There's finally proof of Heaven.A self-proclaimed "prophet," South Africa's Pastor Mostsoeneng Mboro, recently announced that he had ascended to Heaven on Easter Sunday, and he made sure to take pictures with his Samsung Galaxy S5 while he was up there just to silence any doubters.If you wanted to see them, you just had to send him R5000 (about $340).Having no takers and under possible extortion charges, he quickly promised to post the images on Facebook for free.But that's not happening now because -- wait for it -- his phone was stolen!
Harriet Tubman is going to be on the $20 bill, with former president Andrew Jackson demoted to the back. This will make, obviously, no practical difference in anyone's life, but you may have heard or read a lot about it anyway.
This is precisely because it's a purely symbolic question rather than a pragmatic one — it touches some of the deepest nerves in American politics. Fox News' Greta Van Susteren calls it "dividing the country" while Donald Trump has denounced the move as "pure political correctness."
People who were initially enthusiastic about the change when word leaked Wednesday morning were perhaps disillusioned to learn later that day that Jackson hasn't been exiled from the bill entirely. Meanwhile, fans of both the musical Hamilton and the strong-state tradition in American politics are simply heightened to learn that America's first treasury secretary has gotten a reprieve relative to the initial plan to replace him with a woman.
The basic moral of all these storylines is the same.
The demographic face of the United States of America is changing, rapidly. The Democratic Party is fitfully and at times awkwardly embracing that change, while the Republican Party is to an extent being torn asunder by it, with one faction hoping to repackage traditional conservative movement politics for a multicultural audience while another faction wants to create a less ideologically rigid movement that stands foursquare against the declining social privilege of white men.
What, exactly, is happening with the $20?
America's currency notes are routinely redesigned on a set schedule, whose main purpose is to keep the bills up-to-date in terms of anti-counterfeiting measures, but which also presents the opportunity for aesthetic fixes.
Back in June of 2015, the Treasury Department announced that as part of the scheduled revision of the $10 it would redesign the bill to feature a woman in response to longstanding activist requests to incorporate some gender diversity into America's money.
This, however, prompted an immediate backlash from fans of Alexander Hamilton who, as the founder of America's banking and monetary system, arguably has a tighter connection to the currency than anyone else. Instead of ditching Hamilton, many said the Bureau of Printing and Engraving should replace Jacksonwith a woman. Jackson, after all, was a slave-owner and ethnic cleanser who also opposed the existence of paper money.
On April 20, 2016, the Treasury Department leaked that they had decided to go in this direction. A woman — specifically Tubman — would go on the $20.
That news was immediately celebrated by most progressives. Taking an iconic figure of 19th-century white supremacy off of money to replace him with a courageous African-American woman who fought for freedom would make a powerful statement about American identity. It turns out, however, that the plan is not to remove Jackson from the money but instead to do a split with Tubman on one side and Jackson on the other.
This turns out to be one of those compromises that angers everybody. It puts Tubman on the money, but seemingly as a second-class citizen compared to the white men celebrated on other notes. But it also marks a formal recognition that the American pantheon is being revised in a way that reduces white male domination.
How did Andrew Jackson fall out of favor?
The process by which American liberals came to clamor for the replacement of Jackson — but not Hamilton — with Tubman is, essentially, the entire political history of the United States since its founding.
For the bulk of its history, the Democratic Party has understood itself to have been dually founded by Thomas Jefferson (in opposition to Hamilton's Federalists) and Jackson (in opposition to the Whigs of Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams). And the modern day Democratic Party is very much the institutional descendent of Jackson's party, while the Republican Party founded in the 1850s had very clear ideological links to the Whigs.
But during the middle of the 20th century, a complicated series of events caused the parties to "realign" on the question of racial equality.
Northern African Americans were brought into the Democratic coalition by the welfare state programs of the New Deal, and Northern urban machines began to incorporate their interests. Liberal ideologues and progressive labor unions joined African Americans in pushing for a civil rights agenda, and Southern white supremacists began fitful efforts to bolt the Democratic Party.
As the civil rights agenda progressed to include more demands for government regulation of private business and more affirmative provision of government services, the conservative ideology of Midwestern Republicans came more into line with the ideas of the white South.
The new, multiracial Democratic coalition has led to a historiographical revolution in American history that features skepticism of iconic Progressive-era president Woodrow Wilson and new respect for the left-wing credentials of figures like Hamilton, both Adamses, and Clay.
This manifests itself both in scholarly works (Daniel Walker Howe's What Hath God Wrought), popular biographies (Ron Chernow's Alexander Hamilton), pop culture (Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton but also the 1997 movie Amistad and the John Adams HBO miniseries), and punditry (Ta-Nehisi Coates's series of posts celebrating Ulysses S. Grant).
The upshot is that the exact same intellectual currents in American society that were most likely to be enthusiastic about the idea of putting a black woman on American currency were least likely to be invested in the old Jefferson-Jackson tradition of the Democratic Party.
