Innehållsförteckning för May-18-15 från The Nation

@thenation.com Happy Anniversary! I have been a Nation subscriber off and on for nearly 50 years, but I recently made the decision to let my subscription expire. The only reason was that I had come to dread the news. I had decided that it was bad news enough to have become elderly; I did not need the further outrages inflicted by Cruz, McConnell, Gohmert, et al. Like Candide, I made the decision simply to tend my garden. However, I somehow continued on your mailing list just long enough to receive the 150th-anniversary issue [April 6]. What an inspiration! I realize that I really need The Nation for however much longer I am alive. Thank you for the remarkable good work you do. JANEL BORSOS SAN ANTONIO Congratulations on The Nation’s…

The phrase “Clinton rules” has two distinct meanings. The enemies of Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton use it to mean that the former president and former secretary of state flout the rules that apply to everyone else. Liberals, however, use it as shorthand for the way that journalists breathlessly abandon the ordinary standards of evidence to pursue pseudo-scandals against the pair, often cooked up by right-wing operatives. As the Daily Howler wrote in 2007, “Under ‘the Clinton rules of journalism,’ you can say any goddamn thing you want—as long as you say it about the Clintons.” Both versions of the “Clinton rules” describe real phenomena, and with any given news story, it can be difficult to figure out which is at work. It’s easier if you start off by taking…

Aprofound sense of cognitive dissonance lies at the center of American politics: one that even our most elite journalists and pundits refuse to recognize. In virtually all of our political debate and news coverage, the competition between the two parties is treated as one of personalities and ideas. As with any democracy, the guys who are the most popular, whether for reasons of charisma or appealing policy proposals, emerge as the winners. The job of journalists and pundits is to illuminate the candidates’ character and beliefs and track their respective successes, dividing themselves between “substance” and “horse-race” coverage however they see fit. But this is nonsense. In fact, American political life revolves around two mutually reinforcing truths. The first is that our democracy has been severely corrupted by money; the…

“In New York City, one scandal leads to another.” This line, which could be from William D. Cohan’s profile of US Attorney Preet Bharara in this week’s issue, is actually from “The Shame of New York,” a report by journalists Fred J. Cook and Gene Gleason that took up an entire issue of The Nation in 1959. Surveying a city dominated by the corroded husk of the old Tammany Hall machine, police corruption, and the wasteful slum-clearing programs of master builder Robert Moses (theirs was an early criticism of Moses, as was another Nation exposé in 1956), the report shocked the city’s establishment. In her syndicated newspaper column two weeks later, Eleanor Roosevelt called it “as good a muckraking job on big-city government as I can remember since… Jacob Riis…

O my hate, so majestic saintly, pure, and angelic bless my excess with a fat caress make me bow and make me proud. Humped by humble squires proud to be living sans Desire sans Goodness, sans Faith sans sun’s caressing grace. O my hate, grandiloquent shield agitate my soul to infinite zeal beyond other harms concealed. Hate wins, hate resounds!, armor ’gainst a vile amour that defrauds all— seven deadly Sins of my ardor! After CRUZ E SOUSA (Afro-Brazilian, c. 1898)…

On January 15, Warren Weinstein, an American aid worker, and Giovanni Lo Porto, an Italian citizen, were killed by a US drone strike at an Al Qaeda compound in Pakistan, where the two were being held hostage. Their deaths were revealed by President Obama in an April 23 press conference in which he expressed profound regret, took “full responsibility for all our counterterrorism operations,” and pledged a review. The president appeared somber, forthright, even grief-stricken. But his display of emotion, however heartfelt, conceals a more disconcerting reality. To date, not one US official has been held accountable for any civilian casualty in any drone strike anywhere. Securing justice for these victims would be an arduous process, not least because there are so many of them. Since 2004 in Pakistan alone,…

The death of the Comcast–Time Warner Cable merger is an extraordinary victory for democracy. Along with the Federal Communications Commission’s recent decision on net neutrality, it signals the beginning of an anti-monopoly movement much like the one that broke up Standard Oil 100 years ago, ushering in an era of fairer American markets. In early 2014, Comcast’s board of directors met to discuss a merger with Time Warner Cable. CEO Brian Roberts called the subsequent approval “a very special moment.” Most commentators—including progressive writers like David Sirota—predicted that the merger would go through. After all, Comcast had pushed through its merger with NBC Universal in 2011 by buying up lobbyists in Washington. When I testified before the New York Public Service Commission last June, most groups submitting testimony assumed that…

