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Daily Archives: August 20, 2017
Shipyard repays $9.2M to US government to settle overbilling – Sacramento Bee
Posted: August 20, 2017 at 6:42 pm
The Sun Herald | Shipyard repays $9.2M to US government to settle overbilling Sacramento Bee "Corruption, fraud and bribery are not victimless crimes," Mike Wiest, special agent in charge of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service Southeast Field Office, said in a statement. "Overcharging for work not done is not only criminal on its face ... Whistleblower Receives $1.6m in HII Settlement |
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Shipyard repays $9.2M to US government to settle overbilling - Sacramento Bee
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Author says some ‘Wild Things’ about children’s literature – Seattle Times
Posted: at 6:42 pm
Bruce Handy, author of Wild Things: The Joy of Reading Childrens Literature as an Adult, takes an opinionated, biography-with-zingers approach to the Kid Lit pantheon: from Beverly Cleary to Maurice Sendak. And dont get him going on The Giving Tree.
Special to The Seattle Times
Bruce Handy doesnt waste time staking out a critical position. On the fifth page of his new book, Wild Things: The Joys of Reading Childrens Literature as an Adult, Handy says Beverly Clearys grade-school novel Ramona the Pest is like Henry James with much shorter sentences. One paragraph later, he complains that the Curious George series carries a stale, colonial aroma and Madeleine LEngles A Wrinkle in Time is a now dated Cold War fable about collectivism Ayn Rand for kids.
Dont get him going on The Giving Tree, Shel Silversteins inexplicably popular retelling of Stella Dallas and Mildred Pierce for nursery schoolers. Handy interrupts a disquisition on the similarities between The Runaway Bunny and Portnoys Complaint for a two-page takedown of The Giving Tree. One minute hes wondering whether Philip Roth was familiar with The Runaway Bunny (probably not), the next hes calling the main characters in The Giving Tree a boy and a tree two deluded losers engaged in a folie deux: the Joe Buck and Ratso Rizzo of childrens literature.
Tell us what you really think, Bruce.
Wild Things is presented as a smart look at childrens literature by a lifelong reader who loved books as a child and rediscovered them as a parent. It is that, and it does make some serious points about fantasy and death and how children use reading to learn critical thinking and find a place in the world. But what its really about is a series of opinionated profiles of the Kid Lit pantheon: Cleary, Margaret Wise Brown, Dr. Seuss, Beatrix Potter, Maurice Sendak, E.B. White, Laura Ingalls Wilder, L. Frank Baum, C.S. Lewis. Handy draws a wide line between those he writes about and those he doesnt; the latter includes Roald Dahl, J.R.R. Tolkien, Chris Van Allsburg and J.K. Rowling, whose Harry Potter series, though spectacular, goes on forever.
The opinionated, biography-with-zingers approach plays to Handys strengths as an editor for Vanity Fair and a former writer for Saturday Night Live and is great fun for those interested in colorful facts about their favorite childrens book authors. Did you know Brown, the author of Goodnight Moon and an Auntie Mame character of some renown, died when she did a cancan kick and a blood clot dislodged and went to her brain? Her last word was Grand! and her epitaph was Writer of Songs and Nonsense. Handy, who cant give anyone the last word, suggests Goodnight Nobody.
Im the ideal audience for Wild Things. I love Clearys novels about Ramona and Beezus, Henry and Ribsy, and believe that her memoirs, A Girl from Yamhill and My Own Two Feet, are neglected Northwest classics. Like Handy, Ive teared up when reading Winnie the Pooh to my kids and, like him, I didnt get Where the Wild Things Are when I read it as a child. Ill even go him one better and say that Charlottes Web is the Great American Novel, Huck Finn or no Huck Finn. Gatsby? Great, but not as great as Charlottes Web.
Handy gives his favorite childrens books a close reading and uncovers one shiny nugget after another about the men and women who wrote them. His book doesnt hang together, but to hear him tell it, Treasure Island and its unfollowable plot dont either. Neither does The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. There he goes again.
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Arthur Finkelstein, Innovative, Influential Conservative Strategist, Dies at 72 – New York Times
Posted: at 6:42 pm
The numbers spoke to him, Kieran Mahoney, his frequent campaign collaborator and one of his many protgs, said in a telephone interview.
Mr. Finkelsteins combative campaigns helped elect or re-elect the Republican Senators James L. Buckley and Alfonse M. DAmato of New York, Lauch Faircloth of North Carolina, Orrin Hatch of Utah, Jesse Helms of North Carolina, Connie Mack III of Florida, Don Nickles of Oklahoma and Strom Thurmond of South Carolina.
Arthur was responsible for electing more people to the United States Senate than any other political consultant, Mr. DAmato said in an interview.