So when is my ATM going to start spitting Tubmans?
Not until 2030. The new plan does not alter the schedule of bill revisions.
The good news is that the new $10 bill will come out sooner, in 2020, and while it will continue to feature Hamilton on the front, the back "will honor the 1913 march and the leaders of the suffrage movement — Susan B. Anthony, Alice Paul, Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Lucretia Mott — who were instrumental in the passage of the 19th Amendment."
There is some irony here, because Aaron Burr, the man who shot Hamilton and who serves as the villain of Hamilton, was one of the earliest male proponents of women's suffrage in American history and introduced a bill granting women the right to vote during his service in the New York state legislature.
The new $5 has not been the subject of any controversy, but is also worth talking about. The front will continue to honor Abraham Lincoln, while the back is being revised to commemorate major historical happenings at the Lincoln Memorial — in effect, landmark moments in the Civil Rights Movement.
So who has a problem with this?
There's no hardcore Andrew Jackson constituency left in American politics, but the currency revision comes at a time when the Republican Party is being roiled by the surging support for Donald Trump.
Trump has a tenuous connection to the GOP's philosophical commitment to small government, and no personal investment in the kind of Evangelical Christianity that has powered much of grassroots conservatism. Instead, he advances a form of populist ethnic nationalism similar to what you see in many growing European "far right" political parties.
And while neither Trump nor Trumpism has much support among conservative intellectuals, both Trump and Trumpism have considerable support in the more commercialized segments of the conservative media world — talk radio, Fox News, and the tabloid press.
The $20 is a perfect incident to prompt this divide precisely because it has very little real content. There's nothing in Tubman's life or legacy that contradicts any points of modern-day conservative ideology or Republican Party policy ideas. But the very idea of going back through history and finding white male heroes to demote in favor of black female heroes rubs some people the wrong way.
Fox's Greta Van Susteren's negative reaction to the news, and conservative journalist Philip Klein's negative reaction to Van Susteren, captures the dynamic very well.
WTF? How is Obama dividing us by putting Tubman on the $20? Is there a less controversial figure in U.S. history? https://t.co/zkkGoqXaKb
Trump himself denounced the move as "pure political correctness," a term that has little specific content but that allows Trump to affiliate himself with the view — shared by most Republicans but not by most Americans overall — that anti-white discrimination is as big of a problem in America as anti-black discrimination.
As long as we're changing money, why not accomplish something practical?
This is an excellent point. There are three big things the United States could achieve by messing with physical money that will not be achieved by changing whose picture is on it.
Make money blind people can use.
American coins are different sizes from one another, which makes it easy to tell which coins you are holding while fishing around in your pocket. This is also convenient for people with impaired vision, because it lets them know what coins they are holding. Many foreign countries extend this principle to their banknotes for the exact same reason — not everyone can see but everyone needs to use money. Here in America, the vision impaired can go buy a special wallet to help them stay organized.
Eliminate $100 billsto make life worse for criminals.
When is the last time you paid for something with a stack of $100 bills? If you've ever done it, it's probably either because you are a master criminal or (more likely) because a service provider of some kind offered you a "cash discount" and you chose to pretend not to know that the purpose of the discount is that he can avoid reporting the income to the IRS.
Peter Sanders and his co-authors arguable persuasively in a paper for Harvard's Kennedy School of Government that use of $100 notes in legitimate transactions is rare, and legitimate circumstances in which a handful of $20s wouldn't be just as good is very rare. Getting rid of the high-denomination bill would, by contrast, significantly impair large-scale tax evasion and other financial crimes for which portability is a huge deal.
End recessions by eliminating paper money.
The old conventional wisdom in economics was that monetary policy could always end a recession by cutting interest rates. Then people remembered the "zero bound" problem — you can't cut interest rates below zero, because people can always hold onto cash which pays no interest. This turns out to not quite be true, but physical currency still puts a limit on how low interest rates can go.
Without paper money, the Fed could arrange things so money in your bank account would literally disappear over time if not spent. People would then have no choice but to rush out and try to buy durable goods (cars, home repairs, furniture) as the next-best means of saving. That increase in economic activity would spur hiring and reduce unemployment until the Fed started to raise rates again to cool things down and prevent inflation from getting out of hand.
Totally eliminating paper money would have some potentially dire consequences for privacy, but would also conceivable allow us to eliminate recessions altogether.
This is some of my problem with my coworkers--and many on the left--sometimes. I think there's been an unwillingness to engage.
(I know I'm being overly broad here, and not really fleshing the ideas out...I'm tired and I just liked the article. If it engages others I'd work my way into something substantive.)
Mahad Olad, a high school student, used to be active in “the local social-justice scene” around Minneapolis, Minnesota, attending meetings and leading demonstrations for feminist, LGBT, and anti-racism groups. Then he became disillusioned.
