Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 789

The GOP exodus has begun: These prominent Republicans want no part of Donald Trump

On Tuesday night, Donald Trump defeated Texas Senator Ted Cruz in the Indiana primary, cementing the billionaire’s status as the Republican frontrunner and presumptive GOP nominee. As Cruz announced his decision to suspend his campaign, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus called on his party to unite around Trump “and focus on defeating Hillary Clinton.”

.@realDonaldTrump will be presumptive @GOP nominee, we all need to unite and focus on defeating @HillaryClinton #NeverClinton

— Reince Priebus (@Reince) May 4, 2016

But while Priebus and other party leaders insist Republicans must rally around the frontrunner, lifelong GOPers are refusing to support the racist, sexist, xenophobic candidate, with some even begrudgingly suggesting Clinton is a better candidate. Mark Salter, a former speechwriter for John McCain, tweeted support for Clinton Tuesday after Trump peddled an unsubstantiated story by the National Enquirer linking Cruz’s father, Raphael Cruz, to President John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

the GOP is going to nominate for President a guy who reads the National Enquirer and thinks it’s on the level. I’m with her.

— Mark Salter (@MarkSalter55) May 3, 2016

In an email to MSNBC, Salter said he considered Clinton “the more conservative choice and the least reckless one.”

“[Trump’s] policy views are like some drunk’s rant,” Salter said. “If he tried to do anything like he says he will, we’d have no allies, a lot more enemies, and more of them with nukes. Finally, he’s unfit for the office, too, temperamentally and morally, a narcissistic bigot.”

Ben Howe, an editor for the conservative website Red State posted a series of tweets after the Indiana primary results were announced, insisting he is “no longer a Republican.” Howe also indicated he would instead vote for Clinton in November, tweeting the hashtag “#ImWithHer.”

#ImWithHer

— Ben Howe (@BenHowe) May 3, 2016

Shortly after Cruz declared his departure from the race, Lachlan Markay, a writer for the conservative news website Washington Free Beacon who served as the first investigative reporter for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, lodged his opposition to the GOP frontrunner, tweeting “Never Trump. Still,” followed by an image of his burning voter registration card.

pic.twitter.com/L0hQvfBSvS

— Lachlan Markay (@lachlan) May 4, 2016

Jamie Weinstein, senior editor at Tucker Carlson’s conservative news website The Daily Caller also suggested he’d support Clinton over Trump, writing an op-ed Wednesday entitled, “Hillary Is Preferable To Trump Just Like Malaria Is Preferable To Ebola.”

Hillary Is Preferable To Trump Just Like Malaria Is Preferable To Ebola

https://t.co/ywJ53BIjCU

— Jamie Weinstein (@Jamie_Weinstein) May 4, 2016

And in an essay for the Federalist, staunch conservative and five-time undefeated “Jeopardy!” champion Tom Nichols explained his rationale for supporting Clinton over Trump:

Better to lose to a true enemy whose policies you can fight and repudiate, rather than to a false friend whose schemes will drag you down with him. This is a painful choice, but it also embraces realism while protecting the possibility of recovery in the future. The need to live to fight another day is why conservatives should adopt a Hamilton Rule if, God forbid, the choice comes down to Hillary and Trump.

 

#NeverTrump pic.twitter.com/OgsT3y8q8F

— AG (@AG_Conservative) May 4, 2016

Other conservatives are refusing to support either candidate, suggesting they will write in a third party candidate or simply stay home on election day. In an open letter to Trump supporters on Facebook, Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE) said he fears a Trump administration’s abuse of power, adding many conservatives in his constituency are “unwilling to support any candidate who does not make a full-throated defense of the First Amendment a first commitment of their candidacy.”

One of the more outspoken #NeverTrump congressmen, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), also suggested the Republican party will lose conservative voters in November if Trump wins the nomination.

If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed…….and we will deserve it.

— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) May 3, 2016

And conservative blogger Erick Erickson—hardly one to shy away from racist and sexist sentiments—also insisted he wouldn’t be voting for the racist, sexist frontrunner, writing an op-ed eviscerating Trump’s support among “white supremacists, white nationalists and racial grievance mongers.”

