As I noted earlier, my Mother-in-Law is in hospital for infections, so instead of flying down to Memphis to spend Passover with my Sister-in-Laws family, we had our Seder in her hospital room.
It was cramped, and odd.
I’m sure that there other people have had odder Seders, but these 2, Friday and Saturday, were odd, with Marilyn in her hospital bed, and the rest of us around a card table.
Cramped, but we made it work.
Much to his chagrin, she has enthusiastically accepted, and now Representative Barr is desperately trying to find a way to revoke his invitation:
Last month, a clip of New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went predictably viral after she forcefully responded to one of her colleagues on the House Financial Services Committee when he called climate change an “elitist” concern. “Wanting clean air and water is not elitist,” she said.
In response, Kentucky Republican congressman Andy Barr invited Ocasio-Cortez to come meet coal miners in his state “who will tell you what the Green New Deal would mean for their families, their paychecks.” His concern, he said, is that the Green New Deal would phase out U.S. reliance on coal and fossil fuel, which would wreak havoc on the lives of people who work in those industries. Ocasio-Cortez accepted, saying she’d be “happy” to go, adding that the Green New Deal was written to fund coal-miner pensions. “We want a just transition to make sure we are investing in jobs across those swaths of the country,” she said.
All in all, it seemed like an uncharacteristically cordial exchange for two members of Congress. And not even a month later, that cordiality is out the window: Barr attached a rather inhospitable and obnoxious demand to his invitation, writing in a letter posted to Twitter that she should “apologize to [Texas representative Dan Crenshaw] prior to coming to visit Kentucky,” for a completely unrelated event before meeting with miners. The public scolding over purported incivility, along with the random call for an apology to a colleague from a completely different state, leaves the impression that the Barr might not want her to come to Kentucky after all.
Crenshaw was one of the first and most vociferous critics to pile on to Minnesota representative Ilhan Omar for out-of-context comments about 9/11. Strangely enough, Barr didn’t seem to think that Crenshaw directing an Islamaphobic attack towards Omar, culminating in an increase in death threats, demonstrated “a lack of civility.” When Crenshaw shared a tweet that falsely claimed Omar said the 9/11 attacks weren’t terrorism, Ocasio-Cortez pointed out: “You refuse to co-sponsor the 9/11 Victim’s Compensation Fund, yet have the audacity to drum resentment towards Ilhan w/completely out-of-context quotes. In 2018, right-wing extremists were behind almost ALL US domestic terrorist killings. Why don’t you go do something about that?”
………
Uninviting Ocasio-Cortez is probably a smart move on Barr’s part in the long run. For one thing, there aren’t any active coal mines in Barr’s district. And James Comer, another Republican representative from Kentucky, told local news that he didn’t “see any upside” to having her come to Kentucky. “I think a lot of Republicans are making a mistake picking on her. I think we need to be very prepared when we debate her on issues that we’re having a hard time with.”
(emphasis mine)
So, once Barr realized that:
He decided to require that she apologize for calling out another Republican who was actively trying to encourage some random nut job to ASSASSINATE one of her colleagues.
Really classy.
Here is another one: anytime Facebook claims that it violated user privacy unintentionally:
Facebook harvested the email contacts of 1.5 million users without their knowledge or consent when they opened their accounts.
Since May 2016, the social-networking company has collected the contact lists of 1.5 million users new to the social network, Business Insider can reveal. The Silicon Valley company said the contact data was “unintentionally uploaded to Facebook,” and it is now deleting them.
The revelation comes after pseudononymous security researcher e-sushi noticed that Facebook was asking some users to enter their email passwords when they signed up for new accounts to verify their identities, a move widely condemned by security experts. Business Insider then discovered that if you entered your email password, a message popped up saying it was “importing” your contacts without asking for permission first.
At the time, it wasn’t clear what was happening — but on Wednesday, Facebook disclosed to Business Insider that 1.5 million people’s contacts were collected this way and fed into Facebook’s systems, where they were used to improve Facebook’s ad targeting, build Facebook’s web of social connections, and recommend friends to add.
