MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
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In the News
By Quint Forcey @ Politico.com, Nov. 18
Seventy percent of Americans said President Donald Trump was wrong to pressure Ukraine’s leader to pursue probes into his political opponents, according to a new survey, and more than half of respondents indicated he should be removed from office.
An ABC News/Ipsos poll published Monday found that 51 percent of those surveyed believed Trump should be impeached by House lawmakers, as well as convicted by the Senate. Six percent said that while Trump’s actions were wrong and that he should be impeached, he should not be ousted by the Senate.
An additional 13 percent also deemed the president’s push for foreign investigations of his rivals to be wrong, but believed he should neither be impeached nor convicted by Congress. A quarter of respondents, 25 percent, said Trump did nothing wrong [....]
As the country’s first Indigenous president has tumbled from power, Indigenous Bolivians fear the loss of their hard-won political gains, and say a racially tinged backlash has begun.
By Anatoly Kurmanaev and Clifford Krauss @ NYTimes.co, Nov. 15, 2019, Updated 9:12 p.m. ET
COCHABAMBA, Columbia — In the days since the ouster of Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first Indigenous president, deep ethnic tensions that have long divided the country have erupted, complicating efforts to move Bolivia out of political crisis.
Mr. Morales, a champion of the Indigenous, has now been replaced by an acting president of European descent, and resentments have surfaced. Police officers have ripped the Indigenous insignia off their uniforms. Protesters have burned the Indigenous flag. And the acting president, who posted tweets many consider racist, initially appointed a cabinet without a single Indigenous member.
“We feel threatened,” said Juan Acume, a farmer from the Quechua, an Indigenous group, near a protest barricade of earth mounds and tree trunks across Bolivia’s main highway on Wednesday night. “They don’t represent us; they reject us, the Indigenous.” [...]
Former President Barack Obama, in an address to liberal donors, warned candidates not to go too far left and sought to calm those who were concerned about the state of the Democratic primary.
By LIsa Lerer @ NYTimes.com, Nov. 15, Updated 10:56 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON — Former President Barack Obama offered an unusual warning to the Democratic primary field on Friday evening, cautioning the candidates not to move too far to the left in their policy proposals, even as he sought to reassure a party establishment worried about the electoral strength of their historically large primary field.
Speaking before a room of wealthy liberal donors, Mr. Obama urged Democrats to remember the long, combative slog of his primary campaign against Hillary Clinton in 2008, arguing that the 16 month battle ultimately made him a stronger general election candidate.
“For those who get stressed about robust primaries, I just have to remind you I had a very robust primary,” [....]
C.J. Chivers retweeted this and I value his infrequent recommends, especially anything to do with war:
By Jerry Lambe @ LawandCrime.com, Nov. 15
For months, President Donald Trump’s tax returns have been the subject of multiple lawsuits working their way through the federal court system. But it wasn’t until Thursday that one of those cases finally reached the nation’s highest court, when attorneys for President Trump filed a petition for a writ of certiorari with the Supreme Court in Trump v. Vance. According to University of Texas law Professor Steve Vladeck, however, the Vance case, despite winning the race to the Supreme Court, is “likely to be overtaken in importance by other subpoena disputes making their way to the court,” particularly, “the dispute over the House Oversight Committee’s subpoena to the Mazars accounting firm” in Trump v. Mazars USA, LLP [....]
Why do we teach them that a person with a knife is always a lethal threat?
Second headline: ‘We are in a war’ In Hong Kong, an accountant by day becomes street fighter by night
By Shibani Mahtani from Hong Kong @ WashingtonPost.com, Nov. 12, with multiple videos
This cohort’s political evolution demonstrates the breadth of anger in Hong Kong. Where previous upwellings of public fury were often led by students, the authorities now face a scenario where workers with stable jobs and promising careers have been loosed on a path to radicalization.
By Dana Goldstein @NYTimes.com, Nov. 12
A plan to desegregate schools in a liberal Maryland suburb founded on values of tolerance has met with stiff resistance.Photo caption: Protesters outside the Howard County Board of Education building in Ellicott City, Md., last month.Credit...Andrew Mangum for The New York Times
COLUMBIA, Md. — The planned community of Columbia, southwest of Baltimore, has prided itself on its ethos of inclusion ever since it was founded more than half a century ago. Racially integrated. Affordable apartments near big homes. “The Next America” was its optimistic, harmonious motto.
But a recent proposal to restore some of that idealism by balancing the number of low-income children enrolled in schools across Howard County, including those in Columbia, has led to bitter divisions. Protesters in matching T-shirts have thronged school board meetings. Thousands of letters and emails opposing the redistricting plan, some of them overtly racist, have poured in to policymakers. One high school student made a death threat against the superintendent of schools, Michael J. Martirano [....]
(a video report from eye trauma center in Chile, filed Nov. 10, 6:25 mins.)