This evening I saw news that a Jewish cemetery in St. Louis had been vandalized overnight. Reports say that more than 100 headstones were damaged, with some substantial number toppled. This comes, as you may know, amidst an ongoing wave of bomb threats against Jewish Community Centers across the country. To date, thankfully, all have been hoaxes. Police have yet to make a formal determination about whether this vandalism was a hate crime. Whatever the final determination, though, this incident hits very close to home. Because this is the cemetery where my mother was buried after she died in Southern California in 1981.
Republicans struggle to defuse one of the bombs they planted under the Affordable Care Act.
Bill McKibben is an author and environmentalist who in 2014 was awarded the Right Livelihood Prize, sometimes called the ‘alternative Nobel.’ His 1989 book The End of Nature is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change, and has appeared in 24 languages; he’s gone on to write a dozen more books. He is a founder of 350.org, the first planet-wide, grassroots climate change movement, which has organized twenty thousand rallies around the world in every country save North Korea, spearheaded the resistance to the Keystone Pipeline, and launched the fast-growing fossil fuel divestment movement. A former staff writer for the New Yorker, he writes frequently for a wide variety of publications around the world, including the New York Review of Books,National Geographic, and Rolling Stone. Ask Bill your questions about climate change, fracking, etc. here by 3:30 p.m. EST. If you’d like to participate but don’t have a Prime membership, sign up here.
Your roundup of so-called crowds organized by liberal activists that don’t matter at all.
Strategists polled by the Associated Press give Tom Perez (podcast interview) the support of 205 DNC committee members while Keith Ellison (podcast interview) has the support of 153. Jaime Harrison 27; Sally Boynton Brown 10, Pete Buttigieg (podcast interview) 8. Here’s the whole story.
The winner needs 224 to win.
It’s amazing that we are actually having a discussion over whether the US and Mexico can mend their differences over the US demand that Mexico pay what amounts to a war indemnity to build a wall on the US-Mexico border. It’s not just that Mexico hasn’t agreed to this. It is important to step back and realize that this is the kind of demand that usually happens in the context of punishment or exaction for losing a war or some other belligerent action.
The Ukrainian MP who worked with former Trump business associate and felon Felix Sater and current Trump personal lawyer Michael Cohen on that “peace plan” for Ukraine and Russia is now being investigated for treason back in Ukraine.
In response to CNN’s story about the White House asking the FBI to deny the Trump/Russia stories, Press Secretary Sean Spicer is digging deeper. Spicer told CNN: “We didn’t try to knock the story down. We asked them to tell the truth.”
There are a number of ways to interpret this statement. But the most logical one is that what the FBI actually has been saying is not the truth. Another is that the truth is the opposite of what the FBI appears to have found … so far.