The Nation May-19-14

City Power! As a progressive city councilor in the second-largest city in Oregon, I found Michelle Goldberg’s “Power to the City” [April 21] especially timely. Eugene is a midsize city at the epicenter of a county that suffers from chronic lower-than-average wages alongside relatively high housing costs, leaving many working families struggling in near-poverty. In March, I co-sponsored a proposal for a paid sick time ordinance that would provide workplace protections and financial security for approximately 25,000 mostly low-wage workers in our city. It is modeled after a similar ordinance in Portland, implemented in January. We are hearing from union grocery store workers who can’t take sick time until they have been ill for three days, hospital workers who don’t earn sick days and workers who fear losing their jobs…

@KatrinaNation
Justice Sotomayor delivers most
passionate, significant and constitutionally powerful dissent
of her career
over affirmative
action ban.
 @chrislhayes
Best thing about the whole Bundy story
is learning that the federal government runs a food stamp program for cows.
 @lizzwinstead
When God closes a Fred Phelps, he opens a Cliven Bundy.
 @EdgeofSports
If Tillman and the many other crimes
of the Iraq War
had received 1/100th the Congressional/media attention of Benghazi, we’d be better off.
 @RichardKimNYC
Whenever I get a handwritten letter
with multiple
American flags stamped all over it,
I know it is gonna be
a hilarious morning.
 @tomtomorrow
Seems like the people who wave the flags the hardest are
often the ones who hate the country
the most.
…

Future historians will note that in April 2014, nearly a quarter-century after the end of the Soviet Union, the White House declared a new Cold War on Russia—and that, in a grave failure of representative democracy, there was scarcely a public word of debate, much less opposition, from the American political or media establishment. 
 The Obama administration announced its Cold War indirectly, in a front-page New York Times story by Peter Baker on April 20. According to the report, President Obama has resolved, because of the Ukraine crisis, that he can “never have a constructive relationship” with Russian President Vladimir Putin and will instead “ignore the master of the Kremlin” and focus on “isolating…Russia by cutting off its economic and political ties to the outside world…effectively making it a…

Iris Stevenson hurt no child, seduced no teenager, abused no student at Crenshaw High School in Los Angeles. This is what her supporters say in rallying outrage that this exemplary teacher has languished for months in the gulag of administrative detention known as “teacher jail”: she doesn’t belong there.
 And she doesn’t. 
 Days before being removed from her music classes in December and ordered to spend her workdays isolated on a floor of the LA Unified School District (LAUSD)HQ with other suspect teachers, Stevenson, a legend in South LA and beyond, was at the White House directing the renowned Crenshaw Elite Choir as it sang for President Obama. 
 She has not been officially informed of the charges against her. Unofficially, Stevenson is said to have swept off the…

Comedian and political satirist Bill Maher has been the host of HBO’s Real Time With Bill Maher since 2003. His previous show, Politically Incorrect, which started
 in 1993, was canceled by ABC after 9/11. This interview has been edited and condensed. —Jon Wiener
 JON WIENER: You do live shows all over the place. What’s it like to do your left-wing live show in a right-wing state like Alabama?
 BILL MAHER: I’ve been to Alabama twice this year. It’s a lot of fun. I’ve yet to find a place in America that’s so backward I can’t find two or three thousand screaming liberals to come out on a Friday night and cheer for the blue team. I think they’re gratified to look around the room and see so many people who…

Since 2007, at least fourteen inmates in Texas state prisons have died from overheating, according to a new report by the University of Texas School of Law’s Human Rights Clinic. 
 Temperature logs kept by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice reveal heat indices in some facilities surpassing 100 degrees Fahrenheit by 8:30 in the morning, with temperatures spiking above 110 degrees for a heat index of 149 degrees Fahrenheit.
 And yet Texas has repeatedly failed to provide proper air conditioning and ventilation to inmates, even though federal appellate courts have found that submitting inmates to extreme heat is a violation of their constitutional rights. 
 —Julianne Hing
 Colorlines.com…