Yeah, “Unintentionally,” right.
Every time such an error is revealed, and it seems to be about every 6 months, it always is something that makes Facebook more money.
To quote Richard Dreyfuss, “This was no boating accident.”
Maybe Rich Liberals Don’t Hate Sanders Because They Fear He Can’t Win, But Because They’re Rich
Takes on the assumption that the New York Times makes in their article, you know, the, “From canapé-filled fund-raisers on the coasts,” one, that rich donors are acting for the good of the party, as opposed to their own personal interests:
Why does the New York Times take rich liberals at their word that their concern with Bernie Sanders is that he would lose to Trump, rather than the obvious, glaring fact that his election would run counter to their interests?
………
That a network of multi-millionaire and billionaire donors would dislike a candidate who not only rejects their funding, but is actively trying to tax them at rates not seen since 1960, would surely be enough reason to explain why these wealthy elites would want to “stop” his nomination. But not to the credulous New York Times, which takes at face value rich donors’ claim to oppose Sanders because they believe he simply can’t defeat Trump:
………
Because it would be unseemly to suggest a group of super-rich hedge fund managers, Hollywood producers and CEOs would dislike a candidate who has made a career out of promising to expropriate the bulk of their wealth, we get a faux pragmatism argument. But polls show Sanders defeating Trump with numbers comparable to any other declared candidate—a fact the New York Times never bothers to mention, letting the idea go unchallenged that “socialist” (!!) Sanders is an electoral liability. The simpler, less altruistic motive is simply never entertained.It’s a variation on the Inexplicable Republican Best Friend trope FAIR previously documented (2/26/19): Instead of assuming that lifelong conservatives may just prefer more conservative politicians, progressive-bashing GOP pundits are propped up as neutral observers simply looking out for the Democratic Party. Just the same, super-wealthy Democratic donors can’t oppose Sanders because they simply prefer more centrist, pro-Wall Street candidates; they must have a sincere, pragmatic concern he would lose the general election.
They are voting with their bloated wallets.
Normally, this would be thought less serious than, for example, the ruling against China’s claims to the South China sea, except that one of the islands is the US mega-base at Diego Garcia.
The British government expelled all every resident of the island to accommodate the US military, so this could get ugly.
If the British blink, I would expect the Pentagon to continue squatting on the island:
The UK has been ordered to hand back the Chagos Islands to Mauritius “as rapidly as possible” after the United Nations’ highest court ruled that continued British occupation of the remote Indian Ocean archipelago is illegal.
Although the majority decision by the international court of justice in The Hague is only advisory, the unambiguous clarity of the judges’ pronouncement is a humiliating blow to Britain’s prestige on the world stage.
The case was referred to the court, which hears legal submissions over international boundary disputes, after an overwhelming vote in 2017 in the UN assembly in the face of fierce opposition from a largely isolated UK.
Delivering judgment, the president of the ICJ, Abdulqawi Ahmed Yusuf, said the detachment of the Chagos archipelago in 1965 from Mauritius had not been based on a “free and genuine expression of the people concerned”.
“This continued administration constitutes a wrongful act,” he added. “The UK has an obligation to bring to an end its administration of the Chagos archipelago as rapidly as possible and that all member states must co-operate with the United Nations to complete the decolonization of Mauritius.”
………
The judgment represents a significant defeat for the UK on virtually every point it contested in the hearing last September.
By a majority of 13 to one, the court found that the decolonisation of Mauritius had not been lawfully completed and that it must be completed “as rapidly as possible”. The only judge dissenting from the main opinion was an American.
Of course the only judge dissenting was American. We want that airbase.
That British deported the entire population of the island chain to facilitate this.
It was an immoral theft of these people’s homeland.
This video shows Elliot Abrams, a man who supported and justified the murder of civilians, genocide, and the rape and murder of nuns in the 1980s, expressing shock and outrage that he was confronted on his record of psychopathic mayhem. (And his record of lying to Congress, but that’s a pretty minor mark on his ledger by comparison)
The very serious people in Washington are shocked that freshman Representative Ilhan Omar actually confronted him about this.