In the process, Mr. Finkelstein transformed liberal into a dirty word.
His conservative political action committee was instrumental in the surprise unseatings of liberal Democratic stalwarts in 1980, including Senators Birch Bayh of Indiana, Frank Church of Idaho and George S. McGovern of South Dakota. He also collaborated with fellow Republicans in establishing another fund-raising behemoth, the National Congressional Club
In 1994, Mr. DAmato and Mr. Finkelstein engineered the defeat of Mario M. Cuomo, New Yorks three-term governor, by George E. Pataki, an obscure state senator. Mr. Patakis resonant rationale was that Mr. Cuomo was too liberal for too long.
A canny Brooklyn-born brawler who made his political debut on a Greenwich Village soapbox, Mr. Finkelstein was adept at aggressively wooing disaffected Democrats to his Republican clients camps in statewide campaigns. His strategy was largely to ignore party labels and focus on the basic beliefs that moved these Democrats.
I have been criticized for 20 years for running ideologically arched campaigns, he told the National Conservative Political Action Conference in 1991. I plead guilty. I will continue to run ideologically arched campaigns as long as there are more conservatives than there are liberals, rather than more Democrats than there are Republicans.
He refused to acknowledge, though, that he engaged in negative campaigning. That phrase connotes false accusations, he said, when it just means that you speak about the failings of your opponent as opposed to the virtues of your candidate.
Rather, he called his strategy rejectionist voting a formula built on slogans that disparaged adversaries. (He would often count on a third contender to siphon votes from the rival who posed the most serious threat to a client).
Prime examples of that strategy were Mr. DAmatos upset win over Senator Jacob K. Javits, the venerable liberal Republican incumbent, in the 1980 primary, and Mr. DAmatos re-election squeaker against the Democratic state attorney general, Robert Abrams (hopelessly liberal, Mr. DAmato said), in 1992, when Bill Clinton swept the state with a 1.2-million-vote margin on his way to winning the presidency.
I never once put him on television to talk, Mr. Finkelstein said of Mr. DAmato. He was completely irrelevant to the campaigns.
Those campaigns were vicious and mean, he told a college audience in Prague in 2011. Negative, negative, negative cause you cant possibly win otherwise.
The negatives used in the primary portraying Mr. Javits, at 76, as sick and aging were tempered in the 1980 general election campaign by an ad that famously featured Mr. DAmatos mother, armed with bags of groceries, lamenting the struggles of the middle class and urging, Vote for my son, Al.
That humanized me, Mr. DAmato recalled.
Mr. Finkelstein said, We had to prove Alfonse had a mother.
Mr. DAmato narrowly defeated his Democratic rival, Representative Elizabeth Holtzman, in the general election, in which Mr. Javits ran on the Liberal line.
As a gay, Jewish libertarian, Mr. Finkelstein helped elect homophobic candidates, once polled South Carolinians on whether they would support a rival candidate identified as a Jewish immigrant, and supported gay rights and abortion rights as what the political consultant Roger Stone, another of his protgs, called, in a phone interview, a situational conservative.
Still, Mr. Finkelstein suggested, he was not a hired gun who would provide his services to just anyone.
It would be very hard for me to work with somebody with whom I have fundamental disagreements, against someone with whom I agree, he said.
Mr. Finkelstein insisted that he never lied I do not slander somebody without proof, was how he put it but he acknowledged a generation ago that truth was fungible.
The most overwhelming fact of politics is what people do not know, he told the college students in Prague. In politics, its what you perceive to be true thats true, not truth. If I tell you one thing is true, you will believe the second thing is true. A good politician will tell you a few things that are true before he will tell you a few things that are untrue, because you will then believe all the things he has said, true and untrue.
Arthur Jay Finkelstein was born on May 18, 1945, in the East New York section of Brooklyn, the son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. His father, Morris, was a cabby. His mother was the former Zella Ordanksi. The family moved to Levittown, on Long Island, when he was 11, then to Queens, where he graduated from Forest Hills High School.
In 1967, Mr. Finkelstein earned a bachelors degree in economics and political science from Queens College. As a student, he sometimes shared a college radio program with Ayn Rand, the author and philosopher whose laissez-faire capitalism he would fiercely defend in street-corner debates in Greenwich Village.
After he volunteered in Barry Goldwaters 1964 presidential campaign, F. Clifton White, the architect of the Draft Goldwater movement, became his patron and recruited him to James Buckleys Senate race in 1970 as the candidate of the fledgling Conservative Party.
Invoking Richard M. Nixons silent majority, Mr. Finkelstein encapsulated Mr. Buckleys message in the catchphrase Isnt it time we had a senator?
