The New York Timesis live-updating developments Tuesday as powerful Hurricane Milton moves through the Gulf of Mexico toward Central Florida.
New York Times:“Cissy Houston, a Grammy Award-winning soul and gospel star who helped shepherd her daughter Whitney Houston to superstardom, died on Monday at her home in Newark. She was 91.”
Weather Channel: “H​urricane Milton has rapidly intensified into a Category 3 and hurricane and storm surge watches are now posted along Florida's western Gulf Coast, where the storm poses threats of life-threatening storm surge, destructive winds and flooding rainfall by midweek. 'Milton will be a historic storm for the west coast of Florida,' the National Weather Service in Tampa Bay said in a briefing Monday morning.” ~~~
~~~ New York Times live updates are here for what is now a Cat 5 hurricane.
CNN: “This year’s Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine has been awarded toVictor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun for their work on the discovery of microRNA, a fundamental principle governing how gene activity is regulated. Their research revealed how genes give rise to different cells within the human body, a process known as gene regulation. Gene regulation by microRNA – a family of molecules that helps cells control the sort of proteins they make – ... was first revealed by Ambros and Ruvkun. The Nobel Prize committee announced the prestigious honor ... in Sweden on Monday.... Ambros, a professor of natural science at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, conducted the research that earned him the prize at Harvard University. Ruvkun conducted his research at Massachusetts General Hospital, and is a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School.”
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Public Service Announcement
Washington Post: "Americans can again order free rapid coronavirus tests by mail, the Biden administration announced Thursday. People can request four free at-home tests per household through covidtests.gov. They will begin shipping Monday. The move comes ahead of an expected winter wave of coronavirus cases. The September revival of the free testing program is in line with the Biden administration’s strategy to respond to the coronavirus as part of a broader public health campaign to protect Americans from respiratory viruses, including influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), that surge every fall and winter. But free tests were not mailed during the summer wave, which wastewater surveillance data shows is now receding."
Washington Post: “Comedy news outlet the Onion —reinvigorated by new ownership over this year — is bringing back its once-popular video parodies of cable news. But this time, there’s someone with real news anchor experience in the chair. When the first episodes appear online Monday, former WAMU and MSNBC host Joshua Johnson will be the face of the resurrected 'Onion News Network.' Playing an ONN anchor character named Dwight Richmond, Johnson says he’s bringing a real anchor’s sense of clarity — and self-importance — to the job. 'If ONN is anything, it’s a news organization that is so unaware of its own ridiculousness that it has the confidence of a serial killer,' says Johnson, 44.” ~~~
~~~ Marie: I'll be darned if I can figured out how to watch ONN. If anybody knows, do tell. Thanks.
Washington Post: “First came the surprising discovery that Earth’s atmosphere is leaking. But for roughly 60 years, the reason remained a mystery. Since the late 1960s, satellites over the poles detected an extremely fast flow of particles escaping into space — at speeds of 20 kilometers per second. Scientists suspected that gravity and the magnetic field alone could not fully explain the stream. There had to be another source creating this leaky faucet. It turns out the mysterious force is a previously undiscovered global electric field, a recent study found. The field is only about the strength of a watch battery — but it’s enough to thrust lighter ions from our atmosphere into space. It’s also generated unlike other electric fields on Earth. This newly discovered aspect of our planet provides clues about the evolution of our atmosphere, perhaps explaining why Earth is habitable. The electric field is 'an agent of chaos,' said Glyn Collinson, a NASA rocket scientist and lead author of the study. 'It undoes gravity.... Without it, Earth would be very different.'”
New York Times: “Hvaldimir, a beluga whale who had captured the public’s imagination since 2019 after he was spotted wearing a harness seemingly designed for a camera, was found dead on Saturday in Norway, according to a nonprofit that worked to protect the whale.... [Hvaldimir] was wearing a harness that identified it as “equipment” from St. Petersburg. There also appeared to be a camera mount. Some wondered if the whale was on a Russian reconnaissance mission. Russia has never claimed ownership of the whale. If Hvaldimir was a spy, he was an exceptionally friendly one. The whale showed signs of domestication, and was comfortable around people. He remained in busier waters than are typical for belugas....” ~~~
~~~ Marie: Oh, Lord, do not let Bobby Kennedy, Jr., near that carcass. ~~~
~~~ AP Update: “There’s no evidence that a well-known beluga whale that lived off Norway’s coast and whose harness ignited speculation it was a Russian spy was shot to death last month as claimed by animal rights groups, Norwegian police said Monday.... Police said that the Norwegian Veterinary Institute conducted a preliminary autopsy on the animal, which was become known as 'Hvaldimir,' combining the Norwegian word for whale — hval — and the first name of Russian President Vladimir Putin. 'There are no findings from the autopsy that indicate that Hvaldimir has been shot,' police said in a statement.”
