Parkland students blend QR and fashion to register voters


What's going on: In their most recent popularization in the U.S., QRs are front and center in the anti-gun violence movement from March for Our Lives, launched by students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in Parkland, Fla

After the February massacre at the school, in which a gunman killed 17 students and teachers, Jammal Lemy, 20, a local t-shirt designer and former Stoneman student, was asked by movement leaders to design merchandise to help fund their national tour.
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The idea was that 38 states allow online registration, so if you scan the t-shirt's QR — which Lemy thought would be an irresistible impulse — you would be taken instantly to a voter registration page.

https://www.axios.com/2018-midterm-elections-march-for-our-lives-qr-voter-registration-87556a63-da00-4083-a690-45d1e9d1ceca.html?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=organic

Republicans are struggling to make the $1.5 trillion Trump tax cuts a winning issue with voters in the midterm congressional elections, but the cuts are helping the party in another crucial way: unlocking tens of millions of dollars in campaign donations from the wealthy conservatives and corporate interests that benefited handsomely from it.

Billionaires and corporations that reaped millions of dollars in tax cuts are pumping some of that windfall into the Congressional Leadership Fund, a “super PAC” closely aligned with Speaker Paul D. Ryan that is flooding the airwaves and front porches of swing congressional districts with increasingly sharp attacks on the Democratic candidates vying to wrest control of the House.

The fund’s donors include the casino magnate, Sheldon Adelson, who has given $30 million, and whose company, Las Vegas Sands, reported a nearly $700 million windfall from the tax law earlier this year; Timothy Mellon, chairman and majority owner of Pan Am Systems, a privately held collection of companies that includes rail, aviation and marketing services, who has contributed $24 million; Valero Services, a Texas oil refining company that reported a $1.9 billion benefit from tax cuts in the first quarter, and which has given $1.5 million; and a collection of other corporations, executives and financial fund managers.

Well over a quarter of the group’s donations have come through the American Action Network, a separate legal entity that focuses on issues and does not reveal donors, but that spent heavily to promote the tax cuts before and after President Trump signed them into law late last year.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/18/us/politics/tax-cuts-republicans-donors.html#click=https://t.co/3qpP3XwHqu

A dozen former top intelligence officials, representing previous Republican and Democratic administrations, issued a letter late Thursday supporting former CIA Director John Brennan and lambasting President Donald Trump’s move to revoke his security clearance.

The rare statement from the former officials — including former CIA directors who served under Presidents Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton — comes one day after Trump pulled Brennan’s clearance and said he would evaluate clearances for other former intelligence officials, including two who signed on to the pro-Brennan statement.

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“You don’t have to agree with what John Brennan says (and, again, not all of us do) to agree with his right to say it, subject to his obligation to protect classified information.”

Those signing the letter were former CIA Directors William Webster, George Tenet, Porter Goss, Michael Hayden, Leon Panetta and David Petraeus; former CIA Deputy Directors John McLaughlin, Stephen Kappes, Michael Morel, Avril Haines and David Cohen; and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.politico.com/amp/story/2018/08/16/trump-brennan-intelligence-officials-criticism-782898

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Nineteen months ago, Donald Trump swore an oath to defend the U.S. Constitution. One protection in its First Amendment is the stated guarantee of a press free from government dictates, and an implied responsibility for journalists to be a check on that government’s enormous powers.

Rather than defending or at least respecting that guarantee and that responsibility, Trump has escalated from criticism to incitement: At public appearances he demonizes the reporters who cover his speeches and his crowds. He routinely insists that journalists intentionally craft false reports. As he put it in a July speech to a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Kansas City, “Don’t believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news. Just remember — what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”

America’s news media — the reporting that journalists promulgate and the decisions they make — aren’t beyond fallibility or reproach; every day journalists get some things right and other things wrong. Tension between presidents and reporters is a staple of most administrations: Journalists rightly objected when President Barack Obama’s Department of Justice, determined to halt leaks, spied on reporters and repeatedly invoked the Espionage Act against their sources.

But Trump’s rants pose a much different, more dangerous threat. He is toying with the power of the presidency in order to provoke one part of the American public against another. At some point such verbal assault encourages ideological extremists to take action. It threatens journalists’ personal safety. And it undercuts that responsibility for a press that’s supposedly free of government control to act as a watchdog on public officials.

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http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/editorials/ct-edit-trump-press-journalists-20180813-story.html