| | | | Central Park Isn't a Safe Space | | In an age when politics is based increasingly on identity, "everything becomes fodder for partisanship," Fareed argues in his latest Washington Post column:
"Consider the now-famous production of the Public Theater's 'Julius Caesar' in Central Park, in which Caesar resembles President Trump," Fareed writes. "Conservatives have pilloried the play, raising outrage among people who have never seen it, saying that it glorifies the assassination of a president, and seeking to defund the production."
"In fact, the central message of 'Julius Caesar' is that the assassination was a disaster, leading to civil war, anarchy and the fall of the Roman Republic. The assassins are defeated and humiliated and, racked with guilt, die horrible deaths."
"Political theater is as old as human civilization. A sophisticated play by Shakespeare — that actually presents Caesar (Trump) in a mixed, somewhat favorable light — is something to be discussed, not censored, and certainly not to be blamed for the actions of a single deranged shooter, as some on the right have suggested."
"Do conservatives now want Central Park to be their own special safe space?"
| | Trump's Mistake on Cuba: Rhodes | | President Donald Trump announced today that he's reversing course on parts of his predecessor's policies to normalize relations with Cuba. An architect of President Barack Obama's opening to the country, former Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes, explains why this is a bad idea in the Atlantic:
"While President Obama raised the hopes of Americans and Cubans alike with a forward-looking opening in diplomatic, commercial and people-to-people ties, President Trump is turning back the clock to a tragically failed Cold War mindset by reimposing restrictions on those activities," Rhodes writes. "While not a full reversal of the Obama opening, Trump's actions have put relations between the United States and Cuba back into the prison of the past—setting back the prospects for reform inside of Cuba, and ignoring the voices of the Cuban people and a majority of Americans just so that he can reward a small and dwindling political constituency."
| | Where Will This Investigation
Go Next? | | | With new reports on the Russia investigation followed closely by fiery tweets from the President, Andrew Sullivan reminds us in New York Magazine to pause and "let all this sink in":
"This is now a slow-moving version of Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre — but graver. It's graver because the original crime — the Kremlin's attempt to hack our elections in possible cahoots with some on the Trump campaign — has so much wider ramifications than an office break-in… And this crisis is more dangerous because the president has not only been trying to prevent or rig any such investigation for months… but also continues to boast about this obstruction of justice as if there were nothing wrong with it at all."
"It seems to me completely plausible — even inevitable — that Mueller will be fired too at some point," Sullivan writes about the special counsel tasked to lead the investigation. "More saliently, if his team's work eventually exposes and proves Trump's obstruction of justice, the only possible recourse, impeachment, will never happen. There will never be 18 Republican senators who will vote against the leader in this Congress or any other. We will have a criminal in the White House indefinitely, utterly impervious to sanction, and emboldened even further. And he will have brought almost half the country along with him, digging deeper in with every news cycle."
-- The next big development could be the recusal of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who Trump attacked today in a tweet. Noah Feldman explains why in Bloomberg View:
"Even before Trump commenced his assault on Rosenstein for conflict of interest, it was becoming conceivable that the deputy attorney general would have to recuse himself from supervising Mueller. If Mueller is focused on the Comey firing as a potential obstruction of justice, he would want or maybe need to know the details of how Trump interacted with Rosenstein around that decision," Feldman writes.
"Nonetheless, without Trump's Twitter barrage, Rosenstein could potentially have refused to recuse himself by saying that Mueller, not he, is doing the investigating."
"After Trump's tweet, that course of action isn't really available to Rosenstein. Trump not only made a concrete argument that Rosenstein has a conflict of interest, but also deepened that conflict by asserting that firing Comey was Rosenstein's idea."
| | Grocery Aisles: Great Real Estate | | Jeff Bezos's Whole Foods deal isn't just about the groceries; it's also about the real estate, Jason Del Rey writes in Recode:
"Amazon took a big leap into the grocery industry when it announced its intention to buy Whole Foods for $14 billion," Del Rey writes.
"But the deal gives Jeff Bezos something else he craves: More than 400 brick-and-mortar stores that could also serve as same-day delivery hubs, especially in urban centers."
| | The Triumph of Indian Americans... in Comedy! | | In the Hindustan Times, Kanishk Tharoor reflects on the rise of two American comedians from Indian Muslim backgrounds, Aziz Ansari and Hasan Minhaj, and the ways in which they "insist on the centrality of lives and worldviews otherwise deemed marginal":
"Though America has always been a racially diverse country, the powers that govern its popular culture long assumed the universality of the white (most often male) American experience," Tharoor writes. "Non-whites — including Asians, Muslims, and Hindus — only appeared in the terms in which others imagined them."
"That is slowly changing. Along with black and Latino figures, it's refreshing and encouraging that the likes of Ansari and Minhaj are finding prominent places in American popular culture. They star not as exotic tokens of another world, but as fully realised individuals."
| | Australia's Unorthodox Gun Control Policies | | Australia announced a three-month gun amnesty today, allowing owners of unregistered guns "to hand them in without fear of punishment," James Griffiths writes for CNN.
"This week's move is the first major gun amnesty in the country since the 1996 Port Arthur massacre, in which a lone gunman killed 35 people with a military-style semiautomatic rifle.
"In the wake of that tragedy, then Prime Minister John Howard banned rapid-fire rifles and shotguns and tightened gun licensing," Griffiths writes. "The government eventually bought back and destroyed more than one million firearms.
"In the wake of his reforms, mass shootings in Australia dropped to zero, gun suicides declined by an average of 4.8% per year, and gun-related homicides declined by an average of 5.5% per year.
"Those statistics are often pointed to by gun-control advocates in the US as proof restricting the availability of deadly weapons can reduce the number of deaths from them."
| | | | | | |
No comments:
Post a Comment