When he was just 16, the ACLU profiled the teen activist. He came to the U.S. as a child. Later, his immigrant parents took him back to their home country, Kenya, so that their son could experience what it was like to live in that culture as well.
“In Kenya, he saw the harsh realities faced by women trying to access reproductive health-care services and how the gay and lesbian community is forced to live underground,” the ACLU explained. “While Mahad cares about many social-justice and civil-liberties issues, he is especially drawn to reproductive freedom and LGBT rights because of his experience in Kenya. He has been one of his school's biggest advocates for comprehensive sex education and has helped to organize events at his school to teach students important information about comprehensive safe-sex practices, something that his school does not teach in class.”
Two years later he was sending off a frustrated email to me.
“I genuinely cared about these causes—still do,” he wrote, referencing everything from anti-racism to LGBT rights to reproductive health. “I believed I was doing something noble. At the same time,” he added, “a large part of me was not quite in agreement with some of the views and concepts espoused by social-justice groups. Their pro-censorship tendencies, fixation with intersectionality, and constant uproar over seemingly trivial and innocuous matters like ‘cultural appropriation’ and ‘microaggressions’ went against my civil-libertarian sensibilities.”
He fit in fine at the ACLU. But interacting with social-justice groups made up of high school and college students, he increasingly found himself having to bite his tongue.
“I never voiced my personal disagreements because having dissenting views is strictly forbidden in the activist circles I was a part of,” he explained. “If you’re white, you will be charged with being a ‘bad ally.’ (There's also certain gatherings you cannot come to because your mere presence might be threatening.) If you’re a person of color, your disagreements will usually be dismissed as some form of ‘internalized racism,’ ‘internalized sexism,’ or ‘respectability politics,’ among many other activist jargon's thrown at individuals who do not conform the groups views.”
Eventually, he started to speak up anyway, he said.
“On Twitter,” he wrote, “I discussed how trigger warnings have almost been rendered useless now that they’re used to alert individuals when talking about normal everyday things, like food, cars and animals. And that their use could potentially have adverse effects on academic freedom. I was accused of being outrageously insensitive and apparently made three activist cohorts have traumatic breakdowns.”
“In another tweet,” he added, “I criticized the usual tactic of campus activists to disrupt and heckle controversial speakers and advised them to raise their strong objections during the question and answer session, which lectures usually reserve long hours precisely to debate opponents. This time, the attacks got a little more personal. I was accused of being a ‘respectable negro,’ ‘uncle tom,’ ‘local coon’ and defending university officials to continue to ‘systemically oppress minorities.’”
I asked if he thought his race and ethnicity made it easier or harder to dissent. “A little easier, I guess,” he replied, “But it really doesn't feel good being a called a ‘house nigger.’”
He says he was ultimately kicked out of student-led social justice groups.
“In no way am I denying or minimizing the appalling fact that, sometimes, racial and ethnic minority students face abhorrent discrimination—even hate crimes— on certain college and university campuses” he wrote. “For that reason, occasionally, there’s very legitimate reasons for these student activists to be worried, aggrieved, and lead emotionally charged protests. I earnestly believe that the best and most beneficial method to simultaneously fight against blatant bigotry and for marginalized groups who are the objects of hate is more speech, not less.”
He wonders how a kid with beliefs like his will fare in higher education.
“When I go off to college next year, I honestly don't know where I'm going to fit in... The only political/social group accepting of my views are normally libertarians,” he wrote. “For the most part, these campus activism groups have my sympathies. I just wish that they didn't have such a hostile attitude towards free speech and didn’t dismiss opposing viewpoints based on the person’s identity.”
Events at Yale were particularly upsetting to Olad as he pondered going away to college himself.
“From Mizzou to Ithaca to Amherst, I was initially very supportive of the nationwide protests that sparked across college campuses against racial insensitivity. I believed, and still do, that student activists have every right to hold demonstrations, push for robust changes and confront their respective administrations if they truly suspect that they are being treated unfairly or feel threatened,” he wrote. “However, Yale made me take a different look not just at just at these protests, but some of the core concepts these student activists (and the groups I was involved in) take almost too seriously. I sympathize with the student protesters and wholly understand their frustration is not stemming from a simple email, but the overall atmosphere of Yale for students of color. Nonetheless, I believe Erika and Nicholas Christakis were wronged on many levels.”
If social-justice activists on college campuses were committed to respectfully considering the perspectives of individuals from historically marginalized groups, as almost all claim to be, a black immigrant from a relatively poor country would have no reason to worry about being accepted into their communities to fight racism and advance gender equality, even in spite of the well-trod disagreements that have long divided civil libertarians from parts of the social-justice community.
Unfortunately, I think that Mahad Olad is correct to be concerned, and that too many left-wing student groups treat no one as badly as students of color or women who consider themselves to be classical liberals, libertarians, or conservatives, or who merely disagree with the actions of progressive protesters on campus.