“Twenty years ago Republicans supported impeaching the President of the United States for lying under oath in office and having an affair in the Oval Office,” Erickson wrote. “Now that same party is on the verge of nominating a serial philanderer and pathological liar. At the very least the GOP owes Bill Clinton an apology.’

It is a rare form to see someone like Erickson, who spent the majority of his conservative adult life railing against liberal democrats, insisting he will not play a role in ensuring the Republican frontrunner makes it to the White House.

It’s impossible to foreshadow the outcome of this insane 2016 election, but it seems pretty clear that, at least for the hard-line conservative constituency within the GOP, the Republican Party is imploding.

After Trump, the deluge: Does the GOP catastrophe hold the seeds of renewal?

I was looking forward to more of Carly Fiorina’s nightmarish singing. I don’t think that adjective is metaphorical. That moment last week when Fiorina busted out the lullabies for Ted Cruz’s robot children, revealing her true identity as the White Witch from the “Chronicles of Narnia,” was a lot like one of those moments in a “Nightmare on Elm Street” movie where a character thinks she’s awake and in the real world only to realize, skreek-skreek-skreek, that the real world no longer exists and maybe never did.

Now the upper echelons of the Republican Party are having their own nightmare moment, following the ignominious defeat of the worst standard-bearer for their damaged brand they could possibly have conjured up. Seriously: Their final weapon against a hostile takeover by a would-be tyrant who represents virtually none of their party’s supposed core beliefs, and who is positioned for a disastrous defeat in an election they quite likely could have won was a man whose actual wife felt compelled to deny that he was the Zodiac Killer. It was as if the Los Angeles tourist board sat around a table trying to come up with the perfect symbol for their city’s wild and colorful cultural history, and unanimously agreed on Charlie Manson.

I don’t actually think that what has happened to the Republican Party is good for America or for politics, and I have repeatedly argued that the Democratic Party faces a version of the same crisis, more politely and in slow motion. Yeah, now Hillary Clinton wants to claim that losing Indiana doesn’t matter and she barely even tried; that wasn’t what we heard last week. But when it comes to the downfall of Ted Cruz, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. During my one up-close encounter with Cruz in New Hampshire, I witnessed him lecturing a roomful of bored voters about why their region of the country was called “New England,” as if they hadn’t heard about that in elementary school. He may be intelligent and a principled conservative and all that, but he’s also a monumental douchebag. He’s Il Duce of Doucheburg, Lord of the Tiny Tower of Barad-Dûche.

Anyway, Republicans: The nightmare is now your reality. One, two, Donald’s comin’ for you! Three, four, better lock the … Too late! Anyway, locking the door didn’t help, because Donald Trump came boiling through the keyhole of the Republican castle like poison gas. Everybody inside now has a choice between breathing deeply and hoping it’s all over soon, or jumping out the window. Death is not the end, or so an old ballad informs us, and neither the political demise of the GOP’s leadership caste nor the electoral death that lies ahead in November will be the end of the Republican Party. But what in God’s name will its afterlife look like?

Donald Trump really does have some things in common with Freddy Krueger, including his unusual complexion and the fact that he represents the murderous, odious but in many ways understandable lust for revenge on the part of those who’ve been relentlessly crapped on from above. Everybody following this election has made the same observation, but it bears repeating: For 40 years or more, the dark political wizards of the Republican Party have bred and nurtured the Trump demographic, and now they’re shocked that it’s grown up into a carnivorous flower that has snaked its way to the rear to bite them in the capacious collective ass.

Pat Buchanan and Lee Atwater and Karl Rove and the Koch brothers have poured billions of dollars and volumes’ worth of Voldemort-level evil lore into convincing disgruntled and downwardly mobile white Americans to vote against their own economic interests over and over again. They fed them a catechism of resentment directed at a long list of nefarious foes — culminating in Barack Hussein Obama, the Kenyan-commie-gay usurper — and promised them a return to an imaginary America that never existed in the first place and definitely couldn’t exist now (and that in any case the Republican leadership absolutely did not want).

