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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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House Chaplain Patrick Conroy was suddenly forced out of his job last week by Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), and while it’s not clear why, Democratic lawmakers and Hill sources say it was driven by Ryan’s distaste for one of Conroy’s prayers about the GOP’s tax bill.
As first reported by The Hill, Conroy was clear in his resignation announcement that it wasn’t his choice to go. It was Ryan’s.
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The Hill reported that four different sources ― two Democrats and two Republicans ― said Conroy was told he had to quit or he would be fired. There’s been no reason given for why he was let go, but Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) tells HuffPost that his GOP colleagues have pointed him to a prayer that Conroy made on the House floor last fall amid the debate on the GOP tax bill.
Here’s that Nov. 6 prayer, in which Conroy wishes for no “winners and losers” under the legislation. As has been reported, the tax bill greatly benefits the rich over time.
PRAYER
The Chaplain, the Reverend Patrick J. Conroy, offered the following prayer:
God of the universe, we give You thanks for giving us another day. Bless the Members of this assembly as they set upon the work of these hours, of these days. Help them to make wise decisions in a good manner and to carry their responsibilities steadily, with high hopes for a better future for our great Nation.
As legislation on taxes continues to be debated this week and next, may all Members be mindful that the institutions and structures of our great Nation guarantee the opportunities that have allowed some to achieve great success, while others continue to struggle. May their efforts these days guarantee that there are not winners and losers under new tax laws, but benefits balanced and shared by all Americans.
May Your blessing, O God, be with them and with us all this day and every day to come, and may all we do be done for Your greater honor and glory.
Amen.
Connolly said Republican lawmakers told him Ryan was peeved because he read that prayer as a “tilt to the Democrats” because it implied criticisms of the tax cuts being more beneficial to the rich (which they are).
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Article by Jennifer Bendery, HuffPo yesterday.
By Bob Herman @ Axios.com, April 26
Seven of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies — AbbVie, Amgen, Novartis, GlaxoSmithKline, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly and Biogen — cumulatively collected $12.1 billion of profit in the first three months of 2018. That's up 29% from the same time last year.
The bottom line: Drug makers have not been shy about raising list prices on previously approved medications, despite President Trump's rhetoric about going after the industry.
Some highlights from those companies thus far [....]
The nation’s largest generation is transforming cities large and small. This list shows you where their impact is greatest.
By Derek Robert & Tim Henderson @ Politico Magazine, April 26
[....] There’s no denying millennials’ impact. The Brookings Institution has found those born between 1981 and 1997 to be the most ethnically and racially diverse generation to come of age in America thus far, led only by the generation to follow. Millennials recently surpassed Gen X-ers as the largest share of the American workforce, with 56 million either working or looking for work in 2017, according to the Pew Research Center. And, according to Nielsen, they spend more than $65 billion per year. That’s more than the GDP of Lithuania, Luxembourg or Costa Rica.
But there’s another way of looking at this vast and diverse generation that avoids the pitfalls of sneering cliché or parental tut-tutting. Now beginning to reach their peak impact years, millennials are not just a looming wave any longer. They’re remaking society in their own image, transforming a country they’ve already inherited. They’re using new tools and developing new social rules that are quietly reordering the nation’s most pressing problems and reshaping the way we solve them. In a word, millennials are innovating, and the places they’re breaking ground are in the cities they’ve already begun to re-engineer to their unique needs.
Over the next year, POLITICO Magazine will tell this side of the millennials’ story as the next chapter of its award-winning What Works series [....]
Live updates @ CNN, April 27 (No Trump anywhere to be seen, doing it all by themselves)
By Andrew Kirill @ DailyBeast.com, April 26
During a truly bonkers House hearing on Thursday, the pro-Trump YouTube repeated multiple, provably false claims and shouted at Democratic lawmakers.
By Devlin Barrett and Rosalind S. Helderman @ WashingtonPost.com, April 26 at 9:10 PM
NEW YORK — A federal judge on Thursday appointed a special master to review material seized from the office and residences of President Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen, acceding to his request that an independent party review the material before federal prosecutors can access it.
The decision, a win for Cohen, came after prosecutors quickly pounced on comments Trump made Thursday morning that the lawyer performed little legal work for him, to undercut Cohen’s argument that much of the material was protected by attorney-client privilege.
U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood appointed retired federal judge Barbara S. Jones to serve in the special-master role to assess whether the documents include any confidential communications between Cohen and his legal clients, including Trump [....]
[...]The relentless decline of “The Apprentice” reflects a splash-and-crash cycle that’s been a hallmark throughout Trump’s life—from his buildings to his casinos to even his brief stint as a sports team owner. His initial successes are often followed by reckless decisions to double down on his bet, just to keep the excitement going—with often disastrous results. “It’s true of everything he goes into,” Trump biographer Tim O’Brien said in an interview. “He will hunker down and do something well—and then he thinks he’s Zeus.” And that’s when the trouble starts. “Because he’s not Zeus.”
Narcissistic rabid weasel Trump went to his morning Daycare for Wingnut Imbeciles TV Show, Fox and Friends, to take zero accountability for the Jackson fiasco, and bragged about how in Montana: "they love me and I love them. Jon Tester, I think this is going to cause him a lot of problems in his state"...Predictably, talk of "our nation's heroes" by Adm. Jackson, and attacks on "false allegations" the press by Trump were coming out as Jackson withdrew from nomination for head of the 300,000+ employee VA. The brave service persons who came forward to report how Dr. Jackson had violated the letter and intent of pharmacy, personal integrity and command policies will not now be examined in confirmation hearings before the Senate.
