As John Nichols tweets:
“American journalism is in crisis, under attack and literally shutting down across the vast news deserts of a country where citizens are no longer getting coverage that is sufficient to sustain democracy. So DC journalists have rallied after the #WHCD to condemn… a comedian.”
YOU-GO-GIRL
2010, 2014, 2016, one statehouse after another. . . despite their gains during recent special elections, if they put more standard-issue corporate Dems on the ballot in November, they’ll get wiped out all over again.
Get your hands off the primaries, Reps. Pelosi and Hoyer!
Heaven forfend they might articulate the hope that spiritual values animate public policy.
The GOP party line is now that any attempt to oppose Trump in any way will spell electoral ruin for a Democratic senator. Thus Trump & Sen. Cronyn’s yelping about the defeat Sen. Tester will allegedly be delivered because he revealed how flagrantly ill-qualified as well as ethically dubious the latest Trump lemon was.
Note to Sen. Tester: just explain to the population of Montana how grotesquely unfit and thereby potentially or currently catastrophic Trump’s nominees are.
New York’s Landmarks Preservation Commission has in recent years turned into an advocacy group for development. As the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation writes, LPC has “approved demolitions, alterations, and new construction in historic districts and changes to individual landmarks that would have been unimaginable in years past. It has denied protections to incredibly important historic sites, flying in the face of the intent and spirit of the landmarks law.”
The imminent, long-belated resignation of current chair Meenakshi Srinivasan–watch, she’ll go to an overpaid position with a development company–means there is a chance to put LPC back on track.
Chauncey DeVega writes in Salon:
“America’s crisis in civic literacy, political polarization, rampant anti-intellectualism, deeply embedded sexism and racism, greed, broken schools and weakened democratic institutions, as well as a hollowed-out public sphere where people confuse celebrity with human worth, made the election of someone like Trump nearly inevitable.”
Why is the Mayor opposing landmark status for the Third and Fourth Avenue corridors south of 14th Street?
Because he and Deputy Mayor Glen and, of course, the developer vultures, intend to level those beautiful, historic buildings still standing to let the new Tech Hub on 14th Street serve as the camel in the tent.
Shame on you, Mayor whatever your name is!
I’m looking forward to reading or perusing Ara Gallant by David Wills.
The truth about McConnell: Will Bunch in the Philadelphia Daily News doesn’t pull punches.
The invidious old time-server rules via “a win-at-all costs mentality that crushes norms of basic democracy that had survived for a couple of centuries. It is Mitch McConnell, more than anyone else in Washington, who has turned the notion of comity into comedy.”
You know, organizations like dance companies might want to reflect on why they are no longer covered in the newspapers and how unregulated business practices have hollowed out journalism.
With arts on the ropes in the U.S. and coverage in the “mainstream” media almost non-existent, it might be a good idea to understand how we have got to this point.
Read Alex Shephard in The New Republic on how “Finance is Killing the News.”
