It's getting bitter out there. My criticism of tRump has resulted in losing around two dozen followers on Twitter this week alone. And now even this staunch post-Garland follower has had it, unfollowing me. But as I've put it, losing followers over someone like tRump is a gain.
If you're not losing followers on Twitter, you're not tweeting anything worth tweeting.
— Bosch Fawstin (@BoschFawstin) August 22, 2015
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As historians begin to assess Barack Obama’s record as president, there’s at least one legacy he’ll leave that will indeed be historic—but not in the way he would have hoped. Even as Democrats look favorably ahead to the presidential landscape of 2016, the strength in the Electoral College belies huge losses across much of the country. In fact, no president in modern times has presided over so disastrous a stretch for his party, at almost every level of politics.Heh, the party of old white people. Well, James Clyburn's black, but he's old and decrepit, definitely not the image of a young vigorous political titan. A bunch of hacks and losers, that's what they are. The Depends Gang.
Legacies are often tough to measure. If you want to see just how tricky they can be, consider the campaign to get Andrew Jackson off the $20 bill 178 years after he left the White House. Working class hero? How about slave owner and champion of Native American genocide? Or watch how JFK went from beloved martyr to the man whose imperial overreach entrapped us in Vietnam, and then back to the president whose prudence kept the Cuban Missile Crisis from turning into World War III.
Yet when you move from policy to politics, the task is a lot simpler—just measure the clout of the president’s party when he took office and when he left it. By that measure, Obama’s six years have been terrible.
Under Obama, the party started strong. “When Obama was elected in 2008, Democrats were at a high water mark,” says David Axelrod, who served as one of Obama’s top strategists. “Driven by antipathy to George W. Bush and then the Obama wave, Democrats had enjoyed two banner elections in ’06 and ’08. We won dozens of improbable congressional elections in states and districts that normally would tack Republican, and that effect trickled down to other offices. You add to that the fact that we would take office in the midst of the worst recession since the Great Depression, and it was apparent, from Day One, that we had nowhere to go but down.”
The first signs of the slowly unfolding debacle that has meant the decimation of the Democratic Party nationally began early—with the special election of Scott Brown to Ted Kennedy’s empty Senate seat in Massachusetts. That early loss, even though the seat was won back eventually by Elizabeth Warren, presaged the 2010 midterms, which saw the loss of 63 House and six Senate seats. It was disaster that came as no surprise to the White House, but also proved a signal of what was to come.
The party’s record over the past six years has made clear that when Barack Obama leaves office in January 2017 the Democratic Party will have ceded vast sections of the country to Republicans, and will be left with a weak bench of high-level elected officials. It is, in fact, so bleak a record that even if the Democrats hold the White House and retake the Senate in 2016, the party’s wounds will remain deep and enduring, threatening the enactment of anything like a “progressive” agenda across much of the nation and eliminating nearly a decade’s worth of rising stars who might help strengthen the party in elections ahead.
When Obama came into the White House, it seemed like the Democrats had turned a corner generationally; at just 47, he was one of the youngest men to be elected as president. But the party has struggled to build a new generation of leaders around him. Eight years later, when he leaves office in 2017 at 55, he’ll actually be one of the party’s only leaders not eligible for Social Security. Even as the party has recently captured more young voters at the ballot box in presidential elections, its leaders are increasingly of an entirely different generation; most of the party’s leaders will fade from the national scene in the years ahead. Its two leading presidential candidates, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are 67 and 73. The sitting vice president, Joe Biden, is 72. The Democratic House leader, Nancy Pelosi, is 75; House Whip Steny Hoyer is 76 and caucus Chair James Clyburn is 75, as is Harry Reid, the Senate Democratic leader, who will retire next year. It’s a party that will be turning to a new generation of leaders in the coming years—and yet, there are precious few looking around the nation’s state houses, U.S. House or Senate seats...
You can see why Obama and Kerry wanted to wrap up negotiations with Iran as quickly as possible to avoid giving Congress enough time to consider all this information. Every day the Iran deal looks worse and worse.Keep reading.
Remember Obama talking up sanctions snapback? Remember the time he promised that you could keep your doctor? The two have a lot in common, except that, as far as we know, the administration didn't write a whole bunch of letters to foreign governments telling them they were lying about ObamaCare.
But the country's number one traitor did just that on sanctions snapback.
Sens. Mark Kirk (R., Ill.) and Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) disclosed in the letter to the State Department that U.S. lawmakers have been shown copies of several letters sent by the Obama administration to the Chinese, German, French, and British governments assuring them that companies doing business with Iran will not come under penalty.
The Obama administration is purportedly promising the foreign governments that if Iran violates the parameters of a recently inked nuclear accord, European companies will not be penalized, according to the secret letters.
