June 28, 2016

but ah my friends and oh my foes, it shed a lovely light.

Fare thee well, all.

Thanks for the hospitality over these many years, Skinner. You've been a gracious host. I've enjoyed discussions with so many people here, and I've learned a lot.

But sometimes moving on is just the right... move.

That's it, really.

Have a lovely summer, everyone.

(Mods, I understand if you lock this.)

June 28, 2016

Clinton to offer debt forgiveness to young entrepeneurs in the form of deferred

student loan payments.


WASHINGTON — Hillary Clinton will propose allowing entrepreneurs to defer making student loan payments, as part of a technology agenda she plans to introduce on Tuesday.

Clinton’s campaign says she would permit start-up founders and early employees to forgo payments on their federal student loans for up to three years. Those who launch businesses that provide social benefits would also be permitted to apply for forgiveness of up to $17,500 of their debt after five years.

She’ll also propose connecting every household in America to high-speed internet by 2020 and training 50,000 new computer science teachers over the next decade.

Clinton will present her agenda during a campaign stop at a small business incubator in Denver. She is working to woo young voters attracted to primary rival Bernie Sanders.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/clinton-to-offer-debt-forgiveness-to-young-entrepreneurs/2016/06/28/865404f8-3d17-11e6-9e16-4cf01a41decb_story.html

June 27, 2016

Across the country, the SCOTUS decisison re abotion, really undermines T.R.A.P.

Sure, a constitutional amendment declaring that life begins at conception gets the lion's share of the outrage on the left, but it never should have. It is, as many in the pro-choice community have said for years, a classic feint- "look over here, look over here"- while from coast to coast, this century, Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers has been the work horse of the anti-choice movement. It would be hard to overstate how damnably effective T.R.A.P. has been, in state after state in shutting down clinics and shutting out docs who perform abortions.

The decision yesterday regarding the onerous Texas regulations will impact other states with similar regulations, but it's important to remember that not all T.R.A.P. regulations in every state where they've been enacted were covered in the Texas decision.

It was a good, important first step in reversing the onerous burdens that have been placed on women seeking abortions in many states, but it's still just a first step.

http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/06/27/483698407/fallout-from-supreme-court-ruling-against-texas-laws-abortion-restrictions

June 27, 2016

Donald Trump Isn't the Presidential Candidate We Should Be Worried About

Boy, does this article make a good point.


The real danger is the smarter, more capable neo-fascist politician who will inevitably rise in his wake.

The voters vowed to take their revenge at the polls. They’d missed out on the country’s vaunted prosperity. They were disgusted with the liberal direction of the previous administration. They were anti-abortion and pro-religion. They were suspicious of immigrants, haughty intellectuals, and intrusive international institutions. And they very much wanted to make their nation great again.

They’d lost a lot of elections. But this time, they won.

In Poland, that is.


<snip>

read:https://www.thenation.com/article/donald-trump-isnt-the-presidential-candidate-we-should-be-worried-about/

June 26, 2016

Today's NY Sunday magazine cover: Will Trump Swallow the G.O.P. Whole?

June 26, 2016

On Eve of SCOTUS Abortion Decision, Texas Accused of Suppressing Key Data

The Supreme Court is expected on Monday to announce its decision on Texas' abortion law, in what could be the most consequential ruling on the issue in a generation. The question: Do new requirements on abortion providers pose an unconstitutional "undue burden" on Texas women?

But among the reams of evidence presented to the high court and the public debate in Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt, something is still missing: A full, official account of the initial impact of the law on Texas women.

A state employee with knowledge of the annual data Texas collects on abortion spoke to NBC News and is accusing state officials overseeing the Department of Health Services of intentionally blocking the information and instructing staff members to mislead people who ask for it. Because fact-finding traditionally ends after such a case goes to trial, long before it reaches the Supreme Court, the justices may or may not have considered it. But in the court of public opinion, the data could potentially undermine Texas' official argument that its requirements pose no particular burden on women.

First catapulted to the national stage by then-state Sen. Wendy Davis' pink-sneakered filibuster, the law has a bundle of abortion restrictions. Local abortion clinics have asked the Supreme Court to block two of the rules: that doctors performing abortions have admitting privileges at local hospitals and that even early procedures, including "medication abortions" that involve only taking two pills, take place in expensive ambulatory surgical centers.