New York Times: Botswana's “President Mokgweetsi Masisi grinned as he lifted the diamond, a 2,492-carat stone that is the biggest diamond unearthed in more than a century and the second-largest ever found, according to the Vancouver-based mining operator Lucara, which owns the mine where it was found. This exceptional discovery could bring back the luster of the natural diamond mining industry, mining companies and experts say. The diamond was discovered in the same relatively small mine in northeastern Botswana that has produced several of the largest such stones in living memory. Such gemstones typically surface as a result of volcanic activity.... The diamond will likely sell in the range of tens of millions of dollars....”
Click on photo to enlarge.
~~~ Guardian: "On a distant reef 16,000km from Paris, surfer Gabriel Medina has given Olympic viewers one of the most memorable images of the Games yet, with an airborne celebration so well poised it looked too good to be true. The Brazilian took off a thundering wave at Teahupo’o in Tahiti on Monday, emerging from a barrelling section before soaring into the air and appearing to settle on a Pacific cloud, pointing to the sky with biblical serenity, his movements mirrored precisely by his surfboard. The shot was taken by Agence France-Presse photographer Jérôme Brouillet, who said “the conditions were perfect, the waves were taller than we expected”. He took the photo while aboard a boat nearby, capturing the surreal image with such accuracy that at first some suspected Photoshop or AI."
Washington Post: “'Mary Cassatt at Work' is a large and mostly satisfying exhibition devoted to the career of the great American artist beloved for her sensitive and often sentimental views of family life. The 'at work' in the title of the Philadelphia Museum of Art show references the curators’ interest in Cassatt’s pioneering effort to establish herself as a professional artist within a male-dominated field. Throughout the show, which includes some 130 paintings, pastels, prints and drawings, the wall text and the art on view stresses Cassatt’s fixation on art as a career rather than a pastime.... Mary Cassatt at Work is on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through Sept. 8. philamuseum.org”
New York Times: “Bob Newhart, who died on Thursday at the age of 94, has been such a beloved giant of popular culture for so long that it’s easy to forget how unlikely it was that he became one of the founding fathers of stand-up comedy. Before basically inventing the hit stand-up special, with the 1960 Grammy-winning album 'The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart' — that doesn’t even count his pay-per-view event broadcast on Canadian television that some cite as the first filmed special — he was a soft-spoken accountant who had never done a set in a nightclub. That he made a classic with so little preparation is one of the great miracles in the history of comedy.... Bob Newhart holds up. In fact, it’s hard to think of a stand-up from that era who is a better argument against the commonplace idea that comedy does not age well.”
I've been thinking about the discussion of the Vietnam war that took place among contributors here last week. As far as I recall, that war and the Korean War, from a U.S. policy perspective, had little or nothing to do with the welfare of the people of Southeast Asia. Our goal in Korea, Vietnam, Laos & Cambodia was never to help the locals; it was always to contain China. Sure, there was a lot of rhetoric about “communism,” and diversionary red scares peppered the hoohah, but it was not the form of government that concerned us. (The most belligerent war hawks never murmured about declaring war on “socialist” countries like Sweden & Denmark or on the dozens of dictatorships we often aided and abetted.) What policymakers cared about was China's taking over the portions of Asia it did not already control.
In the 1950s and '60s, pretty much everybody in the U.S. believed in the “domino theory” – and with good reason. It was proved in Eastern Europe and ultimately in Southeast Asia as well. Whether or not the people of Vietnam are happy with their government today seems relatively unimportant to the issue. The question was then whether or not the Vietnam war was worth the effort to contain China. Maybe it did slow that country's march over its neighbors and influence its politicians' decision not to go further – at least militarily.
Facile remarks about agent orange, by the way, say nothing whatever about whether or not the war itself was justifiable. Certain military tactics may be unjustified – for humanitarian or other reasons – in a conflict that is otherwise a “just war.” Ask the people of Dresden about that.