Mr. Buckley went on to defeat the Republican incumbent, Charles E. Goodell, and the Democratic challenger, Representative Richard L. Ottinger.
In 1972, Mr. Finkelstein founded the Westchester County-based Arthur J. Finkelstein & Associates with his brother Ronald. In the 1976 presidential campaign, he was credited with helping Reagan, in an unsuccessful bid to deny President Gerald R. Ford the nomination, win crucial Republican primaries in North Carolina and Texas.
He later choreographed campaigns by his friend Ronald S. Lauder, the cosmetics heir, against Rudolph W. Giuliani in the 1989 Republican mayoral primary; a referendum to impose term limits on New York City elected officials; and races in Eastern Europe and in Israel, where he was recruited by supporters of Mr. Netanyahu and other conservative candidates of the Likud Party.
In his work for Mr. Netanyahu, the incumbent prime minister, in 1999, Mr. Finkelstein took on the Labor Party challenger, Ehud Barak (who was being advised by the Democratic consultants James Carville, Bob Shrum and Stanley Greenberg), with the campaign slogan Ehud Barak: Too Many Ambitions, Too Few Principles.
Mr. Netanyahu was defeated in that campaign, but Mr. Finkelstein returned to Israel to help Ariel Sharon oust Mr. Barak and later re-elect Mr. Netanyahu, taking back power for the Likud Party.
I would always say, Arthur, do you realizes how much were changing history? his colleague George Birnbaum recalled. He would say, I dont know how much were changing history; were touching history.
Philip Friedman, another political consultant, told The New York Times in 1994: Finkelstein is the ultimate sort of Dr. Strangelove, who believes you can largely disregard what the politicians are going to say and do, what the newspapers are going to do, and create a simple and clear and often negative message, which, repeated often enough, can bring you to victory.
Thanks largely to his brothers financial discipline, the messengers firm prospered, too.
Early in our friendship, Craig Shirley recalled last January on nationalreview.com, I asked him whether it was Finkelsteen or Finkelstine (with a long i), and Arthur characteristically replied, If I was a poor Jew, it would be Finkelsteen, but since I am a rich Jew, its Finkelstine.
Mr. Finkelstein was openly gay, although his sexual orientation was not common knowledge until it became the subject of an article in Boston Magazine in 1996. He married Donald Curiale, his partner of more than 50 years, in a civil ceremony in 2004.
His survivors include Mr. Curiale; their daughters, Jennifer Elizabeth Delgado and Molly Julia Baird-Kelly; a granddaughter; and his brothers, Ronald and Barry.
Mr. Finkelstein smoked heavily, loved to gamble and was habitually rumpled.
Hed walk through the door carrying a poll tucked under his arm and take off his shoes and unfasten his tie, leaving the ends dangling, and start pacing up and down in his stocking feet, Richard Morgan wrote in The Fourth Witch (2008), describing a strategy session of the National Congressional Club. Then Tom Ellis would growl, O.K., youve told me about the poll. Now tell me the ad, and without blinking Arthur would go into a kind of trance and just dictate a 30-second ad.
Rarely photographed or interviewed, Mr. Finkelstein was unusually reflective during his 2011 public appearance in Prague, in which he discussed his accomplishments, the goals of negative campaigning and how television and the internet have altered politics since the eras of Goldwater, who remained one of his heroes, and Reagan.
I went into this as a kid to change the world, because I was an absolute ideologue, he said. I would stand outside on soapboxes in Greenwich Village at 3 in the morning and argue with people about the nature of freedom.
I said I wanted to change the world, I said I did, I made it worse, he added, without amplifying and, perhaps, with a dollop of self-deprecation. It wasnt what I wanted to do.
An earlier version of this obituary misstated the middle initial of George Pataki, the former governor of New York. It is E., not L.
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Arthur Finkelstein, Innovative, Influential Conservative Strategist, Dies at 72 - New York Times
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Why Stephen K. Bannon was such a failure – The Washington Post – Washington Post
Posted: at 6:42 pm
Stephen K. Bannon, the recently deposed architect ofPresident Trumps nonexistent populist agenda, wishes it was the 1930s.
That, of course, is what he promised to do: to make things as exciting now as they were back then. Now, he might not have been talking about the war or the depression or the fascists in other countries, but what he did mean was a politics where racial resentment and economic populism could once again exist side-by-side. Where Republicans could targetMuslims for special restrictionsand raise the top marginal tax rate to 44 percent; could cut legal immigration in half and undo free trade deals; could stick up for white supremacistsand spend $1 trillion on infrastructure. In other words, where the ideological heirs of the Dixiecrats were the ones calling the shots.
They havent been for a long time now.
