Source: https://www.politico.com/gallery/2021/07/02/the-nations-cartoonists-on-the-week-in-politics-003749
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The Article Was Written/Published By: POLITICO Staff
If you’re the sort of person who regularly scans the latest science-related headlines, you’ve probably come across the coffee shuffle at some point: Articles reporting on the latest study to show coffee may do something good for you, followed by articles reporting on studies showing that coffee is actually the devil’s…
Source: https://gizmodo.com/coffee-is-good-for-you-coffee-is-bad-for-you-1847123270
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Ed Cara
It’s not the crazies like Marjorie Taylor Greene who are dismantling democracy before our very eyes, argues Paul Krugman in this New York Times opinion piece. It’s the cowardly careerists like Kevin McCarthy who pretend they believe Trump is still president so they can remain in power. — Read the rest
Source: https://boingboing.net/2021/05/25/paul-krugman-in-ny-times-government-by-the-people-may-soon-perish-from-the-earth.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=paul-krugman-in-ny-times-government-by-the-people-may-soon-perish-from-the-earth
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Mark Frauenfelder
As an occupier, Israel must provide medical supplies to Palestinians and adopt measures to combat the virus there.
Source: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/3/23/covid-19-vaccinations-are-proof-of-israels-medical-apartheid
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We all know that millions of Americans are out of work. But how many, and where? For decades, we’ve been relying on the unemployment rate compiled each month by the Bureau of Labor Statistics to answer that question. Over the years, the rate of unemployment has become not just a gauge of the health of the labor market but the most common yardstick policymakers use to assess the health of the economy as a whole.
By this measure, despite the pandemic, things don’t look so bad right now. The headline unemployment rate for December stood at 6.7 percent. In recent years, there’s been some public recognition that that the headline rate is something of an undercount, since it only includes people actively looking for work; so-called discouraged workers who are unsure of how to go about a job search or who are too discouraged to try any more don’t show up in that top-line number. And, for decades now, the BLS has diligently supplemented the headline unemployment rate with additional information about these workers.
But it turns out that discouraged workers aren’t the only problem with the unemployment rate. In fact, these days the headline unemployment rate isn’t just an undercount, it actually paints an alternate reality that masks the degree to which low- and moderate-income people are hurting. As a result, policymakers believe these Americans are better off than they actually are.
There are two additional problems with the way we count people who are unemployed.
First, there’s no accounting for how many hours a part-time worker is working. By the BLS’ traditional definition, a handyman or private nurse who works for a single afternoon each week is counted in the headline national unemployment figure as “employed,” even if they want more work but can’t find it. Our unemployment figures make it look like the person working a handful of hours because that’s the only work they can get is just as “employed” as a full-time CEO. In practice, this means that the unemployment rate actively obscures how many workers are living in poverty in part not because they don’t have a job, but because they can’t get enough hours.
Second, the data doesn’t indicate whether the job a worker is doing pays enough to keep them out of poverty. The assumption implicit in the data is that if you’re “employed,” all should be well, but as the growing movement toward raising the minimum wage attests, it’s increasingly clear that many American workers are employed, often full-time, but still living in poverty.
So it’s time to stop using the unemployment rate as shorthand for how well the economy is going. After all, what good is an indicator that counts someone so underemployed that his family is living in poverty on the same side of the economic ledger as someone in the top 1 percent?
To be clear, the problem isn’t the data itself — the survey data compiled by the federal BLS remains the gold standard for assessing the labor market. The problem is that policymakers depend on the picture painted by the top-line statistic to help them understand reality. That picture is completely different if you filter the same BLS data to exclude part-time workers looking for full-time work and those making less than a poverty wage (pegged conservatively at $20,000 per year).
Anyone who wants full-time work but can only find part-time work, and those working full-time but earning too little to climb above the poverty line, should be considered functionally unemployed. I’ve begun to calculate this, which I’ve dubbed the True Rate of Unemployment. And the TRU in December wasn’t 6.7 percent — it was an alarming 25.1 percent.
The divergence between the official unemployment numbers and functional unemployment is stark, and it was bad even before the pandemic. In February 2020, when the economy was supposedly “hot,” the official BLS release suggested that a mere 3.5 percent of Americans were unemployed, but the “TRU” number was 24 percent. Think of that. So even when the economy was purportedly at its peak before the pandemic, approximately a quarter of Americans looking for full-time work at a livable wage couldn’t find it. And then at the nation’s worst moment in nearly a century, that number jumped, showing that 32.4 percent of the workforce was out of luck.