Another concept most Americans believed in at the time their leaders were amping up the Viet Nam military effort was that our guys were the “good guys” and our aims were righteous. Millions of Americans, including most of our leaders during the Vietnam era, had participated in what was seen almost universally as a “just cause” – World War II. Young men signed up for Vietnam because their fathers had gone to Italy or Guam. To find fault with them – years or decades later – for believing in the rectitude of our leaders then seems rather callous. Maybe ya hadda be there to get it. Opposition to the Vietnam war was never universal, though it grew with time and events. There was often a certain selfishness in much of the opposition, and the same was true for many who favored the war. Dick Cheney and Bill Clinton were hardly the only guys who thought they should not have to risk getting shot up because they had better things to do stateside.
In hindsight, was Vietnam a good idea? Well, we lost, so maybe not. We lost in Korea too – mostly – but democracy did gain a little toehold in a region that is largely devoid of popularly-controlled government models. I don't know if Japan's and South Korea's examples have influenced the demands of those Chinese citizens who are pressing for a more open, capitalistic society, but that seems plausible.
A veteran of the Korean conflict, a contributor here, reminded me of another benefit to the Korean war: “I got a 4-year, totally free, college education and a guaranteed low-interest, zero-down home loan out of the deal,” James Singer wrote.
I have often written about the social compact that dominated this country's economy during much of the second half of the last century – the unwritten understanding among the government, business and labor that each had a stake in the U.S. and that each needed the others for the country to prosper. But I don't think it ever occurred to me how important the wars were to that compact: the G.I. bills that funded Singer's education & home loan also paid for millions of others' educations and provided for low- or no-down-payments on their little slices of the pie. The social compact may have developed out of the disaster of the Great Depression, but for decades the G.I. bills were a significant factor in sustaining it. Little changed for women and minorities in the two decades following World War II – even though minority men did their share in the wars* – but the white man-of-the-house made out pretty well. So did the country, for all he contributed in return.
*AND, I should have said, so did women of all hues.
Hope Yen of the AP: "Four out of 5 U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, a sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream. Survey data exclusive to The Associated Press points to an increasingly globalized U.S. economy, the widening gap between rich and poor and loss of good-paying manufacturing jobs as reasons for the trend. The findings come as President Barack Obama tries to renew his administration's emphasis on the economy, saying in recent speeches that his highest priority is to 'rebuild ladders of opportunity' and reverse income inequality." James S. mentioned this in yesterday's Commentariat.
"Detroit Looks to Health Law to Ease Costs." Monica Davey & Abby Goodnough of the New York Times: "As Detroit enters the federal bankruptcy process, the city is proposing a controversial plan for paring some of the $5.7 billion it owes in retiree health costs: pushing many of those too young to qualify for Medicare out of city-run coverage and into the new insurance markets that will soon be operating under the Obama health care law.... But if large numbers of localities follow that course, it could amount to a significant cost shift to the federal government."
Kate Pickert of Time: "Earlier this month, the Washington Post published a blockbuster front-page story about a secretive committee that determines what Medicare pays physicians for their work. Part of the American Medical Association (AMA), the committee estimates the time and intensity of various doctor tasks, and the recommendations are plugged into a formula that sets Medicare reimbursements. The committee overestimates the time it takes to perform myriad medical procedures, which thereby increases the amount doctors can earn from Medicare.... What's surprising about this AMA committee's influence is ... that the federal government relies on the committee so heavily -- almost blindly at times." The Affordable Care Act's Independent Payment Advisory Board may reduce the power of this group.
Kari Rea of ABC News: "Today on 'This Week,' Glenn Greenwald ... claimed that those NSA programs allowed even low-level analysts to search the private emails and phone calls of Americans":
... Digby: Meanwhile, we had David Gregoryfluffing the NSA's pool boy, Congressman Mike Rogers, on Meet the Press. Rogers explained at length, without any follow-up, that the vote this week that came just 6 votes short of dismantling the NSA programs was a result of the public being upset about the administration's abusive Big Brother IRS and Obamacare which they confused with the benign NSA that's doing God's work. That is no joke, it's what he said. And then he lied repeatedly about other details we already know while the petty little Villager David Gregory (who, like so many others, obviously can't see past his personal animosity toward Greenwald to the underlying issues) asked him to go on at length about how Edward Snowden is killing people." ...
