By Salman Rushdie @ NewYorker.com, May 31

In a time like the present, when reality itself seems everywhere under attack, Falstaff’s duplicitous notion of the truth seems to be shared by many powerful leaders. In the three countries I’ve spent my life caring about—India, the U.K., and the United States—self-serving falsehoods are regularly presented as facts, while more reliable information is denigrated as “fake news.” However, the defenders of the real, attempting to dam the torrent of disinformation flooding over us all, often make the mistake of yearning for a golden age when truth was uncontested and universally accepted, and of arguing that what we need is to return to that blissful consensus.

The truth is that truth has always been a contested idea. As a student of history, at Cambridge, I learned at an early age that some things were “basic facts”—that is, unarguable events, such as that the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066, or that the American Declaration of Independence was adopted on July 4, 1776. But the creation of a historical fact was the result of a particular meaning being ascribed to an event [....]

Op-ed by Fareed Zaharia @ WashingtonPost.com, June 1

ROME -- The Republican Party faces dim prospects in the midterm elections. But it doesn’t have to be that way, says Stephen K. Bannon, the chief ideologist of the populist wave that brought Donald Trump into the White House. “If the Republicans continue on the path they are on,” Bannon told me Thursday, “they will lose 40 seats in the House and President Trump will be impeached.” He presented an alternative that strikes me as clever, and it’s a strategy that Trump himself seems to instinctively get.

Bannon was in Rome to learn from and provide support to the unusual coalition of populists and nationalists who together won half the vote in Italy’s recent elections and have formed a government. Bannon sees that sort of coalition — mixing left and right, old and young — as his goal for the United States. “Europe is about a year ahead of the United States. . . . You see populist-nationalist movements with reform [here]. . . . You could begin to see the elements of Bernie Sanders coupled with the Trump movement that really becomes a dominant political force in American politics.” (This column draws on an on-air interview he did with me for CNN, as well as a subsequent conversation.) [.....]

Deserves more coverage, pass it around....

By Riley Yates @ The Morning Call/Allentown, PA via Pocono Record, May 26

[....] The ways that Robert T. Kujawa menaced the Baker family, who are black, were many, authorities said.

He’d use a pellet gun to shoot out their outdoor lights, to knock holes in their fence, and to damage their patio furniture. The Bakers would find broken glass on their property, or that the pump to their pool had inexplicably been unplugged. And then there were the words Kujawa yelled at them — the n-word, the f-word and others.

It was in that context that Kujawa, who is white, was charged last year with hate crimes. Police said he posted Confederate flags in the windows of his Henry Street home — but only those facing the Bakers — and called Biafra Baker and her eldest son, now 12, the n-word while they were in their backyard on July 3.

On Friday, in a Northampton County courtroom, that harassment ended with finality. Labeling Kujawa a hateful man who had shown no remorse, Judge Jennifer Sletvold sentenced him to two to four years in state prison for ethnic intimidation, a charge that is rarely prosecuted.

“Over the course of many years, Mr. Kujawa robbed this family of their peace,” Sletvold said [....]

Hat tip: Maiello's Twitter feed. An absolutely fascinating tidbit of old time gay sub-culture that's new to me and I am not a newbie on that front. Hey, the biker character in "The Village People" makes a lot more sense now! I knew that character was referring to S & M culture, but the whole picture was not clear.

GOP lawmakers thought the president was going to hit China — not key U.S. allies.

By Burgess Everett @ Politico.com, May 31

Republicans are bitterly protesting the Trump administration’s decision to impose sweeping tariffs on U.S. allies — alarmed that the White House ignored their frenzied lobbying campaign and afraid that the party could suffer at the polls in November.

The GOP’s free-traders were mollified this spring as the Trump administration exempted U.S. allies from steel and aluminum tariffs imposed on other countries like China. But on Thursday, that all changed as President Donald Trump imposed 10 percent tariffs on aluminum imports and 25 percent tariffs on steel imports from the European Union, Canada and Mexico.

The move thrusts the GOP back into an internecine war over free-trade policies that have defined the party for decades just as Republicans mobilize for a hotly contested midterm campaign [....]

By Lisa Miller @ NYMag.com, May 30

On the Tuesday after the Monday when Donald Trump officially moved the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, his daughter and son-in-law performing pseudo-diplomacy and wearing mannequin smiles as Israeli soldiers shot live ammunition into crowds of protesters in the Gaza Strip, killing 60 people, I arrived at the 16th-floor Park Avenue suite of the Jewish philanthropist Charles Bronfman. The previous week, in an address to Hebrew Union College, Bronfman had seemed to pick a fight with the government of Israel — a surprising and unprecedented act for a man who has spent his whole life and hundreds of millions of his own dollars investing in Israel, promoting it to Americans, and defending its right to defend itself [....]

[....] Establishment patriarchs used to not talk like this to reporters. Among American Jews, the ground rules were clear: Like members of a contentious family, the leaders of Jewish organizations may have had their disputes with Israel, but, also like family, they were expected to air those grievances in private [.....]