BY HANK REICHMAN Today’s Washington Post carries an article reporting that protesters upset by President Trump’s upcoming visit to the United Kingdom have launched a campaign to play Green Day’s “American Idiot” so many times that, by the time Trump arrives, the song will be the No. 1 single in the UK. According to the…
BY AARON BARLOW This afternoon, from 5:30 to 6:30, union members in New York City protested outside of the Federal Courts in lower Manhattan. The event, organized by the Professional Staff Congress (PSC), the faculty union of the City University of New York, drew hundreds of frustrated and angry people in what is surely one…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH This headline is from today’s Wonkette newsletter: Michael Cohen’s Tell-All Book Has Been Cancelled. Sorry, Pulitzer Committee! Wonkette is available at: https://wonkette.com/. It is in the same vein as The Onion but much nastier and unrestrained: that is, I sometimes cringe or flinch right before I laugh out loud—that is, at…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Yesterday’s daily newsletter from TheTeaParty.org featured this headline: “We’re Not Joking: Kerry’s School Lacrosse Captain Was Robert Mueller.” The news item to which the headline provided a link featured this photo: Yes, Robert Mueller and John Kerry both attended St. Paul high school and played on the same lacrosse team. This…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH In a piece for the Undernews daily newsletter from the Progressive Review, Sam Smith recalls his activism in the 1960s and how the traumatic events of 1968 affected him and many activists like him. Near the end of the piece, he quotes from a piece that he wrote during that period:…
BY WENDY LYNNE LEE Guest blogger Wendy Lynne Lee is a professor of Philosophy at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania. On the morning after the 2016 election of Donald Trump many of us were bleary; some were despairing, and I was both. But I was also clear-headed and I understood then, just as I do now,…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Several days ago, Sasha Ingber contributed an article to the Washington Post on how “Trump’s Presidency Has Prompted a New, Nationwide College Course on Why Democracies Collapse.” The course has been developed by Robert Balir, an assistant professor of political science at Brown University. A specialist in post-conflict security in Africa,…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH What follows is a brief descriptive item from the daily newsletter Curbed, taken largely from the announcement from Wright Auctions: A rare work by midcentury designer Isamu Noguchi, a 1948 marble table, is expected to fetch between $1 million and $1.5 million when it heads to the auction block later this year. A…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH The following is from a news story in the Arizona Republic: A bill to fundamentally restructure how Arizona’s three state universities are managed passed an Arizona Senate committee Monday as a fast-tracked proposal that won’t receive much public input. Rep. Mark Finchem, R-Oro Valley, wants to effectively dismantle the Arizona Board…