Why not? Well, because our parties have sorted themselves based on race first and economics second. The political history of the past 100 years, you see, has really been the story of the rise and fall of the New Deal coalition. Franklin D. Roosevelts response to the Great Depression brought blacks, liberals, Northern ethnics and Southern whites all together until the civil rights movement drove them apart. Its true that the Dixiecrats the Jim Crow-supporting Southerners who left the Democratic Party to form their own, before eventually migrating over to the Republican one werent all in favor of big government, but a lot of them were. Forced to choose between that and racial backlash, however, they chose racial backlash, whether that wascalls for law and order or denunciations of welfare queens or, in the past few years, chants of build the wall.
Bannon didnt want them to choose anymore. He understood that a lot of Republicans dont care about Ayn Rand-inspired odes to heroic entrepreneurs, or paeans to the Schumpeterian beauty of creative destruction, or how much capital gains are taxed. They want their Social Security and their Medicare. Theyre called Trump voters, and they arent really represented in Washington. Thats because the money men and interest groups that members of Congress rely on ensure complete ideological conformity on the issue nearest and dearest to the hearts or rather the wallets of the donor class: how much theyre taxed. Bannon wanted to change that so people could get Democratic economic policies together with a Republican brand of racial pandering.
The only problem is you cant. Just look at Bannons proposal to increase the top tax rate to 44 percent. Who was ever going to vote for that? Republicans never would when their partys entire raison detre for the past 40 years has been keeping taxes as low as possible on the rich. And neither would Democrats when Bannon had alienated them about as much as possible with his barely disguised attempt to ban Muslims. The same was true of infrastructure. Republicans didnt really want to do it, and Democrats didnt want to with Trump. It reduced Bannon to being able to do little more than alternately insist that he wanted to build a rainbow coalition of populists we'll get 60 percent of the white vote and 40 percent of the black and Hispanic vote, and well govern for 50 years, he rather modestly claimed and cheer, for example, when Trump said last Fridays neo-Nazi rally was full of very fine people. Bannon never understood that one made the other impossible.
Bannon thought he was a revolutionary, but he was just whistling Dixie.
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HARTMAN: The Quiet Man Who Changed the World – The Hayride
Posted: at 6:42 pm
My friend and mentor Arthur J. Finkelstein died last night. If youve never heard of him, thats how he wanted it.
The son of Belarusian immigrants, Arthur was born in the 1940s and grew up in Brooklyn. He was a mathematical savant, and went to Columbia University. He crossed paths with Ayn Rand, and at one point in his young life was a collaborator on her radio show in New York City.
In his early 20s, Arthur was hired as a data analyst for the Nixon Administration. By 1972, he was producing commercials for Nixons reelection campaign. He went on to consult for the likes of Strom Thurmond, Jesse Helms, Alphonse DAmato, George Pataki and Ronald Reagan, merging his ability to gather and analyze data at an astonishing pace with his sharply creative mind. At one point in the mid-1990s, a significant plurality of United States senators were Arthurs clients. He only worked for Republicans. Overseas, he worked for Ariel Sharon and Binyamin Netanyahu. He consulted for prime ministers and presidents all over Europe.
Because Arthur couldnt be everywhere, he made a practice of discovering and cultivating young talent. He sent me to the Czech Republic for months to work in a national race, and to Nigeria for a week during that countrys tumultuous 2015 presidential campaign. He sent one of my friends to Kosovo before Kosovo was even a country and my friend stayed for four years, advising the fledgling government with Arthurs remote guidance.
CNN once called Arthur the Kaiser Soze of American politics, referencing the shadowy, never-seen crime boss in The Usual Suspects. Some people, it was reported, didnt think Arthur even existed, but that his name was a bogeyman invoked to scare liberal opponents. I laughed when I read that, having had dinner with Arthur in New Orleans only a week earlier. He existed. He definitely existed, larger than life to those who knew him, and nobody at all to the public at large. Ill admit to a sort of sardonic pleasure when I was with Arthur in public, thinking to myself, Nobody knows who this man is, but he has done so much to impact their lives.
Arthur was kind, brilliant, sly, unassuming and hilarious. He didnt just employ me on occasion, but he was my friend. He rarely called, but often emailed often random messages like, Happy Friday! or Good morning! Hope youre well. He began every conversation with, good morning!, regardless of the actual time of day; I attributed it to the fact that he was constantly changing time zones in his travels and work.
He alternated between horrible eating habits and hardcore dieting. I sat in lunch meetings with him where he ate nothing but slices of swiss cheese, and once had dinner with him at an outdoor caf in Prague, watching him eat a raw onion dipped in fondue.
