Kavanaugh didn't just DARVO his way through yesterday's hearing: his bluster, tears, rage, and blame-shifting also allowed him to dodge a remarkable number of questions raised by the senators.
Ford, by contrast, answered virtually every question put to her.
Vox went through the transcript and painstakingly logged whether each question raised was addressed. They confirmed the impression that Kavanaugh was dodging the questions and Ford wasn't, and produced an excellent interactive graphic that allows us to visualize the both witnesses' forthrightness and drill down on each question and statement.
I don't believe it was just old people, i think it was DUMB, and Racist people... I don't like the anti-age bias. Old people have enough to worry about... but it is bold and makes good points.
This country belongs to whomever shows up. And do you know who shows up for every election? Old people. But only 46% of people18-34 years old voted in the last election.
So the elderly have a disproportionate influence on our politics and our country. And a lot of them would like to keep it that way.
Voters Not Politicians gathered an astounding 425,000 signatures in Michigan to secure a spot on the November ballot for a proposed constitutional amendment creating a citizens’ commission for redistricting.
LANSING, Michigan—Katie Fahey walks in to the Grand Traverse Pie Company, blocks from the state capitol, wearing a black T-shirt that announces her cause. “Voters should choose their politicians,” it reads, “not the other way around.”
As Fahey steps to the counter to order lunch, the cashier, a 20-something like her, recognizes the message. Last year, he tells her, he signed the initiative petition circulated by Voters Not Politicians to ban gerrymandering.
“We got almost a half a million people to sign,” enthuses Fahey, who founded the group in 2016 based on her viral Facebook post.
“That’s for the midterms?” asks the cashier’s co-worker.
“Yeah! So, Yes on 2, November 6!” Fahey says. “We just need 2 million voters. It’s fine! We got this.”
Fahey’s bravado is both sincere and ironic. An improv troupe founder and a mile-a-minute talker, the short-statured, dark-haired 29-year-old projects an idealistic energy that helped inspire thousands of volunteers through a massive, low-budget petition drive. She’s also wittily understating her group’s mammoth task ahead—and its high stakes for democracy, in Michigan and beyond.
Voters Not Politicians’ efforts have pushed Michigan, a swing state that swung to Donald Trump in 2016, to the forefront of the national movement to fight gerrymandering, the manipulation of election maps for partisan advantage. Michigan is the largest of four states voting in November on proposed changes to how voting districts are drawn after each census. A win in Michigan, one of the most gerrymandered states in the nation, could be a turning point for the growing effort to end partisan redistricting one state at a time.
It won’t be easy. But Voters Not Politicians’ volunteer army, led by Fahey, has already taken its effort further than the state’s political insiders thought possible.
The crowdsourced campaign held 33 town-hall meetings in 33 days, wrote a ballot proposal to give redistricting powers to a citizens’ commission, and fanned out across Michigan with clipboards and petitions in hand. Last fall, Voters Not Politicians volunteers collected 425,000 petition signatures in four months to secure a spot on Michigan’s ballot—a rare feat, usually accomplished only by hiring paid signature gatherers.
This fall they’re tackling a new set of challenges to redeploy their canvassers to get out the vote, fund-raise for TV ads, explain a complex proposal, channel Democrats’ anger against Michigan’s Republican gerrymander, and convince Republicans to support their proposal as a swamp-draining reform. Despite the group’s pledge not to work for any party’s advantage, conservative opponents have already tried to label the campaign a stalking horse for Democrats’ ambitions. But polls show it’s winning support across the political spectrum.
“Nobody feels like their politicians are listening to them,” Fahey says. “People want to drain the swamp. They want the political revolution … A lot of people understand that politicians [are] going to be politicians, and that them being able to control the outcome of elections doesn’t make sense.”
On election day 2016, Fahey, then 27, left her job at a recycling nonprofit in Lansing and rushed to the airport, thinking she’d witness history. A friend had an extra ticket to Hillary Clinton’s election watch party in New York City, and Fahey, who’d voted for Clinton that morning, thrilled at the invitation to go. “I could watch the first woman president find out she won,” Fahey remembers thinking.
