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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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[....] The court papers filed by President Donald Trump’s administration complete the briefing on the government’s emergency application asking the justices to block lower court injunctions in favor of challengers to the ban. The Supreme Court could now act at any time [....]
Review of Risk, a documentary film directed by Laura Poitras
By Sue Halpern for The New York Review of Books July 17 issue, available online now
About forty minutes into Risk, Laura Poitras’s messy documentary portrait of Julian Assange, the filmmaker addresses the viewer from off-camera. “This is not the film I thought I was making,” she says. “I thought I could ignore the contradictions. I thought they were not part of the story. I was so wrong. They are becoming the story.” [....]
The Arab-German journalist Souad Mekhennet narrowly avoided being radicalized. Now she uncovers what motivates fervent believers in jihad.
Book review by Alexis Okeowo @ NewYorker.com, June 20
[....] When we talk about radicalization, the narrative moves from vague discontent to extremism—a journey spurred by alienation, discrimination, and poverty. In the Arab-German journalist Souad Mekhennet’s new book, “I Was Told to Come Alone: My Journey Behind the Lines of Jihad,” an enthralling and sometimes shocking blend of reportage and memoir from the centers of jihadi networks in the Middle East and North Africa, Mekhennet interrogates those assumptions, which don’t always hold true. A Frankfurt correspondent for the Washington Post, Mekhennet has a singular perspective on the modern crisis of terrorist violence, intimate and constantly questioning. Mekhennet says that she is someone who narrowly escaped being radicalized herself—owing to the influence of her involved parents and family friends. Instead, she turned to uncovering what motivates the most fervent of believers in jihad, and how they became so unrepentant [....]
Karen Handel, a Republican, won a U.S. House seat in Georgia, according to The Associated Press. It’s a reprieve for President Trump and a demoralizing blow to Democrats.
If “monopoly” sounds like a word from another era, that’s because, until recently, it was. Throughout the middle of the 20th century, the term was frequently used in newspaper headlines, campaign speeches, and State of the Union addresses delivered by Republican and Democratic presidents alike. Breaking up too-powerful companies was a bipartisan goal and on the minds of many voters. But, starting in the 1970s, the word retreated from the public consciousness. Not coincidentally, at the same time, the enforcement of anti-monopoly policy grew increasingly toothless.
The story of why the word and the movement dropped off the map in tandem carries lessons about how an economic policy’s effectiveness can be its own undoing, and about how people are thinking about corporate power today. Because monopoly is back. As concentration has soared to levels not seen in decades, economists are talking about monopoly again; recent scholarship has linked consolidation with rising inequality and other economic ills. Politicians on both the left and right are talking about it, too—the announcement last week that Amazon is planning to buy Whole Foods has refocused some politicians’ attention on the subject.
On a spring morning last year, two men from opposite ends of the ideological spectrum met at a Manhattan diner for brunch and, somewhat to their own surprise, discovered they agreed on a way to address that problem. One was Eli Lehrer, who co-founded and runs the R Street Institute, a free-market-oriented, Republican-leaning think tank in Washington. Lehrer believes the time has come for the American right to reconsider its decades-long war on unions. Their collapse, he says, has fueled the growth of government and of the welfare state, which has stepped in to regulate workplaces and provide job security as unions have died out.
His unlikely dining companion was Andy Stern. As the president of the Service Employees International Union from 1996 to 2010, Stern had become the labor-movement equivalent of a rock star by more than doubling the union’s membership. Unions, he thinks, cannot survive unless they innovate and change, but laws intended to protect and preserve them get in the way. “Anytime anybody gets creative, these laws stop us,” he said when I spoke with him and Lehrer recently.
Sensitive personal details relating to almost 200 million US citizens have been accidentally exposed by a marketing firm contracted by the Republican National Committee. The 1.1 terabytes of data includes birthdates, home addresses, telephone numbers and political views of nearly 62% of the entire US population. Anyone could access the data as long as they had a link to it.
Michigan's attorney general charged two new high-ranking state health officials Wednesday in the fourth round of criminal charges to stem from the Flint drinking-water crisis.
Six officials were charged in all — five with involuntary manslaughter — according to Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette.
So, after more than three years, one death due to Legionaire's disease, and so many children and adults harmed by lead-tainted water, we finally have charges brought against the people who were so concerned about not rocking the political boat, they failed do the right thing.
I think I might actually hate these people.
Shakespeare Dallas, in Texas, has had 90 emails, while Shakespeare & Company in Massachusetts has had nearly 50, plus about 10 angry phone calls."It's a case of mistaken identity," said Raphael Parry, the artistic director at Shakespeare Dallas.