He rarely (if ever) dressed formally. He traveled the world with a carryon bag, and I dont think I ever saw him in anything but khakis, a blue button-down shirt and, occasionally, a navy blazer. He wore only loafers, which he took off unabashedly as he paced a room giving lectures on poll data, dictating a press release, or laying out a strategy. He once told me that after an extended meeting with President Reagan and James Baker in the Oval Office, he received a letter from Baker: Dear Mr. Finkelstein: Thank you for meeting with me and the President last week, and thank you for keeping your shoes on most of the time.
Arthur didnt like technology. He didnt have a laptop, but only a Blackberry. He kept his campaign plans scrawled in pencil on pages torn from a legal pad, which he carried in his breast pocket. He and I once had a somewhat furtive meeting with a world leader at a restaurant in a remote village near the Czech-Austrian border. When he asked me for the poll data, I pulled out my laptop and opened it. He looked at me like I was an idiot and asked where the actual BINDER of poll information was. It was hidden in a safe place in my hotel, but he would have preferred paper.
Arthur rarely worked for candidates in races that were smaller than statewide or national, but he made exceptions for friends, including California Congresswoman Mary Bono Mack and Florida Congressman Connie Mack. (He sent one of my associates to work on Marys campaign for a full 14 months; he asked me to go work full-time for Connie in 2010, leading up to Connies Senate run, and I declined; although I rarely said no to a request from Arthur, it turns out that was a good call on my part.)
When the Washington Post first reported that he was gay in the 1990s, Arthur was irked not because he was ashamed, but because it was nobodys business. He wasnt a celebrity or public figure, and he didnt want to be. Hillary Clinton made some snarky comments about him when that story broke, and he never forgave her. When she was first gearing up to run for president, Arthur launched a website called StopHerNow.com, dedicated just to her.
One of my former associates once emailed me that while taking a graduate course he was assigned a chapter to present to the class. It was called, The Most Evil Man in America, and it was about Arthur. I asked Clifton if he told the professor he actually knew the Evil Man in question; he replied that he hadnt, and wasnt going to until the semester was over. Arthur was not evil, although Mrs. Clinton and a bevy of other Democrats would disagree with me.
Arthur was intensely private. He didnt grant interviews. He didnt like to be photographed. He didnt like being in the news. When then-GOProud Executive Director Jimmy LaSalvia sent an angry tweet that referred to presidential candidate Rick Perrys pollster as a faggot, it became news and some media linked the pollster in question to Arthur because they had worked on the same campaign once, more than 20 years earlier. Arthur was livid. He called me to vent, in part because I had arranged for he and LaSalvia to meet in Boston only a few months earlier.
Arthur and his husband Donald were together for 50 years, and had children and grandchildren. Donald, a teacher, held down the family front while Arthur traveled, changing the world.
That is what he did, you see: He changed the world. Without fanfare, without drawing attention to himself, without a spotlight, Arthur worked hard to elect good people to high office. Excluding some candidates and office-holders, its impossible to think of a single person who has had as much impact on American politics and, indeed, global politics as did my friend Arthur. Excluding very few, its hard to think of a single person who has had such an impact on me, on my life and career.
The Kaiser Soze of American politics, the Most Evil Man in America, arguably the most impactful man in modern politics, has gone on to the next life. I will miss him. I already do. Many in the world will feel the loss, without noticing or even knowing about it. Arthurs legacy is vast and important, and invisible to most.
Thats how he wanted it.
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Contested law presents clear and present threat to America’s democracy – St. Paul Asian American Press
Posted: at 6:42 pm
By Clarence Hightower, Ph.D.The Anti-Poverty Soldier
Clarence Hightower, Ph.D.
Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual).Ayn Rand
For this nation to remain true to its principles, we cannot allow any Americans vote to be denied, diluted, or defiled. The right to vote is the crown jewel of American liberties, and we will not see its luster diminished. President Ronald Reagan
The vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison men because they are different from other men. President Lyndon B. Johnson
The true way and the easiest way is to make our government entirely consistent with itself and give every loyal citizen the elective franchise. Frederick Douglass
Voting is the right on which all other rights depend. Thomas Paine
Before I proceed, please forgive the seemingly excessive number of quotes I have cited. I sincerely believe, however, that they are all particularly germane to the topic of this column.
What I find particularly interesting about them, is that they represent extreme ends of the political spectrum across three centuries, and include two statements from abolitionists one of which has been called The father of the American Revolution. And in spite of the ideological differences shared by these individuals, their sentiments in this particular arena are the same.
Although this rhetoric highlights some of our nations most lofty principles, it goes without saying that America has not always lived up to these principles regardless of when they were spoken or written. Consider the extermination and forced relocation of Americas indigenous population, the institution of chattel slavery, the eras of Reconstruction and Jim Crow, Exclusion and Internment Camps, and the Civil Rights and Womens Suffrage movements. For the better part of our history, American citizens have been denied basic human rights including the right to vote.
