Coming February 6, 2024 . . .
MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop
Coming February 6, 2024 . . . MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
As a native Pennsylvanian, I never once considered attending Penn State University. Penn State always seemed like a place full of cliquish white people recalling their glory years of making fun of the dorky kids in high school. More progressive white people and people of color went to big city state schools like Pitt or Temple while whiter, more conservative types tended to dominate the settings of the rural, fraternity-heavy Penn State campus.
What a curious non-story to be included in the NYT "alleged NEWS" section. From the article:
"For weeks in February and March, the numbers swelled outside this Capitol. Tens of thousands of protesters — and protesters of the protesters — marched around Capitol Square and filled the building’s rotunda, chanting, shouting and singing in response to Mr. Walker’s plan to cut collective bargaining rights and workers' benefits in order to help solve the state's budget problems."
Once I got to the part about "- and protestors of the protestors -" I knew the author had blown away any personal credibility as a "news reporter" interested in sharing an unbiased assessment of activist involvement in Madison. At no time throughout the year we've had in Madison was there ever any real "protest of protestors" involved in any numbers or impact. But this reporter repeats this Fox News invention as a way of discounting the presence of large numbers of Wiscnsinites - 100k PLUS at times! - rallying against Scott Walker and his abominable plans for this state.
Like I said: a really curious non-story here, passed off as legitimate journalism. Why here? Why now? (And, I might add, a nice pic of CJ, Jenna and a couple others in the rotunda!)
The veterans bill, passed by the Senate 94-1, would provide tax credits for firms that hire unemployed or disabled vets........“All Americans deserve the same opportunity to get hired. I cannot support this tax credit because I do not believe the government should privilege one American over another when it comes to work,” DeMint said.
When that one American served the country honorably, in a nation at war for over 10 years, if unemployed or disabled or both, they do deserve to have some advantage in the way of an employer tax credit Mr. DeMint, and, Senator, membership in the Armed Forces is open to all Americans who are fit and willing to serve their country, there is no discrimination, it is a 'privilege' that is open to all.
94 other Senators disagreed with DeMint, who was the only Senator to vote no on the Bill.
[Overheard on Wall Street : "If they'd like to die then they'd better do it and decrease the surplus population."]
STATE COLLEGE, Pa. -- Penn State receivers coach Mike McQueary, one of the central figures in the burgeoning child sex abuse scandal at the school, will not attend Saturday when the Nittany Lions play their final home game of the season, the school announced Thursday night.
The school cited "multiple threats" as the reason for McQueary's absence Saturday against No. 19 Nebraska.
By Olivia Chung, Asia Times Online, Nov. 10, 2011
HONG KONG - "Get rich - then get out" is the life message being grasped by China's wealthiest citizens two decades after former leader Deng Xiaoping supposedly declared that "to get rich is glorious".
About 60% of rich Chinese people intend to migrate from China, according to a report jointly released by the Hurun Report, which also publishes an annual China rich list, and the Bank of China. A separate study by US-based Bain & Company and China Merchants Bank in April of 2,600 high-net worth individuals - those who hold more than 10 million yuan (US$1.6 million) in individual investable assets (excluding primary residences and assets of poor liquidity) - found that about 60% of those interviewed had completed immigration applications to other countries or had plans to do so....
The most favorable destinations by rich Chinese is the US, with 40% of respondents claiming it was their first choice, followed by Canada and Singapore....
Also see
Will Aba be the CCP's Waterloo?
By Peter Lee, Asia Times Online, Nov. 11, 2011
Summary: A string of self-immolations at a single Tibetan Buddhist monastery has put Aba prefecture, a remote corner of Sichuan province, in the news again, three years after violent protests in the run-up to the Beijing Summer Olympic Games and the devastation of the Wenchuan earthquake. A rising death toll of radicalized monks and mismanagement of the quake's aftermath will be taken as the Chinese Communist Party's legacy if it continues along its path of repression and re-education.