It gets worse. I’ve also been calculating the ratio of working-age adults who are functionally unemployed to the population at large, which would include those discouraged workers who’ve stopped looking for unemployment. As of December, a full 53.9 percent of working-age Americans do not have living-wage full-time jobs. More disheartening still: It’s 80 percent for those without a high school degree, and 59.5 percent for those with only a high school diploma.
Maybe most troublesome, our research reveals that Black Americans tend to glean marginally better employment opportunities for themselves during boom times — but then fall back farther when the economy turns sour, preventing them from ever establishing a real toehold toward economic equality. Today, the situation for Black Americans is disgraceful, with 30.2 percent unemployed by TRU, compared with 22.7 percent for white Americans.
The bottom line for too many Americans and for minorities in particular, is that for a long, long time, the American economy has not been performing as well as the headline unemployment rate suggests. And while that may be news to those living in comfortable neighborhoods and suburbs, it will not surprise those living in more downtrodden corners of many cities, let alone those who are living in places like the largely forgotten city where I grew up, York, Pa. Over the last several decades, as businesses including York Dental or York Air Conditioner have either closed facilities or scaled back, middle-class prosperity has become more of an impossible dream than an American Dream.
Washington, D.C., has failed to respond appropriately because the headline unemployment figures, particularly in good times, have given some policymakers of both parties license to embrace a narrative that in the absence of a crisis like the one we’re enduring today, our economic approach works fairly well.
We need an economic agenda born from the realization that the true unemployment picture is much worse than policymakers realize. A quarter of the workforce, including a disproportionate share of minority communities, can’t land a full-time job with a living wage even when the overall economy appears to be healthy. The window through which we view the economy matters. We’ve been using a broken measuring stick to keep track of our success.
It’s time to take a hard look at just what the unemployment rate tells us and stop thinking that it’s a good measure of overall economic performance. Until we begin seeing the economic landscape as it is, policymakers are unlikely to make much headway toward fostering the kind of economic growth that will have a genuine, broad-based impact on the lives of struggling Americans.
Source: https://www.politico.com/news/agenda/2021/01/25/unemployment-worse-than-you-think-462218
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Eugene Ludwig
In the coming days, Donald Trump could become the first president to be impeached twice. With proceedings expected to begin this week, a proposed article of impeachment released to the media on Friday unsurprisingly focuses on the riot in Washington last week.
However, if House Democrats want to minimize politicization and maximize the chances of conviction in the Senate, they would have a much better chance if they adopted articles of impeachment stripped of partisan rhetoric and containing multiple, independent charges, each grounded on federal criminal law and indisputable evidence.
The draft article of impeachment characterizes the president’s impeachable conduct as “Incitement of Insurrection.” After all, Trump had fanned the flames that led to the events on January 6 for months with baseless claims of election fraud. And just hours before the deadly mob attack, at a rally down the street, he encouraged his mass of supporters, who had gathered in D.C. in the thousands, “to fight much harder” and to head toward the Capitol “to show strength.”
But the charge as written not only makes bipartisan support difficult; it also creates a hornet’s nest of legal argumentation—about the First Amendment, how to prove “incitement” and the meaning of “insurrection”—that could complicate and impede Senate conviction. The attack on the Capitol can be more simply, and less controversially, stated in terms of the federal crime of “seditious conspiracy.”
By using the word incite, the draft focuses on the speech given by Trump before the storming of the Capitol. This narrow focus has caused some lawyers and scholars, including Trump’s own previous impeachment defense attorney Alan Dershowitz, to say Democrats are trying to punish constitutionally-protected speech. The very potential for debate gives Congressional Republicans, including those who may disapprove of both Trump’s recent actions and inactions, an opportunity to oppose impeachment.
It is also not necessary to characterize the events that transpired as an insurrection, which may strike some as an exaggeration, when the behavior of those who attacked the Capitol fit the federal crime of “seditious conspiracy” (which actually carries twice the ten-year sentence of insurrection). This crime is committed whenever two or more people conspire “by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States,” which is exactly what took place on Wednesday. Also, those who attacked the Capitol did so with the explicit purpose of preventing Congress from carrying out its legal duty to certify the election, thus committing another form of seditious conspiracy: conspiring “by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States.”