The worst disconnect in American politics is between what presidential candidates say about trade policy and what presidents do. In 2008, candidate Barack Obama decried “a Washington where decades of trade deals like NAFTA and China have been signed with plenty of protections for corporations and their profits, but none for our environment or our workers.” Not a lot of specifics, but great characterization. Unfortunately, Obama now wants congressional approval of a trade promotion authority in order to “fast-track” passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership deal, which Global Trade Watch’s Lori Wallach refers to as “NAFTA on steroids.” Labor and environmental groups warn that the fast-track dodge will prevent precisely the oversight and amendments that are needed to protect workers and communities in the United States and abroad. Prospective 2016 Democratic…

THAT THING YOU’RE WATCHING, OR playing, or reading: Who but curmudgeons doesn’t now call it content? The concept of medium specificity—that a film is something fundamentally different from a television show or video game—had a good run, but it now seems increasingly beside the point. For those who can afford the requisite subscriptions, all digital amusements and diversions can be conveniently engaged on the same handheld device. This is an impressive and often welcome development, though it generates its own confusions. November’s powerful, high-profile four-part miniseries Olive Kitteridge, which I watched in bed on an iPad using a borrowed HBO Go account the day after its premiere, introduces itself on-screen as “A Film by Lisa Cholodenko,” and the claim seems plausible enough, if unnecessary. “Film” is no longer a convincing…

SITTING IN AT UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA For two years, student activists at the University of Alabama have called on the school to join the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC), an independent labor-monitoring group, to ensure adequate oversight of the factories that produce collegiate apparel. On April 6, 10 students, alongside community supporters and two Bangladeshi garment workers, one of whom survived the April 2013 Rana Plaza factory collapse, which claimed over 1,100 lives, staged a sit-in at president Judy Bonner’s office—the first documented occupation of the president’s office since the university was established in 1831. The students demanded that the university respect the lives of garment workers who make its apparel by joining the more than 180 universities currently affiliated with the WRC. Outgoing president Bonner has promised to review the…

$32M Amount spent last year by Comcast and Time Warner Cable on influencing the federal government $4.6M Money invested by Comcast to lobby for the Time Warner merger and other issues during the first three months of this year $2.1M Amount given to federal candidates by Comcast last year as donations 1M Number of comments and petition signatures given to the Federal Communications Commission asking that the merger be blocked “Politicians didn’t stop [the Comcast–Time Warner] deal. You did.” —Senator Al Franken (D-Minn.)…

What strikes me most about the recent videos of black men dying and dying and dying is the repetition. They all seem familiar—as in: We’ve heard it before, and before, and then well before even that. The scenes splashed across the news have become almost ritualistic, prayerful; they have a narrative potency that seems to move of its own accord, an agency exceeding that of the humans involved, whether police or suspects, victims or bystanders. We all know the words, we all sing along. In North Charleston, South Carolina, the death of Walter Scott began with a litany like so many before it: He reached for my weapon, a struggle ensued, I feared for my life, the weapon discharged. Amen. The counternarrative, the recall and response, was provided by a…

ACROSS 1 “Barb”: that is one choice among terms of endearment (5) 4 Through crash, ban my foes (2,5,2) 9 What you might be doing in the apartment as malfunctioning Net breaks up a call (7) 10 Hamlet opposing sick era (7) 11 Did he know all about Eve in the “morning after” commercial? (4) 12 Gandhi’s last neutral robe is something drawing interest (10) 14 Strangely, the sting becomes more constrained (8) 16 Gladiator, possibly restricted near Mideastern country (5) 19 Long, thick hair finally upset the artist of Olympia (5) 20 Crazy antics preceding Marty’s last two symbols for holiness (8) 22 Appalling lack: Ben-Hur getting time off to eat (5,5) 25 Vagabonds after high school, gone with the wind (4) 27 Womanizer returns, ultimately unforgiven with a…