Journalism

JW: A week after repeal-and-replace failed in the House, we’re trying to assess the damage to Trump and the opportunities for progressives. Seems to me this is a disaster for Trump, and a disaster for the Republican Party. Is it possible this is wrong?

Chris Hayes: No. I don’t think you’re wrong. What an unbelievable failure. I have never, in my political reporting career, seen something crash and burn quite like this. Sixty times they voted for repeal, while Obama was president, and now you cannot get a vote for this piece of, frankly, garbage legislation that no one liked—no one across the ideological spectrum.
…continued HERE

If you Google the question “Is Trump Like Nixon,” you get something like four million reults, mostly answering ‘yes.’
But we weren’t so sure about that, so we checked with Rick Perlstein–he wrote the book Nixonland.
READ our Q&A with Rick Perlstein HERE

#1 on the “Most Popular” list at TheNation.com
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

Read HERE
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.

Read HERE
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