Welcome to The Slice, TPM’s latest project! I’m Nona Willis Aronowitz and I run this thing.
Back during the height of the siege of Kobane there was a lot of coverage of the residents’ valiant defense of the town against what then seemed like an unstoppable ISIS tide. There were also a thousand web slide shows of the female militia members with AK-47s defending the town. But there’s a whole other part of the story you likely have not heard of: in this Kurdish enclave within Syria, a radical egalitarian political experiment in a region many of us associate with sectarianism, authoritarianism and repression. It may have meant the difference between victory and defeat in Kobane’s now apparently successful defense against ISIS. A fascinating story from The Slice.
Pro-fracking New York State lawmaker apologizes for “F**king Douchebag” rant.
This is Roger Ver. Last year he renounced his citizenship to avoid paying US taxes. Now he’s upset that the “tyrants” in the US government won’t give him a visa to visit Miami this weekend to speak at a Bitcoin conference.
As many of you know, unitary, robust citizenship is an important value to me. Another big interest of mine is morons and arrogant douchebags, especially people who fall into both categories. Which brings us back to Roger Ver, variously known as a “Bitcoin entrepreneur” or the “Bitcoin Jesus.” Ver is now a citizen of Federation of Saint Kitts and Nevis. He was so excited about avoiding taxes that as soon as he became a Nevisian he set up yet another start up that would allow you to use bitcoins to buy a Saint Kitts and Nevis passport so you too could avoid US taxes. Alas, it folded after a few months, apparently because the St Kitts government disavowed it.
“If my good friend Dr. Gasparri says a curse word against my mother, he can expect a punch,” said Pope Francis, throwing a pretend punch his way.
Through all the disagreements that define our politics, it is seldom questioned that Tea Party type conservatives are really, really devoted to the Constitution. They are, ‘Constitutional Conservatives’, as they put it. Indeed, many mainstream Republicans and Democrats will only criticize these folks by saying that their inflexible devotion to the Constitution is simply outdated or unworkable in the context of the changes that have happened in the United States over the last 225 years. The core premise is seldom questioned.
But this – sadly or happily, depending on your point of view, but certainly hilariously – is completely wrong. In fact, though many, many things have changed to make the politics of today almost impossible to relate to the politics of the very late 18th century, one of the main aims of the authors of the Constitution was to bring to heel the kind of folks who now call themselves ‘constitutional conservatives’. Let’s call this the Rand Paul Delusion.
Today we’re releasing our latest TPMPrime longform on the US oil and gas boom and how its reordering geopolitics (sub req), perhaps long into the future, in ways you’ve probably never considered.
The verdict is in: New Yorkers really don’t like Pat Lynch and they really, really don’t like cops turning their backs on the Mayor at police funerals.
I’ve written a number of pieces recently on the war between the NYPD – or at least major elements of it – and Mayor de Blasio. As I’ve written, my major question has been, where do New Yorkers fit in? Now we have New Yorkers verdict – a new poll out from Quinnipiac. And New Yorkers have a resoundingly negative verdict on the back turning and the general behavior of the NYPD leadership over recent weeks.
Earlier I noted the new Quinnipiac Poll that showed that while New Yorkers give solid approval numbers to the NYPD, they roundly oppose the campaign of public back-turning and the police refusal to enforce all but the most serious laws in the weeks since the execution style killing of two NYPD patrolmen. What also emerged in the poll is public anger that Patrick Lynch, President of the Police Benevolent Association has managed to make the public face of an asshole into the public face of the NYPD. And now there are signs of rising opposition to Lynch within the union itself. A raucous union meeting at Antun’s catering hall in Queens Village on Tuesday night broke down into a melee of pushing and shoving and screaming involving some 100 police officers angry Lynch’s leadership of the union. The yelling and screaming and shoving went on for about ten minutes, according to the Daily News, before Lynch walked out.