Last week, while reporting on UC Davis, I noted the allegation that a Hispanic staff member loyal to Chancellor Linda Katehi, the object of ongoing protests, was called “a coconut” by several activists, meaning “brown on the outside, white on the inside.”
Back in college, when I edited student newspapers both at Pomona College, my alma mater, and the Claremont Colleges, a consortium of 5 undergraduate institutions, I was constantly urging people who expressed thoughtful opinions in conversation to contribute to our op-ed pages. On four or five occasions, students of color regretfully declined, saying they didn’t feel able to set forth their opinions publicly without being savaged by a tiny subset of campus activists who, despite their small numbers, managed to chill speech. I always wondered if these students were exaggerating the likely backlash—their ostensibly heretical views were almost always extremely mainstream—until a conservative Asian American woman began writing for The Student Life and I got an education in leftist racist hate mail.
Alton Luke II, a black student at Occidental, told the Los Angeles Times about the backlash that he faced after questioning aspects of last semester’s protests at his institution.
Many right-leaning journalists and college professors have encountered black, Hispanic, and Asian American students who’ve been subjected to hatefulness because they dared to depart from the political line some expect them to toe. If you’re a white liberal, which is to say, a person those students wouldn’t typically choose to confide in about this particular problem, it would be easy to be totally blind to it.
So I’m glad Mahad Olad is sharing his experience. Others like him are hearing the same slurs and being subject to the same prejudices. They should be aware that they’re not alone.
Ideally, all books should remain available forever. In practice, libraries' shelf space is limited, and patrons more readily gravitate to a new Carl Hiaasen novel or a recent biography by Doris Kearns Goodwin than they do to a 1954 tome on proper housekeeping. What are librarians supposed to do?They weed. And what they weed is sometimes immortalized on a very entertaining website called Awful Library Books. It's run by two Michigan librarians, Mary Kelly and Holly Hibner, who are the subject of a current New Yorkerarticle.I just spent an enjoyable hour looking at Kelly's and Hibner's digital collection of the doomed, especially at titles that reference religion. Here are 11 books that jumped out at me -- scorching my retinas and making me headdesk till I bruised.
This book was what everyone loved as Freshmen and Sophomores at Trinity. I hadn't thought of it for years (and never actually finished it).
When I reviewed Mark Leyner’s Gone With The Mindearlier this year, there was an interesting theme that kept popping up in the comments section. Many readers had been fans of Leyner in the past—even passionate ones—but they were only tentatively interested in his latest, having grown out of him with time.
This kind of reaction wasn’t surprising. There are certain authors—Leyner among them, but Tom Robbins and Chuck Palahniuk also come to mind—who can strike the right people at the right time and seize their imaginations. “We’re looking to them as keys that open doors to dangerous ideas and exciting new adult worlds,” The A.V. Club’s Nathan Rabin wrote of such artists—and when those readers then settle into their adulthood, the allure fades.
The author who held this position for me was Dave Eggers, whose A Heartbreaking Work Of ...
Add a little sizzle to your look by accenting your outfit with these pepperoni pizza socks. They feature a vibrant pizza graphic that won't fade when you wash them and are made from a Dri-style fabric that is designed to wick away sweat.
Greg Locke, a pastor from Mount Juliet, Tennessee, is mad at Target after the corporate office decided that transgender customers may use whichever bathroom comports with their gender identity. So he stormed into the local Target store, asked for the manager, and gave her a piece of his mind.We'll never know whether the exchange he describes really took place; being the armchair hero that he apparently is, he made a video about it after the supposed fact, filming himself in the Target parking lot.It's a wonder the lens didn't get all spittle-flecked during Locke's two-minute diatribe, which you can admire here.
In 2014, 12-year-old Tamir Rice was killed by a police officer. He was unarmed. He was playing with a toy gun in the park when police pulled up and fired two shots within two seconds.
On Monday, the city announced that the lawsuit filed by Rice's family in federal court had been settled for $6 million.
The head of the Cleveland police union could have responded with a basic statement identifying the tragedy and the loss involved. Instead, he responded yesterday evening by once again blaming Tamir Rice for his death.
We can only hope the Rice family and their attorneys will use a portion of this settlement to help educate the youth of Cleveland in the dangers associated with the mishandling of both real and facsimile firearms. Something positive must come from the tragic loss. That would be educating youth of the dangers of possessing a real or replica firearm.
Yes, that's who's at fault here. Toy guns. Tamir.
See more from the Washington Post, and read the whole letter.
Movie-themed YouTube channel Now You See It (previously) takes a look at a few recurring themes in movie endings.
(SPOILER ALERTS: 12 Angry Men, The Silence of the Lambs, and Psycho. The other movie clips only show the last shot and don't spoil anything. See the full list of movies referenced below.)
I wish this comment were true: "I mean, she makes great syrup, but honestly, worth being on the currency?" he also asked.
But seriously, just because Jackson owned slaves, that shouldn't remove him from the money. The fact that he hated the national bank? Maybe that.