Because “seditious conspiracy” perfectly describes the crimes committed on January 6, why not make the straightforward charge that Trump was a party to this conspiracy? Someone can be considered part of a criminal conspiracy even if they did not know “all the details of the crime or all of the members of the conspiracy,” as long as they shared the general objective of the conspiracy, which could be stated in this case as simply as: to use force or the threat of force to prevent Congress and the vice president from counting and announcing certified electoral votes for president on the date and at the time set by law.
Charging Trump with being a party to seditious conspiracy eliminates any First Amendment arguments that he was merely making a speech to a public gathering or expressing his opinion that the election results were tainted by fraud. If sufficient evidence is presented to the Senate that Trump did far more than give that speech—for example, he had personally promoted the gathering by social media, going so far as to direct his followers to “Be there, will be wild!”—then bipartisan support for conviction should be possible.
But Trump’s role in promoting the Capitol riot is not the only recent action that could justify impeachment. It’s not only possible but strategic to include multiple additional charges, so that there might be a greater chance of winning significant GOP backing for some counts, even if not for all of them.
Two additional articles of impeachment could be grounded on the federal law making it a crime to use “official authority for the purpose of interfering with, or affecting, the election for the office of President.” Trump’s statements in the past week about (and implicitly to) Vice President Mike Pence as well as his documented conversations with Georgia election officials are examples of such abuse of authority. Even though the statute is written to apply to persons employed by the United States in an “administrative position,” for purposes of impeachment it surely makes sense to hold the president to the same standard of legality as would apply to his subordinates.
On January 5, Trump falsely stated via Twitter that “The Vice President has the power to reject fraudulently chosen electors.” He later that day gave a public speech in which he stated “I hope Mike Pence comes through for us” and if he “does not come through, I won’t like him quite as much.” And the next morning, he tweeted more of the same.
Trump’s actions forced Pence to issue a letter to Congress on January 6, stating correctly that “my oath to support and defend the Constitution constrains me from claiming unilateral authority to determine which electoral votes should be counted.” Trump immediately responded by posting on Twitter: “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country.” By this conduct, the president clearly used his official authority for the purpose of attempting to interfere with or affect the vice president’s constitutional duties in relation to the presidential election.
On January 2, Trump, acting through White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, initiated a telephone call to the Secretary of State of Georgia, Brad Raffensperger. The president told Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes,” which was one more vote than the margin of victory for Joe Biden in Georgia. Trump proposed that this change in the legally certified electoral vote tally in Georgia be made by “saying, you know, that you’ve recalculated.”
And just yesterday, the Washington Post reported that Trump had earlier pressured the state’s lead elections investigator to “find the fraud” and, by doing so, become “a national hero.” By this conduct in both instances, in addition to potentially breaking Georgia state law, Trump again used his official authority for the purpose of interfering with or affecting the presidential election.
The most critical reason for sending articles of impeachment to the Senate is to provide an insurance policy against further grave misconduct during the remaining days of Trump’s presidency. Even if the Republican-controlled Senate is not currently inclined to consider reconvening for a trial in the next 10 days, the option for swift removal of the president would be available if a new crisis developed. And the Senate need only convict on one charge to do so.
Finally, there are good arguments that the Senate could render judgment on articles of impeachment even after Biden’s inauguration by exercising its constitutional authority to disqualify Trump from ever again holding “any Office of honor, Trust, or Profit under the United States.” If the new Democratic majority wants to initiate a searching inquiry into Trump’s involvement in the Capitol riot, an article framed in terms of seditious conspiracy would sufficiently support such action.
Source: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/01/10/trump-impeachment-articles-incite-insurrection-seditious-conspiracy-456937
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Clark D. Cunningham
Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/independentpremium/voices/coronavirus-uk-economy-cashless-sterling-cash-dollars-sweden-germany-b434157.html
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Hamish McRae
Retired airline pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger on Friday condemned President Trump’s …
Source: https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/515247-capt-sully-sullenberger-slams-reported-trump-comments-on-war-dead-no
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Morgan Gstalter
If I just want to sit and stare at a wall, I can. I turn my phone off at night. I listen to the church bells. I just think. And everything becomes clearer that way
Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/lockdown-coronavirus-mental-health-open-water-swmming-walks-podcasts-a9600361.html
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Rachael Revesz
This advantage isn’t simply a feel-good rallying cry to give older women a self-esteem boost, but based on qualities and traits they develop over time.
Source: https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/aging-woman-s-secret-power-data-proves-it-ncna1231616
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Jeannette McClennan
A majority of Trump voters want to protect so-called Dreamers from deportation, according to a new poll, putting pressure on President Donald Trump to shield immigrants who were brought to the country illegally as children.