But those guys had a blind spot: They never imagined that someone could come along and steal the whole circus from under their noses, promising those voters the same infantile fantasy, freed of the irritating ideological baggage. Trump is the political equivalent of an all-night strip club where the lap dances are free and the bouncer never ends up breaking your teeth on the curb at 6 a.m. All the jingoism and crude misogyny and empty tough talk you could want, with fewer pointless overseas wars and no mystifying asides about free trade or Medicare Part B or bigger tax cuts for the people who already have all the money. (Or “flexible savings accounts.” Of all the Republican scams of recent years, one of the subtlest and most demonic.)

People like me in the educated coastal classes typically view Trump’s voters as stupid, ignorant and dangerous, but that’s no better than two-thirds correct. They may want impossible things, and they may be dug into hardened bunkers of magical thinking. But they eventually noticed that the Republican leadership and its anointed candidates viewed them with contempt and played them for suckers. Maybe they’re not so dumb after all.

Anyone who gets conned is in on the con at an unconscious level, or so psychologists and David Mamet characters say. Trump’s electorate is in on the con at pretty nearly a conscious level, I would say. Many of his supporters understand he probably can’t win the election, and couldn’t build his stupid wall even if he did. Trump and his wall are signifiers of incoherent rage, focal points for unfocused resentment. His voters are less interested in governing the country than in ventilating their rage and “fucking shit up,” to use the vernacular. They have succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.

What does the Republican Party’s leadership class do now? Better to ask what it can possibly do. Many elected officials and party apparatchiks will uneasily gather behind Trump at Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, perhaps the most appropriately named venue in political history. Others will stay home and sulk; a few will actually jump ship and support Hillary Clinton. (Who is, and I’ll say this just once, closer to being a conventional Republican than Trump is.) All of them will try to forget the whole thing as rapidly as possible after November. It’s like a Britney Spears wedding: What happens in 2016 stays in 2016.

Given the universally flawed prognostications of virtually everyone, we should make no assumptions about what happens in a fall campaign between Trump and Clinton that will surely be among the most dreadful in American history. But let’s roll, for now, with the conventional wisdom that Clinton is disliked but Trump is despised — he appears to be the most unpopular major-party candidate in recent political history — and that it will be nearly impossible for him to assemble an Electoral College majority.

For the Republican Party, the Trump coup-d’état followed by a November wipeout would be catastrophic. First the party’s leadership and its funders have been comprehensively rejected by the electoral base, and then the riled-up base is (presumably) rejected by the general public. But that catastrophe contains the seeds of possible renewal, or at least it would if there were any Republicans with the wit and imagination to seize them.

In its 21st-century incarnation, the GOP has become the party of rejectionism and nihilism and total whiteness. If there was a turning point — and, really, there were dozens — it came with the shocking primary defeat of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in 2014, a rising conservative star in a safe Republican seat dethroned by a hard-right upstart. The center-right party of suburban businessmen and ladies who lunched and small-town Protestant ministers, which once had room for Dwight Eisenhower and Fiorello La Guardia (not to mention Edward Brooke, the first elected African-American senator, and Margaret Chase Smith, the first woman to serve in both houses of Congress) has tethered itself to the most resentful and most alienated elements of the exurban white underclass.

That demographic is declining, in relative terms. But it still comprises many, many people, and it’s both heartless and inaccurate to suggest those people are dying out or disappearing. Despite our stereotypes about race and poverty, Census Bureau numbers suggest that of the 47 million or so Americans who live below the poverty line, roughly 20 million are white. Millions more working-class whites outside the big cities live above the poverty line under precarious paycheck-to-paycheck circumstances, amid a pervasive atmosphere of downward mobility and lost opportunity. If those people feel abused or ignored, and believe they lack effective advocates, it’s because they have been and they do.

Whether those people can ever be persuaded to fight for their actual economic interests, in the poisoned climate of American politics, is a question with no evident answer. But in 2016 the toxic marriage between the Republican Party and working-class white America has finally hit the rocks, and for that we have to thank a bulbous pink-and-orange entity whose hair was apparently sculpted by the high-velocity winds of his distant homeworld. Behind the scenes, the GOP’s Washington leadership can read: They know that John Kasich might well beat Hillary Clinton in a general election, but has no chance of winning the nomination in a primary season dominated by angry downscale white folks. Hell, Jeb Bush might beat Clinton, despite having captured the Ed Muskie Memorial Trophy as most hapless primary candidate of all time (previously held by Rick Perry and the late Fred Thompson).

