An anonymous reader writes: Lawrence Lessig's Mayday.us project had a bold goal: create a super PAC to end all super PACs. It generated significant support and raised over $10 million, which it spent endorsing a group of candidates for the recent mid-term elections and the primaries beforehand. The results weren't kind. Only two of the eight candidates backed by Mayday won their elections, and both of those candidates were quite likely to win anyway. Lessig was understandably displeased with the results. In a post on the Mayday site, he said, "What 2014 shows most clearly is the power of partisanship in our elections. Whatever else voters wanted, they wanted first their team to win." Kenneth Vogel, author of Big Money, a recent book on the rise of super PACs, was critical of of Mayday's efforts, saying, "While voters do express high levels of disgust about the state of campaign finance and the level of corruption in Washington, they tend to actually cast votes more on bread-and-butter economic issues." Still, Lessig is hopeful for the future: "We moved voters on the basis of that message. Not enough. Not cheaply enough. But they moved."
Oakland's next mayor has the luxury of replacing an unpopular incumbent, while inheriting an economy that is churning out new jobs, restaurants and bars at a breakneck pace.
Voters did her an extra favor by approving two tax measures that will safeguard police spending and all but ensure that Oakland's crumbling roads will at least stop getting worse.
Gorbachev, who is credited with forging a rapprochement with the West that led to the demise of communist regimes across Eastern Europe, accused the West, and the United States in particular, of not fulfilling their promises after 1989.
even Capaldi's cool interactions with kids are dark
Proving that Twelve really does care about humanity (really!), Peter Capaldi has sent a lovely video to an autistic child to help him overcome a loss.
The video description reads:
A lovely message from Peter Capaldi to my 9 year old autistic son. This arrived just before Thomas’ nanny’s funeral and helped him to deal with his grief in a profound way. Thankyou Peter so much.
This is what the Doctor is really about. Thanks for being a good one, Capaldi.
'the charge has been withdrawn. Greg Hollister-Jones, Crown Solicitor of Tauranga, New Zealand, cited “insufficient evidence” as the reason for dropping the accusation.
The AC/DC drummer will still be charged with threatening to kill two men who have yet to be identified, as well as possession of methamphetamine and cannabis. (Or, in the vernacular of AC/DC, one count of threatening to “Shoot To Thrill,” and two counts of possessing a “Whole Lotta Rosie.”)'
Rolling Stonereports that, a day after AC/DC’s Phil Rudd was arrested in New Zealand for allegedly “attempting to procure a murder,” the charge has been withdrawn. Greg Hollister-Jones, Crown Solicitor of Tauranga, New Zealand, cited “insufficient evidence” as the reason for dropping the accusation.
The AC/DC drummer will still be charged with threatening to kill two men who have yet to be identified, as well as possession of methamphetamine and cannabis. (Or, in the vernacular of AC/DC, one count of threatening to “Shoot To Thrill,” and two counts of possessing a “Whole Lotta Rosie.”) The lesser charge of murder threats still carries a maximum seven-year sentence.
'In keeping with most Doctor Who season finales, this episode is a weird mish-mash of dodgy plot points and love saving the day and genuine, earned emotional resolutions.'
'Well done Moffat, you killed the one helpful female character whose selling point isn't just the fact she looks nice.'
This season of Doctor Who has been pretty tightly structured around a few big themes, and all of them were tied up in the season finale. A lot of them, not surprisingly, had to do with Clara Oswald — and we finally found out why she was chosen as the Doctor's companion. Spoilers!
'Utah was all set to be up 14-0 on an Oregon team that was headed into this Saturday night game as favorites. Kaelin Clay had just beat his coverage and the entire Oregon defense for what looked like a 78-yard touchdown. There was only one problem.
He celebrated too soon.
The refs never signaled for the touchdown and it took the Ducks players a second to process that the ball was still live, but after a skirmish and another fumble, Oregon’s Joe Walker recovered the ball and ran it all the way back for a touchdown to tie the game at seven.'