The same trend holds across all Republicans, according to the findings from the latest POLITICO/Morning Consult poll. In fact, the poll indicates that wide swaths of registered voters support Dreamers regardless of gender, education, income, ethnicity, religion and ideology. That includes 68 percent of Republicans, 71 percent of conservatives and 64 percent of those who approve of the job Trump is doing. Even 69 percent of those who voted for Trump in 2016 — when he vowed to deport Dreamers — say they should be protected.
The findings highlight a looming political challenge for Trump as he runs for a second term, partly to make good on his promises to immigration hard-liners while looking to appeal to Hispanics and slicing into the advantage Democrats have with them.
Any day now, the Supreme Court is expected to allow Trump to shutter the Obama-era program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, forcing the president to make a decision on Dreamers less than five months before voters head to the polls.
Overall, more than three out of four registered voters say Dreamers should be allowed to stay in the United States. That includes 61 percent who say they should be allowed to become citizens if they meet requirements, and 17 percent who say they should be allowed to become legal residents if they meet requirements. Just 12 percent say they should be deported. Ten percent didn’t know or had no opinion.
“As Congress awaits the looming Supreme Court decision on DACA, nearly two-thirds of voters — driven by Democrats and independents — believe Dreamers should be allowed to stay in the U.S. and given a pathway to citizenship,” said Kyle Dropp, co-founder and chief research officer at Morning Consult.
Trump is considering slowly winding down the program and using the looming end point as leverage to try to strike an elusive immigration deal with Democrats. Already, Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, has floated including DACA as part of a broader immigration package after the Supreme Court ruling, two people familiar with the conversations previously told POLITICO.
Trump has previously offered legislative proposals that would give Dreamers permanent legal protections in exchange for some of his hard-line immigration priorities, including cuts to legal immigration and border wall funding. But the offers failed in part because the president himself backed away after facing opposition from immigration hawks who accused him of going against his own campaign promise.
Roy Beck, president of NumbersUSA, which supports immigration restrictions, said his group supports proposals that offer legal status to Dreamers as long as they come with workforce enforcement measures, including E-Verify, an electronic system that allows businesses to check the work authorization of their employees. “We’ve acknowledged that most of the Dreamers have a compelling case,” he said.
Registered voters are split on whether they trust Trump or Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, to handle the issue of immigration, according to the new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll. Forty-three percent say they would trust Biden, compared with 41 for Trump. Fifteen percent don’t know or had no opinion.
Biden, who was vice president when DACA was created, has vowed to reinstate the program and allow Dreamers to receive federal student aid, calling Trump’s decision to end the program “cruel and counterproductive.”
“Immigrant youth are not a negotiating chip,” he wrote in a statement this week to mark the eight-year anniversary of the program. “They are not disposable.They are an integral part of the American fabric. Their story is our story, and their struggles are our struggles. Donald Trump and the Republicans in Congress should stop threatening their lives for political gain.”
Biden, who has faced criticism for the number of immigrants deported during the Obama administration, has vowed to reinstate DACA within his first 100 days as president and work with Congress to create a pathway to citizenship for the 11 million immigrants in the United States illegally.
The poll indicates that the issue of immigration falls largely along partisan lines, though Trump garners more support from Republicans than Biden does with Democrats. Eighty percent of Democrats say Biden would handle immigration best, while 85 percent of Republicans say Trump would. Moderates favored Biden over Trump, 48 percent to 32 percent.
Trump made cracking down on immigration the centerpiece of his 2016 campaign, promising to build a wall on the southern border with Mexico, deport millions of migrants who arrived in the country illegally and end DACA, which provides renewable work permits to Dreamers.
But Trump’s rhetoric on immigration and DACA has wavered as president. When he moved to end DACA, Trump spoke of his “great heart” and “great love” for Dreamers. He then offered a six-month wind-down period designed to give Congress time to pass legislation to make the program permanent.
His stance appeared to change again, however. Just last November, he lashed out at Dreamers on Twitter, saying that “they are far from angels.”
“The president is, months before an election, doing absolutely everything within his power to see DACA ended and DACA recipients subjected to immediate deportation, an issue where only one in eight Americans support his position,” said Todd Schulte, president of FWD.us, a group working to protect Dreamers.
