Journalism

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Robert Mercer is a little-known hedge-fund billionaire who, along with his daughter Rebekah, played a key role first in making Trump a candidate, and then in shaping his White House staff.
An interview with New Yorker writer Jane Mayer on her research into the darkest reaches of right-wing political funding: HERE

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JW: We want to talk about the big picture. A revitalized feminist movement is changing things, despite what we see in the White House. How would you describe it?

Rebecca Solnit: There was an extraordinary set of years, 2012, 2013, 2014, where the rules really changed….finally women were in a position to say, “We’re not going to take this anymore. You can’t pretend it’s not happening.” And then to make some changes.

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It’s going to be a long four years….for our own well-being over the long haul, I think we could all use a day without Trump, every week: one day on which we don’t read about him, watch him on TV, listen to him on the radio, or talk about him with friends; one day on which we don’t even think about that man. . . .

At Factor’s Deli on Pico in Beverywood, a dozen carts are lined up, filled with party platters ready to be delivered.  “Those have to be for parties tonight,” I say to the woman who must be the catering manager.  She says “One lady told me ‘it will either be a celebration, or a suicide party.  Either way we need a deli platter.”
… continued at LA Review of Books Blog HERE

The biggest decision in Hillary’s life came in 1974, when she moved from Washington, DC to Little Rock to be with Bill.  Friends  begged her not to do it — they said she could have a stellar career in politics without Bill, and that Arkansas was the backwoods compared to her world in Washington.  At a time when the women’s movement was rising, Hillary would devote her remarkable energy and talents to advancing her husband in the world, instead of herself — taking on the traditional role of the wife. The question is simple: why?  …continued HERE

I first met Tom when he was a community organizer for SDS in Newark in 1964 or ’65. I was a student going to college in New Jersey, and Tom came down to tell our SDS chapter about organizing poor people, and about how and why black Newark was going to explode (and of course it did, in 1967). He was already a hero to us, even before the Vietnam war took over everything on the left.
. . . continued at TheNation.com HERE

Q.: Dylan won the Nobel Prize for literature — do we have to argue about whether what Dylan writes is “literature”? Do we have to say Homer sang his epics, or that Virgil was a lyricist?
A.: I have no interest in those questions. I’ve always thought the question of whether Bob Dylan was a poet was a waste of time.
. . . continued at LA Review of Books HERE

DONALD TRUMP HAS FAILED at many things: his casinos went bankrupt, his “university” collapsed in lawsuits, his TV show was cancelled. But he was hugely successful with one undertaking: his book Trump The Art of the Deal.  Reading the book is a miserable experience, especially now. And it’s full of lies, of course; lies about his, well, deals.   But Art of the Deal does contain one massively important truth. . .
. . . Continued at the LA Review of Books HERE

Most presidential candidates have a bunch of academic economists and PhD policy experts from universities as advisers. Hillary Clinton has dozens. Donald Trump, however, has only one: an economist at the UC Irvine business school named Peter Navarro. He’s sticking with Trump even after the groping tape. He ran for office several times as a Democrat—and lost. His status as the only academic on Trump’s economic advisory team says a lot about the ideas and proposals that Trump has been espousing.
. . . continued at TheNation.com HERE

After the news broke about Donald Trump’s boasting on tape of sexual assault, the first politicians to withdraw their endorsements of Trump and call on him to abandon the race were Mormons. . .  Why was it Mormons, and not evangelical Protestants or Catholics, who went first and took a principled stand against Trump’s boasts about being a sexual predator?
continued at TheNation.com HERE