By Eric Newcomer @ Bloomberg.com, April 25
“It’s often lost on the public just how badly they’re being screwed”
Pet peeve of mine since I figured out through my own troubles connecting wassup with this; glad to see the coverage
Book review by Isabel Hull @ London Review of Books, for April 2018 print issue (free online), of The Internationalists and Their Plan to Outlaw War by Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro , 608 pp, September 2017. Lede:
Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro’s point is that ‘for all its problems, the New World Order is better than the Old.’ Theirs is a valuable reminder that law matters and that international co-operation is not a utopia, but a functioning reality. Recently, it has been hard to hear that truth above the din produced by bad actors, like Putin and Trump, and by criticism of the neoliberal order from the left and the populist right, which obscures the positive effects of internationalism. What’s more, we take for granted a world in which the assumption is that countries will not engage in war.
A conversation with VR pioneer Jaron Lanier on Silicon Valley’s politics, being quoted by Mark Zuckerberg, and what went wrong with the internet.
Interview by Noah Kulwin @ NYMag.com, April 17
[....] Lanier currently works at Microsoft Research as an interdisciplinary scientist. He is the author of the forthcoming book Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. [....]
By Michele Cottle @ TheAtlantic.com, April 24
As the culture war between gay rights and religious liberty rages, conservatives are livid that the president renominated Chai Feldblum at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Analysis by Amanda Erickson @ WashingtonPost.com, April 24, with video & description of apprehension
[....] Such actions are part of a concerted effort by the Toronto Police Service to have its officers de-escalate dangerous situations rather than open fire. In the past, Toronto police had faced widespread criticism for their use of force. In one incident from 2013, an 18-year-old named Sammy Yatim was shot nine times and killed by officers responding a call claiming Yatim had a weapon.
“That and other high-profile police shootings in recent years prompted scrutiny of officers' use of force, and led to formal calls to change police tactics in order to de-escalate standoffs,” the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. reports.
Earlier this year, the Toronto Police Services Board passed a motion to provide hundreds of officers stun guns instead of guns. Toronto law enforcement officials have also conducted an extensive review of their “use-of-force options,” the CBC reports, and done several training sessions on de-escalation. Police are “taught to use as little force as possible in any given situation,” Toronto Police Chief Mark Saunders said at a news conference after Minassian's arrest. [....]
Attorney General Jeff Sessions has decided against recusing himself from the investigation into President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, but will consider stepping back from specific questions tied to the probe, according to a person familiar with the matter.
I wonder if this is actually auspicious for the investigation. For all his faults, Sessions seems less inclined to toady to Trump these days. Assuming he doesn't interfere with the investigation, Trump would have to remove both Sessions and Rosenstein (and Francisco?) to find someone who would close the Cohen case.
@ Associated Press via NBC.com, April 20
When Deidre Downs was crowned Miss America in 2005, the idea of gay marriage seemed impossible. Last weekend, she married her girlfriend.
I won’t try to paraphrase this Lithub excellent essay by Rebecca Solnit.
This is just one example in the well-wriiten look at how things have changed on the empathy train:
...PBS News Hour featured a quiz by Charles Murray in March that asked “Do You Live in a Bubble?” The questions assumed that if you didn’t know people who drank cheap beer and drove pick-up trucks and worked in factories you lived in an elitist bubble. Among the questions: “Have you ever lived for at least a year in an American community with a population under 50,000 that is not part of a metropolitan area and is not where you went to college? Have you ever walked on a factory floor? Have you ever had a close friend who was an evangelical Christian?”
The quiz is essentially about whether you are in touch with working-class small-town white Christian America, as though everyone who’s not Joe the Plumber is Maurice the Elitist. We should know them, the logic goes; they do not need to know us. Less than 20 percent of Americans are white evangelicals, only slightly more than are Latino. Most Americans are urban. The quiz delivers, yet again, the message that the 80 percent of us who live in urban areas are not America, treats non-Protestant (including the quarter of this country that is Catholic) and non-white people as not America, treats many kinds of underpaid working people (salespeople, service workers, farmworkers) who are not male industrial workers as not America. More Americans work in museums than work in coal, but coalminers are treated as sacred beings owed huge subsidies and the sacrifice of the climate, and museum workers—well, no one is talking about their jobs as a totem of our national identity.
I hope you will read this. It is worth our time.
Robert Kuttner, HuffPo today
Did you have a happy Tax Day? Are you feeling grateful for the Republican tax cut?
Evidently, most American taxpayers are not.
In a sublime case of poetic justice, the so-called Tax Cut and Jobs Act is backfiring on the Republicans big time. Most voters are unimpressed, and Republicans themselves are ceasing to emphasize it in their campaign material.
In the March 13 special election for the Pennsylvania’s 18th Congressional District, where Democrat Conor Lamb narrowly beat Republican Rick Saccone, Republicans actually pulled ads that bragged about the tax act, because their polls showed that it was more of a target than an achievement.
Republican strategists who wanted President Donald Trump to emphasize the tax cut this spring were initially annoyed that he was talking about trade, immigration and Korea instead. Now they realize that Trump may be onto something.
Even better, Democrats are sensing that the tax issue can be turned against the Republicans in the 2018 and 2020 elections. This outcome is the result of Republican overreach, opportunism, and sheer greed.
Previous Republican tax cuts, under Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush, were also tilted to the top, but made sure to include some real benefits for regular people. But this bill was so heavily skewed to the wealthy that most people won’t see any benefits at all in their paychecks.
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