Some point out, quite convincingly, that even after the passage of landmark decisions such as Brown v. The Board of Education or The Civil Rights Act of 1964, American democracy has left millions upon millions behind. Far too many Americans are still subject to poverty, housing and employment discrimination, substandard schools, inadequate healthcare, segregated neighborhoods, and environmental racism and classism. Still, we must remember that people fought, bled, and died for the right to be free, the right to education, the right to work, and the right to vote.
In 2013, almost 50 years after the first Selma to Montgomery march, which became known as Bloody Sunday (and the subsequent passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act as unconstitutional. Writing for Newsweek, Jamal Hagler of the Center for American Progress contends that this 5 to 4 decision struck a devastating blow to voting rights, reducing federal oversight of elections and giving rise to a new era of voter suppression.
Moreover, as several others reveal, the movement to impede voting rights has been ongoing for the last several years. According to the NYU Brennan Center for Justice more than 40 states have proposed restrictive voting laws since the 2010 election. And, 24 of these states, which include Iowa, Wisconsin, and Ohio, have passed new voting restrictions such as photo ID laws, proof of citizenship requirements, and limited registration and early voting periods.
While some have taken to the notion, without any evidence mind you, that there was rampant voter fraud during the 2016 elections, journalist Ari Berman presents an alternate view noting that this was the first presidential election in 50 years without the full protections of the Voting Rights Act.
If that is not depressing enough, a plan by the state of Ohio to permanently remove tens of thousands of registered voters from its electoral rolls, which was previously cited as unconstitutional by the U.S. Court of Appeals, all of a sudden has the support of the U.S. Justice Department. This attempt to purge voters from its rolls is based solely on whether or not the individual has cast a ballot in the last two years.
The Supreme Court has agreed to hear the State of Ohios appeal, which critics say is specifically designed to target people of color and the poor. A statement from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund argues that The DOJs interpretation of federal law would leave Americans vulnerable to getting purged from the voter rolls, dispossessing millions of a fundamental right simply because they did not exercise it. President of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, Kristen Clarke, soberly adds that The Justice Departments latest action opens the door for wide-scale and unlawful purging of the voter registration rolls across our country.
Sure, our American democracy isnt nor has ever been perfect. But these latest trends bare the scent of something far worse.
Clarence Hightower is the Executive Director of Community Action Partnership of Ramsey & Washington Counties. Dr. Hightower holds a Ph.D. in urban higher education from Jackson State University. He welcomes reader responses to 450 Syndicate Street North, St. Paul, MN 55104
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OkCupid bans white supremacist for life, asks daters to report others – Ars Technica
Posted: at 6:41 pm
Dating site OkCupid made the unusual move of announcing that it had given a single member a "lifetime" ban on Thursdayand naming himin order to make a point.
"We were alerted that white supremacist Chris Cantwell was on OkCupid," the company wrote at its official Twitter account on Thursday. "Within 10 minutes, we banned him for life."
Cantwell was the subject of a Vice documentary about the white-supremacist Unite The Right marches in Charlottesville, Virginia, over the past weekend, where he offered numerous racist and threatening comments while acting as a march organizer and riding in a car alongside former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke. ("We're not non-violent," Cantwelloffered at one point in the documentary. "We'll fucking kill these people if we fucking have to.")
In announcing this ban,OKC alsoasked its users to be vigilant about any other active members of hate groups found on the site. "If any OkCupid members come across people involved in hate groups, please report it immediately," the company wrote on its Twitter page. The tweet linked to the company's official "feedback" site.
On OkCupid, Cantwell wentby the handle "ItsChris603" where he described himself as "a professional podcaster and writer specializing in controversial political satire" who specifically sought only"white" women. His dating profile did not contain statements anywhere near as sensational as those in the Vice documentary, though in a section titled,"I spend a lot of time thinking about," Cantwell wrotethe following: "Getting married, and how to stop the Democrat party from destroying Western Civilization." (A 2015 archiveof his dating profile is different, as it containsa shout-out to Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged and a declaration that "I will make you laugh at things you might feel guilty laughing about, which is my favorite kind of laughter.")
Cantwell's OkCupid profiles look remarkably different fromonewritten by theSouthern Poverty Law Center, which describes him as "an unapologetic fascist who spews white nationalist propaganda with a libertarian spin" (and with many citations).
OkCupid's media relations team actively approached news outlets at the moment the company announced the ban, including Gizmodo, whichpublished a statement from OKCupid CEOElie Seidma: "We make a lot of decisions every day that are tough. Banning Christopher Cantwell was not one of them."