F%$# those delicate snowflakes, and f%$# them for rehabilitating a f%$#ing genocidal maniac.
May their names be obliterated as well. (that is what יש”ו stands for)
This week started with a terrifying bang, when German and French negotiators announced a deal to revive the worst parts of the new EU Copyright Directive though a compromise on “Article 13,” which requires copyright filters for any online service that allows the public to communicate.
The Franco-German “compromise” was truly awful: German politicians, worried about a backlash at home, had insisted on some cosmetic, useless exemptions for small businesses; French negotiators were unwilling to consider even these symbolic nods towards fairness and consideration for free speech, competition, and privacy.
The deal they brokered narrowed the proposed German exemptions to such a degree that they’d be virtually impossible to use, meaning that every EU-based forum for online communications would have to find millions and millions to pay for filters — and subject their users to arbitrary algorithmic censorship as well as censorship through deliberate abuse of the system — or go out of business.
Now that a few days have passed, European individuals, businesses, lobby groups and governments have weighed in on the proposal and everyone hates it.
(emphasis original)
A partial list of people who hate the deal:
Article 13 is shaping up to be a “Douglas Adams” level of legislative insanity, where at each stage, it is replaced by something even more bizarrely inexplicable.
*In an earlier post, I suggested that I was too pessimistic about the progress of the EU’s disastrous, “Article 13,” proposals. It appears that my pessimism might have been justified.
Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) stated in a filing Wednesday that full compliance with a wildfire prevention court order would cost between $75 billion and $150 billion.
The US District Court for the Northern District of California proposed on January 9 to require PG&E to re-inspect all of its electrical grid and remove or trim any trees that could fall on the lines and fix all conductors that may push together. These changes were required to be completed before the 2019 wildfire season, which starts June 21, 2019.
The court declared in a preliminary finding last week that based on evidence presented, that uninsulated power conductors are often pushed together due to fallen trees or limbs. This then caused sparks to fall on the vegetation below which pose an “extreme danger” of starting a wildfire. The equipment was called a common cause of California wildfires in 2017 and 2018 that have been attributed to PG&E.
………
PG&E is accused of starting wildfires through reckless operation or maintenance of its power lines. The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection has not concluded investigations into the 2018 Camp Fire or other 2018 wildfires, but the law suit states that the organization found evidence of state law violations in eleven 2017 wildfires.
Screw them.
They have been doing this for years, and have never got anything more than bailouts from the California legislature.
They need to be “Arthur Andersoned” with extreme prejudice.
The corporation should be executed in the public square as a warning to others.
Two politicians from Amazon.com Inc.’s hometown traveled across the country to New York to deliver a cautionary message about the company’s expansion in the city.
Members of the Seattle City Council, Lisa Herbold and Teresa Mosqueda, are urging elected officials in New York to pass legislation now that will address potential housing and transportation issues that will inevitably follow in the wake of Amazon’s decision to build a major new campus in Queens. Both are speaking Monday at an event hosted by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, which has been backing efforts to organize workers at an Amazon fulfillment center in Staten Island.
“I hope they can learn from Seattle’s experiences and create a set of new expectations for corporate responsibility that can benefit the working poor who work for Amazon and other people priced out of housing in high cost cities everywhere,” Herbold said in an emailed statement ahead of the event.
………
Members of the Seattle City Council, Lisa Herbold and Teresa Mosqueda, are urging elected officials in New York to pass legislation now that will address potential housing and transportation issues that will inevitably follow in the wake of Amazon’s decision to build a major new campus in Queens. Both are speaking Monday at an event hosted by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, which has been backing efforts to organize workers at an Amazon fulfillment center in Staten Island.
“I hope they can learn from Seattle’s experiences and create a set of new expectations for corporate responsibility that can benefit the working poor who work for Amazon and other people priced out of housing in high cost cities everywhere,” Herbold said in an emailed statement ahead of the event.