Business executives, donors and Republican leaders have long urged Trump to show compassion for Dreamers. Since 2018, the number of those who say Dreamers should be allowed to become citizens if they meet certain requirements has increased slightly, to 61 percent from 58 percent.
But it will be nearly impossible for a divided Congress to tackle immigration in an election year, given the historic intractability on the issue and the current focus on responding to the coronavirus pandemic and police brutality. Democrats are also suspicious of any immigration deals with Trump and want to wait to see whether their party wins back the White House and Senate in November.
After Democrats took control of the House in 2019, the lower chamber did pass a bill, largely along party lines, to provide legal status and eventual citizenship to 2.3 million Dreamers, including DACA recipients. The Senate, which needs 60 votes to pass legislation, has ignored it.
Morning Consult is a global data intelligence company, delivering insights on what people think in real time by surveying tens of thousands across the globe every single day.
More details on the poll and its methodology can be found in these two documents: Toplines | Crosstabs
Source: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/17/trump-supporters-dreamers-poll-323432
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Anita Kumar
I didn’t feel privileged, so for a while I didn’t think I was. Then I realized where I’d gone wrong
Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/poor-white-americans-reparations-slavery-black-lives-matter-tanehisi-coates-a9569431.html
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Joel Wayne
Nearly seven-in-10 voters say things in the U.S. are pretty seriously on the wrong track, according to a new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll.
Only 31 percent of voters say the country is headed in the right direction, the lowest mark recorded in POLITICO/Morning Consult polling since President Donald Trump took office in early 2017. Sixty-nine percent of those surveyed from May 29-June 1 say the country is on the wrong track.
The poll was conducted May 29-June 1, amid historic disruption in American life: the continued coronavirus pandemic, the crippling of the U.S. economy and the widespread protests over police brutality and the unequal treatment of racial minorities. Those protests turned violent and destructive in some cities while the poll was in the field.
With Trump facing a challenging reelection campaign in five months, Republican voters are far more likely to say the country is headed in the right direction. Nearly two-thirds, 65 percent, say the country is going in the right direction, versus 9 percent of Democrats and 23 percent of independents.
While the 31 percent “right direction” figure is a Trump-era low, it represents only a slight decline from the previous week, when 34 percent said the country is headed in the right direction. But the change is more significant since the coronavirus crisis began: Three months ago, in a POLITICO/Morning Consult poll conducted in late February and early March, 43 percent said the country was headed in the right direction.
“As 2020 headlines continue to be dominated by crises, the fewest voters we’ve tracked in nearly four years believe the country is going in the right direction,” said Tyler Sinclair, vice president at Morning Consult.
The new POLITICO/Morning Consult survey is not the only one to show declining views of the country’s direction. A Monmouth University poll out Tuesday also represented the low-water mark, going back to 2013, in the percentage who said the U.S. was headed in the right direction.
Though a decline in the number of Americans viewing the country as headed in the right direction would be concerning for Trump’s campaign, other incumbent presidents have won reelection even with significant majorities saying the country is on the wrong track. A Washington Post analysis in 2016 showed that Barack Obama and Bill Clinton won reelection despite high “wrong track” numbers in the polls.
The president’s approval rating is considered a more accurate predictor of his political fortunes, but that also looks bleak for Trump: In the new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll, 41 percent of voters approve of the job Trump is doing, and 55 percent disapprove. That’s statistically unchanged from the previous week, when 40 percent approved — though it is slightly lower than Trump’s approval ratings earlier this year, before voters’ perceptions of his response to the coronavirus outbreak turned negative.
The POLITICO/Morning Consult poll surveyed 1,981 registered voters and has a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percent.
Morning Consult is a global data intelligence company, delivering insights on what people think in real time by surveying tens of thousands across the globe every single day.
More details on the poll and its methodology can be found in these two documents: Toplines | Crosstabs
Source: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/03/poll-us-wrong-track-297033
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Steven Shepard
‘If all lives matter why are black people killed just for being black?’ Eilish asked
Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/news/billie-eilish-all-lives-matter-george-floyd-police-brutality-a9541071.html
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Adam White
Since everyone and their mother (and their dog) is on Instagram, it can be tough to separate the bland, average accounts from the truly great ones. But we’re here to help!
We’ve listed 34 absolute best instagram accounts — in no particular order, beyond being grouped with somewhat similar pages. To be clear, there are certainly plenty of fantastic Instagram pages we’ve left off. We can’t rank them all! But this is what we really love, the best in our eyes.