Former Republican presidential hopeful Ben Carson said Wednesday although he’s a fan of legendary abolitionist Harriet Tubman, her likeness shouldn’t replace President Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill.
Welsh actor and comedian Rob Brydon uses a Bernard Levin poem to demonstrate William Shakespeare's strong impact on everyday modern day English, by sharing quite a few common phrases that were coined by the famous bard.
Bernie Sanders' path to the Democratic presidential nomination is now as blocked as an artery filled with hardened butter, and the Vermont senator is having a hard time convincing the cognoscenti that he should stay in the race.
The democratic socialist's point, the pundits say, has been made. His influence pulled former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to the left. His presence in the race forced her to oppose trade agreements she otherwise would have supported, and to make far-reaching promises on issues as disparate as college tuition and campaign finance reform. He's made her a better campaigner, forcing her to confront the pandemic of anxiety that even Democratic base voters feel, the relative macro-health of the economy notwithstanding.
Sanders' campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, recently made a lame attempt to justify Sanders' continued presence in the race by the absence of Clinton's support among independents. Superdelegates, he said, will be persuaded that only Sanders can put together the coalition needed to beat Donald Trump in the fall.
That's hogwash.
The better answer as to why Sanders ought to stay in the race has little to do with Hillary Clinton, and nothing to do with the presidency. But it has everything to do with the future of the Democratic Party.
The Democratic Party, he writes, is "more like a centrist, interest group brokerage party that seeks to mediate between the claims and concerns of left-wing activists groups and those of important members of the business community — especially industries like finance, Hollywood, and tech that are based in liberal coastal states and whose executives generally espouse a progressive outlook on cultural change."
I'll take this a step further. The current Democratic elite is transactional with these interest groups. These transactions are at the heart of what alienates the Sanders coalition — not just because they lack a soul but because they reify the institutional barriers to participation and engagement that prevent people from flourishing.
People who are disenfranchised — through unjust laws, immigration status, arcane and archaic election mechanics, gerrymandering, racism, classism, governmental neglect, lack of education, incarceration, and so on — don't deserve their fate being determined this way.
And yet, "this way” is what Hillary Clinton represents to many, many of these young voters and their allies.
Imagine for a moment that you are an undocumented immigrant, or a passionate advocate for them. You'd hope that the strongest possible Democratic candidate would be elected in the fall, one who would appoint a Supreme Court justice would who uphold President Obama's executive action on immigration; one who might, given the right Republican opponent, change the color of the quarks in Congress just enough to make significant headway on immigration reform. Hillary Clinton would be that candidate. And indeed, her support from the pro-reform immigration institutionalists is strong.
But you've also got a long memory. You remember, back in 2008, when she was late on immigration. She was as late on immigration as she was on gay rights. And now she's pandering to Latinos.
You remember, not too long ago, when she supported sending Central American children refugees back to their home countries, back to (what you imagine to be) their certain deaths; or when she opposed driver's licenses for undocumented immigrants because that was the strong position to take at the time. And now she's hugging a crying citizen child of immigrants, comforting her and saying she will make sure her mommy is not deported.
You just don't trust Hillary Clinton with your future.
You don't hate her; you hate the transactional politics she represents. And Bernie Sanders — he's not perfect, but man, if given the chance to pop a balloon in the middle of Easter Mass, you would. Because the future of the party belongs to you, not to people of Clinton's generation.
It's hard to argue with the notion that a person who shares these beliefs wouldn't want Sanders to stay in the race as long as possible, if only to make sure that the next presidential race is fought on more hospitable territory to candidates like him.
This argument founders on the shoals for a few reasons. One is that it endorses the transactional politics that it purports to disdain. The other is that it lacks — like many of Sanders' pronouncements — necessary details. It's an argument for change without a plan for change. It may be possible in 20 years to build a Democratic Party that is funded only by small donors, that reflects a strong left-wing consensus, that is led by social justice warriors, and that can elect politicians who are one with the force. But we're nowhere near that yet. And all other things being equal, most people inside the Democratic Party will vote with their interests in mind, and not with a grander, humanistic conception of a freer future.
They don't want to send a message; they want to win. Winning makes their lives marginally better. Sending messages makes them feel better.
Still, I get it. I get it more than I've gotten it before. The authors of this political revolution will determine how it proceeds. The cognoscienti won't.
And, this is exactly what people were talking about when they said these laws disenfranchise people rather help secure elections.
A video of Virginia McLaurin dancing with the Obamas went viral in February, but the 107-year-old DC resident has been unable to travel for a flood of interview requests, as she has been unable to replace a photo ID she lost years ago, according to Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy.
It's a glimpse into how difficult obtaining a photo ID can be for some people. In McLaurin's case it's a bureaucratic catch 22. In order for McLaurin to receive a new photo ID, she must present the D.C. Department of Motor Vehicles with her birth certificate from South Carolina. But she needs a photo ID to get the birth certificate, she told Milloy.