Congress became aware of these promises during closed-door briefings with the Obama administration and through documents filed by the administration under a law requiring full disclosure of all information pertaining to the accord.
“We therefore request the Administration to publicly release these letters, which are not classified, so that the full extent of the Administration’s non-public assurances to European and Chinese governments can be discussed openly by Congress and analyzed by impartial outside experts,” they write...
G.Y.: One of your newest books is entitled “Black Prophetic Fire.” Define what you mean by “black prophetic fire.”Today's younger generation's being hoodwinked by New Left communists.
C.W.: Black prophetic fire is the hypersensitivity to the suffering of others that generates a righteous indignation that results in the willingness to live and die for freedom.
I think in many ways we have to begin with the younger generation, the generation of Ferguson, Baltimore, Staten Island and Oakland. There is not just a rekindling, but a re-invigoration taking place among the younger generation that enacts and enables prophetic fire. We’ve been in an ice age. If you go from the 1960s and 1970s — that’s my generation. But there was also an ice age called the neoliberal epoch, an ice age where it was no longer a beautiful thing to be on fire. It was a beautiful thing to have money. It was a beautiful thing to have status. It was a beautiful thing to have public reputation without a whole lot of commitment to social justice, whereas the younger generation is now catching the fire of the generation of the 1960s and 1970s.
Earlier this month, when writers at Vice Media were emailing about the potential benefits of unionizing, one employee brought up company co-founder Shane Smith’s purchase of a $23 million mansion in Santa Monica, Calif., a house featured in “Beverly Hills Cop” and the HBO show “Entourage.”I suspect unionization's a really bad idea. But then, most of these outlets are on the far-left. We'll see.
“For next time [management] says they can’t afford to give us raises,” the employee wrote, posting a link to an article about the real-estate deal.
Two days later, on Aug. 7, the writers voted to join the Writers Guild of America, East.
The move at Vice is part of a broader unionization push in the digital media world. This summer, the WGA and another union, News Guild-CWA, have also signed up writers at Gawker Media and Salon.com, and say they’re actively trying to make inroads elsewhere.
As online media outlets grow in heft—generating significant revenue and earning eye-popping valuations in investment rounds—their workers are beginning to argue they deserve better compensation and employment protections. Vice, whose edgy brand of online content and TV has caught on with young audiences, is a new-media powerhouse that was valued at $2.5 billion in its last investment round.
But the labor organizing movement is happening at what is arguably the most inopportune moment for the industry, just as it is attracting attention from strategic investors who can inject a huge amount of capital into their fledgling businesses. Big media companies are scouting the space aggressively as they chase young audiences, and while unions won’t necessarily be a hang-up in deals, they won’t be a selling point.
Skeptics say collective bargaining may not make sense for these companies, and could counter some of the advantages they have over traditional newsrooms, such as nimble decision-making, flexible work roles, and, in some cases, a lower wage scale.
“It raises questions about the extent to which a union contract might encumber a company from being able to make rapid decisions,” said Iliya Rybchin, the director of the media and entertainment practice at venture capital firm Highnote Foundry, which isn’t an investor in any of the unionized companies. “With unions you also often have strong delineations about roles, and in young companies you usually want a lot of fluidity.”
Management at all of the new-media companies that have voted to unionize have recognized and accepted the decisions of their workers.
One investor who has been on the board of several digital media companies—none that have unionized—said the collective bargaining movement is a bad idea. “For a fast-changing, dynamic, tech-led industry the last thing you want are barriers to growth,” he said, adding that unions have “been a weight” on traditional newsrooms...
"Trump is a walking, talking wake-up call for the GOP and media elite” http://t.co/VlKYMgliSZ pic.twitter.com/dbBubFMPmq
— TIME.com (@TIME) August 21, 2015The Donald has landed back on the cover of TIME magazine http://t.co/c5vCgYGE6G pic.twitter.com/d6BDweSsaD
— Zap2it (@Zap2it) August 20, 2015In an appearance on a Russian-owned news channel in 2014, the Labour leadership contender Jeremy Corbyn compared the actions of US forces during the Iraq war to those of Islamic State militants.
U.S. law enforcement officials are investigating how classified material found its way into messages that members of Hillary Clinton’s State Department staff sent to her private e-mail address, according to a U.S. official with knowledge of the inquiry.Still more.
The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an investigation still in its early stages, said there is some indication that Clinton aides drew upon a variety of messages in classified information systems to produce summaries and updates of events in Libya and elsewhere and then sent them to Clinton or her aides using a private server.
The official didn’t identify the aides.
This transfer of classified information onto a server not approved to handle sensitive material is a focus of the investigation and could form the basis for a criminal probe to determine just how much classified material was sent - and who prepared and sent it.