Instead, Fahey got to Midtown Manhattan in time to watch Donald Trump’s upset victory unfold. She was standing among other Clinton supporters at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in Manhattan, still dressed in the red pantsuit she’d worn to work, when a reporter captured her reaction.
“My disappointment makes me not trust the rest of the world,” Fahey told the Associated Press reporter that night. “I don’t even want to go out. I want to wear sweatpants and curl myself up in a corner.”
Afterward, Fahey says, she thought of her Millennial friends, who’d enthused over Bernie Sanders in 2016, and her parents, who’d grown excited about Trump. “I don’t want to wait four years and the next presidential election for them to stay engaged,” she recalls thinking. She dreaded Thanksgiving with her parents, fearing she’d end up in an argument about Trump and Clinton. “At Thanksgiving dinner, I wanted to talk about fixing stuff, and not candidates or political parties,” she recalls.
Fahey had never been involved in a political campaign, though she exhorted her friends to vote and had talked about her support for Clinton in conversation and enthusiastic Facebook posts. But she’d passed on attending Michigan State University to study sustainable business and community leadership at Aquinas College, a Dominican liberal-arts college in Grand Rapids that weaved Catholic social teaching into its curriculum. “If I see something not happening, I’m not afraid to go jump in and fix it,” she says. In the fall of 2016, Fahey was working full-time at the Michigan Recycling Coalition, studying for an M.B.A., and running two comedy troupes and the Grand Rapids Improv Festival. “I’m kind of a doer,” she says.
It’s not always easy to get people riled up about gerrymandering.
Two days after the election, Fahey went on Facebook. “I’d like to take on gerrymandering in Michigan,” she posted. “If you’re interested in doing this as well, please let me know.” She’d learned about gerrymandering in school—in fourth grade, in fifth grade, in 10th grade, in a public-administration class at Aquinas—and it had angered her each time.
“Redistricting,” Fahey says, “is one of the basic building blocks of democracy. It determines how 10 years of elections at a time will end up. And yet we know it’s corrupt and broken, and we don’t do anything about it.”
Her post spread fast. Friends shared it in political Facebook groups. Strangers responded, offering help. Fahey set up a Facebook group of her own, Michiganders for Nonpartisan Redistricting Reform, and asked members to pledge to support a solution that didn’t benefit any individual or party. Organized with Google Sheets, conference calls, and its first in-person meeting in January 2017, the group grew. By February it had chosen a catchier name, Voters Not Politicians. It held 33 town-hall meetings in 33 days, starting in Marquette and Alpena, northern Michigan cities that often get less political attention.
It’s not always easy to get people riled up about gerrymandering, but Michigan proved fertile for a grassroots revolt against it. The state is closely divided politically, yet ever since a Republican-controlled redistricting in 2011, the GOP has enjoyed a 9–5 dominance of the state’s congressional delegation and large majorities in the state legislature. The congressional map in metro Detroit includes some especially freakish shapes: the Eleventh District looks like a sleeping vulture, the Fourteenth a bearded man meditating next to a crocodile’s jaws. Emails sent in 2011 between GOP congressional staffers, consultants, and the Michigan Chamber of Commerce, recently disclosed in a lawsuit, make the mapmakers’ partisan bias clear. “We’ve spent a lot of time providing options to ensure we have a solid 9–5 delegation in 2012 and beyond,” a chamber executive wrote.
Between 3,000 and 6,000 people came to Voters Not Politicians’ 33 town halls, Fahey says. They filled out surveys that asked if they wanted politicians to draw district lines, and if not, what process they’d prefer. Framing the question that way steered the group toward creating a citizens’ redistricting commission, as in California and Arizona. Specifics were hammered out in two in-person meetings of about 50 people, with others joining online via Google Docs and Trello. “Anyone who wanted to be at the policy table could be,” Fahey says: “a birthing doula, a lawyer, teachers, a caterer, pastor, veterinarian, an HR lawyer.”