We also tried to feature a mix of accounts. Some will make you laugh, others are our favorite famous Instagrammers, and still others will help you appreciate beautiful photography. Here goes nothing. Read more…
More about Instagram, Social Media, Instagram Tips, Insta, and Culture
Source: https://mashable.com/article/best-instagram-accounts/
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Tim Marcin
One of our News & Guts supporters sent us her thoughts on self-quarantining and we wanted to share it with you.
From: Pamela Busfield in Austin, TX
I expect to read a number of stories of the struggles some people are facing during this crisis. So in contrast, I just wanted to take a moment to share the fact that I am grateful today and each day.
I am 71 years old, retired, and grateful for the fact that I have good health insurance, on the chance that I do get sick. (I strongly support a universal health care program because everyone should have the peace of mind that I have, knowing you have access to medical care without the worry of the cost).
I am grateful that my financial situation has not changed because of this crisis, as I still receive my state retirement and my social security checks to cover my expenses. I don’t have any stocks or investments so I’m not all frantic with what’s happening with the stock market.
I’m grateful that I have my little doggie to keep me company, two loving daughters who call to check on me each day, all the groceries I need, art supplies, books, and music to make my self-distancing a rather pleasant experience. (A little secret. I sometimes practice this self-distancing thing even when there is no crisis. Calms the mind).
My heart goes out to those whose lives have been turned upside down, those whose health has been affected, and those who have died from this virus. I’m terrified for our country and the rest of the world. At this point, I know there is not a lot I can do to be helpful. I feel like I’m doing my part by staying home and not adding to the problem. And I check on my family and friends, to keep them from going nuts. Some of them don’t handle the isolation as well as I do.
And the last thing that comes to mind this morning that I am grateful for is mail-in ballots. And I can’t wait to send in my vote on November 3, 2020. Until then……
Pamela Busfield‘s furry companion
The post Finding Things To Be Grateful For appeared first on News & Guts Media.
Source: https://www.newsandguts.com/finding-things-to-be-grateful-for/
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The Article Was Written/Published By: News & Guts
The extent to which Kobe Bryant has been deeply, personally mourned by fans across the country, from cities that once only spoke his name as a bitter curse—full disclosure, mine included—has been remarkable.
It’s undeniably tragic that a 41-year old man would die in a helicopter crash, leaving his family behind; and the public grief is especially understandable in Los Angeles, where his 20-year career made him a fan favorite. NBA fans also know, however, that Bryant relished his role as something of a public villain, decried in turn for his occasionally selfish play, antagonistic style, and off-the-court controversy. Bryant was a competitor whose intensity got in the way of teamwork, and over the course of his career, he would drive not just his opponents, but league officials, executives and even teammates to frustration. Not that he cared—just count the five championships.
Still, Bryant eventually softened into a beloved elder statesman of the league, which is the persona that people largely chose to remember last week. It’s the most understandable thing in the world that most people would smooth over the spikier parts of his reputation in the wake of a genuine tragedy, but the national public mourning for Bryant stood apart even in that light. While it’s mostly explained by both the tragic nature of his death and his cultural ubiquity, it’s worth considering another way in which Bryant was unique: He may have been the last superstar of an era when sports fandom lacked its now-frequently intense political charge. He was a competitor whose talents you could memorialize, whatever your politics, without seeming to take a side.
Over the course of Kobe’s 20-year-long career, he remained consistently silent on political issues, in a way that by the time of his retirement seemed wildly anachronistic. Bryant’s apolitical attitude reflected the individual-focused, Jordan-era status quo in which he entered the league, but it eventually made him out of step with his younger counterparts, who have largely taken up the activist mantle of older icons like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Oscar Robertson. Today’s NBA stars are eager not only to use their platform to amplify political and social causes, but to establish activism as a responsibility in its own right, as LeBron James, Carmelo Anthony and others did at the ESPY Awards in 2016. Even prominent head coaches like Steve Kerr and Gregg Popovich—who are demographically more likely to be Trump supporters than liberal agitators—have earned reputations for speaking out against police shootings and the Trump administration in the bluntest terms.
That outspokenness has earned the NBA’s current reputation as the “woke” league among the four major American professional sports, recently given its first high-profile test by the intraleague debate over the morality of doing business with China. Bryant was a star in that country, surpassing even Michael Jordan’s peak fame in the U.S., with nascent Chinese business connections of his own. Chinese fans called him Xiao Fei Xia, or the “Little Flying Warrior.” He was, predictably, silent about the China-Hong Kong controversy, at least in public.