In that same report, Gizmodo went to the trouble of rifling through Cantwell's Internet history to find his own "dating advice for the ladies" post that revolved around his use of OkCupid; this post included a "tip" to women that simply said, "In a photo of you and a friend, I assume you are the ugly one." Cantwell has since deleted that and similarposts from his personal site.
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OkCupid bans white supremacist for life, asks daters to report others - Ars Technica
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Heather Yakin: Decent people and bigots are not morally equivalent – Times Herald-Record
Posted: at 6:41 pm
Heather Yakin Times Herald-Record @HeatherYakin845
The chaos and horror that erupted in Charlottesville, Va., are not, I fear, a passing thing.
These attitudes of hate, the desire of a certain sort of white person to beat down or extinguish those whom they deem less human, less worthy, have never really gone away.
The hate has been underground, ashamed. In private quarters, they complained about political correctness and how those others just dont know their rightful place. They complained about change, about progress, about their opposition to the rights and beliefs of others.
They refer to us as animals and parasites, as objects and property and above all as inferiors. They worship the false idols of the Confederacy, venerating a flag at its heart that signifies treason.
This culminated Saturday in an act of terror, a car driven into a crowd by a dogmatist, no different than the vile dogmatists who have driven into other crowds in other places in the name of other gods or ideologies.
Our president, two days later: Racism is evil. Thanks. (And then Tuesday he took that back.)
There is bad behavior, lots of it, on both sides. Brawls have broken out at other rallies. These antifa so-called activists are basically vandals looking for an excuse to break things. Smoke bombs and spray-painted slogans do nothing to change minds.
But if you see moral equivalence between these pseudo-anarchist punks who want to punch or pepper-spray people with whom they disagree and Nazis or the KKK, you've got problems.
The left needs to deal with its idiots. The right needs to take a long look at its allies, and make a decision. Real conservatives need to take back their movement. Man, do I miss real conservatives.
On Saturday, neo-Nazis and white supremacists marched in the streets of Charlottesville, ostensibly in defense of some Confederate monuments the city wants to remove.
Theyre provocateurs, proudly proclaiming what they view as their own innate superiority. In photos of these angry young men, they look like nothing so much as earnest young converts to objectivism, guys who read "Atlas Shrugged" or "The Fountainhead" and have not yet realized that Ayn Rand was a hypocrite and not a particularly good writer. Theyve immersed themselves in a virtual echo chamber where their every transgressive idea is applauded and reinforced.
Their online mantras of fake news and snowflake and go back to your safe space are kindergarten playground taunts. No, I take that back. In kindergarten, the teacher would have scolded such childishness.
The left needs to remember that these alt-right guys have a right to their speech, however vile it is, under the U.S. Constitution. The Supreme Court has upheld only the narrowest of exceptions to the First Amendment, and awful, pseudo-intellectual stupidity is not one of them.
Cut off one groups speech rights, and yours could be next. Fight bad ideas with better ideas.
Even white supremacists and the KKK and their sympathizers have a right to speak without government interference. Consider it a form of truth in advertising, with their terrible beliefs revealed by the light. Let decent people everywhere mock and scorn them for their awful speech, and help the marketplace of ideas to relegate their bigotry to museum shelves, as a cautionary tale.
Let us never forget the lessons of the past.
On Twitter @HeatherYakin845
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Heather Yakin: Decent people and bigots are not morally equivalent - Times Herald-Record
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Cars of the future to be made of wood? THIS peek into future will leave you wonder-struck – Financial Express
Posted: at 6:41 pm
Rearden metal becomes something of a byword for revolution in manufacturing in the course of the novel.
One of the plot points in Ayn Rands Atlas Shrugged is the invention of an alloy far stronger, durable and lighter than steel called Rearden metal, named after Hank Rearden, the fictional industrialist who invents it in the novel. Rearden metal becomes something of a byword for a revolution in manufacturing in the course of the novel. Atlas Shrugged came out in 1957, and it spoke of a material that was to steel what steel was to iron. Six decades hence, steel still remains supreme. But the hunt for a substitute has, depending on end-use, variously thrown up plastic, aluminium, titanium, carbon fibre and whatnot. An unlikely candidate is a wood, or more specifically, nanocrystalline cellulose (NCC)nanofibres made of wood pulp. Wood, you would think, is lighter yes, but what about strength? Researchers at Kyoto University and auto-parts suppliers to Japanese car-makers like Toyota are betting their top yen on cellulose nanofibers to substitute steel, and even the popular carbon-fibre, in the decades to come. They say, as per a Reuters report, that it is one-fifth weight of steel and can be upto five times stronger.
