Journalism

Can Edward Snowden come home soon?  His lawyer, Ben Wizner of the ACLU, talks about what would happen in an espionage trial — and why Obama should issue a pardon.
The campaign to pardon Snowden, led by the ACLU, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International, is collecting signatures on a petition: https://www.pardonsnowden.org/

They call him “Minnesota’s mini-Trump”: Jason Lewis, the right-wing talk-show host who’s running for Congress for an open Republican seat in the suburbs south of the Twin Cities, the 2nd Congressional District. It’s the same seat Bill Maher targeted two years ago in his “Flip-a-district” campaign—only then it was held by a six-term Republican incumbent named John Kline. Maher’s effort didn’t work; Kline was reelected.. . .
continued at TheNation.com HERE

Political science tells us Hillary Clinton will win the election—the poll numbers are so clearly in her favor. As of this moment, the authoritative FiveThirtyEight “polls only” forecast says Clinton’s chance of beating Trump is 86.6 percent. But polling is an inexact science, and a lot of pundits are asking: Could the polls be wrong this time?
. . . continued HERE

Republicans are doing everything they can to keep Hillary’s e-mail in the news. And now they have a new front in their campaign: They’re arguing that Clinton violated the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by storing official information on her private e-mail servers.

Read at TheNation.com, HERE

Trump needs at least five or six million more votes than Romney in 2012.  Where can he get them?  A look at longstanding patterns in American voting suggests that it’s pretty much an impossible task.
READ the piece at TheNation.com HERE

The new book Witness to the Revolution: Radicals, Resisters, Vets, Hippies, and the Year America Lost Its Mind and Found Its Soul, by Clara Bingham, is an oral history of 1969-1970.  It’s surprisingly moving and powerful.
Read my review HERE.

When the circus came to Pico Blvd;
a look inside the karate studio;
and the mystery of the Pico Teriyaki House: they’re never open, but the guy is always in there.
http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/pico-diary-3/

There were two Nancy Davises in Hollywood in the early ’50s. One called the other a Communist. That was not true. The first one ended up in the White House, and the other one ended up in Ventura, California, flipping burgers in a snack bar.
story @TheNation.com http://bit.ly/1TYDchM

Lunch at the Cemitas Poblanas truck, kindergarteners on their way to make pizza, and a chat with the EMT guys at the Fire Station
— my new Pico Diary, at the LA Review of Books: HERE.

Tavis Smiley talks about Martin Luther King’s final year—the year that began with his speech condemning the war in Vietnam, where he called the US “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”  That year ended, of course, with the sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis.
Print version of the longer interview published online on MLK Day HERE