undermining President Donald Trump ahead of a midterm election that threatens to derail his presidency.
“What they have to do is shut up and get with the program, OK?” Bannon said in an interview with POLITICO. “And here’s the program: Ground game to support Trump’s presidency and program, [and] victory on Nov. 6.”
Bannon’s comments came as the network of major Republican Party donors, led by billionaire industrialist Charles Koch, convened in Colorado Springs, Colorado, to discuss the 2018 political landscape. During the retreat, top Koch officials described the Trump White House as toxic and destructive to the country.
They sharply criticized Trump's protectionist trade policies, arguing that his actions were taking a toll on the economy. A video shown during the conference depicted images of recently shuttered businesses [....]
By Jordan Cairney @ TheHill.com, July 29
The Senate fight over documents related to President Trump's nominee to the Supreme Court is boiling over.
Trump pick Brett Kavanaugh, a circuit judge since 2006 who previously worked for President George W. Bush’s administration and Kenneth Starr’s independent counsel investigation into former President Clinton, has a voluminous paper trail that lawmakers estimate tops a million pages. Democrats want to see as many of those papers as they can, while Republicans seeking to confirm Kavanaugh before the midterm elections favor a narrower scope. [....]
The key part of the battle is Democratic demands for documents tied to Kavanaugh’s work as a staff secretary in the Bush administration. Republicans argue that Democrats are waging a “fishing expedition” to hunt for damaging information [....]
The Rev. Al Sharpton and other leaders are stepping into the battle over a proposed limit to the growth of for-hire vehicles, calling it a civil rights issue.
By Jeffrey C. Mays @ NYTimes.com, July 29
As president of the New York Urban League, Arva Rice often relies on ride-hailing apps such as Uber and Lyft to reach her home in Harlem after late-night events. “I have been passed up by yellow taxis on numerous occasions,” explained Ms. Rice, who is black. “When you live in Harlem or Bed-Stuy, getting home is harder than it should be.”
Black and Latino New Yorkers — and those who live in the boroughs outside Manhattan — have long said they are not served well by yellow taxis. Now, a proposal by the City Council to place a one-year freeze on for-hire vehicle licenses is being opposed as a civil rights issue by organizations such as the National Urban League, the National Action Network and the N.A.A.C.P.
“I’m trying to get to work, I’m trying to get to school — I want somebody that’s going to pick me up,” the Rev. Al Sharpton told an audience on Saturday at the Harlem headquarters of his organization, the National Action Network [....]
By Hannah Beech from Gua Musang Malaysia for NYTimes.com, July 29
An 11-year-old girl’s marriage to a 41-year-old man — the father of her best friend — has reignited debate in the multiethnic democracy about the persistence of an age-old Islamic practice.
By Mark Landler @ NYTimes.com, July 29
BRIDGEWATER, N.J. — President Trump and the publisher of The New York Times, A. G. Sulzberger, engaged in a fierce public clash on Sunday over Mr. Trump’s threats against journalism, after Mr. Sulzberger said the president misrepresented a private meeting and Mr. Trump accused The Times and other papers of putting lives at risk with irresponsible reporting.
Mr. Trump said on Twitter that he and Mr. Sulzberger had discussed “the vast amounts of Fake News being put out by the media & how that Fake News has morphed into phrase, ‘Enemy of the People.’ Sad!”
In a five-paragraph statement issued two hours after the tweet, Mr. Sulzberger said he had accepted Mr. Trump’s invitation for the July 20 meeting mainly to raise his concerns about the president’s “deeply troubling anti-press rhetoric.”
“I told the president directly that I thought that his language was not just divisive but increasingly dangerous,” said Mr. Sulzberger, who became publisher of The Times on Jan. 1. “I told him that although the phrase ‘fake news’ is untrue and harmful, I am far more concerned about his labeling journalists ‘the enemy of the people,’” Mr. Sulzberger continued. “I warned that this inflammatory language is contributing to a rise in threats against journalists and will lead to violence.”
