On Monday, First Lady Michelle Obama took the stage at the Democratic National Convention to give an emotional endorsement of Hillary Clinton. “Leaders like Hillary Clinton,” said Obama, “who has the guts and the grace to keep coming back and putting those cracks in the highest and hardest glass ceiling, until she finally breaks through, lighting all of us along with her.”
This afternoon in Philadelphia, Bernie Sanders spoke to supporters in advance of this week’s Democratic Convention. During his speech he doubled down on his Hillary Clinton endorsement, telling the gathered crowd that not only must Donald Trump be defeated, he must be defeated by voting for Clinton and her new running mate Tim Kaine.
Tonight at the Republican National Convention, potential first lady Melania Trump delivered the night’s headlining speech in what was her most important moment in the public eye since she married Donald Trump 11 years ago. The speech was praised by hacks on both sides of the aisle (and the middle), though there might unintentionally be a reason for that: As first pointed out by journalist Jarrett Hill, Melania—or more likely her speechwriters—appears to have lifted at least one crucial section of her speech from the one Michelle Obama gave at the 2008 Democratic National Convention.
CLEVELAND — In 2012, the non-TV press at least had a halfway decent view of the stage. The press stand seats here in Quicken Loan Arenas are effectively behind the podium, which will eventually have the unintended effect of making it clear to the media when any speaker goes off-prompter (not that anyone scheduled to speak this week is known for that, or anything).
This week, white America learned the names of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, for the same reason it learned the names of so many black men it would otherwise be content with avoiding, ignoring, or beating down upon: because Sterling and Castile met some police officers, and the police officers treated them without mercy.
Gretchen Carlson, the former co-host of Fox News’ morning variety hour Fox & Friends, has filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against the network’s founder and powerful CEO, Roger Ailes. In it, Carlson’s attorneys allege that Ailes repeatedly made sexual advances on Carlson, and retaliated against her when she rebuffed them, culminating in her firing on June 23 of this year.
Short answer: Not great. Bit of a mess. Long answer:
Let’s say you’re an American who woke this morning to the news that the people of the United Kingdom voted in favor of their nation leaving the European Union, and you’re unsure about what that means. Let’s say, hypothetically speaking, that you happened to be abroad, in a country within the UK, when the news came in. All the Britons around you seemed to understand what was going on perfectly, and you felt like the odd man out. You wondered: What does England have to do with Wales? Why no Southern Ireland? Is that a boy wearing a skirt?
A 200+ page document that appears to be a Democratic anti-Trump playbook compiled by the Democratic National Committee has leaked online following this week’s report that the DNC was breached by Russian hackers. In it, Trump is pilloried as a “bad businessman” and “misogynist in chief.”
One day after the Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel revealed his clandestine legal attack on Gawker Media to the New York Times, Gawker reporter Ashley Feinberg published a lengthy investigation that sought to solve the enduring mystery of Donald Trump’s infamous mane, which she described as a “cotton candy hairspray labyrinth.”
In 1962, the Pentagon had a pickle on its hands: America wanted to give South Vietnam guns with which to kill its Communist brothers and sisters in North Vietnam, but we couldn’t figure out which guns. The answer became as clear 50 years ago as it is today: The AR-15 is an incredibly good tool for killing lots of other humans.
Before Sunday morning, the event that had the grave distinction of being the largest massacre of gay people in American history occurred June 24, 1973, at the Up Stairs Lounge in New Orleans. A fire, which a police and fire investigation eventually deemed arson, killed 32 people during a Sunday beer blast after a church service had been held in the space. The details contain gruesome stuff like bodies being melted together, as well as disgustingly sad anecdotes of love and failed heroism. Bartender Buddy Rasmussen successfully led a group of about 20 men out of a hidden fire exit onto the bar’s roof that provided safe access to the ground. Among the group was a man named George Mitchell. According to Jim Downs’s Stand By Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation:
Tax Day is Monday, America. I hope you filed your return already, and can spend the weekend enjoying the sunny weather, unstressed about your civic obligation to fill government coffers. If you haven’t, don’t worry: you still have three days. A word of advice, however: don’t file with Liberty Tax Services, which has seen an alarming number of stores shut down over alleged misconduct lately.
For the past several days, including today, the most trafficked piece of content on Politico.com has been a slideshow of 17 wire pictures featuring Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton and her long-time aide Huma Abedin in various settings, including the 2008 campaign trail and several countries Clinton visited as Secretary of State. Its description refers to Abedin as Clinton’s “body woman”—an appellation borrowed, it seems, from a 2006 Observer article—and Abedin’s job as “assisting the former secretary of state’s move back into her private life.” Its title is, “How close are Huma Abedin and Hillary Clinton?”
One afternoon in early January, just outside the small, north Texas town of Pottsboro, Vincent Smith shot and killed his friend, Charles Carter, who was drunk. The two were members of the American patriot movement, and they had been organizing, through Facebook, a march of gun rights evangelists on Washington. According to those who knew him, just before he was killed, Carter was expressing an interest in acquiring the makings of a bomb. The march imploded, just feet from where it began, before it ever got on the road.
This afternoon, according to the 91-year-old conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, the board of Eagle Forum—including a shadowy faction of anti-Schlafly board members, known around Eagle Forum as the “Gang of 6”—will hold a secretive telephone meeting. Although she will be on the call, Schlafly can’t say for sure what’s on the agenda for the meeting, but the board is not convening to oust her from the organization she founded 44 years ago. She hopes.
Bill Clinton was supposed to be stumping for Hillary Clinton in Philly today. Instead, he spent a considerable amount of time explaining to Black Lives Matter protestors why they need to stop being so loud.
When Toni Morrison’s Beloved was published, in 1987, Margaret Atwood, writing in the New York Times Book Review called it a “triumph.” She wrote of the novel, which has come to be considered one of the most important of the contemporary era, “[Morrison’s prose is] by turns rich, graceful, eccentric, rough, lyrical, sinuous, colloquial and very much to the point.” A few weeks ago, writing in an email to an AP English teacher who is one of his constituents, Virginia State Senator Richard Black called Beloved “moral sewage.”