Ms. Marvel is a Pakistani-American superhero born in the late 1990s whose real name is Kamala Khan. She’s a Muslim teenager who worries her observant parents when she sneaks out at night, which she does (mostly) to protect Jersey City from evildoers, using her unwieldy shape-shifting powers to grow and shrink in size.
Wolverine was born in the late 1880s in the Northwest Territories in Canada. He’s served as a spy, a samurai, a soldier of fortune, an X-Man, an Avenger, a Horseman of the Apocalypse, and even as a member of an all-Canadian super-squadron called Alpha Flight. His mutant healing factor, the source of his long life and incomparable alcohol tolerance, has rescued him from every conceivable physical injury: shootings, stabbings, poisons, fires, more stabbings, magick, repulsor rays, Sentinels. The invincible adamantium lining inside his skeleton has rendered his bones unbreakable. The claws that he ejects from his knuckles with a snikt! can slice through anything.
So when Ms. Marvel runs into Wolverine unexpectedly in the sewers of Jersey City, she squees as if she’s just met Hugh Jackman. The selfie cover of Ms. Marvel #7 captures the unfiltered delight of a teenaged Jersey fangirl and the scowl of everyone’s favorite Canucklehead. Alas, for poor Wolvie, the ‘gram would be his last.
Wolverine—James Howlett to his family, Logan to his friends, Wolverine to his teammates, Patch to his enemies, Weapon X to his other enemies, Death to his other other enemies—died last month, in the aptly titled Death of Wolverine #4. He’s survived by Daken (his wicked son), X-23 (his superheroine clone), and Sabretooth (his son, his brother, or his father, maybe?), as well as the ongoing comic-book series that will continue even after his death. May the man who always let ‘em rip rest in peace. He never got much rest from Marvel.
Created as a Canadian government super-agent in 1974 by writer Len Wein and artist John Romita, Sr., his very first battle ended in a tie with the Incredible Hulk. (A tie with the Hulk. Spider-Man would call escaping the Hulk with even some of his limbs intact a hard-earned win.) After he was drafted for the 1975 relaunch of the X-Men, Wolverine became the face of that team over the course of the 1980s, thanks to the exceptional gifts of writers and artists Chris Claremont, Frank Miller, Dave Cockrum, and John Byrne, among others.
In their hands, Wolverine emerged as a creature and a criticism of Vietnam: A restless nomad with no memory for the forces that had forged him, a reluctant but perfect weapon listing always toward a relapse into a savage berserker state. He was walking PTSD. At his most noble, Wolverine was Marvel’s failed samurai, a loner doomed to wander the earth in search of some saving grace. Logan was forever denied Captain America’s domestic morality, Iron Man’s technocratic utopianism, Thor’s assured superiority: And that’s why Kamala Khan draws Wolverine on her notebooks.
Regarding his actual death, well, Wolverine has survived worse. So much worse. That adamantium skeleton was gifted to him through a secret Canadian biotech weapons program. (That’s right, a maple-leaf military-industrial complex: Comic books sometimes require the suspension of disbelief.) Yet the adamantium X-factor wasn’t worth much to him when the god-like Avengers villain Thanos turned it into sponge during one memorable cosmic melee—one that will soon enough be a feature film—and much less when the mutant master Magneto leached the adamantium right out of his body through his pores in 1993 (a comic book I waited in line to buy). This time around, a virus sapped him of his healing factor, or something, meaning last call for Logan when his rogues’ gallery found out. In the end, the system that made him was his undoing.
The very best Wolverine story ever told—Marvel Comics Presents #72-84, drawn and written by the incomparable Barry Windsor-Smith in 1991—also concerned this Weapon X program. This arc details how Logan goes from man to beast mode in beautiful books, frequently wordless, almost unparalleled in the medium. More recent series by the up-and-comer Jason Aaron, who’s done the most to define the character over the last decade, have pushed Wolverine’s healing factor to absurd and unsustainable limits. Under Aaron’s tenure, Wolverine led a squad of mutant assassins, the ones who do the work that family-friendly X-Men can’t or won’t do, only to eventually walk away from that life into a different sort of cage: academia. (Long-time fans dissatisfied with Wolverine’s end owe it to themselves to read Mark Millar’s alt-future limited series Old Man Logan.)
