Journalism

Driving past the Fountain Valley hospital south of Los Angeles, you see something new: a huge white tent in what was the parking lot. To Angelenos, it looks something like the tent that appears downtown Beverly Hills for the Vanity Fair Oscar party. But this one, and others like it outside hospitals throughout Southern California, is not a party tent; it’s a temporary structure designed to deal with the overflow of Covid-19 cases at the hospital—a “triage tent.” . . .
continued at TheNation.com, 4-16-2020, HERE

The underground press of the Sixties is often described as self-indulgent; critics said it “trampled the tenets of accuracy and fairness,” while the mainstream media of the era is often portrayed as bland and cautious, and as practicing a phony objectivity. That was not true of the newspaper landscape in Los Angeles. The LA Times was firmly and loudly right-wing, while the LA Free Press (the “Freep”), the first underground paper of the era, and the most successful, was often a voice of reason, albeit a passionate one. A simple comparison of the coverage of the 1965 Watts uprising reveals a great deal.. . .
Excerpt from “Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties,” continued at the LA Review of Books HERE

It’s been another tough political season for the pundits. Take Super Tuesday. On the Monday before the vote, a typical headline read something like this one from The Hill: “Sanders Poised for Big Super Tuesday.”
On Wednesday, those headlines were replaced by ones like this from CNBC: “Super Tuesday results: Joe Biden shocks the world.”
Predictions gone wrong are nothing new for the punditocracy, of course. . . .
. . . continued at LATimes.com, HERE

A year ago, I wrote a piece headlined “2019 will be the worst year of Trump’s life.” Lately, I’ve been feeling a bit smug about my prescience. A wiser man might retire from the prognostication game on that high note, but instead I’m going to double down with a new prediction: 2020 will be the worst year of Trump’s life.
Contined at the LA Times HERE
1-1-2020

Jon Wiener: El Paso,Christchurch, Charleston: the attackers have all been described as loners. You say they are all connected. How?
Kathleen Belew: We’re talking here about the White Power movement, a coalition that includes Klan groups, neo-Nazi groups, skinheads, and other activists.  One of their key tactics is called leaderless resistance—a few people work in a cell without direct communication with other cells and without direct orders from leadership. This strategy was implemented to stymie infiltration efforts and prosecution. But there’s been a much larger and more damaging legacy: It has effectively erased this entire movement as a movement, so what we see instead are a series of stories about lone wolf attackers, acts of violence that are inexplicable and unrelated to each other. . . . continued at TheNation.com, HERE   9/3/19

JW: Paris isn’t the only place where a cathedral of Notre Dame is in ruins and awaiting rebuilding. There’s another Notre Dame—in Haiti, destroyed in the earthquake of 2010. Remind us first of all why we care about Haiti, including those of us who’ve never been there.
Amy Wilentz: We should all care about Haiti, because it was the first black republic ever established on the globe. It had the only successful slave revolution, which began in 1791, and eventually created the Republic of Haiti.
. . . continued at TheNation.com, HERE
5/10/19

The fossil fuel industry knew everything there was to know about climate change back in the 1980s. And they believed what their scientists were telling them. Exxon started building all its drilling rigs to compensate for the rise in sea level it knew was coming.  But of course the thing they didn’t do was tell any of the rest of us. Just the opposite. They’ve spent billions of dollars building the architecture of deceit and denial and disinformation that has spread with relentless efficiency the lie that science was unsure about climate change. . . .  4/25/19
continued at TheNation.com, HERE  4/25/19

Jon Wiener: The chair of the House Ways and Means Committee formally requested six years of Trump’s personal and business tax returns earlier this month. Trump, of course, refused to comply, and said the law is “100 percent” on his side. Does the IRS have to hand over Trump’s tax returns to the chair of the House Ways and Means Committee?
David Cay Johnston: If they follow the law, they absolutely have to hand them over. . . .
continued at TheNation.com, HERE   4/23/19

Q. Everybody I know says that if there’d been a fair count in the Georgia election, and no voter suppression, you would be the governor of Georgia right now. But you did accomplish some amazing things in that race.
Stacey Abrams: We received more votes than any Democrat in Georgia history, including President Obama, or Secretary Clinton, or any Democrat who’s ever run. We tripled Latino turnout, we tripled Asian Pacific Islander turnout, we increased youth participation rates by 139 per cent, we increased black turnout by 40 per cent.. . .
. . . continued at TheNation.com, HERE