... Ed Pilkington of the Guardian: "Pressure is building within the US Senate for an overhaul of the secret court that is supposed to act as a check on the National Security Agency's executive power, with one prominent senator, [Ron Wyden {D-Oregon}] describing the judicial panel as 'anachronistic' and outdated.... Sunday, the prominent Democratic senator for Illinois, Dick Durbin, added his voice to the mounting criticism of the Fisa court, telling ABC's This Week: 'There should be a real court proceeding. In this case, it's fixed in a way, it's loaded. There's only one case coming before the Fisa, the government's case. Let's have an advocate for someone standing up for civil liberties to speak up about the privacy of Americans.'" ...
... Ditto from Jonathan Weisman of the New York Times, with a few different examples of the shift. ...
... David Fahrenthold of the Washington Post: Sen. Ron "Wyden [D-Oregon] finally has the audience he sought. All it took was Snowden. This is an awkward fact of Wyden's success: To get anyone's attention, the senator needed somebody else to break the laws that he would not. 'This debate should have started long, long, long ago. And it should have been started by elected officials and not by a government contractor,' Wyden said Friday." ...
... Missed this report by Peter Wallsten of the Post, published July 26: "The Obama administration's top intelligence official acknowledged Friday that there have been 'a number of compliance problems' in the government program that has collected phone data on millions of Americans. James Clapper, director of national intelligence, also said the government had not collected any other bulk data on Americans using its authority under the USA Patriot Act beyond the phone information and Internet data gathered under a separate program that was canceled in 2011." You can get to Clapper's letter from Wyden's site. If the task box doesn't load automatically, click "please click here." When the task box opens, click on "Open with Adobe reader."
John Broder of the New York Times: "Mr. Obama's decision to nominate [Gina] McCarthy, 59, [to head the EPA] was an act of defiance to Congressional and industry opponents of meaningful action on climate change. It was also a sign of his determination to at least begin to put in place rules to reduce carbon pollution."
Sam Roudman in the New Republic: the Bank of America building, touted when it opened in 2010 as an "environmentally-responsible high-rise building," in fact "produces more greenhouse gases and uses more energy per square foot than any comparably sized office building in Manhattan." Roudman explains how that came about, mostly because of the way BoA uses the building & because faulty standards gave BoA the green rating in the first place.
** E. J. Dionne: "Yes, let's mess with Texas." Eric "Holder's move shows is an utter contempt for efforts to deprive our fellow Americans of their right to cast a meaningful ballot. It is a contempt that all of us should feel."
Bill Keller: "People may no longer give [President] Obama suspicious glares in department stores or clutch their purses when he enters an elevator, but they have typecast him according to their own fears and expectations of a black man in the White House. They are still profiling Barack Obama."
Garrett Epps, in a Salon republication, takes to the Second Amendment with textual analysis and concludes that it "is in equipoise." Interesting anyway.
Nicole Winfield of the AP: "Pope Francis is reaching out to gays, saying he won't judge priests for their sexual orientation, in a remarkably open and wide-ranging news conference as he returns from his first foreign trip. Francis says: 'If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?' His predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, authored a document that said men with deep-rooted homosexual tendencies should not be priests. Francis is being much more conciliatory, saying gay clergymen should be forgiven and their sins forgotten."
Andrew Kaczynski of BuzzFeed wonders, "Is This The Most Embarrassing Interview Fox News Has Ever Done?":
... CW: for what it's worth, there is plenty of evidence that some of the models for Jesus were Zealots, & some "sayings of Jesus" written in the Gospels are consistent with Zealotry. No serious scholar would disagree with this, though some weigh other attributes more heavily than radical aspects that the Gospel writers included to define Jesus; e.g., his Pharisaic sayings are perhaps more prevalent than the political sayings attributed to him. But there is not much evidence that Jesus was an actual person. I'd have to read Aslan's book to see if he acknowledges the scholarship that pretty much debunks the Jesus biography.
Local News
** Yesterday, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew said the federal government would not be bailing out Detroit (see yesterday's Commentariat for link), but John Cassidy of the New Yorker writes, "President Obama should stress the necessity of shared sacrifice, and push the state of Michigan to take on more of the city's fiscal responsibilities, perhaps by offering it more federal aid. Once all the parties come to an agreement, the federal government could also help with the tasks of downsizing and of rebuilding roads and schools, and taking other measures to attract businesses and families." As for the country's collapsing infrastructure, "Where better to start than in Detroit?" Leaving Detroit's fate in the hands of a Republican governor & his backers is handing conservatives the opportunity "for showdowns with public-sector unions across the country."