So I guess the Republican brain trust can decide to follow Donald Trump and his true believers down the sewer drain of permanent white resentment. I mean, that’s the way they’ve been going anyway. They’ve still got plenty of money and nice offices, and they’ve baited the Democrats into a pattern of ideological retreat that has won the GOP a hefty share of power in Congress and clear across the middle of the country. That’s all in doubt now, but it’s not like it’s going to vanish overnight.

Or the Republicans could untether themselves from racism and xenophobia and a reflexive hatred of government, and build for the future as a moderate pro-business party with vaguely libertarian social policies and an internationalist foreign policy that tries to balance flag-waving machismo with pragmatism. Kasich and Bush would be leading candidates in that party, while Trump and Cruz wouldn’t even be in the picture. That party could win elections, but there’s no visible path for today’s doomed Republicans that leads from here to there. For one thing, that party already exists, or very nearly does. It’s about to nominate Hillary Clinton.

She’s still so unusual: Cyndi Lauper on her rockabilly roots, the song that makes her sound like Ethel Merman, and her special kinship with Patsy Cline

As the title implies, Cyndi Lauper’s new album, “Detour,” is a curveball of sorts: It’s a collection of vintage country covers recorded with a who’s-who of Nashville musicians and collaborators such as Emmylou Harris, Willie Nelson, Alison Krauss and Vince Gill. However, within the context of her illustrious, three-decade-plus career, “Detour” makes perfect sense. Lauper’s work has spanned the entire continuum of popular music—between the Technicolor new wave of 1983’s “She’s So Unusual” and the blues explorations on 2010’s “Memphis Blues,” she dabbled in electronica, reggae, R&B and soul, to name a few—and her nimble, expressive voice can handle any genre.

The scope and approach of “Memphis Blues” informed “Detour,” as did the suggestions of the album’s co-executive producer Seymour Stein, the Sire Records co-founder who Lauper had wanted to work with “for a while.” The resulting track list suits her to a tee: Not only does she tackle classics popularized by her beloved Patsy Cline (“Walkin’ After Midnight,” “I Fall To Pieces”) and standards such as “Heartaches By the Number,” but the musician also nods to other trailblazing women (an organ-burnished take on Wanda Jackson’s rockabilly classic “Funnel Of Love”; the rollicking, fiddle- and pedal steel-augmented title track, a duet with Harris) and doesn’t skimp on humor.

Jewel shows up to add raucous yodels to a cover of Patsy Montana’s “I Want to be a Cowboy’s Sweetheart”—the first country single by a woman to sell over a million copies—while Gill and Lauper trade barbs on a version of Loretta Lynn and Conway Twitty’s “You’re The Reason Our Kids Are Ugly.” Throughout, Lauper embraces these different songs and styles with gusto—as her early days in the rockabilly-tinged rock band Blue Angel proved, she’s a natural country vocalist who imbues these classic songs with depth and grace.

In late February, Salon and Lauper connected via phone to talk about the genesis of “Detour,” her connection to country music and the artists on the record, and the slipperiness of genre designations.

You’ve wanted to do this album for a while, correct?

Well, I wanted to work with Seymour Stein for a while. I thought about it, like when I first met K.D. Lang and I jammed with her. She said, “You got a little country in your voice.” I was busy doing other things. And I figured, hey, I wanted to work with Seymour, Seymour wanted to work with me. He had a couple ideas, and this was one of them. I thought this would be a good idea and a nice counterpart to the “Memphis Blues” thing that I did, because it’s all around the same time period. It was a time when blues and country walked hand-in-hand, so I thought it would be really interesting.

