Tonight the Wall Street Journal has a fascinating look something we may soon hear a lot more about in a very rushed and chaotic fashion. Last month, an outfit called the Milbank Memorial Fund (as best I can tell a relatively non-ideological foundation focused on health care policy) held a secret one day meeting in Chicago for officials from states who may suddenly find their citizens cut off from Obamacare health care insurance subsidies because of the new GOP challenge to the law.
The verdict. Basically that they’re screwed.
Remember how in the faltering days of John McCain’s 2008 campaign he grabbed on to the Russo-Georgian War as a harbinger of a new Cold War and boldly declared that “We Are All Georgians Now”? Well, even the Georgians aren’t Georgians now. Or at least not Georgia’s then-President Mikheil Saakashvili. The last we heard of him he was living in “self-imposed exile” as a Brooklyn hipster after getting run out of the country and charged with various crimes. But now he’s back in the action. He’s renounced his Georgian citizenship to be appointed governor of the Odessa region of Ukraine.
ICYMI: Man who held a Muhammad cartoon contest outside the mosque of those would-be shooters who tried to shoot up Pam Geller’s Texas Muhammad cartoon contest now says he needs to raise $10 million on GoFundMe “to protect his family” or possibly run against John McCain.
You may have seen some mention of the now-apparently-concluded Laura Kipnis saga at Northwestern University. If you haven’t, here’s the quick gist: A couple months back, Kipnis, a Professor of Radio, TV and Film at Northwestern, wrote an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, lampooning and denouncing what she views as the ‘sexual paranoia’ now reigning on college campuses, spreading out into the society at large and creating a broader climate of adult infantilization captured by new phrases like ‘trigger warnings’, ‘safe spaces’ and the like. This created a good bit of controversy and debate, unsurprisingly. It also spurred a protest at Northwestern in which student activists demanded that the administration publicly reject Kipnis’s views and reaffirm its support for its own policies on sexual harassment and assault.
Then, in response, at least two students at Northwestern filed Title IX complaints against Kipnis – alleging that her essay constituted retaliation against students whose sexual abuse or assault claims she described in passing in the essay. The University did in fact open such an investigation, complete with a contract with an outside law firm to conduct the investigation, which was entirely based on the article in question and a single tweet Kipnis tweeted to support the same article.
Check out This Chart on how millennials rely on Facebook for political news in the same overwhelming number that boomers rely on local TV news.
A TPM Reader who is an academic and asks to remain anonymous sends along this note responding to the Kipnis story. I think the point about the demographic nature of the battle, though certainly far from the entirety of the battle, is an apt point.
I will say that I’m under no pressure at my own campus or in my own field.
But the broader tension– amplified by social media and blogs– is very real. A lot of hurt feelings, as the establishment figures like Kipnis are liberals, even leftists.
And needless to say, the fight is as demographic as it is ideological. The insurgents tend to be younger, gayer, browner, more female, etc. Conversely, establishment figures tend to be older, more male, and more Jewish.
FIFA Prez Sepp Blatter resigns.
Here’s the background on the scandal and indictments (though of him himself) that apparently brought him down.
Huffpo is reporting that someone approached former Congressman Mel Watt (D-NC) about Speaker Hastert’s alleged history of sexual abuse at some point early in Hastert’s tenure as Speaker.
A new academic study says that presidents of both parties are guided by the views of the wealthy and political elites and use polling shape public opinion of the population at large to serve those interests.