This is particularly true overseas, Mr. Sulzberger said, where governments are using Mr. Trump’s words as a pretext to crack down on journalists. He said he warned the president that his attacks were “putting lives at risk” and “undermining the democratic ideals of our nation.” [.....]
Trigger warning: A lot of history is recounted to make a point.
Any Russian interference is only a small part of the “election meddling” we should care about
Four nineteenth-century authors offered blueprints for a better world—but their progressive visions had a dark side.
By Adam Gopnik @ NewYorker.com, for July 30 print issue, available online now (as is a podcast version)
Michael Robertson’s “The Last Utopians: Four Late Nineteenth-Century Visionaries and Their Legacy” (Princeton) is instructive and touching, if sometimes inadvertently funny. The instructive parts rise from Robertson’s evocation and analysis of a series of authors who aren’t likely to be well known to American readers, even those of a radical turn of mind. All four wrote books and imagined ideal societies with far more of an effect on their time than we now remember [....]
[....] What in the world made “Looking Backward” appealing not only to men of letters like William Dean Howells and Mark Twain but to so many farmers and workers that Bellamy was eventually made a delegate of a populist party? Part of the appeal, Robertson persuasively argues, had something to do with post-Civil War nostalgia for the purity of wartime regimentation. In a time of confused plutocracy, everyone wanted a variant of what William James later called “the moral equivalent of war.”
But pursuing the moral equivalent of war always gives you the warrior’s idea of morality. As Bellamy’s book progresses, power, brutality, and the capacity to dominate become all that matters. Rules are made and harshly enforced. Robertson chides Bellamy for being inconsistently feminist, which is true, but what is chilling in Bellamy is how much of the totalitarian imagination is already in place in his work, and how alluring it can seem. It’s the same phenomenon that we find in the Athenian intellectual’s idealization of Sparta: intellectuals always dream of a closed society even though they themselves can exist only in an open one [....]
'If I kissed that one, would it lead to more?' Mortgage regulator taped making suggestive comments to employee.
By Victoria Guida, Katy O'Donnell & Lorraine Woellert @ Politico.com, July 27
Mel Watt, the powerful regulator of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, is under investigation for alleged sexual harassment of an employee.
A Federal Housing Finance Agency staffer accused the FHFA director of repeatedly making inappropriate sexual advances when she tried to discuss career and salary concerns.
The conversations included a 2016 meeting during which Watt steered the discussion to his feelings for the woman, according to documents and partial transcripts of tapes obtained by POLITICO. In a separate encounter, Watt asked about a tattoo on her ankle, saying, “If I kissed that one would it lead to more?"
The employee’s lawyer, Diane Seltzer Torre, confirmed the investigation after POLITICO received copies of the documents related to the case [....]
Senior figures in the Turnbull Government have told the ABC they believe the United States is prepared to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities, perhaps as early as next month, and that Australia is poised to help identify possible targets.The ABC has been told Australian defence facilities would likely play a role in identifying targets in Iran, as would British intelligence agencies.
By Ralph Ellis, Nicole Chavez & Cheri Mossberg @ CNN.com, July 27
Residents of the Northern California city of Redding fled their homes Friday as towering flames from an out-of-control wildfire swept into the western city limits and destroyed residences, authorities reported.
The Carr Fire in Shasta County grew rapidly Thursday night, ravaging several small communities and jumping the Sacramento River before threatening the outskirts of Redding, a city of about 95,000 people around 120 miles south of the California-Oregon border, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire, reported.
The fire has destroyed at least 65 structures so far, damaged 55 others and threatens almost 5,000 homes and buildings, Cal Fire spokesman Scott Kenney said Friday morning [....]
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos plans to eliminate regulations that forced for-profit colleges to prove that they provide gainful employment to the students they enroll, in what would be the most drastic in a series of moves that she has made to free the for-profit sector from safeguards put in effect during the Obama era.
The so-called gainful employment regulations put into force by the Obama administration cut off federally guaranteed student loans to colleges if their graduates did not earn enough money to pay them off. That sent many for-profit colleges and universities into an economic tailspin because so many of their alumni were failing to find decent jobs.