As I did the discovery, and he sent me songs to listen to, I became surprised that these were songs when I was a kid that were hits. Because they’re country songs, and in a lot of ways, you didn’t think it was country, because they played everything on the radio. It wasn’t segregated like it is now. So it was just pop songs. Patsy Cline and Loretta Lynn, even though they were country, they were pop artists. When I was a kid, that’s how I remember it, except I liked the cowboy outfits. They didn’t always wear cowboy outfits—Dale Evans did, and Roy Rogers. I was very impressed with them. [Laughs.] And Sky King. It was a different kind of horse with Sky King. It wasn’t Trigger—it was an airplane. But they still had the hat, you know.

As you were growing up, what role did these artists play in your musical memories and development as a vocalist or musician?

All I can say is, I heard their voices on the radio when I was little. When I mean little—I had a pony stick. I was little. [Laughs.] The first time I saw Patsy Cline, I might have been four-and-a-half or five. I was sitting on the big chair with my grandmother, and Nana and I were watching Arthur Godfrey’s “Talent Scouts” show. And Patsy Cline sang, and we were really excited and happy and thought she was really great. Nana cried for all the winners all the time—I don’t know why, really. She watched another show too that influenced me, “Queen For A Day.” Usually it was about a woman who toiled a lot and did everything by hand, so they put a crown on her head, and maybe a mink stole over her shoulders and gave her a washing machine. And I used to think to myself, “You know what, I’d rather sing. I’m not doing laundry.” The nerve, calling a woman “queen” and giving her a washing machine and making her have to do the wash. So. [Laughs.] You know, it was a big influence on my life.

The two Patsy Cline covers are some of my favorite songs on the record.

I loved her. In the ’80s, when the movie came out [“Sweet Dreams”], my friends worked at MCA, the music company. But she would send over all the Patsy Cline greatest hits packages. In the ’80s, when I didn’t go out much because I was famous… Really, it was too much, so I wouldn’t go out. So I would be in my apartment singing on the top of my lungs with Patsy. [Laughs.] I sang harmony with her; I sang with her. I was very, very close to Patsy. It was almost like when I was nine and I used to sing with Barbra Streisand. She had no idea how close I was with her. No idea. It was like that in the ’80s with Patsy.

[On “Detour”] I didn’t even sing my absolute, absolute favorite song, because I’d just rather hear her sing it, and sometimes you have to forget. The first time I sang “Walkin’ After Midnight,” I thought it should be faster, because I walk a lot with my husband, and he’s always a lot faster, so I sped it up. [Laughs.] I mean, it almost sounds like “Just a Gigolo.” I didn’t realize it, but when I was listening to it I was like, “Oh my God!”

You know, I’d never really heard Skeeter Davis [who popularized the “Detour” song “The End Of the World”]. I only knew [the version done by] Herman’s Hermits. I knew about Marty Robbins when I was a kid. You gotta remember what was on TV, what was in the movies—big, big western movies in the ’60s. Huge. And always like, you know, “Who Shot Liberty Valance” and these theme songs. I knew that Marty Robbins wrote a song for a movie, but when I heard [Robbins’] “Begging [To You],” I just thought, it’s a really simple story, it reminds me of a Roy Orbison story. Which I’m not sure if Roy Orbison was a country artist or just a rocker—I have no idea, because the lines bleed together. Like Willie Nelson—yes, he’s a country artist, but you kinda think of him as a bit of a rocker, you know what I mean?

Even today.

Especially today. And so I thought to myself that all of these were stories, and picked the best stories. Like “You’re the Reason” is just a funny song. I mean, “You’re The Reason Our Kids Are Ugly?” Come on. That’s funny. Vince Gill has a sense of humor, so I thought that would be so much fun. But I also thought, when I saw him in the Time Jumpers, what no one really realizes about Vince Gill is what an extraordinary guitar player he is.

Yes, he is.

His voice isn’t just like butter—his guitar playing is tremendous. When it came time to cutting “Detour,” the band that we were using, the Nashville cats—who I adore—were not really available. I just asked [“Detour” co-producer] Tony Brown… And I did work with Tony Brown because he was Elvis [Presley]’s piano player and because I heard some of his work and it had an edge to it, and because he’d worked with Emmylou Harris. In fact, I didn’t realize [Tony] was in Vince Gill’s band until I looked it up, and then I looked up some old Vince songs, and that song “It’s Hard to Kiss the Lips at Night That Chew Your Ass Out All Day Long,” that was pretty funny. And I saw Tony Brown in it and said, “You’re kidding me!”