The group took advice from Kathay Feng, the executive director of California Common Cause, who helped create her state’s citizens’ redistricting commission in 2008. It also ran its draft by possible future allies, including the League of Women Voters, the NAACP, and the ACLU, to ensure it conformed to their endorsement criteria for redistricting reform.
Its proposal would amend Michigan’s constitution to create a 13-member redistricting commission made up of regular citizens: four Republicans, four Democrats, and five independents or members of minor parties. People would apply to join, and the commissioners would be randomly selected from among the qualified applicants, though legislative leaders would be able to strike a few names from the list. To keep political insiders off the commission, the proposal bans partisan elected officials, candidates for partisan offices, lobbyists, political consultants, members of party governing committees, state employees outside civil service, and their close relatives from serving on the commission.
“I can actually impact the changes I’ve been wanting to see through direct democracy.”
More importantly, Fahey says, the proposal would embed fairness in redistricting into the state constitution. “We directly make gerrymandering illegal,” she says. (“Districts shall not provide a disproportionate advantage to any political party,” the proposal reads. “Districts shall not favor or disfavor an incumbent elected official or a candidate.”)
But as Voters Not Politicians prepared to circulate petitions, it got discouraging advice. Conventional wisdom often claims that initiative petitions can’t get enough signatures to make the ballot with a volunteer petition drive alone—it takes paid signature gatherers. “There were a bunch of groups who were like, ‘You guys are crazy. We don’t want to work with you or endorse you yet, because you can’t do it,’” Fahey says. “I said ‘No! We’ve done the math.’”
The group had 180 days to gather 315,000 signatures in a state of 10 million people. “We had a plan,” the field director Jamie Lyons-Eddy says. “We needed 3,000 people to get 10 to 15 signatures a week.” Between social-media recruits and town-hall attendees who signed up to volunteer, 4,000 people ended up circulating petitions. Lyons-Eddy split the state into 14 regions, with about 10 petition teams in each. Still an online-only group with no physical offices, it crowdsourced ideas on where to get people to sign. Highway rest stops proved especially fruitful. One woman collected 80 signatures while dressed up as the gerrymandered Eleventh District.
Costs were about one-tenth of what the conventional wisdom expected: The biggest expenses were $40,000 to print the petitions and $140,000 to have a consultant verify the petitions, much of it chipped in by the volunteers themselves. The group turned in 425,000 signatures, 70 days early. In July, the proposal survived a challenge at the Michigan Supreme Court, which ruled 4–3that it fit in the structure of the state constitution.
Fahey thinks the keys to the group’s success were taking on a systemic reform, inviting people to help write the ballot language, making the group easy to join, and having enthusiastic volunteers, not paid workers, convincing people to sign.
“I can actually impact the changes I’ve been wanting to see through direct democracy,” Fahey says, “not through a politician who’s maybe making a bunch of promises and not delivering.”
Late in august, denise yezbick walks through Detroit’s middle-class Palmer Woods neighborhood, holding an oversize clipboard. An adjunct English professor with gray-blond hair that reaches her shoulders, she’s got a Voters Not Politicians button pinned to her purse strap.
Yezbick knocks at a small Tudor Revival house. Matthew Weiner opens the door, wearing a blue T-shirt, gray shorts, and sandals. She asks if he’s heard of Proposal 2. He’s not sure, so she delivers a two-minute pitch for Voters Not Politicians’ proposal.
“This is your voting district, Fourteen, here,” Yezbick says, holding up the back of her clipboard to show a map of the zig-zagging congressional district. “And the reason it’s this crazy shape—”
“Crazy,” Weiner agrees.
Yezbick is careful to sound nonpartisan. “Both Republicans and Democrats abuse the system,” Yezbick says. “It just so happens we’ve got Republicans in power right now.” But as she says Republicans squeezed as many Democrats as possible into the Fourteenth to make surrounding districts less competitive, she’s got a receptive audience in Weiner, for reasons beyond good-government reform.
“I’m against gerrymandering,” Weiner tells Yezbick, “and I’m a Democrat.” His mother-in-law recently read the book Ratf**ked, which describes how Republicans took control of redistricting in many states by targeting key elections in 2010.
