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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 Jennifer Percy for The New York Times Magazine, Jan. 18
Two years after the standoff at the Malheur Refuge, many people in the region remain convinced that their way of life is being trampled.
This is probably the correct call on both counts, although the fear from enviros (like me) that raising the cost of solar panels will slow the move away from fossil fuels is very legit. Still the 20% tariff will probably raise total installation costs for consumers by well under 10%. Still too much. The right answer is to impose a 100% tax on fossil fuels and to return the revenues to the American people. Ultimately, this is a win for American workers.
By Amber Phillips @ WashingtonPost.com, Jan. 22
In a decision that could tilt the congressional balance of power in a key swing state in favor of Democrats, Pennsylvania's highest court decided Monday that the state's GOP-drawn congressional districts violate its Constitution, and ordered all 18 districts redrawn in the next few weeks. [....]
In a 4-to-3 decision, Pennsylvania's Supreme Court ordered the Republican-controlled state legislature to redraw the lines by Feb. 9, an extraordinarily quick timeline that will reset the districts in time for the state's May congressional primaries. Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf will have veto power over the maps. “I strongly believe that gerrymandering is wrong and consistently have stated that the current maps are unfair to Pennsylvanians,” he said in a statement.
Meanwhile, Pennsylvania Republicans cried foul and said they would try to appeal the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court. The state Supreme Court has a 5-to-2 Democratic majority 2015, and GOP lawmakers suggested the court ruled to benefit its own party [....]
By Jonathan Swan @ Axios.com, 4 hrs. ago
Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team has been talking with George Nader, a little-known Bannon associate who boasts of his well-placed connections in the Middle East, Axios has learned.
Nader has spoken with Mueller's team at least twice, according to a source briefed on the investigation. A second source briefed on the investigation confirmed that Mueller's team has brought Nader in for questioning in the past week. The Special Counsel's office declined to comment.
Nader visited the White House frequently during the early months of the Trump administration. He became friendly with former chief strategist Steve Bannon, visiting his office regularly. A source familiar with the White House meetings said Jared Kushner also met Nader. After asking around about Nader, Kushner decided not to continue meeting with him, according to the same source [....]
By Beth Mole @ Ars Technica, Jan. 18
For four of the country’s largest hospital systems, enough is enough.
Sick of drug companies’ eye-popping price hikes and ridiculous shortages, the feisty hospital systems announced Wednesday that they’ve banded together and formed an unnamed non-profit to make their own steady supply of affordable generic medicines.
The leading hospital system, Intermountain Healthcare, released a statement explaining [....]
By Amie Parnes @ TheHill.com, Jan. 21
When Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) lashed out against Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen this week, he became the latest potential 2020 presidential candidate to use a high-profile Senate committee hearing to amplify their stature.
Booker mostly got what he wanted: his fiery questioning of Nielsen at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday played on loop across the cable networks and fired up the conversation around his would-be candidacy [.....]
I watched it, it was an incredibly eloquent and skillful take down of Nielsen with just the right precise smidgen of outrage and emotion, not too much. Because it was so skillful, I think this is why GOP media reacted so strongly against it. I recommend others seek it out. Note that at the end,there's a sort of wink when Booker graciously thanks Sen. Graham, as chairman of the committee, for the opportunity to join it, and Graham basically responds in a way to say you're welcome, I mean really really welcome, this could be good....
By Johnny Simon @ Quartz.com, Jan. 18
US president Donald Trump sat down for an interview with Reuters in the Oval Office on Wednesday (Jan 17). While the interview ended with takeaways of Trump’s plan ahead for this year’s midterm elections and tensions with North Korea, a truly remarkable exclusive was this photo of Trump and his communication staff engaged in tense tableau while Reuters journalists looked on. For those who have read the various stories depicting a White House coming apart at the seams, with a diminishing team of advisors, here is an intimate image that seems to illustrate that chaos [.....]
By Jennifer Schuessler @ NYTimes.com, Jan. 16
[....] Bill Miller, the value investor who famously beat the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index for 15 consecutive years (and whose faith in bank stocks later won a mocking depiction in the movie “The Big Short”), has donated $75 million to the philosophy department of Johns Hopkins University.
The gift, formally announced on Tuesday, appears to be the largest by far to a philosophy department anywhere in the world, the university said. It will allow the department, which will be renamed for Mr. Miller, to nearly double in size, to 22 full-time faculty members, while also supporting graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and new courses aimed at attracting undergraduates [.....]
By Lily Geismer @ Los Angeles Review of Books, Jan. 19
WHAT SHOULD WE MAKE of conservatism in the Trump era? Last spring, Rick Perlstein, a historian of the American right, published a mea culpa in The New York Times Magazine explaining how the election of Donald Trump had led him to reconsider the settled narrative of modern American conservatism. Perlstein bemoaned the fact that 20th-century political historians mostly restricted their attention to establishment figures like William F. Buckley Jr., Barry Goldwater, and Ronald Reagan. Instead, he exhorted his colleagues to look fringeward, to “conservative history’s political surrealists and intellectual embarrassments, its con artists and tribunes of white rage,” in order to understand the foundations of Trumpism.
Though much of its contents were written and published prior to this call to arms, the updated edition of Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind can be read as a powerful rejoinder to Perlstein’s argument. Robin posits that the roots of Trumpism are not on the right’s fringe but rather among its standard-bearers, going back as far as Edmund Burke, the father of modern conservatism, and winding through respected figures like Joseph de Maistre, Friedrich Hayek, and Antonin Scalia [....]
In key House races, Republican candidates might be the only names on the ballot in November.
FULLERTON, Calif. — Democrats who cheered the retirement announcements of Reps. Darrell Issa and Ed Royce last week are sobering up to a new fear: A potential nightmare scenario in which no Democratic candidate ends up on the November ballot in either seat, dealing a blow to the party’s efforts to retake the House.
The problem is California’s unusual, top-two primary system, where the top two vote-getters regardless of party affiliation advance to the November general election.
Prior to the retirement announcements, Democrats had been pounding for months on Royce and Issa, yoking the two vulnerable Republicans to a president loathed in this heavily Democratic state. But with no GOP incumbent in either race — and with Democratic candidates threatening to splinter their party’s share of the vote — Democrats now face the prospect of getting scrubbed entirely from the November ballot [.....]
By Michael D. Shear & Maggie Haberman @ NYTimes.com, Jan.
[....] Once again, Mr. Trump’s impulses led him to ignore political protocols and his own Republican allies, like Speaker Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin and Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, who had groused in recent days that the Senate would consider an immigration bill “as soon as we figure out what he is for.” [....]
In classic Trump style, the president on Friday made anxious conservatives hold their breath for almost 90 minutes as the possibility of a Trump-Schumer deal dangled in the Washington wind. In a later Twitter post, Mr. Trump declared it an “excellent preliminary meeting” and said he was making progress with Mr. Schumer and Republican leaders [.....]
By Ali Breland @ TheHill.com, Jan. 19
Russian-linked bots on Twitter are pushing for the House Intelligence Committee to release a classified report written by committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.).
Some Republicans believe the report shows political bias in the FBI and the Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation of possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.
#ReleaseTheMemo is the top trending hashtag among Twitter accounts believed to be operated by Kremlin-linked groups, according to Hamilton 68, a website which tracks Russian propaganda online.
Hamilton 68 is spearheaded by Clint Watts, an expert on foreign actors using American social media. Watts has testified before Congress multiple times on the matter [....]