Bryant’s refusal to acknowledge the political and social dimensions of his career appropriately echoed his hero and predecessor in Jordan. At the height of his stardom, Jordan apocryphally justified his own recusal from politics by saying that “Republicans buy sneakers, too.” But where Jordan saw his neutrality as an economic calculation, Kobe simply didn’t see the neutrality in the first place. Politics had nothing to do with his singular mission to destroy and demoralize his opponents, on or off the court. Therefore, they were unworthy of his public consideration.
Compare Bryant to his era-defining successor in LeBron James, who in addition to being one of the greatest players in the history of the game has repeatedly and vocally embraced his role as a political figure. In 2016, the year Bryant retired, James campaigned for Hillary Clinton in his home state of Ohio. After Trump’s election, he expressed skepticism that that future NBA champions would want to make the traditional White House visit. Bryant, on the other hand, stuck to a more nonpartisan “Rock the Vote”-style plea for participation in 2016, although he coyly noted that “you know what candidate I’m supporting.”
James’ debut as a major activist came in March 2012, when he tweeted out a now-famous photo showing him and his then-teammates on the Miami Heat wearing hoodies in solidarity with the recently murdered Trayvon Martin. The text that accompanied James’ photo was unambiguous about his intent: “#WeAreTrayvonMartin #Hoodies #Stereotyped #WeWantJustice.”
Bryant was more circumspect. Regarding the Martin case, the Laker great said he “won’t react to something just because I’m supposed to, because I’m an African-American,” as he told the New Yorker’s Ben McGrath in 2014. He positioned himself beyond classification as a spokesman for any group: “There is a bigger issue in terms of being an African-American athlete, and the box people try to put you in because of it.”
Bryant would later change his mind on the topic, speaking in support of Martin at a rally staged by the slain teenager’s parents. But his earlier statement was reflective of his status as the last of the NBA’s old guard—men who saw their superstar status as transcending their personal identity, at least in the public sphere.
Another conspicuous example of that dynamic, from far earlier in Bryant’s career, only recently came to light. Jerry West, a Laker legend who went on to serve as a top executive for the franchise, described during the aforementioned TNT panel a time in 2004 when Bryant confided in him his intent to leave the Lakers for their crosstown rivals, the Los Angeles Clippers. “I’ve never really mentioned this to anyone,” West said. “He was going to come and sign with the Clippers. … I said, ‘Kobe, you can’t go play with the Clippers. You can’t play for that owner. Period.’”
The Clippers were then owned by Donald Sterling, a notorious racist and slumlord who was banned from the NBA for life in 2014 when a tape of one of his offensive tirades surfaced. But Sterling’s reputation long preceded that bombshell. As part of a 2019 podcast from ESPN, former Clippers forward Olden Polynice described how, in the early 1990s, Sterling would ogle him and other black players in the locker room, and likened Sterling to a slave owner for his exhortation to no one in particular to “look at this buck.” It’s impossible to imagine that Bryant, who at that point had played his entire career in the same city at the Clippers, hadn’t heard such stories, if not worse.
And yet, he seemed to have his heart set on departing for the Clippers before West’s intervention. The simplest explanation for his indifference is that Bryant assumed his on-the-court greatness would make the surrounding circumstances irrelevant. His dissatisfaction with his circumstances on the Lakers, especially his personal clashes with O’Neal, was what led him to nearly leave the team in the first place. (Bryant ultimately spent his entire career as a Laker, almost unthinkable in today’s NBA).
Another superstar contemporary of Bryant’s is worth considering in this light: Allen Iverson, drafted first overall in the same 1996 draft class from which Bryant would be picked 13th. Iverson did not have the luxury of eschewing the politics that came with being a brash, successful black man in a league still dominated by white interests; politics repeatedly found him.
As a 17-year-old, Iverson was involved in a fight at a bowling alley that pit a group of black teens against a group of white teens. Prosecutors charged him with a felony, alleging that he hit a woman in the head with a chair—a charge Iverson denied, and which video evidence threw into doubt. Tried as an adult, Iverson was convicted and sentenced to 15 years in prison. Although he was granted clemency after just four months, the racial tensions at the heart of the case were unmistakable. They dogged Iverson for his entire career.