Yezbick gets a similar reaction from Beverly Garner, one street over. Garner, holding her baby granddaughter at the door, says she’s a contributor to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. She’s known about gerrymandering for a long time, and remembers when Democrats controlled the Michigan legislature in the 1980s and nudged maps in their direction. “I was very, very aware this time,” Garner says, “because of how it affected our area.”
Engaged Democrats like Weiner and Garner could lift Proposal 2 to victory. Pollsters are forecasting a blue wave in Michigan this year: the Democrat Gretchen Whitmer leads the Republican Bill Schuette by double digits in the governor’s race, and Democrats have a shot at taking at least two GOP congressional seats outside Detroit despite the gnarled maps: the Eighth, which stretches from Lansing to Detroit’s northern suburbs, and the sleeping-vulture Eleventh.
Still, Voters Not Politicians has plenty of work ahead. A recent poll found Proposal 2 leading 38 percent to 31 percent, but had another 31 percent of voters undecided. To ramp up for the general election, Voters Not Politicians recently opened its first offices to distribute lawn signs and literature, and is fund-raising to pay for TV ads. As of summer’s end, it’s raised about $2 million, and Fahey says it’ll need millions more to win. Canvassing is still a big part of the strategy: Volunteers have knocked on 148,000 doors so far to spread the word.
It’s only very recently in history that we’ve been able to buy more than the bare necessities. Can the history of consumption guide us to a wiser future?
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the recording of MC5’s seminal live/debut album, Kick out the Jams. To celebrate, guitarist Wayne Kramer has hit the road with an all-star band, playing the entire record plus other MC5 classics. There’s also the imminent release of a very cool vinyl boxed set of the MC5’s three LPs—but more on that in a moment.
1972 would prove to be the final year for the MC5, but early in the year they were still actively promoting their recently released third album, High Time. An overseas tour, with concerts in England and France, was booked for February-March. Bassist Michael Davis, traveling separately from the group, missed his flight to England, causing him to a be a no-show for a major gig in London. The MC5 played a few subsequent dates, before Davis left the band. One of the last concerts performed by the original lineup took place on February 11th at Friars, a club in Aylesbury.
Footage shot at this gig has been uploaded to Wayne Kramer’s YouTube channel. The two clips—which have been restored and look/sound fantastic—reveal that, even as the group was reaching the end of the line, some of that ol’ ‘5 magic was still there.
The new MC5 vinyl box, Total Assault: 50th Anniversary Collection, comes out on September 21st. The Rhino Records set includes the three albums the MC5 released: Kick out the Jams (1969), Back in the USA (1970), and High Time (1971). All three are pressed on colored vinyl, and feature faithful reproductions of the original artwork. The box also will include previously unreleased photos. Pre-order yours here.
The City of Los Angeles sends the nation-wrecking finance industry more than $100MM/year in the form of fees and penalties for its banking business, supporting the institutions whose racist lending practices, financial engineering and mortgage fraud have wreaked untold harm on the city's residents.
This November, Angelenos will get to vote on a proposition to create a public bank that will back LA's smaller community banks and do the city's business without lining finance's pockets. This bank will be able to fund community projects from housing to transit to health-care, and will be able to take deposits from the city's burgeoning cannabis industry, which is presently shut out of the federally guaranteed bank system and relies on safes in entrepreneurs' homes or businesses to stash millions in cash.
The finance industry hates and fears this proposal and is spreading FUD about how a bank that is under democratically elected political control will inevitably become corrupt -- while the discipline of the market will supposedly keep banks on the straight and narrow. Tell that to the millions of Americans whose suffered from Wells Fargo's corruption.
And those are not the only benefits of a public bank, backers claim. A public bank would enable the city to loan money for badly needed affordable housing development. They believe a city-owned bank could extend the credit lines of community banks and credit unions to offer loans to low-income residents and help bankroll affordable housing.
