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Recently my partner and I had brunch with some old comrades, folks I first met in the 1996 fight to stop the state of California from outlawing affirmative action. Sadly, we lost that one and, almost three decades later, we continue to lose affirmative action programs thanks to a Supreme Court rearranged or, more accurately, deranged by one Donald J. Trump. It was pure joy to hang out with them and remember that political struggle during which, as my partner and I like to say, we taught a generation of young people to ask, “Can you kick in a dollar to help with the campaign?” For a couple of old white lesbians who, in the words of a beloved Catherine... Read more

Source: Trump Showed Us Who He Is the First Time Around appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

If recent polls show Americans are increasingly reluctant to provide military aid to Ukraine, how willing would it be to defend NATO allies from a Russian attack?

Another time for choosing Indulge me. I still struggle to get campaigns here to rethink their strategy and to cast a wider net for “low-propensity” voters Democrats here cannot win statewide races without. Without getting into the weeds, a short thread by Anat Shenker-Osorio gets at what I was already recommending. It’s related to how Jay Rosen a full year ago recommended the press approach this election: Not the odds, but the stakes. For individual voters, the stakes are also high, but democracy may seem an abstraction. Shenker-Osorio’s observations are based on preliminary findings, but what seems to move voters is reframing how Democrats pitch their message: from vote for us to vote for you. “We must shift folks from seeing election as contest between 2 (or more) people to seeing it as fork in road between 2 different futures.” It is old hat to ask people if they are better off now than they were four years ago. But they might disagree that they are, no matter how much data you throw at them. It’s almost reflex on the left to try to browbeat people into submission with our supposed superior command of the facts.

Frontline advisors at Rooted Finance sacked on International Women's Day

Anita McNaught pays tribute to an exceptional TV news cameraman who was killed two years ago in the first weeks of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine

Open Rights Group has responded to the government’s announcement that it will update the definition of extremism used by government departments and officials. Sara Chitseko, Pre-Crime Programme Manager at Open Rights Group said: “After months of media briefings, the government announcement of its new definition of extremism seems to be more about political point scoring […]

Well, we guess the cat’s out of the bag—or as we say around these parts, the door is off the plane: we have been sending aircraft into the sky that are not sky-worthy. Frankly, they’re barely ground-worthy. And you probably heard that the whistleblower who raised all those quality concerns has not at all suspiciously been found dead of a self-inflicted wound. Naturally, people have been asking for our response to these allegations that our planes aren’t safe and should be grounded.

Our response is: stop being a little bitch. We’ve got a new safety policy, and that policy is: fuck it, we ball.

Safety measures are exhausting and expensive. And do we even really need them? Planes basically never crash! Everybody needs to calm down and let loose, as loose as some of the screws on our airplanes. Other aircraft carriers won’t even let you roll down the window. We’re rawdogging the atmosphere. Get on board, or get the fuck out.

When scientific pursuits are subject to human shortcomings: the Indian scientist made to wait 50 years for his Nobel Prize

- by Aeon Video

Watch at Aeon

Victoria Benedictsson assumed a male identity, achieved literary stardom, and took her own life. Then Strindberg stole it

- by Elisabeth Åsbrink

Read at Aeon

Dementia accelerates a process we all experience, as our memories become increasingly externalised into the world around us

- by Crispin Sartwell

Read at Psyche

Political economy has long taken a keen interest in the politics of economic ideas, but considerably less attention has been paid to the politics of economic method. Method gets neglected as the technical realm within which, it is assumed economic ideas, once established, are implemented in straightforward fashion. In fact, economic method and technique are in fact key sites in […]

I was asked during an interview the other day from Paris whether I was a Post Keynesian. I replied not at all and explained that I have never felt that my ideas fit into that category although in a facile sense we are all post keynesian in a temporal sense. Most progressive economists would answer…

What looks like a disastrous collapse in students’ literacy may be simply a reversion to a kind of mean.

A NINETEEN-YEAR-OLD refugee from Syria studying nursing and business in Coff Harbour has taken out the International Women’s Day (IWD) Coffs Coast Woman of the Year award. This award and others were handed out at the annual IWD Breakfast held at the Coffs Harbour Race Club on March 8. Advertise with News of The Area...

The post Falak Othman named IWD Coffs Coast Woman of the Year appeared first on News Of The Area.

On 11th March 2024, Phillip Adams invited me to LNL for one last time before he is due to retire. Bittersweet program where we talked about everything that intervened between our first ever encounter on LNL in 1993 to today. Thank you Phillip. On behalf, I believe, of countless souls who will miss your voice, […]

The post My last waltz on Late Night Live with my friend, the wonderful, Phillip Adams – audio appeared first on Yanis Varoufakis.

“Europe and Australia are facing a common existential threat: a creeping irrelevance caused, on the one hand, by our failure properly to invest and, on the other hand, by our ill-considered slide from a strategic dependence on the United States to a non-strategic, self-defeating servility to Washington’s policy agenda.” Yanis Varoufakis’s address at the National […]

The post Reversing Europe’s and Australia’s slide into irrelevance & insecurity – National Press Club of Australia speech appeared first on Yanis Varoufakis.

ULONG resident and inspirational community champion Carol Cleary has been named the 2024 Coffs Harbour Electorate Local Woman of the Year. In making the announcement, Member for Coffs Harbour Gurmesh Singh said Carol was awarded the prestigious honour in recognition of her significant work and leadership to actively support her local community over many years....

The post Carol Cleary named Coffs Harbour Electorate Local Woman of the Year appeared first on News Of The Area.

As the first-ever Medicare drug-price negotiations take shape, Big Pharma-backed Democrats want to limit the number of costly medicines regulators can target.

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

It’s a winner. Huge. You go boys and girls: Republicans leading the party’s effort to defend the House in this fall’s elections are pushing GOP colleagues to openly discuss their positions on abortion, rather than try to sidestep the issue like many did in the previous campaign, arguing that doing so will be critical to winning competitive races. A memo prepared by House Republicans’ campaign arm and viewed by The Wall Street Journal says Republicans have a “brand problem, not a policy problem,” as their reluctance to discuss the issue left it to Democrats to define where the GOP stood. Many voters view the party’s hopefuls as opposing abortion under any circumstances, when there are actually a variety of positions held by candidates, particularly in swing districts, the memo states. The guidance tells candidates that they must “confidently articulate” their stance and that “being unwilling to stake out a clear position with voters is the worst possible solution.” Abortion has weighed on the party’s success in recent years.

We now know the recipients for the next Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Leadership Awards. This year’s RBG Awards will go to entrepreneur Elon Musk, actor and filmmaker Sylvester Stallone, lifestyle expert Martha Stewart, philanthropist Michael Milken and media mogul Rupert Murdoch. This award is given out by a right wing foundation through the Library of Congress so I guess that explains it. But why is the Library of Congress involved in something like this? And they couldn’t find more than one woman for the RBG award? Sylvester Stallone?