I know it's the American Conservative, but he's dead accurate here.
Emma Ashford rejects the idea that Saudi Arabia is a “good ally” for the U.S.:
These tensions reflect a basic reality: Saudi Arabia may once have been a good ally, but today the relationship is toxic. Saudi actions are more often negative for U.S. policy objectives than positive. Rather than repairing the relationship, U.S. policymakers should reduce support for Saudi Arabia’s regional agenda.
In fact, even the use of the term “ally” to describe Saudi Arabia is inaccurate. Despite a long history of U.S. military support – including U.S. defense of the Kingdom during the first Gulf War – and cooperation on a variety of issues, there is no formal treaty alliance between the United States and Saudi Arabia.
If we recognize that Saudi Arabia is a client rather than an ally, and if we can also acknowledge that it is a largely useless and reckless client, it becomes easier to understand that the U.S. doesn’t need to “reassure” the Saudis and indulge them in their worst instincts. The U.S. needs the Saudis much less than they need us, and that should be reflected in the relationship with Riyadh. The Saudi government is a dependent that causes the U.S. numerous headaches, destabilizes the surrounding region with their reckless actions, promotes dangerous fanaticism abroad, and contributes little or nothing to making the U.S. and our real allies more secure. The costs of the relationship are now much higher than any benefits it may produce, and the relationship should be downgraded accordingly. It should be possible for the U.S. and the Saudis to have a normal relationship without backing their policies to the hilt, arming them to the teeth, and helping them to whitewash their international crimes. The first step in having that normal relationship is to stop pretending that there is a vitally important “alliance” with the Saudis that needs to be maintained.
Bring the exquisite taste of craft beer to your home with this easy to use automated craft beer home brewery. You simply choose your favorite recipe from the vast online library, press the start button, and wait one week to sample the best beer you've ever had.
This has to be only something that works at the equinoxes, though, right?
Place a fun spin on the way you tell time with help from this digital sundial. Rather than relying on batteries or electronics, it's mathematically designed to let only certain sun rays pass through it depending on the time of day, allowing it to display the time like a digital clock.
Shared because of the amazing absurdity and wonderful logical fallacies. Yay for Pat Buchanan still being crazy.
In Samuel Eliot Morison’s The Oxford History of the American People, there is a single sentence about Harriet Tubman. “An illiterate field hand, (Tubman) not only escaped herself but returned repeatedly and guided more than 300 slaves to freedom.”
Morison, however, devotes most of five chapters to the greatest soldier-statesman in American history, save Washington, that pivotal figure between the Founding Fathers and the Civil War—Andrew Jackson.
Slashed by a British officer in the Revolution, and a POW at 14, the orphaned Jackson went west, rose to head up the Tennessee militia, crushed an Indian uprising at Horseshoe Bend, Alabama, in the War of 1812, then was ordered to New Orleans to defend the threatened city. In one of the greatest victories in American history, memorialized in song, Jackson routed a British army and aborted a British scheme to seize New Orleans, close the Mississippi, and split the Union.
In 1818, ordered to clean out renegade Indians rampaging in Georgia, Jackson stormed into Florida, seized and hanged two British agitators, put the Spanish governor on a boat to Cuba, and claimed Florida for the USA. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams closed the deal. Florida was ours, and Jacksonville is among its great cities.
Though he ran first in popular and electoral votes in 1824, Jackson was denied the presidency by the “corrupt bargain” of Adams and Henry Clay, who got secretary of state. Jackson came back to win the presidency in 1828, recognized the Texas republic of his old subaltern Sam Houston, who had torn it from Mexico, and saw his vice president elected after his two terms.
He ended his life at his beloved Hermitage, pushing for the annexation of Texas and nomination of “dark horse” James K. Polk, who would seize the Southwest and California from Mexico and almost double the size of the Union.
Was Jackson responsible for the Cherokees’ “Trail of Tears”? Yes. And Harry Truman did Hiroshima, and Winston Churchill did Dresden.
Great men are rarely good men, and Jackson was a Scots-Irish duelist, Indian fighter, and slave owner. But then, Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe were slave owners before him.
To remove his portrait from the front of the $20 bill, and replace it with Tubman’s, is affirmative action that approaches the absurd. Whatever one’s admiration for Tubman and her cause, she is not the figure in history Jackson was.
Indeed, if the fight against slavery is the greatest cause in our history, why not honor John Brown, hanged for his raid on Harper’s Ferry to start a revolution to free the slaves, after he butchered slave owners in “Bleeding Kansas”? John Brown was the real deal.
But replacing Jackson with Tubman is not the only change coming.
The back of the $5 bill will soon feature Martin Luther King, Eleanor Roosevelt, and opera singer Marian Anderson, who performed at the Lincoln Memorial after being kept out of segregated Constitution Hall in 1939. That act of race discrimination came during the second term of FDR, Eleanor’s husband and the liberal icon who named Klansman Hugo Black to the Supreme Court and put 110,000 Japanese into concentration camps.