A spokesman for the State Department didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Anybody who knowingly e-mailed classified material to Clinton or her top aides when she was secretary of state could face criminal prosecution, according to current and former U.S. national security officials. Clinton, the leading Democratic presidential candidate, isn’t the target of the investigation.
“There’s a responsibility to safeguard classified information,” Michael Hayden, former director of the National Security Agency and CIA, said in a phone interview. Failing to protect such data “could get to a level of negligence that criminal penalties would kick in.”
Inspector General
The probe comes after the inspector general for U.S. intelligence agencies determined that four e-mails on Clinton’s server contained classified information at the time they were sent. The State Department and intelligence agencies now are trying to determine if other material in the e-mails was classified when sent, and whether the data should be classified at all.
Clinton and her aides have said material in her e-mails wasn’t marked as being classified at the time it was sent and received through her server. Law enforcement officials, however, are examining e-mails that contained material known to be classified when sent.
Clinton used a private e-mail system in her home in Chappaqua, New York, while she was secretary of state from 2009 until February 2013. E-mails sent and received by her and top aides that used the system were stored on a server. The Federal Bureau of Investigation took possession of the server on Aug. 12 as part of its investigation.
30,490 E-Mails
Clinton said she turned over paper copies of 30,490 e-mails relating to government business from her tenure. Government screeners have flagged 305 of those documents for further review by U.S. intelligence agencies to see if they contained classified material.
There are several scenarios in which known classified material could have been improperly transferred, according to Hayden and an intelligence official who asked to remain anonymous to speak about a current investigation.
The most egregious way would be to knowingly strip classification markings from documents or other data, a move that would clearly be a criminal act.
Another, and possibly more probable, scenario is that those sending e-mails blended data from multiple sources that ultimately included or referenced some classified content.
“What you’re probably talking about is someone typing a message based on multiple sources in their head,” Hayden said.
ATHENS—Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras resigned in a bid to trigger snap elections and return to power stronger, plunging his country into weeks of political paralysis just as it seemed to have scraped through a summer of fraught bailout talks and near-bankruptcy.More.
Mr. Tsipras’s gambit, announced in a short televised address late on Thursday, is expected to lead to his re-election in September, thanks to his popularity and the absence of strong challengers. But whether elections bolster his grip on Parliament, as he hopes, hinges on his ability to persuade Greeks that the €86 billion ($96 billion) bailout he negotiated with Europe is the only path out of the country’s long crisis.
Greece’s head of state, President Prokopis Pavlopoulos, was expected to accept Mr. Tsipras’s proposal to hold the vote on Sept. 20.
The election will effectively be a referendum on the 41-year-old Mr. Tsipras and his bailout agreement with the rest of the eurozone.
The deal commits Greece to further years of stringent economic retrenchment, including tax increases and cuts to pension entitlements. Greeks elected Mr. Tsipras and his left-wing Syriza party only in January this year to put an end to five years of unpopular austerity measures, which the country’s creditors demanded in exchange for bailout loans.
Mr. Tsipras’s acceptance in July of creditors’ policy demands followed months of diplomatic confrontation. The standoff ultimately led to Greece defaulting on its debts to the International Monetary Fund and imposing capital controls, further battering Greece’s depressed economy.
The premier’s U-turn has split Syriza. Dozens of his lawmakers have withheld support for legislation needed to clinch the bailout package. Mr. Tsipras has had to rely on the votes of opposition parties, but they have warned they won’t prop him up for long...
Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Thursday that he would consider removing the pedestrian plazas from Times Square in a bid to restore order in the crowded streets of the Manhattan crossroads.More.
The move, which the mayor described as one of several options to be considered by a task force of New York City officials, would undo a signature accomplishment of Mr. de Blasio’s predecessor, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, whose decision to close part of Times Square to vehicular traffic has been hailed as an influential innovation in urban design.
The plazas, which replaced portions of Broadway and Seventh Avenue, are popular with tourists, theatergoers and Midtown office workers.
But conditions in Times Square have recently come under scrutiny, with some New Yorkers complaining about the proliferation of street performers — including, most notably, topless women wearing body paint — who are said to be accosting pedestrians for tips for posing for photographs.
Mr. de Blasio has been keen to demonstrate that he is addressing the concerns, and on Thursday he announced a task force to consider ideas on how to better prevent activities that the city deems illegal or harmful to the area’s quality of life.
But the mayor, at a news conference in Queens, surprised many urban planners when he said he would give “a fresh look” to whether the pedestrian plazas should remain...
A Cruella de Ville moment for Queen Helena #TheRoyals @TheRoyalsOnE @LionsgateTV pic.twitter.com/zlsRkQc7Nn
— Elizabeth Hurley (@ElizabethHurley) August 19, 2015