By John Paul Stevens, New York Review of Books, Nov. 10, 2011 issue
Extensive review of William J. Stunz's new book, The Collapse of American Criminal Justice, by retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens.
By Declan Walsh in Karachi, Guardian.co.uk, Nov. 10, 2011
Karachi version of Dirty Harry [Chaudhry Aslam Khan,] who has been shot five times, makes pledge after suicide attack blows the front off his home.
by Eyder Peralta, The Two Way @ NPR.org, Nov. 10, 2011
The history of the more than $4 billion in debt spans a decade and mostly involves a failed sewer construction deal fraught with corruption. Experts worry that the municipal bond market in the United States will suffer the consequences.
All Things Considered, NPR.org, Nov. 10, 2011
Audio [4 min 42 sec]
Guy Raz speaks with Portland, Ore., Mayor Sam Adams who today ordered the Occupy protesters in his city out of their encampments by 12:01 a.m. Sunday. The move comes after he wrote an open letter to the protesters, saying their living conditions were unsustainable.
What do we want? Funding! How will we get it? Comics!
That’s the goal of the Occupy Comics Kickstarter project, launched Wednesday by transmedia studioHalo-8 and explained in the video pitch below. The plan is to graphically document the Occupy movement with the help of a roster of respected comics creators and artists, then funnel the proceeds directly to the protesters taking hits and making history for the 99 percent.
“Comics is at the root of this thing,” Halo-8 founder andOccupy Comics organizer Matt Pizzolo said in an e-mail to Wired.com. “Just look at Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s V for Vendetta masks at every protest. A Guy Fawkes mask is now a more iconic image of street protest than a gas mask.”
Occupy Comics contributorMolly Crabapple, whose work can be seen above and below, lives a block from Zuccotti Park, where the Occupy Wall Street movement got its start. She said she visits the site, where hundreds of people have encamped to protest economic inequality, almost daily.
“It’s a beautiful community, almost a mini-city, complete with library, kitchen, free store, coffee, compost and Ben and Jerry’s ice cream scooped out by Ben himself,” Crabapple told Wired.com in an e-mail. “But the media wasn’t portraying this. So I started drawing the protesters to show the diversity down at Zuccotti. Later, I did more blatantly political work in response to attacks on unions and police brutality in Oakland.”
The idea that people, working through consensus, can solve basic problems such as how to regulate public space, security and infrastructure is one of the most powerful spurs to current architectural thinking. Younger architects and planners are studying how people actually use space rather than adopting top-down design ideas fashioned by governments or urban theorists. A new sense of post-Utopian architecture is replacing older, modernist efforts to impose ideal order on the intractable city. After analyzing how people in Rio de Janeiro’s largest favela, or shanty town, respond to their harsh urban environment, the architects at Atelier UM+D (based in southern Brazil) proposed designs for an innovative skyscraper that would blur the lines between public and private space, organize residents around basic needs such as food and medical care, and allow for far greater adaptability than most carefully programmed urban buildings.
Fourteen clips, most less that 3 minutes long, of Glenn Greenwald speaking before students at Claremont McKenna College in California. His discussion of the rule of law, and who in America is bound by it, and the importance of how that has changed, has relevance to almost everything discussed here at Dagblog. I will be interested in reactions to it wherever they may appear, but especially here among those who have expressed a variety of strong opinions about the value of his work.
Penn State trustees fired football coach Joe Paterno and university president Graham Spanier amid the growing furor over how the school handled sex abuse allegations against an assistant coach.
The massive shakeup Wednesday night came hours after Paterno announced that he planned to retire at the end of his 46th season.
But the outcry following the arrest of former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky on molestation charges proved too much for the board to ignore.
Voters in eight cities in three states cast ballots Tuesday to decide whether red light cameras and speed cameras should be used in their communities. Seven of the races went against the use of photo ticketing.
The night's first results came from Ashtabula, Ohio where 60 percent of residents approved an amendment to the city charter stating that the city "shall not use any traffic law photo-monitoring device" unless a police officer personally issues the citation.