It’s the students who served under him during his tenure as mutant prep-school headmaster and his former teammates from across the planet who are mourning him now. (Specifically, in the limited series, Death of Wolverine: The Logan Legacy, that runs through December). But his enemies might pour out a can of Molson for the ol’ runt, too. Wasn’t he always just a saki summit away from common ground with the Silver Samurai? Didn’t he marry Mystique a couple times? Every time Wolvie and Sabretooth took it down to claw city, wasn’t that just a family tradition (maybe)? And didn’t Omega Red—well, no, fine. Omega Red flat-out sucked.
Beyond the ongoing Wolverines comic series that will continue under his name—the death of Wolverine doesn’t have to mean the death of a salesman—the Runt will also live on in Hollywood. This is the Wolverine that Marvel Studios, the studio behind The Avengers, really wants to die. So long as 20th Century Fox keeps pumping out X-movies such as 2014’s X-Men: Days of Future Past every few years, they keep the film rights to Wolverine and his fellow X-Men—lest the rights revert back to Marvel, which sold them off during a financial period darker than Logan’s worst hangover. (Wolverine’s rights were sold years before Marvel Entertainment was acquired by Disney, for nearly $5 billion, in 2009.)
Studio shenanigans could be one factor in the death of Wolverine. Deep in the message boards, conspiracists whisper that Marvel has shown its hand, disinvesting creative energy in the print comics whose characters don’t work toward the ascendant Marvel Studios’ bottom line. This week, Marvel Studios announced a slew of new film productions, including Black Panther, Doctor Strange, a different woman named Marvel, the problematic Inhumans—more on them in a second—and Avengers sequels for as long as Robert Downey Jr. can muster a smirk. At the same time, Marvel canceled its long-running Fantastic Four print comic-book line, even in advance of 20th Century Fox’s reboot of the film franchise next year, leading critics to speculate that the horse follows the cart at the House of Ideas.
That may be true. Today, Marvel is putting its thumb on the scale for the Inhumans, a throwback team of super-powered characters who work sort of like the X-Men’s mutants, but without the history (or quality, or thorny Fox ownership). The hip new Ms. Marvel is one of those Inhumans. That run-in underneath the Jersey streets could have launched another classic Wolverine team-up, a pairing along the lines of his endearing apprenticeship of the X-Men’s Kitty Pryde. (Things never worked out well for Logan’s romantic interests, who had a habit of dying violently, but no character in comics had better realized friendships with women.)
And of course Wolverine would wind up in Ms. Marvel’s sewer: He’s starred or appeared in nearly every ongoing Marvel Comics book over at least the last two decades. Where he doesn’t belong is in a universe that is lurching from an X-Men–centric metaphysical foundation (homo superior genetic mutations) to one more closely aligned with the Inhumans.
Wolverine is Marvel’s team-book fullback, its definitive anti-hero, the best he is at what he does (although it isn’t very nice): Don’t expect him to stay under for long. Maybe in his next act, he’ll undergo an overdue transformation like Cap (who is now black), Thor (now a woman), or Iron Man (okay, Tony Stark only moved to Silicon Valley, but still). Wolverine was never going to be the hero to lead Marvel into its Silver Screen Age. Because he’s the long-suffering Wolverine, he had to die.
And good for him. Take a load off, Logan. Before they put it right back on you.
'She wants to repeal Obamacare. She wants to defend the Second Amendment. She’s pro-life. All-in-all, a typical Republican.
Except: Not at all. Though she may speak out against immigration or D.C. dysfunction, she is not a white-haired, pale-skinned Methuselah turning beet-red on Fox News while doing so. She is a black woman under 40.