Another benefit touted by bank promoters: badly needed investment in infrastructure. They hold out the example of Costa Rica’s public bank, Banco Popular. Advocates claim that this bank has been the financial linchpin behind the financing of water supply systems, residential solar panels, and hydroelectric generators.
“A public bank could make some investments that in the long-term would be profitable for LA… [investments that] no bank focused on short-term profit would dare to invest in,” Baradaran asserted.
A public bank is also seen by many as a means to local self-determination and bypassing high Wall Street interest rates. For example, LA public bank advocates estimate Los Angeles pays $3.14 billion in debt service, the cost to borrow money, from Wall Street. They argue a municipal bank would allow the city to recapture that money and give Los Angelenos a say in redirecting this funding toward local projects.
Competition scholar and cyberlawyer Tim Wu (previously) is best known for coining the term "Net Neutrality," but his work ranges over all sorts of issues related to technology, competition, monopoly and innovation; in his forthcoming book, The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age, he makes the case for breaking up the tech giants, starting with Facebook -- because the problem with Big Tech isn't "tech," it's "big."
Wu sensibly lays the current antitrust crisis at the feet of Ronald Reagan, who followed the University of Chicago economists' doctrine and dismantled antitrust enforcement except in the narrow case of price-fixing to set a minimum price; this has allowed companies to get away with a host of anticompetitive evils, from predatory pricing to market-cornering to buying up all competition before it becomes a threat.
Wu sets out the case for breaking up the tech giants without any legal reforms -- just through a change in enforcement strategies, the kind of thing that President Elizabeth Warren could order on her first day of work in January 2020 regardless of the makeup of Congress or the Senate.
“The easiest way to do it is to start by breaking off WhatsApp and Instagram so those are separate companies,” says Wu. “Hopefully, those companies try to introduce more privacy-sensitive or otherwise better social networking options. Right now, because they’re all owned by the same place, they’re never really allowed to get at the mothership and be a true replacement for Facebook. I think WhatsApp is in an even better position [than Instagram], frankly, to try to go at it. They’ve got this great messaging service. Everyone loves it.”
But wouldn’t reaching in to break up Facebook be difficult for the government to justify? Wu thinks differently. “Unless you believe that we want one ruling master of all social networking and it should be Mark Zuckerberg… then there’s no good reason not to break it up,” he adds. “What’s the argument against it?”
“These are corporations,” says Wu. “They have subunits. Sometimes corporations divide by themselves. It’s not that dramatic, and there’s been this campaign to say, ‘Oh my god, this would be like the most insane thing ever.’”
California's Democratic Governor Jerry Brown repeatedly vetoed universal healthcare after the state legislature voted it through; Democratic state majorities in NY, CT and NJ refused to enact legislation to close the "carried interest" tax loophole that makes billions for hedge-fund managers; Rhode Island Democrats went on a slashing spree, taking down pensions for teachers, firefighters and other public servants while the finance-affiliated state treasurer funneled the pension funds into her pals' underperforming hedge funds; Democrats in NJ gutted the tax bill to give millionaires an easy ride; New York Democrat Governor Andrew Cuomo shut down the state anti-corruption commission, only to have his top aide busted for being horrifically corrupt.
These establishment Democrats all hold the safest of seats, and when that happens, they cozy up to industry at the expense of workers. After all, osculating captains of industry gets you invited to fancy parties where you can collect tons of campaign checks, plus those guys will give you awesome "consulting" work once you're out of office (think of this as the "Dan Lipinski effect".
All things being equal, robber-barons would rather give money to Republicans, but if a Republican can't get elected, they'll just buy themselves some Democrats.
But the 2018 Tsunami is changing that. By primarying these DINO's, progressive Democrats are offering a real challenge -- not just to Trump, but to the Trump-lites who aren't openly racist but who are just as happy as Trump is to hand the country over to looters.
The Democratic Establishment is running scared. After the New York Democratic Party libeled a progressive candidate for governor who is standing up to Andrew Cuomo, Cuomo claimed he had no idea what was going on.