"Don't blast everyone who's in theatre or the arts. It's unbelievable. It's shocking. People need to do their research before they blast off." He and his staff have received emails including "I hope you die and so do your family" and "You truly are a bunch of freaks... We should send all you freaks to ISIS. They would eliminate your stench on this earth with real knives."
It seems insurers quite like it but don't want their fingerprints on it, and the rest of the HC industry is scared of Trump and the GOP taking away their subsidies if they oppose it. It's not clear why the AARP isn't flexing its muscle. Any smart takes on this?
“Hubris syndrome,” as he and a co-author, Jonathan Davidson, defined it in a 2009 article published in Brain, “is a disorder of the possession of power, particularly power which has been associated with overwhelming success, held for a period of years and with minimal constraint on the leader.” Its 14 clinical features include: manifest contempt for others, loss of contact with reality, restless or reckless actions, and displays of incompetence. In May, the Royal Society of Medicine co-hosted a conference of the Daedalus Trust—an organization that Owen founded for the study and prevention of hubris.
By Jennifer Steinhauser @ NYTimes.com, June 19
[....] And on Tuesday, a measure that would have blocked part of a $500 million arms sale to Saudi Arabia — only weeks after Mr. Trump was received with adulation in the kingdom — had so much bipartisan support that Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson and Vice President Mike Pence had to make a panicked scramble to defeat it. Four Republicans voted to block the sale, and Mr. Trump was saved by Democratic senators who backed him.
Next week, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will move after years of resistance to draft a new war authorization to fight the Islamic State, asserting more power over troop deployments as Mr. Trump publicly cedes that authority to the Pentagon.
Not least, the Trump administration’s budget request that would gut the State Department was met by an instant rebuke from Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, who won’t even consider it.
In the meantime, a number of senators have formed a kind of parallel operation to the State Department by visiting allies to assure them of America’s commitments [....]
The justices declared that they will consider whether gerrymandered election maps favoring one political party over another violate the Constitution, a potentially fundamental change in the way American elections are conducted.
By Robert Barnes @ WashingtonPost.com, 1 hr. ago
The Supreme Court declared Monday that it will consider whether gerrymandered election maps favoring one political party over another violate the Constitution, a potentially fundamental change in the way American elections are conducted.
The justices regularly are called to invalidate state electoral maps that have been illegally drawn to reduce the influence of racial minorities by depressing the impact of their votes. But the Supreme Court has never found a plan unconstitutional because of partisan gerrymandering. If it does, it would have a revolutionary impact on the reapportionment that comes after the 2020 election and could come at the expense of Republicans, who control the process in the majority of states.
The court accepted a case from Wisconsin, where a divided panel of three federal judges last year ruled last year that the state’s Republican leadership in 2011 pushed through a plan so partisan that it violated the Constitution’s First Amendment and equal rights protections [....]
The outcome is likely to affect the legal case of the Washington Redskins, whose trademark registration was revoked in 2014 under the same disparagement clause.
By Robert Barnes @ WashingtonPost.com, 36 mins. ago
[....] Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. delivered the opinion for a largely united court. He said the law could not be saved just because it evenhandedly prohibits disparagement of all groups.
“In the sense relevant here, that is viewpoint discrimination,” Alito wrote. “Giving offense is a viewpoint.”
The trademark office in 2011 said registering the trademark of The Slants, an Asian-American rock group, would violate a part of the 1946 Lanham Trademark Act that prohibits registration of a trademark that “may disparage … persons, living or dead, institutions, beliefs, or national symbols, or bring them into contempt, or disrepute.”
The office said the name was likely to disparage a significant number of Asian Americans. But founder Simon Tam said the point of the band’s name is just the opposite: an attempt to reclaim a slur and use it “as a badge of pride.” [....]
Moscow condemned the downing of a Syrian aircraft by a U.S. fighter as a “flagrant violation of international law” and said it was suspending an air agreement with American military forces.
By David Fillipov & Louisa Loveluck @ WashingtonPost.com, 1 hr. ago
MOSCOW — Russia on Monday angrily condemned the downing of a Syrian aircraft by a U.S. fighter as a “flagrant violation of international law,” and said its forces will treat U.S.-led coalition aircraft and drones as targets if they are operating in Syrian airspace west of the Euphrates while Russian aviation is on combat missions.
The Russian Defense Ministry also said it is suspending an agreement to minimize the risk of in-flight incidents between Russian and U.S.-led coalition [.....]
Police training = "just shoot to kill". Must be easiest job in the world, don't have to think.
A Rhode Island teacher whose photo with Trump soared on social media says he wants to tell the president ‘anti-LGBTQ policies have a body count’