Saying they are unable to comply with the admitting privileges provision — in one border town, McAllen, no hospital would even send abortion providers an application — about half of the clinics in Texas have already closed since 2013. If the Supreme Court allows the other requirement to go into effect, only nine or 10 clinics will be left in a state with 5.4 million women of reproductive age. '

<snip>

read:http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/eve-supreme-court-abortion-decision-texas-accused-suppressing-key-data-n598071

I urge you to read the whole story. The details are damning.

June 26, 2016

I don't like that what happened in Orlando has already faded into being "the past"

It's the damn speed of the world we live in. Its attenuated our attention spans. It's the never ending shoveling of "new" onto our plates by the media which rushes from one thing to the next. It's our connectedness or over connectedness, depending how one views it. Things can be both bad and good. Or at least appear that way. That's how I see the "connected" issue.

It's information overload. It's so much more.

It troubles me greatly that I am susceptible to all this. It trouble me greatly that the enormous tragedy of Orlando is slipping into the past.

I want the loss of those lives so tragically to mean more than a brief moment of national horror.

June 26, 2016

To Change or Not to Change. That is the question.

Forgive me for that, it's more precise to say: to make perceived enormous changes for the sake of change and out of fear, or to largely stay the course and go with incremental change, that is the question.

Personality (yes, an election is always significantly about who we perceive a candidate to be) and the question above, are what I see the election coming down to.

And I suspect that the appetite for change, strong as it is, will diminish between now and then, and that Trump's personality issues will continue to grow (a bit) and become even more of an issue.

I am not saying HRC and democrats have this in the bag. I'd never say that. Current polling favors her, but that isn't factored in to my (overly simple, I'm sure) equation.

June 26, 2016

Robby Mook is a charming young man, Paul Manafort creeps me out, Texit, Vexit

and a couple of other observations.

I did something I haven't done in months, if not longer: I skipped through the Sunday Morning yammering.

I watched Robby Mook on Fox. I'm familiar with him not just as Hillary's campaign manager but because he's a Vermonter who got his start here in Vermont. He was more polished than I recall. He isn't, I don't think, a TV natural, but he was articulate enough.

Paul Manafort? What is there to say? He's a long time republican operative with an ugly and shady past. Good fit for Donald. He got asked by Chuck Todd about Dr. James Dobson's comment this week about Donny being a baby Christian and reborn. He flat refused to answer.

Finally, Chuck Todd asked, if your state was planning to try and leave the U.S. (virtually impossible, I know, but this is kind of fun), what would you call it, using the British model of "brexit". Some Texans have already gone there with Texit. Vermont would be Vexit.

What would your state be dubbed?

Massachusetts could be massexit. Maine could be Mexit. There are too many North and South states for them all to be Nexit or Sexit...

June 26, 2016

Michael Herr, author of Dispatches has died. Vietnam era author changed how we view war

This book had a big impact on me and on millions of others. RIP, and thanks Michael.

No one had a greater effect on how the Vietnam War has been processed in our popular consciousness than Michael Herr, best known as the writer of the book Dispatches and contributor to the screenplays of Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket, who died near his home in upstate New York this past Friday. He was 76.

When you go to war, as Herr did, you naturally imagine the possibility of your own death. I’ve thought about mine before, not in a grand way, but just as a sort of curiosity: What cemetery (Arlington National Cemetery, or a local place)? What headstone (standard white granite, or marble)? What internment ceremony (military honors, or nothing at all)? And I wonder if during his years covering Vietnam, and later when he wrote about it, if Herr gave much thought to questions of how he would be memorialized, if at all.

Herr took a circuitous route to his war. He attended Syracuse University—among his classmates was Joyce Carol Oates—and then dropped out to pursue a writing career and to vagabond through Europe like his idol Ernest Hemingway. He picked up some publishing credentials—New Leader and Holiday magazines—and then struck a deal with Harold Hayes, then the editor of Esquire, to write a monthly column from Vietnam. Herr stayed for eighteen months, embedding with U.S. troops before anyone knew what an embed was, and returning to write Dispatches while simultaneously suffering an emotional collapse.

The book was an instant success. Fame followed and, eventually, Herr turned his back to escape it, relocating to England for many years. Yet, his influence on our modern conception of war is inescapable. Decades after he finished writing on Vietnam, an entire generation marched off to war in Iraq and Afghanistan with images from his books and the two films to which he contributed flickering in their heads, snatches of his dialogue trigger-ready on their tongues.

<snip>

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/06/26/michael-herr-the-author-whose-words-shaped-how-we-saw-our-wars.html