Making NCC starts with the purification of wood. Substances such as lignin, a phenolic polymer that lends wood its rigidity, and hemicellulose, amorphous, randomly arranged heteroplymers that have little strength, are removed. The remainder is pulped and hydrolysed in acid to remove any remaining impurities. After the acid treatment, it is concentrated into a thick paste that can be used to laminate surfaces or is processed into nanofibril strands. The latter are hard, dense and hardy, but can be moulded into different shapes.
NCC has been widely used in the pastby Pioneer Electronics, the Japanese company, to make flexible electronic items, by IBM to make computer parts and by the US army to make lightweight body armour and ballistic glass, among others. The Kyoto University researchers, Denso Corp. (Toyotas largest supplier) and DaikyoNishikawa Corp are melding NCC with plastic to make a material that can some day be used to make entire cars. At the moment, though, the research is focussed on developing a car by 2020 that has cellulose-nanofibre parts.
The focus on lightweight cars stems from the push for electric cars worldwide. Given these will need to have heavier than conventional batteries, the car weight goes up significantly. A lighter car is double-blessingit balances out the weight of the batteries while a lighter car itself will need fewer such batteries to be powered. But, the wunder material cellulose nanofibre is turning out to be, it still is not cost competitive against carbon-fibre. Scientists, though, are optimistic. Plant wastebranches and even twigscould one day be used to make cellulose nanofribres and probably even waste paper. That may bring costs down.
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The North Korea Problem – Being Libertarian
Posted: at 6:40 pm
It seems to me that whenever North Korea launches one of their missiles or decides they are going test another nuclear device, the rest of the world loses their collective mind, and needlessly so. North Korea is no threat to the United States, or anyone, but itself.
Let me explain. On one hand people seem to have the impression that North Korea is some grave threat to the West that needs to be stopped; on the other, people have this view of them as some unintelligent, cartoonish throwback to the Cold War, undermining its own credibility when it misidentifies target cities on propaganda maps. While their military is large, and they indeed could cause some damage, nuclear weapons or not, their hardware is mostly forty years out of date and they have no real way to project power outside their immediate surroundings, even if they develop a working ICBM. And as for the perception of North Korea run by stupid, crazy people, I completely reject that. They came out of the Cold War largely unscathed (and remain so) culturally and ideologically, while most other communist regimes collapsed or evolved towards capitalism. They are a nuclear power, a title only a handful of nations can claim, and they have a propaganda machine so good the regime essentially brainwashed 25 million people into believing their dear leader is a god.
All of this is to say the idea that North Korea is run by crazy people that will nuke either the States or their southern neighbor the very instant they have the capability is absurd. Rather than reckless belligerence, they have shown themselves to be calculating and precise, knowing just what buttons to press, and how hard to press them, without causing a metaphorical detonation. The bombardment of Yeonpyeong and the sinking of the ROKS Cheonan show pretty good examples of this. Causing casualties on your enemies without incurring any of your own shows a pretty remarkable amount of intelligence in my book, and wantonly nuking your enemies is the exact opposite way to go about that. I absolutely guarantee the regime running North Korea is smart enough to know they will lose a war they start with either the United States and/or South Korea, and they most certainly know that if they use a nuclear weapon in an offensive fashion, South Korea would become an island soon after.
For all the decades of posturing and chest beating, the Korean War hasnt resumed. Much the same way the USSR and the US had the means and never exercised them, the same way India and Pakistan have the capability but remain fallout free, so too will the Korean Peninsula remain intact, as long as the participating parties continue to use some restraint.
So, what can we do? Im all for sanctions as a moral action, but practically, North Korea has shown they will carry on regardless; attacking them would only cause an unneeded and bloody war. I really think the best thing we can do is ignore them. Their whole shtick is based on aggression by the West, and we feed that every time the news cycle starts interviewing generals about the best course of action to deal with the regimes latest aggression. I am sure that North Korea would continue to pump out their anti-west rhetoric regardless of whether we give it fuel or not, but at that point we could at least claim the moral high ground, and they would at least have to go through the effort of making up stories on their own.
I mentioned at the beginning of this piece that I think the biggest threat to the regime of North Korea is itself. The libertarian community believes that communism doesnt work. It hasnt yet, and if we truly believe that, we must believe that an oppressive regime like that of the DPRK will eventually collapse and undo itself. As the rest of the world continues to progress around their island of stagnation and misery, and ever more sharply juxtaposes the situations of the North and South, the more the people of the North will see what the South has and start demanding it for themselves. We should certainly be there to help pick up the pieces, but the people of the North need to want change before we can do any good.
Image: Getty
* ColoradoYeah runs the libertarian leaning coloradoyeah.com.
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