It really remarkable when politicians cross the country to tell people that the largest employer in their city is a contemptible greed head.
You know the Russian meddling in the Senate election where Doug Jones defeated Roy “10 Commandments” Moore?
It not turns out that it was a false flag operation by a Democratic Party consultant: (I’m sure that he was well remunerated)
Reid Hoffman, the tech billionaire whose money was spent on Russian-style social media deception in a Senate race last year, apologized on Wednesday, saying in a statement that he had not approved the operation and did not support such tactics in American politics.
Why am I thinking that Mr. Hoffman is lying through his teeth, and that he either knew what was going on, or was willfully blind?
Mr. Hoffman said he had no idea that political operatives whose work he had financed had used fakery on Facebook and Twitter in the special Senate election a year ago in Alabama. But he had an obligation to track how his money was spent, he said, and he promised to exercise more care in the future.
………
The New York Times and The Washington Post reported last week that $100,000 from Mr. Hoffman was spent on a deceptive social media campaign to aid Doug Jones, the Democratic candidate, who barely defeated the Republican, Roy Moore.
………
They also used thousands of Twitter accounts to make it appear as if automated Russian bot accounts were following and supporting Mr. Moore, according to an internal report on the project. The apparent Russian support for Mr. Moore drew broad news media coverage.
(emphasis mine)
It really remarkable just how facile the Democratic Party political consultant community has in stepping on their own penises.
Yet another example of how the Dems snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
We really need to fire the whole lot of them.
Trump should build his Wall out of Hillary’s Emails since no one can seem to get over them.
I have no clue as to the source, it was related to me 3rd hand, but it is f%$#ing brilliant.
The Weekly Standard was just shut down:
The Weekly Standard, the conservative political and cultural magazine, will shut down after its last issue appears on Monday, the chief executive of its parent company said Friday.
The Washington-based magazine’s 35-member editorial staff will be laid off as a result, said Ryan McKibben, the head of Clarity Media Group, the Colorado company that owns the Standard and its sister publication, the Washington Examiner newspaper.
“This was a business decision,” McKibben said. “As we looked at all of our options, we saw we were facing a steady decline in revenues and circulation. That drove us to our decision to close this week. . . . It was a tough decision.”
Staffers who were told of the closure by McKibben at a morning meeting on Friday were skeptical of the business rationale, saying Clarity has invested heavily in the Washington Examiner, with far greater losses than those produced by the Weekly Standard.
Several noted the timing of the closure announcement, calling it “the Christmas massacre.”
The Standard was founded in 1995 by three journalists — Bill Kristol, Fred Barnes and John Podhoretz — with funding from conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch sold his interest to billionaire Philip Anschutz in 2009.
Anyone who calls Bill Kristol, Fred Barnes, or John Podhoretz “Journalists” has a twisted view of the Fourth Estate.
Employees have been told they will receive severance pay in exchange for signing a nondisclosure and nondisparagement agreement.
How utterly proper.
Don’t worry about their employees though, I’m sure that wingnut welfare will take care of them.
With all the gloom and doom about the upcoming trade war with China, the fact that China has cut tariffs on US autos.
This does seem to be a bit of a climb-down on their side.
Progress toward easing the steep tariffs China imposed on U.S. vehicle imports this year lifted carmaker stocks across the globe, as investors wagered on a thawing of tensions that have damaged the world’s biggest automotive market.
Toyota Motor Corp. and Hyundai Motor Co. tracked earlier gains for Daimler AG, General Motors Co. and Tesla Inc. after Bloomberg News reported that a proposal to eliminate the 25 percent surcharge slapped onto U.S.-made cars this year has been submitted to China’s cabinet. The plan would be reviewed in coming days, people familiar with the matter said.
The levy forms the backbone of China’s response to a trade war instigated by President Donald Trump as he seeks to reset trade relations and spur manufacturing in the U.S. Car sales in China have fallen for six straight months after decades of almost uninterrupted growth, and while there are other factors, the tit-for-tat jabs between the world’s biggest economies have played a role.