Make that magnifying glass a mirror. Daily News artwork.Greg Smith of the New York Daily News: "Serial sexter Anthony Weinerpaid a private eye nearly $45,000 in campaign cash to investigate his lie that a hacker posted a crotch shot on his Twitter feed, campaign spending records show. Weiner's brazen attempt to cover his tracks occurred shortly after Memorial Day weekend in 2011, when his first sexting scandal erupted and he went into furious spin control trying to save his career in Congress. He maintained that he had been victimized -- and promised an investigation to get to the bottom of how it happened."
Adam Martin of New York: Maureen Dowd & Rush Limbaughagree about Huma Abedin's reason for sticking with der Weinerschnitzel.
News Lede
Washington Post: "A wave of vandalism continued to mar some of Washington's more popular landmarks Monday with at least three more attractions spattered with green paint, and authorities announced the arrest of a woman near one of the incidents at Washington National Cathedral. The latest crimes occurred three days after the Lincoln Memorial was hit in similar fashion. On Monday, the light-green paint was discovered on an organ in the cathedral's Bethlehem Chapel, in the cathedral's Children's Chapel and on the granite base of a statue next to the Smithsonian Castle on the Mall. D.C. police said Monday evening that they had charged Tian Jiamel, 58, whom they believe to be homeless, with one count of defacing property."
Scott Wilson of the Washington Post: "President Obama praised veterans of the Korean War at a ceremony Saturday marking the anniversary of the armistice, using their return to an apathetic America decades ago as a promise to better care for the generation returning from distant battlefields today":
Here is "a transcript of an interview with President Obama conducted by Jackie Calmes and Michael D. Shear of The New York Times. The interview was conducted at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., on July 24, 2013." ...
... Stories from the interview:
"In a week when he tried to focus attention on the struggles of the middle class, President Obama said in an interview that he was worried that years of widening income inequality and the lingering effects of the financial crisis had frayed the country's social fabric and undermined Americans' belief in opportunity." ...
"President Obama said in an interview that he would evaluate construction of the Keystone XL pipeline on the basis of whether it would significantly contribute carbon to the atmosphere. But he mocked Republicans' arguments that the approval of the pipeline, which would carry oil from Canada to the Gulf Coast, would create many jobs in the United States." ...
"President Obama waved aside persistent Republican criticism of his signature health care law last week, saying in a New York Times interview that the overhaul would become vastly more popular once 'all the nightmare scenarios' from his adversaries proved wrong." ...
... Igor Volsky of Think Progress: "Health premiums in Marylands exchanges will be 'among the lowest of the 12 states that have available proposed or approved rates for comparison,' the state's exchange — Maryland Health Connection -- announced Friday. The news comes just as New York,Oregon, Montana, California, and Louisiana are also reporting lower than expected premiums." ...
... Of course, even when the news is good, Republicans will lie about it, fudging figures to make it appear insurance premiums will go up. Take Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana, ferinstance. CW: Also, it would help if the local papers, who according to Forbes' Rick Unger dutifully reported Pence's distorted figures, actually checked the facts instead of just typing up Mike Pence's press releases.
Nobody Loves Larry (Except Maybe Barry.) Steve Leisman of CNBC: "Wall Street overwhelmingly believes President Obama will and should pickJanet Yellen to be the next chairman of the Federal Reserve, according to a survey." Fifty percent of "the Wall Street pros" CNBC surveyed said Obama should choose Yellen; 2.5 percent said he should nominate Larry Summers. ...
... Amanda Marcotte in Slate: "... Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas President Richard Fisher complained on CNBC that picking Yellen would be 'driven by gender.' Oh, he admits she's qualified for the job, but hastened to add, 'There are other capable people.' Which seems to suggest that Obama should exhaust every male candidate before settling on a female one, a course of action that would not be 'driven by gender' because men don't have a gender." ...
... Digby: "President Obama has long been suspected of being wobbly on women's issues.His record is, at best, mixed.... He should be seeking every opportunity to appoint qualified women to powerful positions. And when they are more qualified by dint of superior temperaments, there's really no excuse for him not to."
We simply conclude that the law has long recognized the distinction between the owners of a corporation and the corporation itself. A holding to the contrary -- that a for-profit corporation can engage in religious exercise -- would eviscerate the fundamental principle that a corporation is a legally distinct entity from its owners. -- Judge Robert Cowen of the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals, explaining to Mitt Romney, et al., that corporations are not people, my friend ...