And, lest we forget, while Abraham Lincoln remains on the front of the $5 bill, the war he launched cost 620,000 dead, and his beliefs in white supremacy and racial separatism were closer to those of David Duke than Dr. King.
Alexander Hamilton, the architect of the American economy, will stay on the $10 bill, due in part to the intervention of hip-hop artists from the popular musical, “Hamilton,” in New York. But Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Sojourner Truth, who fought for women’s suffrage, will be put on the back of the $10. While Anthony and Stanton appear in Morison’s history, Sojourner Truth does not.
Added up, while dishonoring Andrew Jackson, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew is putting on the U.S. currency six women—three white, three African-American—and King. No Catholics, no conservatives, no Hispanics, no white males were apparently even considered.
This is affirmative action raised to fanaticism, a celebration of President Obama’s views and values, and a recasting of our currency to make Obama’s constituents happy at the expense of America’s greatest heroes and historic truth. Leftist role models for American kids now take precedence over the history of our Republic in those we honor.
While King already has a holiday and monument in D.C., were the achievements of any of these six women remotely comparable to what the six men honored on our currency—Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, Jackson, President Grant, and Ben Franklin—achieved?
Whatever may be said for Eleanor Roosevelt, compared to her husband, she is an inconsequential figure in American history.
In the dystopian novel, 1984, Winston Smith labors in the Ministry of Truth, dropping down the “memory hole” stories that must be rewritten to re-indoctrinate the party and proles in the new history, as determined by Big Brother. Jack Lew would have fit right in there.
This is just no an acceptable answer. We all know that this is the reason, but it is wholly inappropriate to deny people the right to representation in Congress simply because you don't like the way the numbers work out.
Similarly, at this point we need to do something about Guam, American Samoa, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. Maybe make a state out of the Pacific Islands, and then one of the Caribbean. Obviously not all their interests would coalesce, but as of right now they have no say on a national level, despite the fact that they serve in our military, and in Puerto Rico's case they have a larger population than 21 states.
Republican presidential candidate Ohio Gov. John Kasich told The Washington Post editorial board on Wednesday that he was still opposed to making Washington, D.C. a state, arguing that it would give more votes to the Democratic Party.
I'm so done with this. I don't love Clinton, but I have reservations about Bernie. Still, I'm sick of the Bernie fans who say they won't support Hillary. Even if you don't like her, she gets to replace Scalia, and AT LEAST 1, maybe two other Justices. It's the balance of the Supreme Court for a generation. Even if you think she isn't great, it isn't like she's going to nominate Bork.
I'm really not sure what CNN was smoking suggesting the Democratic primary was turning out to be a tight race. The internal breakdowns of the exit polls really didn't seem to make that kind of result possible. And she's had a huge lead since the very first results. The one thing that made me wonder was that her vote was coming in from New York City. Sanders should do better in the more rural areas. So maybe it was going to close? But not enough to overcome this margin. So Clinton wins and seemingly wins pretty handily.
During a campaign event in Buffalo, New York, on Monday, Donald Trump referred to the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attack in New York City as "7-11."
"I was down there and I watched our police and our firemen, down on 7-11, down at the World Trade Center, right after it came down, and I saw the greatest people I’ve ever seen in action," he said.
Mostly shared because of the embedded story about the LA Gov installing chicken coops. Awesome job.
TPM Reader BW sees things looking up ...
With all the talk about how the system is rigged, it’s easy (at least for me) to feel hopeless and cynical, and forget that elections actually matter. But here’s an example from poor, broke, beleaguered Louisiana, of how much they really do matter.
Oh, and enrollment for Louisiana’s Medicaid expansion begins in a little more than a month. From the farcical coffee shop spy caper of Fargo, Louisiana…to this. Still seems hard to believe sometimes.
God, this guy is such a tool. Super conspiracy theorist asshole with like 3 good songs to his name calling out a WHOLE GENERATION OF PEOPLE.
I guess technically I'm a millennial, but I feel these criticisms are generally directed at people born in the 1990s, and it has to stop. Also, again, this guy is an idiot.
Billy Corgan built a successful music career on being an angsty rock ‘n’ roll boy, and in recent years he has leveraged that angst into a website about cars or something, a producing gig with TNA Wrestling, and a memoir that may or may not cover the entirety of human history. Despite all that success, though, Corgan is still just a rat in a cage. He has fears and anxieties like any other normal person does, and he recently appeared on a popular radio show to discuss them with a guy who knows all about fears and anxieties (because he constantly invents them): High-profile conspiracy theorist/asshole Sandy Hook truther Alex Jones.
Corgan was on the show to promote a vaguely defined documentary he’s working on about the history of America, explaining that he interviewed a bunch of people across the country who all expressed the surprising idea that ...