As Yves Smith observes, “Um, this does not look like Trump is losing the trade war.”
When It Comes to American Jobs, the US Could Learn from Its Largest Sex-Furniture Manufacturer
It’s more than just occupying a niche.
It’s local sourcing, a skilled and well remunerated (and hence stable) workforce, a deserved reputation for quality, and good communication with customers.
It gave Trump the ability to stoke his base, and wave his dick around and pretend to be brave.
It now turns out that fraudulent accounts on social media played a large role in instigating the caravan, and applying the old saw of cui bono, the most likely suspects are people tied to Trump and the Republican party:
Just days before the migrant caravan set out from Honduras, an imposter stole the identity of a prominent early supporter on Facebook, using a fake account to try to boost the caravan’s numbers.
Bartolo Fuentes, a Honduran activist, journalist, and former lawmaker told BuzzFeed News that someone used the phony account to send Facebook messages falsely claiming that established migrant groups were organizing the effort. News like that — coming from a well-known public figure in Honduras, such as Fuentes — could go a long way to convincing people to join the group of migrants traveling to the US.
The caravan, which threaded north through Guatemala and Mexico, eventually ballooned in size to more than 7,000 people. It also became a political flashpoint in the lead-up to last month’s US midterm elections.In response to a query from BuzzFeed News, a Facebook spokesperson said the phony account “was removed for violating [the company’s] misrepresentation policy,” but declined to share any further information, such as what country it originated from, what email address was used to open it, or any other details that might reveal who was behind it. Facebook added that, barring a subpoena or request from law enforcement, it does not share such information out of respect for the privacy of its users.
Actually Facebook does share such information (Cambridge Analytica), but only with people who won’t advertise the fact.
As far as Fuentes can tell, the fake account, which primarily used Facebook Messenger to spread disinformation, was created less than a week before the caravan was scheduled to depart.
On his real account, Fuentes did post a few times about the caravan, which he said he’d heard about in mid-September after being invited to join a small private WhatsApp group of would-be migrants. One of his posts, from Oct. 4, showed a stylized image of a bedraggled migrant and indicated the caravan “spontaneously convened” without any formal organizer.
But the messages being sent by the imposter, which also had Fuentes’s photo, had a very different flavor, the former lawmaker learned. They claimed that the prominent and influential migrant rights organization Pueblo Sin Fronteras was organizing the caravan and would be leading it on the arduous journey.
But the news was fake. Although Pueblo Sin Fronteras had organized several previous caravans, including a big one in the spring that attracted 1,500 people, it staunchly opposed the latest effort based on well-founded fears it would stoke anti-immigrant sentiment ahead of the elections.
The bogus Fuentes account stands out for its sophistication and timing. It was created before the caravan departed, when the event had not yet attracted news coverage. It operated entirely in Spanish and precisely targeted influencers within the migrant rights community. And rather than criticize or undermine the caravan — as other online campaigns would later attempt to do — it was used to legitimize the event, making a loosely structured grassroots event appear to be a well-organized effort by an established migrant group with a proven track record of successfully bringing Central American people to the US border.
Fuentes has been unable to get any information from Facebook about the account, but one small detail stood out. Whoever created it listed the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa as Fuentes’s hometown, rather than the San Pedro Sula suburb of El Progreso. That might seem like a minor error, but it’s the sort of mistake a foreigner — not a Honduran — [also, in my personal opinion, not a member of the FSB or GRU] would make about the well-known former lawmaker, whose left-wing party stands in opposition to the current president’s administration.
………
The largest caravan organized by Pueblo Sin Fronteras numbered 1,500 people. To this day, Mujica said he is mystified by how the latest caravan could have grown so large.
“Nobody wanted this to take place so close to the elections,” he added. “Somebody was clearly trying to mislead people to generate more interest in the caravan.”
