Photos by DYLAN LONG BY DYLAN LONG I was at the George Floyd protest yesterday that ended on the Vine Street Expressway in a melee with the police, both as a participant and a witness documenting the events with my camera. This is what I saw: The demonstration started at 8th & Race and snaked through Center City streets near City Hall, ending up on the Ben Franklin Parkway. At approximately 4:50 PM we approached the 22nd street on-ramp to I-676, aka the Vine Street Expressway. Police officers blocked the entrance with their cars, but protesters began bypassing them along […]
OPEN LETTER: From Admiral Mike Mullen, 17th Chairman Of The Joint Chiefs Of Staff, To America
Photo OLAF BLECKER THE ATLANTIC: It sickened me yesterday to see security personnel—including members of the National Guard—forcibly and violently clear a path through Lafayette Square to accommodate the president’s visit outside St. John’s Church. I have to date been reticent to speak out on issues surrounding President Trump’s leadership, but we are at an inflection point, and the events of the past few weeks have made it impossible to remain silent. Whatever Trump’s goal in conducting his visit, he laid bare his disdain for the rights of peaceful protest in this country, gave succor to the leaders of other […]
WORTH REPEATING: The Banality Of Evil
WILL BUNCH: The moment we’ve been dreading since that escalator ride down Trump Tower five years ago this month — that’s been slowly building brick by brick as Donald Trump tore down the rule of law, abused the presidency to enrich himself, and grabbed the bully pulpit of the White House to divide America with racism, sexism and xenophobia — finally came at 6:45 p.m. as the sun sank over Washington on the night of June 1, 2020. Backed into a corner after his incompetence and distrust in science was trampled by a virus that’s killed 105,000 Americans, compounded by […]
BEING THERE: This Is America
NEW YORKER: “A riot is the language of the unheard.” This is how Martin Luther King, Jr., explained matters to Mike Wallace, of CBS News, in 1966. […] In September, 1967, with little more than seven months left to live, King delivered a speech in Washington, D.C., in which he addressed a society “poisoned to its soul by racism” and the question of how to confront and overcome that malignancy. This was in the wake of uprisings in Detroit and many other American cities. King considered the question not in the spirit of endorsement but of comprehension. Urban riots, he […]
HOT DOCUMENT: Nothing Is Real
CBS NEWS: As President Trump continues to insist voting should be in-person and alleges voting by mail leads to fraud, some Republican officials are moving forward with preparations for an increase in mail-in voting, especially in the upcoming primaries across the country, as well as in the general election. It’s the latest sign that while Mr. Trump might be trying to discredit the mail-in process from the bully pulpit, a growing number of voters are indicating support for such options amid health concerns related to the coronavirus and the uncertainty about how safe it will be to vote in the […]
FALSE PROPHET: Idiocracy In The Hall Of Mirrors
THE ATLANTIC: If you were an adherent, no one would be able to tell. You would look like any other American. You could be a mother, picking leftovers off your toddler’s plate. You could be the young man in headphones across the street. You could be a bookkeeper, a dentist, a grandmother icing cupcakes in her kitchen. You may well have an affiliation with an evangelical church. But you are hard to identify just from the way you look—which is good, because someday soon dark forces may try to track you down. You understand this sounds crazy, but you don’t […]
WORTH REPEATING: Will Americans Lose Their Right To Vote To The Covid–19 Pandemic?
NEW YORK TIMES NEW YORK TIMES: A national election is a giant pop-up event, larger in scale and significance than any other private or public occasion. Two-thirds of Americans expect the Covid-19 outbreak to disrupt voting in November, according to a late-April survey by the Pew Research Center. A successful election will require some Covid-era changes. The main one is enabling tens of millions more people to vote by mail (also called absentee balloting — the terms are synonymous) than have ever done so before. It’s also important to make adjustments to keep polling places open for people who don’t […]
BILLY BRAGG: There Is Power In A Union
BILLY BRAGG: We’ve been experiencing what we refer to as ‘Andy Warhol Weather’ here today: fifteen minutes of rain, fifteen minutes of sun, fifteen minutes of hail etc etc. As a result, I couldn’t take my guitar amp out onto the rubble mound this week for the #ClapForNHS #ClapForCarers #ClapForKeyWorkers so I set up in the old garage in case the rain came again. As it’s technically already May 1st — International Workers Day – in some parts of the world, I thought I’d play the riff from There is Power in a Union this week as a salute to […]
RANT: Mad As Hell, Not Gonna Take It Anymore
Dude goes off on the government about stimulus checks by u/dartmaster666 in nextfuckinglevel Voice of reason. Volume up. WARNING: Some profanity and adult situations.
WORTH REPEATING: This Is How Rome Fell
THE ATLANTIC: When the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills—a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public—had gone untreated for years. We had learned to live, uncomfortably, with the symptoms. It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity—to shock Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category. The crisis demanded a response that was swift, rational, and collective. The United States reacted instead like Pakistan or Belarus—like a country with shoddy infrastructure and […]
HOT DOCUMENTS: The Red Dawn Emails
NEW YORK TIMES: As the coronavirus emerged and headed toward the United States, an extraordinary conversation was hatched among an elite group of infectious disease doctors and medical experts in the federal government and academic institutions around the nation. Red Dawn — a nod to the 1984 film with Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen — was the nickname for the email chain they built. Different threads in the chain were named Red Dawn Breaking, Red Dawn Rising, Red Dawn Breaking Bad and, as the situation grew more dire, Red Dawn Raging. It was hosted by the chief medical officer at […]
WORTH REPEATING: Jared Kushner Will Kill Us All
Artwork by @Noid68 NEW YORK TIMES: The journalist Andrea Bernstein looked closely at Kushner’s business record for her recent book “American Oligarchs: The Kushners, the Trumps, and the Marriage of Money and Power,” speaking to people on all sides of his real estate deals as well as those who worked with him at The New York Observer, the weekly newspaper he bought in 2006. Kushner, Bernstein told me, “really sees himself as a disrupter.” Again and again, she said, people who’d dealt with Kushner told her that whatever he did, he “believed he could do it better than anybody else, […]
NPR 4 THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When U Can’t
HEAR & NOW: Winning the Cold War, Bacevich says, led average Americans and policymakers to believe “the future was ours to define.” Instead, he found it led to folly and delusion. American leaders in 1989 had a “simplistic” view of the Cold War and concluded that the fall of the Berlin Wall was a “wonderful,” future-defining event, he says. The post-Cold War presidencies of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama are defined by the belief that the Cold War positioned the U.S. to determine the future, he says. Bacevich finds the problem with these presidents was not with […]