There, the administration of Democratic stalwart Rahm Emanuel has used that power to initiate one of American history’s largest mass closures of public schools and layoff hundreds of teachers. During Emanuel’s tenure, public workers’ retirement savings were invested with financial firms whose executives have bankrolled Emanuel’s political apparatus. Emanuel’s administration also reportedly oversaw a police dark site where suspects were allegedly imprisoned without charge – and the Democratic mayor’s appointees infamously blocked the release of a videotape of Chicago police gunning down an unarmed African American teenager.
With the city subsequently suffering an explosion of gun violence, racial strife and economic inequality, Democratic donors responded by lavishing Emanuel with massive campaign contributions and Democratic voters reelected him. When Hizzoner later announced his retirement amid the trial over the police shooting, Emanuel was immediately lauded as a great hero by the most famous face of the Democratic party, Barack Obama.
The former president’s move was a powerful reminder that Democrats’ let-them-eat-cake attitude and nothing-to-see-here complacency is a toxic gangrene afflicting not just the distant tips of the party’s local tendrils. The fish rots from the head down, and Democrats’ festering noggin is at the top of the national party, where Democratic states’ federal lawmakers have been helping Republicans ransack everything not nailed down to the floor.
One of the dangers of emotional life is that we find that we don't feel 'in the moment': we're at a funeral, but we don't feel sad. We're making love, but our minds are elsewhere. It's our birthday, but we're not jolly. Why is it sometimes so hard for our true inner feelings to keep pace with events in the outer world? An investigation into the psychology of feeling in the moment - or to the left or right of it.
A subway Q train is covered in spray paint at the 96th Street station.
These taggers work fast.
A Q train was completely covered in graffiti overnight at a Second Avenue subway station while it was parked just off the platform, according to photos and a transit activist.
Photos posted to the Progressive Action Facebook page show the colorful train parked at the 96th Street station at about 5 a.m., just before the start of the morning rush hour.
Train conductor Tramell Thompson, a transit activist who runs the Progressive Action page, said it appears that the tagger got to the train while it was parked just off the platform overnight — and that should be a warning to city transit officials.
“If they can go back there and have the time to do all of that graffiti, they have time to do something to the train,” Thompson said. “It’s obvious they have no security back there.”
MTA officials declined to comment on the incident or say how long it took to take the train out of service.
NYPD officials didn’t return requests for comment.
Nike hired Kap for an ad campaign: a satisfying yet bathetic result of his de facto expulsion from professional football for protesting police brutality by kneeling during the national anthem. Conservatives are mad, obviously, and are expressing it by destroying the Nike-branded gear that they have already paid for.
The magazine that documented the "birth of the now" as coined by Dogtown & Z-Boys, Skateboarder magazine was the original Bible of skateboarding and the history it captured in its pages tell the story of modern skateboarding's roots and influenced an entire generation of skateboarders. This documentary tells the story of how this magazine became THE magazine of skateboarders worldwide, why it meant so much to them, and how it left an indelible mark on them during it's meteoric rise and fall by the early 1980s. From shoeless surfers riding the concrete waves and the vast blacktop of Southern California, to fully padded sessions at skateparks, Skateboarder exposed the sport to kids around the world.
"Today is kind of a sucky day," Village Voice owner Peter Barbey told newspaper staff in a phone call Friday. "Due to, basically, business realities, we're going to stop publishing Village Voice new material.”
"I bought the Village Voice to save it; this isn't exactly how I thought it was going to end up. I'm still trying to save the Village Voice,” said owner Barbey, who bought the paper in 2015.
The Voice, founded as an alternative weekly newspaper in 1955, has had a number of previous owners, including New York magazine, Rupert Murdoch, Leonard Stern, and New Times (later Village Voice) Media.
Barbey also seemed to indicate that he may have been thinking about selling the Voice for some time.
"I've been having conversations with other entities for months now," Barbey said in the Friday meeting. "This is something we have to do—for some of them this is something we'd have to do before they could talk to us any further."
Barbey has issued a statement, and you can read it here.
[Photo: Village Voice newspaper boxes on a sidewalk in 2013 (Mark Lennihan/Shutterstock)