... Sam Baker of the Hill: "A federal appeals court said Friday that the owners of a private company could not challenge the contraception mandate in President Obama's healthcare law. The 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals said the owners of Conestoga, a cabinet-making company, could not challenge the mandate because of their personal religious beliefs." CW: This is good news, EXCEPT, "The decision conflicts with another federal appeals court's ruling, which increases the likelihood that the Supreme Court will eventually hear the issue." ViaSteve Benen.
Your Sunday Sermon courtesy of Tailgunner Ted:
... The Moral of Today's Sunday Sermon, courtesy of CW: not all bigots are knuckle-dragging numbskulls. Ted is a damned good speaker, quite capable of rallying the knuckle-dragging numbskulls.
Local News
NEW. Bryce Covert of Think Progress: "On CNN's State of the Union show on Sunday, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew was firm in saying that there will be no federal bailout for the city of Detroit, which is going through the largest city bankruptcy in America's history." ...
... Susan Kelly of Reuters: "Michigan's Attorney General Bill Schuette, a Republican, said on Saturday he would defend retirees who risk losing public pensions because of Detroit's bankruptcy, putting him at odds with the city's emergency manager appointed by fellow Republican Governor Rick Snyder. Schuette, an elected official, said the Michigan state constitution is 'crystal clear' in stating that pension plans are a contractual obligation that may not be diminished or impaired.... The attorney general said he would file in federal bankruptcy court on Monday on behalf of the pensioners affected by the biggest municipal bankruptcy filing in U.S. history."
Michael Barbaro of the New York Times: "In a new sign of tumult within Anthony D. Weiner's embattled political operation, his campaign manager [Danny Kedem] has quit, leaving his already skeletal team without a day-to-day leader." ...
... Maureen Dowd: Huma Abedin's friends "fear Huma learned the wrong lesson from Hillary, given that Bill was a roguish genius while Weiner's a creepy loser."
Isn't She Lovely. Laura Vozzella of the Washington Post: "Virginia first lady Maureen McDonnellbought nearly $9,800 in clothing with money from her husband’s political action committee and tapped into his campaign and inaugural funds to buy $7,600 in mostly unspecified items, according to records and a representative for the PAC. The spending is legal under Virginia's lax campaign finance laws, which prohibit the conversion of political funds for private use only when a PAC or campaign committee disbands -- not while it is operating. But the purchases are unusual in Virginia.... Investigators ... are looking into whether the former Washington Redskins cheerleader and mother of five received free cosmetic dental work from a Richmond-area dentist, jewelry from a state delegate and a $15,000 Bergdorf Goodman shopping spree from [businessman Jonnie] Williams."
Ian Lovett & Rob Davis of the New York Times: "Rather than mollifying his critics, [San Diego Mayor Bob Filner's] announcement on Friday that he would take two weeks away from City Hall to seek what he described as intensive behavior therapy has only further angered many residents, who complained that he was dragging the city through the mud in hopes of salvaging his own career." ...
... San Diego Union-TribuneEditors: "Filnerhas created a mountain of wreckage. There is a City Hall in chaos, not just because of the last two weeks of turmoil but also because of the last eight months of management by bullying, confrontation and perhaps even corruption. There is a city again stained with a national laughingstock image just as it was emerging from the dark days of 'Enron-by-the-Sea.' There are the numerous personal lives that have been torn apart, from his ex-fiancee to his accusers. There is a local Democratic Party leadership that was riding high with his victory last November but is now seen as hypocritical enablers of Filner's inappropriate behavior for supporting him even after being warned two years ago by one of their own that he had a history of verbally and physically harassing women."
Presidential Election 2008
Muffling Miss Sarah. Andrew Kaczynski of BuzzFeed: "Sarah Palin said Friday she was banned by the McCain campaign from talking about Bill Ayers and President Obama's controversial former pastor Jeremiah Wright during the 2008 presidential election. 'Though I was during the campaign running for V.P., I was banned from talking about Jeremiah Wright and Obama's friend Bill Ayers,' Palin said in a Fox News interview. '... Couldn't talk about Obama's lack of knowledge, and job inexperience, and the things that he said like America had 57 states, things like that.... I wasn't allowed to talk about things like that because those elitist, those who are the brainiacs in the GOP machine running John McCain's campaign at the time said that the media would eat us alive if we brought up these things.'"
News Lede
Washington Post: "The first substantive peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians in years will begin Monday evening in Washington, the Obama administration announced, after Israeli leaders agreed Sunday to release 104 Palestinian prisoners.... The release of Palestinian prisoners was one of the major roadblocks to the peace talks."
;)
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