In Wasilla, Alaska yesterday, ancient Rep. terrifies high schoolers with rambling talk on bull sex, suicide and more. Teachers and shaken children recounted that Rep. Young “acted in a disrespectful and sometimes offensive manner to some students, used profanity and started talking about bull sex when confronted with a question about same-sex marriage.”
I have always thought that Ben Bradlee was the rebel and swashbuckler that All the Presidents Men made Woodward and Bernstein seem to be. As you have no doubt heard, Bradlee died today at the age of 93. The AP obituary captures some of the jauntiness of the man with the first line. “In a charmed life of newspapering, Ben Bradlee seemed always to be in just the right place.” As he so often does when he takes to the keyboard, David Remnick, a one-time employee, has an almost perfect evocation of the man in this piece just published at NewYorker.com.
As we arrive at two weeks before election day, we’re discussing our hunches and prognostications about Senate control in this thread in The Hive (sub req).
Who are these people? Help us crowdsource the Palin Clan Brawl crime scene photos.
TPM Reader MA has another thread of the criminalization of high school story. I would say that I still think the mid-late 20th century crime boom is a big, big part of this story, one which is obviously heavily bound up with race but is an independent statistical and societal fact. With that, TPM Reader MA …
Josh, interesting post on the criminalization of innocuous behavior in schools, but I think you missed an important thread. Like the drug war and the militarization of policing, I think this phenomena is largely an expression of our nation’s white supremacist origins and continuing mass anxieties and hysterias about race. One of the things that’s come out of the recent discussion of the killings of Micheal Brown and Eric Gardner, etc., is how police forces are encouraged, through a plethora of mostly unspoken or indirect policies and cues and the prejudices police officers learn like the rest of us growing up in America, to see black and brown-skinned people and particularly young black males as a dangerous, violence-prone, always up-to-no-good criminal class.
Justice Ginsburg watches ‘terrorism’ opera (“The Death of Klinghoffer”) as Giuliani protests outside.
In the constant stream of articles that wash over us from an ever-expanding number of publications, a few stand out. One of them is an article published this morning by The Wall Street Journal. The subject was the increasing tendency for schools to bring in the police for incidents that most of us over 30 or certainly 40 would think of as things schools handle with detention or suspension or one of the other tools we associate with school discipline.
As Republican Govs sign up for Obamacare’s medicaid expansion, there’s a new line: medicaid expansion isn’t Obamacare.
South Carolina Republican doubles down on his attack on “Gremlins” – his word for gay men. “What we have is, I made a comment that same-sex couples that want to destroy traditional marriage and our way of life, they’re gremlins. They’re these creatures that are so destructive.”