How Trump Radicalized the Parkland Kids in Their Fight Against Guns: George Zornick, plus Micah Sifrey on Facebook and Sue Halpern on Trump vs. Libraries

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Last Sunday’s Rally for Our Lives shows that having Trump in the White House has made the demands of those wonderful Parkland kids more radical. George Zornick comments on the ways the Parkland students have transformed the fight for gun control.
Also: It’s time to break up Facebook: that’s what Micah Sifrey says, as Facebook’s business model—selling users’ data to advertisers, including political campaigns—has exposed the problem of monopoly power on the internet.
Plus: Why does Trump want to defund libraries? Sue Halpern explains; her new novel is “Summer Hours at the Robber’s Library.”
3/29/2018

Harold Meyerson: Trump v. Amazon; plus Amy Wilentz: Should Ivanka be Indicted? and Katha Pollitt on Russiagate

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Harold Meyerson comments on Trump’s attack of Amazon, the prospect of a Trump re-election, the new model for unions after the Janus v. AFSCME case.  His new article, “What Now for Unions,” is out now at Prospect.org.
Also, we ask Amy Wilentz whether Ivanka should be indicted — she describes the “grotesque abuse of power” that is the Trump kleptocracy.
Lastly, Katha Pollitt says, it’s time to “get real about Russiagate.”
3/29/18

 

Should Ivanka be Indicted? Q&A with Amy Wilentz.

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Jon Wiener: Ivanka is connected pretty directly to events at the center of the Russiagate investigations. Where do you think the strongest case could be made that she committed a crime?
Amy Wilentz: Possibly it’s the cover-up from the meeting on Air Force One after that fabled meeting in Trump Tower with the Russian lawyer. On Air Force One, the Trump team, including the president and Jared Kushner and Ivanka, crafted a message to the media saying that the Trump Tower meeting was largely about Russian adoptions and had nothing to do with Hillary Clinton. Of course, we subsequently learned it was all about a promise of dirt on Hillary from the Russians.
TheNation.com 3/23/18

 

John Nichols: A Voting Rights Victory; plus Chris Hayes on Crime, and Rebecca Solnit on “Men Explain Things to Me”

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John Nichols reports on breaking news from Wisconsin: a victory for voting rights — in a special election that had been blocked by Gov. Scott Walker.
Plus: Chris Hayes talks about Trump, crime, and his new book, “A Colony in a Nation,” out now in paperback from W. W. Norton & Company.
Also today is the 10th anniversary of “Men Explain Things To Me.”  We hear the backstory from the author, Rebecca Solnit.
3/22/18

Hey, Democrats Are Actually Running to Win! Joan Walsh on the Democrats’ new strategy; plus Amy Wilentz on Ivanka, and Anna Deavere Smith on the school-to-prison pipeline

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After years of getting beaten in state legislative races, the Democrats have a new energy and a new wave of candidates—especially after last year’s stunning victories in Virginia. Joan Walsh reports.
Plus: Should Ivanka be indicted? She’s been part of some of the Trump administration’s conspiracies to obstruct justice, including the decision to fire James Comey as FBI director. Amy Wilentz reviews the evidence and considers the arguments.
Also: Anna Deavere Smith talks about the school-to-prison pipeline—that’s the subject of her one-woman show, called Notes from the Field, which dramatizes the real-life accounts of students, parents, teachers and administrators caught in a system where young people of color who live in poverty get pushed out of the classroom and into the criminal justice system. It’s playing on HBO through the end of March.
3-22-18

Jasper Johns at the Broad: the New York Review

A complaint about the Jasper Johns show at the Broad Museum in LA: they hung his gorgeous “Summer,” part of his “Seasons” series of 1985-86, all wrong.
Johns’s paintings of the Eighties displayed “a new engagement with death, one that deepened amid the first awful years of the AIDS epidemic.” . . .
continued at the New York Review:  HERE 
3/21/18

A forgotten hero stopped the My Lai massacre 50 years ago today:
LA Times op-ed

Everybody’s heard of the My Lai massacre — March 16, 1968, 50 years ago today — but not many know about the man who stopped it: Hugh Thompson, an Army helicopter pilot. When he arrived, American soldiers had already killed 504 Vietnamese civilians (that’s the Vietnamese count; the U.S. Army said 347). They were going to kill more, but they didn’t — because of what Thompson did. . . .
. . . continued at  LATimes.com HERE
3/16/2018

Robert Reich: It’s Time to Fight for the Common Good

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Jon Wiener: There’s a familiar Republican argument against the idea of the common good: It’s my responsibility to do what’s best for me and my family. It’s your responsibility to take care of yourself. If you have problems, health problems or job problems or family problems, that’s too bad—but it’s not my problem. The state should not force me to pay for your problems. You should take responsibility for yourself. I think you’ve probably heard this argument.
Robert Reich: I’ve heard it for a very long time. It’s absurd. . .
TheNation.com 3/16/2018

David Corn on Trump & Putin; Peter Dreier on Disney workers; The Man who Stopped the My Lai massacre

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Why is there no Trump Tower in Moscow?  David Corn talks about Trump, Putin and his new book, “Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump.”
Plus: Is Disneyland really the happiest place on earth? Peter Dreier says, “no, not for the workers.” Dreier, Professor of Political Science at Occidental College, was also part of the research team that produced an Economic Roundtable report, “Working for the Mouse: A Survey of Disneyland Employees,” released February, 2018.
Also: March 16 marks the 50th anniversary of the My Lai massacre; we talk with Hugh Thompson, the pilot who stopped the killing fifty years ago.   3/15/2018