Fascinating and disillusioning story: In the early 1970s Mia Love’s father fled the Tonton Macoutes (a Haitian paramilitary—some trained at Ft. Benning, GA—that backed the Papa Doc Duvalier dictatorship). Like many immigrants, her dad entered “legally” with a tourist visa, but worked “illegally” as a tourist. Like many immigrants, he sent for the rest of his family to come to the U.S. from Haiti. Mia was born in NY in 1975 and under the 14th Amendment (birthright/“anchor baby” law) acquired U.S. citizenship. Under lenient U.S. immigration policy that “at the time was favorable for children” and “that was later repealed,” her parents “received an information packet within a day of making inquiries with immigration officials. They were interviewed and passed a test and within a few years the family members became U.S. citizens.”
Like Mia’s family, Central American parents and children are fleeing violence in their countries of origin and seek refuge in the U.S. Like Mia’s family, many immigrants seek better education and job opportunities. Like Mia’s family, they seek dignity. Perhaps Love’s election to the U.S. Senate would spark some version of Republican empathy toward immigration reform and the current “child migrant crisis?"
Nope. Love has adopted the Republican anti-immigrant rhetoric indicating she would support deporting U.S. born children of undocumented immigrants (“anchor babies”) to discourage ‘bad behavior."
Mia Love, a product of U.S. public school system, “often quotes her father” who claims, “Mia, your mother and I never took a handout. You will not be a burden to society. You will give back.”
Lots of hypocrisy.
For at least half a century, the party of Lincoln has battled charges that it is racist, sexist and anti-immigrant. Today, voters from a conservative state made those arguments a little bit harder to make. In Utah, Mia Love became the first black Republican woman — and first Haitian American — elected to Congress. For the GOP — a house divided that faces significant demographic hurdles to winning the White House in 2016 even as it celebrates President Obama’s shellacking — this was huge. A party threatened with electoral extinction among African Americans and immigrants now has someone to brag about in Washington. In a wave election less about fresh Republican ideas than fervid disapproval of all things presidential, Love’s compelling personal story is an oasis. She’s not just a black face in what’s often described as a party full of angry old white men. She’s a path forward. It’s hard to overstate how unlikely Love’s victory looked on paper. Utah is less than 1 percent black. Though more than 60 percent of the state’s people identify as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the church is just 3 percent black. Love, 38, is one of these few black Mormons — part of a church that, until 1978, didn’t let African Americans participate in all church activities and still hasn’t apologized for its racism. Yet, a woman born in Brooklyn to Haitian immigrants is now a duly-elected representative of the Beehive State. What led to this? A speech at a national political convention about triumphing over adversity — just like another familiar politician facing long odds. At the Democratic National Convention in 2004, Obama spun a tale of unrealistic dreams achieved by the power of a “larger American story.” “I owe a debt to all of those who came before me, and that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible,” the future president said. “Our pride is based on a very simple premise, summed up in a declaration made over two hundred years ago: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’”
Rep.-elect Mia Love (R-Utah) came onto the national political scene during her first campaign in 2012, including this speech at the party's convention in Tampa. (2012 Republican National Convention via YouTube)
Eight years later, Love turned her superficially similar biography — child of foreigner makes good — into a parable for gritty, individual wherewithal. This was Horatio Alger by the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.
Her parents fled Haiti in 1976, one step ahead of the dreaded Tonton Macoutes, the secret police of dictator Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier. “My parents immigrated to the U.S. with ten dollars in their pocket, believing that the America they had heard about really did exist,” Love told the Republican National Convention, gathered in Tampa in 2012 to nominate Mitt Romney. “When times got tough they didn’t look to Washington, they looked within.”
Indeed, Love — a black woman who married a white man she met on a Mormon mission, left her Catholic Church and lit out to a white enclave by the Great Salt Lake — explicitly challenged what she described as a vision of America mired in demography.
“President Obama’s version of America is a divided one — pitting us against each other based on our income level, gender, and social status,” she said. “His policies have failed!”
