As Americans, our money is paying for Israel’s atrocities in Gaza. How much did you give?
The post I Calculated How Much of My Money the U.S. Sent to Kill Palestinians. You Can Too. appeared first on The Intercept.
Reading
What a doozy Republicans have a real problem when it comes to simple questions about the civil war and slavery. Nikki Haley got caught in a major gaffe yesterday in New Hampshire but Ron DeSantis has a lot of nerve dinging her for it though. He’s the guy who said defended a high school AP curriculum that said slavery helped enslaved Black people develop skills that could be applied for their personal benefit. Please. Here’s the whole Haley exchange: This isn’t hard. As Ron Brownstein pointed out, “South Carolina’s 1860 proclamation outlining its reasons for seceding from the Union mentions slavery in its opening sentence & points to the ‘increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery’ as a reason for the state” seceding.” She tried to clean it up today. First, she said it was a Democratic plant in the audience, as if that would make a difference. And she also said this: “Of course the Civil War was about slavery … But it was also more than that. It was about the freedoms of every individual. It was about the role of government.” Hmm.
Georgia Tennant shared a look at David Tennant checking out Ncuti Gatwa & Millie Gibson in Russell T. Davies's Doctor Who Christmas Special.
by Daniel Wortel-London
Advertising works. A recent study by the Advertising Association finds that every dollar of ad spending drives up sales by $21. Ads get us to recognize brands and hum jingles even if we are annoyed by pop-ups. They are particularly effective in driving the kind of unsustainable consumption that is destroying our planet.
This begs a question: Should advertising be limited for the sake of the environment?
The post It’s Time to Ban Earth-Damaging Ads appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.
He’s not even your retribution, MAGA The man spends (how much?) time, bronzer and hairspray on himself each morning before going to work late. He had to have daily presidential security briefings dumbed down to maps and bullet points because he has a short attention span for anything not Donald Trump. He has other priorities (which don’t include personal hygiene). But question his star power (or his liquidity) and you have his full attention. Daily Beast: Donald Trump kept the Christmas spirit going strong on Wednesday when he used his Truth Social account to go after the director of Home Alone and Home Alone 2 for suggesting in an interview that he “bullied” his way into a now-iconic cameo in the 1992 sequel. Just as Trump has frequently accused special prosecutor Jack Smith of having a fake name, the former president suggested the same of Chris Columbus as he disputed the director’s claims about how his appearance during a scene at the Plaza hotel, which he owned at the time, came to be.
You can’t win if you don’t show up to play I’m giving space this morning to the youngest Democratic state chair in the country. One year ago, Anderson Clayton, a 2020 Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and Amy McGrath field organizer took on “the powers that be” in the N.C. Democratic Party. She ran for state chair at 25. And won. Last night, she looked back on that decision (on the hellsite). (Full disclosure: I’m a friend and a fan. Clayton consulted with me for 3-1/2 hrs weeks before announcing her run. She did everything I recommended and more, including getting an early start. I funded a chunk of her campaign and watched it unfold as the only supporter over 35 on her campaign Slack.) (Since winning the chair, Clayton has appeared on television, in national newspaper profiles, and raised funds across the country.) If anyone is going to redeem the global climate and our reeling democracy, it’s not going to be the generations that oversaw bringing the world to this crisis. Fixing what needs fixing is not going to come from a dial-tested three-word slogan or a dead-on-arrival five-point progressive policy.
For a long time, two of the great gerontocracies were the Roman Catholic Church and the Chinese Communist Party. It is quite a thought that if Joe Biden were a Catholic bishop, he would have been required to submit his resignation to the pope five years ago. If he were a cardinal, he would, when […]
The post Eldest Statesmen appeared first on The New York Review of Books.
Our 16th most-read article of 2023.
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Originally published March 20, 2023.
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“As local bills on gender, sexuality, and diversity make their way through Florida’s state legislature, new legislation would ban any discussion of menstrual cycles in school before sixth grade.” – USA Today
In today's BCTV Daily Dispatch: Rick and Morty, The View, What If…?, Doctor Who, The Last of Us, James Gunn/Batman, Prime Video, and more!
I tend to read a novel a week (53 this year). Academic friends sometimes appear amazed by that, but if I don’t read 20 or 30 pages at night, I’m not going to sleep. Add 10 pages here or there during the week, and it’s four a month. Here were my 10 favourites during 2023: […]
The Intercept’s Ryan Grim explores the rise of the Squad in this short audio documentary adapted from an excerpt of his new book.
An analysis of the 100 largest U.S. cities found that the relationship between income inequality and income segregation became stronger from 1980 to 2015.
Unfortunately, sometimes people have to see the consequences of their actions before it can. If there’s one issue I’ve sadly become so pessimistic about that I can hardly write about it anymore, it’s guns. The ongoing tragedy of our fetish for the grotesque weapons of war with which so many Americans believe they have a right to play makes me feel like pulling the covers over my head and never coming up for air. I’ve noted the failure of NRA in the last couple of years and they did manage to pass a very tepid gun safety bill in the last congress. But even with that it just seems so hopeless that I’ve lost heart. But I read a story this morning in the Washington Post that makes me wonder if maybe something might be changing and I’m sharing it with you with a gift link so you can read it too. It’s about four current and three former Senators who have changed their minds. That’s not something I expected to see. They interviewed these senators who all voted against the bills that were proposed in the wake of the horrific Sandy Hook massacre in 2013.
Anyone who makes a MAGA buck has to kick back to Trump. Dear Leader wants his cut: “It’s my fucking money!” the 2024 Republican presidential frontrunner privately vented in October, referring to an alleged sum in the tens of millions of dollars, a source with direct knowledge of the matter tells Rolling Stone. Trump wasn’t talking about a business deal. Rather, he’s been grumbling about money donated to a think tank his former staffers and allies founded in 2021 to “advance the America First agenda.” For several months now, according to three people with knowledge of the situation, the former president has complained to an array of confidants and Republicans about the millions raised by the America First Policy Institute, a MAGAfied think tank launched near the start of his post-presidency. The nonprofit is populated by several former high-ranking Trump administration officials, including Larry Kudlow, Rick Perry, and Linda McMahon, and it’s led by Brooke Rollins, who served as a top White House domestic policy aide to Trump.