This is precisely the sort of Karl Rove style rat-f%$#ery that we see from the Republicans. (Rove once planted bugs in his own office to create the impression that his opponents were spying on him)
There is Republican stink all over this.
The Texas Rangers investigated and charged her with manslaughter.
Dallas County District Attorney Faith Johnson convened a grand jury, and Guyger has been indicted for murder:
A former Dallas police officer who walked into an unarmed man’s apartment on Sept. 6 and shot him while wearing her police uniform has been indicted on a charge of murder.
The Dallas County grand jury began hearing the case against Amber Guyger, 30, on Monday. Guyger was originally charged with manslaughter in the shooting death of 26-year-old Botham Shem Jean. She was released from jail on a $300,000 bond about an hour after turning herself in.
District Attorney Faith Johnson said that by 3 p.m., Guyger had turned herself back in on the murder charge. Her bond was transferred and she has been released.
Asked why the grand jury indicted Guyger on a murder charge, Johnson said, “We presented the evidence and explained the law.” She added that the law prohibits her from talking about the evidence presented to the grand jury.
She said her office had a “very spirited conversation” with the Texas Rangers, the lead investigators in the case, back in September.
“They chose to file this case as manslaughter,” she said. “We did our own investigation.”
A district attorney who doesn’t spend their time covering up for the police is remarkable.
The fact that she is a Republican makes it it even more remarkable.
She was turfed out in recent elections, but her replacement, Democrat John Creuzot ran on criminal justice reform, so my guess is that he will continue to pursue this case with vigor.
The @whca are cowards. The media is complicit. And I couldn't be prouder. https://t.co/OOIFGuZ731
— Michelle Wolf (@michelleisawolf) November 19, 2018
I have to agree.
This is one of the greatest call signs for a pilot ever:
What a call sign. pic.twitter.com/mPcbi9v9Co— Steve Trimble (@TheDEWLine) November 19, 2018
Needless to say, I’m sure that his wingmen are sick and tired of being called, “The Pips.” 
I alway wondered how Albert Shanker ended up being the man who destroyed the 20th century world.
Well, this New York Times Op/Ed provides context for both that joke, as well as a for the war on teachers and unions that some among liberal “education reformers” have engaged in for years.
The short version is that in 1968, there was a majority black school district set up in Ocean Hill-Brownsville (Brooklyn), and one of their first actions wqas to fire some white teachers for being white, and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), Shanker’s union, went on strike, arguing, IMNSHO correctly, that arbitrary hiring and firing makes unionization is meaningless or impossible.
Shanker won, and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville school board lost, and teachers’ unions became the bête noire of the liberal education reform community. (Conservatives and Republicans have always been opposed to labor unions generally, and teacher unions specifically)
On Nov. 17, 1968, Albert Shanker, a tough Queens-bred union president, stood next to New York City’s patrician mayor, John Lindsay, to announce a settlement to a crippling teacher strike that had thrown a million students out of New York City public schools for weeks on end. The divisive strike laid bare long simmering tensions within American liberalism over unions, education and race. Almost a half-century later, the evolution in liberal attitudes that the strike symbolized created vulnerabilities that a very different son of Queens, Donald Trump, exploited in his rise to the presidency.
By the late 1960s, after years of frustration with vicious white resistance to school integration, many African-American leaders supported the creation of a black-controlled local school district in the low-income Ocean Hill-Brownsville section of Brooklyn. The idea was that the district would hire more minority schoolteachers in order to provide role models for students and adopt a curriculum that was culturally affirming.
A firestorm erupted, however, when the local school board (then known as the governing board) sent a telegram to 19 unionized educators indicating that the board “voted to end your employment in the schools of this district.” The list included 18 white educators and one black teacher, mistakenly included, who was immediately reinstated once the error was discovered. A hearing by a retired African-American judge hired by the board, Francis Rivers, found that there were no credible charges against the teachers. But Rhody McCoy, the Ocean Hill-Brownsville local superintendent, told The New York Times, “Not one of these teachers will be allowed to teach anywhere in the city. The black community will see to that.” To protest the terminations, teachers throughout the city began a series of strikes shutting down the nation’s largest school system from early September through mid-November.