"I feel that the citizens of Ashtabula stood up," Mark Leatherman, chairman of the Citizens of Ashtabula Camera Committee told TheNewspaper. "We had the police chief attacking and fighting citizens on this issue on Facebook. We stuck to our guns to get this passed."
Leatherman and fellow volunteers held twenty rallies in support of the ballot measure, ensuring that voters understood that a "yes" vote meant no more cameras. In Garfield Heights, officials were far more aggressive in pushing cameras. Voters in the city had struck down photo enforcement last year, but the city council proposed a charter amendment permitting photo monitoring devices "in school zones and/or park and recreation areas only." This idea found even less support than the cameras received last year. Fifty-four percent opposed the school zone speed cameras.
Redflex Traffic Systems of Australia kicked in at least $108,000 to fund the Safe Roads Ohio front group to campaign for cameras in both Garfield Heights and South Euclid -- the equivalent of $15 per vote. This compares to the unfunded effort in South Euclid to put a stop to the cameras, which won 55 percent of the vote.
In East Cleveland, local officials went to the most extreme lengths of any contest to date to badger voters into supporting cameras. Off-duty police officers, in uniform and with their police cruisers parked on the curb, were ordered to go door-to-door to convince residents to vote to return the cameras. Last month, Mayor Gary Norton mailed layoff notices to thirty-six cops and fourteen firefighters, claiming the city would have to fire them if it lost the photo ticketing revenue. The strong-arm tactics worked, as the city picked up 54 percent of the vote.
He sounds like a crazy man, seriously. I think this is an indication his 15 minutes are up!
But you know, it isn't important cause it doesn't show Romney beating the President.
It’s a major bureaucratic process to remove a child from her home and family. The state insures the child, pays for daycare, investigates the claims of abuse, and retains legal custody, but it cannot actually put a baby to bed at night. And so, on the other side of this most intimate public-private partnership are usually people like us, left alone with a stranger’s child and a garbage bag full of clothes and wondering what’s going to happen next. And what happens next depends, to a stomach-churning degree, on the state’s willingness and ability to keep up its half of the bargain.
So it was with an unusual sense of urgency and dread that our family watched the 2010 Republican wave and the austerity budgeting that has followed in ceaseless progression. When Paul Ryan’s budget, approved by 235 Republicans in the House, proposed dramatic cuts to federal Medicaid spending, it was as if they were trying to make it even more hopeless for us to find a doctor to treat Sophia’s health problems. When Scott Walker in Wisconsin sought to cut the workforce that administers foster care in his state, we went up to Madison to join the protests in solidarity, because we knew how helpless we would be if there were no caseworker on the other end of the phone to answer our own urgent pleas for help and guidance. And the threats have continued, as House Republicans repeatedly propose cutting trillions of dollars in domestic spending to reduce the debt while making room for sustained upper-income tax cuts. The way this hits home for us is simple. A foster parent joins hands with the state in order to take care of a dispossessed child. For the last year, the state has been trying to slip free of our grasp.
[Hat tip to Sharon Astyk. You may need a hanky.]
By Sabrina Tavernise, New York Times, Nov. 8/9, 2011
COLUMBUS, Ohio — A year after Republicans swept legislatures across the country, voters in Ohio delivered their verdict on a centerpiece of the conservative legislative agenda, striking down a law that restricted public workers’ rights to bargain collectively.
The landslide vote to repeal the bill — 62 percent to 38 percent, according to preliminary results from Ohio’s secretary of state — was a slap to Ohio’s governor, John R. Kasich, a prominent Republican who had championed the law as a tool for cities to cut costs. The bill passed in March on a wave of enthusiasm among Republicans fresh from victories at the polls.....
“Who the fuck does he think he is? Who’s the fucking superpower here?” Bill Clinton said in exasperation about Benjamin Netanyahu after one of the Israeli prime minister’s characteristic displays of arrogance in 1996.