The two players also shared a deep connection to Philadelphia, where Iverson played nearly a decade’s worth of MVP-caliber basketball for the 76ers, and where Bryant became a phenom at Lower Merion High School after spending much of his childhood in Italy. Bryant’s upper-class, globetrotting upbringing as the son of former NBA player Joe “Jellybean” Bryant made him in many ways an outsider to his peers and teammates, and it might also explain how he could justify his consistent remove from America’s raging culture wars.
In the NBA, those wars reached a fever pitch in 2005, with the institution of the league’s now-infamous player dress code. Among other things, Iverson’s signature do-rag was banned from news conferences by the late commissioner David Stern, as part of an effort to rid the league of the hip-hop culture that Iverson proudly embodied. Which isn’t to say at all that Bryant existed outside that culture—far from it. But while players like Iverson and former Golden State Warriors star Jason Richardson openly protested, decrying the dress code as racist, Bryant quietly adapted, later describing the change as nothing but a mild annoyance on his way to continued glory.
At the time the dress code was implemented, Bryant was dealing with a major impediment to such glory. The 2003 sexual assault allegations against Bryant are impossible to ignore not only as part of his legacy, but as part of the heelish persona he meticulously constructed over the course of his career. Bryant spent much of the early-to-mid-2000s isolated as he shuttled back and forth between California and Colorado, where he faced first a criminal trial (eventually dismissed, after his accuser told prosecutors she would not testify), then a civil case brought by his accuser.
Bryant paid a price for his alleged actions, losing several major endorsements and being scorned by some fans and the media—though both the endorsements and goodwill were, for the most part, quickly recovered. During this period, Bryant invented the antagonistic “Black Mamba” persona that accompanied his second championship run through the late 2000s and early 2010s, best encapsulated by a late-career promotional video that demanded the viewer, like Kobe, “channel the villain [and] unleash the hero.” Lakers fans rallied around him, building a loyalty perhaps the strongest in any sport.
As Bryant aged, the lifelong exercise in self-branding that grew out of his authentic will to win mellowed into an enthusiastic love of mentorship and parenthood. When his helicopter crashed, Bryant was with his daughter on the way to the Mamba Sports Academy, which he launched in 2018 “to update the way men, women and youth approach human performance.” It was where he attentively encouraged the budding career of Gianna Bryant, who had hoped to play for the women’s basketball powerhouse University of Connecticut, and, eventually, the WNBA.
In retirement, Bryant grew somewhat bolder with his political speech, voicing his support for Colin Kaepernick’s national anthem protests and taking potshots at President Donald Trump on Twitter. He built his legacy during an era where all that NBA fans expected of their superstars was a ruthless, self-justifying dominance on the court, but he ended his career in a time when his successors felt a responsibility to use their power and platform for social good. He seemed in recent years to be working his way toward finding his own typically idiosyncratic place in that firmament.
And just as Bryant spent his career chasing Jordan’s legacy, in the aftermath of his death it became clear that today’s young NBA players idolized Bryant and his hypercompetitive nature in the same way. Although something singular was lost forever with Bryant’s death, if those stars apply his single-minded ethos to the activist framework in which they now operate, we may still see in the future some evolutionary form of the Mamba Mentality.
Source: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/02/01/kobe-bryant-politics-nba-obituary-110030
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Derek Robertson
What is happening in Iran now is not simply ‘news’ for us in the diaspora – it’s the repetition of decades-old trauma
Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/iran-iraq-crisis-missiles-trump-us-soleimani-killing-a9278386.html
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Shappi Khorsandi
#DeleteFacebook.
It’s the one guaranteed response I receive from readers whenever I’ve published a story critical of the social media giant over the past few years.
I, however, have resisted the calls to #DeleteFacebook. As a reporter, it would be hard not to follow what’s happening on there. It is, after all, the world’s largest social network, with billions of users around the globe. There are also some relatives on there that I still like.
That said, I also understand and empathize with the #DeleteFacebook sentiment more so than ever before. The revulsion many feel towards Facebook is unmatched among the big tech titans. But it’s not unwarranted. Data privacy violations, bizarre political ad policies, and a multitude of other questionable business decisions have led to this visceral distaste for Facebook. Read more…
More about Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, Social Media, Data Privacy, and 2020
Source: https://mashable.com/article/delete-facebook-2020/
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The Article Was Written/Published By: (Deleted account)
From ‘total EXONERATION’ to $2m in charity payments, the leader of the free world gave us so much to work with this year
Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/trump-2019-quotes-impeachment-allegations-north-korea-racism-tweets-a9254241.html
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Lucy Anna Gray