………
To begin with, Shanker believed he had no choice but to call a strike to protect his members from arbitrary dismissal. If an employer — of whatever race — had the right to dismiss unionized employees without due process, why have a union? Shanker understood that conservatives didn’t believe in collective bargaining rights and due process. But wasn’t it a bedrock liberal principle, he asked, for workers to have a right to organize and protect themselves from arbitrary actions by their employers?
Shanker and Rustin also thought it was important to fight for integrated schools and noted that “community control” was originally the slogan adopted by white parents in Queens who opposed desegregation. Shanker supported the creation of the nation’s first nonselective magnet schools to foster integration and cited the 1966 Coleman Report, which found that low-income students achieved at much higher levels in socioeconomically integrated schools than in those with concentrated poverty. Settling for community control of segregated schools was wrong, Rustin argued. The idea was, as he put it, “the spiritual descendant of states’ rights.”
………
Instead, to improve teacher diversity, Shanker worked hard to unionize teacher aides and to negotiate a stipend for them to go back to school, get their college degrees and become teachers themselves. Over time, more than 8,000 paraprofessionals became teachers, providing the largest single source of minority teachers in New York City.
When the third and final strike was settled, the community control effort was gutted. Shanker won among broader public opinion, but lost among liberals. Many progressives dismissed Shanker, a cerebral former graduate student in philosophy, as a madman, as a well-known joke from the era suggests. In Woody Allen’s 1973 science fiction comedy, “Sleeper,” Mr. Allen’s character wakes up two centuries in the future to find that that civilization was destroyed when “a man by the name of Albert Shanker got hold of a nuclear warhead.”
More generally, over the subsequent 50 years, the Lindsay/Bundy/Carmichael worldview would largely prevail over the Shanker/Rustin/Harrington approach among progressives. In the years since Ocean Hill-Brownsville, many upper-middle class liberals have demonstrated a lukewarm attitude toward unions. When Democrats held majorities in Congress under presidents Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, the progressive coalition failed to prioritize labor law reforms to give unions a fair shot at surviving. Likewise, those same Democratic administrations largely avoided the fight to support school integration, favoring instead spending more money for high-poverty schools. And at the federal level, Democrats have largely adopted the view articulated by Bundy and others involved in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville conflict that race could be an explicit factor in hiring decisions.
The shifts on unions, school integration and race-conscious decision-making that the 1968 teachers strikes symbolized are not unrelated to the disastrous election in 2016, a calamity from which progressives only partially recovered in 2018. A strong labor movement, an integrated public school system and a legal commitment to equal treatment of individuals by race all help make authoritarian white nationalism less appealing. But the reduced progressive commitment to these critical bulwarks helped clear the way for a demagogue.
This does provide at least a partial explanation of the moral vacuity of the modern education reform, as well as the disastrous abandonment of the labor movement by the modern Democratic Party.
He was 95, and had been in ill health for the past year or so.
Before you ask, I know that Batman is DC and not Marvel, and that he was created by Bob Kane (Eli Katz) and Bill (Milton) Finger.
I’m just doing a bit of light hearted trolling, as Lee did at the wedding of Reed Richards and Sue Storm, when, at the end of the comic, Lee and Jack Kirby (Jacob Kurtzberg) wrote themselves in as gate crashers given the heave-ho by Nick Fury.
It’s Lee and Kirby doing what every reader of that issue wanted to do: Get thrown out of the superhero wedding of the year.
Batman crying is a sort of an homage to Lee’s sometimes mischievous sense of humor.
In case you are wondering, Lee (born Stanley Martin Lieber), Kane, Kirby and Finger were all Jewish.
In a quick perusal of comic book artists of that era, it appears that the only one who wasn’t Jewish was Steve Ditko, whose religion was unclear, but given his Czech origins, he was probably born Catholic.