Criminal justice reporter Eli Hager will be chatting with Prime members at 3pm in The Hive. Hager is a staff writer for the Marshall Project, a nonpartisan news site focused on criminal justice reform. Eli’s primary interests are the criminalization of poverty in the United States and the politics of criminal justice. He also focuses on the intersections between criminal justice and education.
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Amidst all of the coverage of Pope Francis’ visit to the US this week I want to particularly call your attention to this piece by novelist and columnist James Carroll. It’s about another time a Pope, Paul VI, addressed the United Nations. That was in 1965, almost exactly fifty years ago. That moment half a century ago has deep parallels to today and it also opened a breach between Carroll and his father – one, a young man studying for the priesthood and another, a top Pentagon general, who had himself once studied for the priesthood. Definitely give this a read.
There’s a second part of publishing this piece for me personally, which is not connected to the piece itself but my own relationship to the author. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention it. Like one billiard ball hitting another at a certain angle and in so doing shifting its own trajectory, we all have certain people in our lives who we encounter and, through the encounter, the trajectory of our own lives changes. For me, Jim is one of those people.
With less than a week to go before the end of the fiscal year deadline, here’s the latest on the shutdown prospects, including this observation from budget expert Stan Collender: “Boehner may need to allow a shutdown to occur for a few days to give the Freedom Caucus a victory before he can work with Dems on a clean CR.”
Seeing so many stories like this one I’ve become increasingly convinced of the existence and the importance of what I will call the Unicornstitution. Related but by no means synonymous with the US constitution, the Unicornstitution exists as a sort of ersatz Platonic ideal form of the Constitution which exists in the ether and is ready at hand to give a big thumbs up and attaboy and ‘you go girl’ to whatever crazy bullshit thing you already decided to do, especially if you’re really angry and stupid and fundamentally see life in America as as matter of other undeserving people taking away your stuff and your not being able to do anything about it.
Moderate House GOPer (yes, they exist) calls anti-Boehner coup plotters (yes, they’re back) “right-wing Marxists.”
As I’ve said before, I’m something of a Hillary Agnostic. There’s no question that the email story has done her a great deal of harm, regardless of the merits of the story itself. But it’s worth stopping now and then and taking a look at just how nonsensical most of the coverage of the story is at this point. Beside the point that the relevant Inspector General has said that none of the stuff the DC press corps has been hyperventilating about can, by definition, have violated any law, you also have stories like this new one today from Bloomberg.
Just in time to take advantage of Scott Walker’s departure from the race, Chris Christie gets a heaping new spoonful of BridgeGate news.
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