Her father, as she reminds interviewers regularly, worked at several jobs — janitor and factory worker — to get her through college at the University of Hartford in Connecticut. “I remember taking my dad to college with me on the first day of orientation,” she told Fox News in a 2012 interview, “and he looked at me very seriously, and he said, ‘Mia, your mother and I have done everything we could to get you here. We’ve worked hard. We’ve never taken a handout. You’re not going to be a burden to society. You will give back.’”
A talented performing artist, she reportedly turned down a Broadway role in “Smokey Joe’s Cafe” because it conflicted with her wedding in 1998 to Jason Love, who, by the way, took her to a firing range on their first date. She became a neighborhood activist in Saratoga Springs, Utah, leading the charge to get a developer to spray the area for flies — “The War of the Midges” it was called — ultimately winning a seat on the city council and then being elected mayor of the small town.
Even when she entered what would turn out to be a losing congressional run in 2012, the GOP knew what it had. Even the future Republican nominee for vice president said so.
“Mia has a great opportunity to extend the message of liberty and economic freedom in ways that a lot of us can’t, and we’re excited about that,” said Rep. Paul Ryan (Wis.) after hosting a fundraiser for Love.
Two years later, Ryan’s enthusiasm was borne out on Twitter after Love’s victory. She trailed Democrat Doug Owens most of the night as the results came in from Utah’s 4th District, but ultimately triumphed with 50 percent of the vote to Owens’s 47 percent. “Many people said Utah would never elect a black, Republican, LDS woman to Congress. And guess what … we were the first to do it,” she told cheering supporters, the Salt Lake Tribune reported.
Damon Cann, a political science professor at Utah State University, told the paper: “Since the election of Barack Obama, the Republicans have been more serious about trying to showcase the diversity within the Republican Party. And Mia Love is potentially the poster child for diversity in the party.”
Just as Obama’s policies didn’t matter as much as the fact that he existed in 2008, Love’s may not either. Judging by her Web site, she won’t upend conservative orthodoxy. She wants to repeal Obamacare. She wants to defend the Second Amendment. She’s pro-life. All-in-all, a typical Republican.
Except: Not at all. Though she may speak out against immigration or D.C. dysfunction, she is not a white-haired, pale-skinned Methuselah turning beet-red on Fox News while doing so. She is a black woman under 40.
That’s all that matters.
“This is our story,” she told Tampa. “This is the America we know because we built it.”
RELATED: New faces in Washington
Justin Moyer is the deputy editor of the Morning Mix.
'This key episode was the mysterious 1826 disappearance of William Morgan, a Freemason of Batavia, New York. Morgan had been a member of the lodge in Rochester, New York, but was denied admission in Batavia.[5] He intended to retaliate by publishing a book detailing the supposed secrets of Masonry's initiation rituals. When his intentions became known to the Batavia lodge, an attempt was made to burn down the business of the printer who planned to publish Morgan's book.[6] In September 1826 Morgan was arrested on flimsy allegations of theft in an effort to prevent publication of his book by keeping him in jail. The individual who intended to publish Morgan's book paid his bail, and he was released from custody. Shortly afterwards, Morgan disappeared.[7]
Some researchers argued that Morgan had left the Batavia area on his own, either because he had been paid not to publish his book, or to escape Masonic retaliation for attempting to publish the book, or to generate publicity that would boost the book's sales.[8] The generally believed version of events was that Masons killed Morgan by drowning him in the Niagara River.[9][10] Whether he fled or was murdered, Morgan's disappearance led many to believe that Freemasonry was in conflict with good citizenship.[11]'
The Anti-Masonic Party (also known as the Anti-Masonic Movement) was the first "third party" in the United States.[1] It strongly opposed Freemasonry as a single-issue party, and later aspired to become a major party by expanding its platform and positions on other issues. After the negative views of Freemasonry among a large segment of the public began to wane in the late 1830s, most members of the Anti-Masonic Party joined the Whigs, the party most in line with its views on other issues. Although lasting only a decade, the Anti-Masonic Party introduced important innovations to American politics, such as nominating conventions and the adoption of party platforms.
djempirical
OnlyMrGodKnowsWhy
hodad