Pretty cool. Wish it gave the title of the movie and year, and I certainly thought there were more iconic shots in some films (the selection from The Graduate jumps out), but still fun.
Video artist Jacob T. Swinney (previously) celebrates 100 years of cinema with a montage of what he thinks is the most memorable shot from each year.
While many of these shots are the most recognizable in film history, others are equally iconic in their own right. For example, some shots pioneered a style or defined a genre, while others tested the boundaries of censorship and filmgoer expectations. If anything, I want this video to be a reminder as to why we all love cinema so much.
In The Simpsons’ “Bart Gets An Elephant,” the bosses at radio station KBBL threaten ultra-hacky morning-zoo DJs Bill and Marty with a mechanical replacement: The DJ 3000. The machine parrots clichéd drivel like “Hot dog! We have a weiner!”, which is already enough to render its human counterparts utterly useless. If that weren’t enough, it also provides a hot political take: “Looks like those clowns in Congress did it again. What a bunch of clowns.”
In the 22 years since the DJ 3000 weighed in on the legislative branch, its opinion has been quoted dozens of times. After all, no matter what your personal political leanings are, anyone can become frustrated with the woeful inefficiency of the House Of Representatives and Senate. There’s just one problem: The phrase makes no sense. It says nothing. It doesn’t tell us who the clowns are, or what specific actions make ...
Use the power of the Force to spruce up your room's interior using this Star Wars lightsaber lamp. The lampshade features detailed images of the series's iconic characters and features an eye-catching base made up of 3 incredibly detailed LED lightsabers.
An Adam Taylor story in the Washington Post, to be filed under “About time!”:
Politicians in the Czech Republic are set to put decades of debate to an end this week by officially announcing a new name for the country: Czechia.
In a meeting with reporters this week, Foreign Minister Lubomir Zaoralek said he supported the move, suggesting that foreigners often mangled his country’s name when he met them abroad. “It is not good if a country does not have clearly defined symbols or if it even does not clearly say what its name is,” Zaoralek said, according to the Czech News Agency.
When the decision does go through, Czechia will officially become the conventional short-form name for the country, while the Czech Republic will remain the conventional long-form name.
As always, not everyone is happy (Karla Šlechtová, the minister of regional development, says the change will mean wasted funds in rebranding and the new name is too close to Chechnya), but I am. Thanks, Eric!
It’s one thing for the GOP to spend years working to take defined pension benefits away from workers still on the job, but at least those who have already retired should be safe. Only that's not the case.
Some 400,000 retirees who worked in the trucking, parcel delivery and grocery supply industries face drastic pension cuts on July 1 as a result of a little-noticed measure attached to a huge end-of-year spending bill passed in December 2014.
The provision in question goes after those whose retirement is funded through the Central States Pension Fund. That fund is projected to run low in a decade, a situation that would normally be addressed by the government’s Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation, which acts as an insurance plan for failing pensions. It’s there specifically so that workers don’t suffer when companies fail to make necessary contributions to funds or fund investments turn south. Only in this case, the 2014 bill makes sure that the government won’t step in. Instead, the bill slashes payouts from the fund.
James Lambert, 69, a former trucker, from Randolph, Ohio, was told his $2,200 monthly pension payment would be slashed to $1,200.
Bob Berg, 61 … was informed that his monthly payment would drop from $3,000 to $2,200.
And Judy Weeks, 62, ... would drop from $3,000 to $1,258.
These aren’t exactly princely sums. The highest payout originally meant getting by on $36,000 a year. But if you’ve planned your life around that payment, only to find it cut to $14,000 a year … That’s not just tough, that’s being thrown into poverty. In many cases it probably means being thrown out of a home. So how did such a bill get passed in the first place?
Coeds. That usually helps me to make a lot of accurate assumptions.
Republican presidential also-ran John Kasich continues to have issues when speaking to the womenfolks. Here he is capping off a response to a college student's question about campus sexual assault.
“This ought to be done in the country,” Kasich said. “That our coeds know exactly what the rules are, what the opportunities are, what the confidential policies are, so that you are not vulnerable, at risk, and can be preyed upon. I have two 16-year-old daughters, and I don’t even like to think about it.”
"It’s sad, but it’s something that I have to worry about," the female student replied, according to ABC News.
"Well, I would give you—I’d also give you one bit of advice," Kasich added. "Don’t go to parties where there’s a lot of alcohol."
To critics, there's more than a touch of well if you didn't want to be raped you shouldn'ta been drinking that in that response.
On the other hand, Gov. John Kasich giving bad answers to audience questions is pretty much the only press he gets these days, so his handlers are probably just telling him to go nuts. It's not like it'll make any difference at this point.
If you wanted to see them, you just had to send him R5000 (about $340).Having no takers and under possible extortion charges, he quickly promised to post the images on Facebook for free.But that's not happening now because -- wait for it -- his phone was stolen! 
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Public Religion Research Institute