Anyway, not that there weren’t really great songs on that album too, that Vince did. And he has a new album that’s really pretty terrific. But when [Gill] came to play, and we were gonna cut [the song] “Detour,” Tony got some other players and said, “Why don’t you get some players from the Time Jumpers? Because these guys know cowboy swing and ‘Detour’ is a cowboy swing song.” So he started playing, and honest to God, when Vince plays, it almost feels like Christmas. Kind of like Christmas—I don’t know how you feel about it. Or maybe the style of music was on some of my mother’s Christmas records when I was little, I have no idea. But it just sounds like Christmas to me. And his vibe is great, he’s such a nice guy.

And so everything kind of came together. And then we recorded “You’re the Reason [Our Kids Are Ugly].” He and the guys he was working with, they must have worked together forever, because the way they talk. We stood live and we did it. And as everybody felt stuck, everybody would chime in and say, “Well, what about this, and what about that?” and say, “That’s good, let’s try it, you never know, let’s do it.” And it’s live. That’s what live is. I was so grateful that I could do things live. It’s not like I’m reinventing the wheel. If it doesn’t sound good after a couple of times, then we won’t do a song, you know what I mean? But mainly, I was excited to do it live. I was excited to sing with these guys playing.

At first, it was a little daunting. Everything you try and do that’s a little different with new people is a little daunting sometimes. But you gotta hang in there. It’s like being a surfer: You’re looking for that wave you’re gonna ride in. [Laughs.] And for them, they were used to playing together. The first song we did together, they were great and I sucked. I even said, I was like, “Well, you guys connect together great. I didn’t connect with you guys. And, therefore, it ain’t good, so we gotta try to connect.” And after that, I think it was a conscious effort to really connect to each other. I think the first song we did where we all connected was “Funnel of Love.” That was live. And then the next one we did that we really connected was “The End of the World.” After that, we kind of had a vibe. The first two were like, ehhh, not really. But that’s how it is.

Then I went back and fixed the Patsy Cline song, because I had in my head because I was singing with her that I would sound like her. But the truth is, I’m not gonna sound like Patsy Cline. And if I did sound like Patsy Cline, that wouldn’t be a bad thing! There’s only one of her, and I know for a fact that no matter how I try to change my voice, there’s that sound that never goes away. It’s just there. No matter what I sing, it’s always that sound. It doesn’t change. So I thought, “Just surrender to it, sing what you love, and make it as great as you can. Tell these stories.” And so I sank into the sound of whatever sounds my voice made in that key, or whatever it could do well in certain keys, and married that.

Like in “Heartaches by the Number,” I knew there’s no way I can sing like Ray Price. Singing in that way makes me sound like I don’t know who, like Ethel Merman, it’s not a good idea. Just like when I tried to sing “I’m Gonna be Strong” and sing it like Gene Pitney sang it, I sounded like Ethel. Not a bad thing to sound like Ethel Merman, but not in those kind of songs.

I just kind of looked for what I loved. And I realized I was in a rockabilly band, so why not let them play country? But country and rockabilly is the same thing, so I did it as if I was in Blue Angel. And then I also loved singing “Funnel of Love” because I felt like I was back in the rockabilly band again. Wanda Jackson and Elvis Presley and Brenda Lee, and all the early country people—even Patsy Cline—well, I always thought they were rockabilly. I cut my teeth as a singer when I was in a band listening to them. When I started writing rockabilly, I was listening to them, and all of Sun Records and then everything old I could find.

And you’re right that it’s hard to define. It’s not like it’s a well-defined genre or sound. It’s slippery, in a good way.

It’s a slippery slope. It is different—it’s just that I always thought Wanda Jackson was one of the original rockers. And everybody, as soon as you say that, goes, “Well, she was country.” But you know, Elvis Presley, not for nothing, is country, too. And what he was doing was mixing blues and country. And so I thought, well, this is the perfect thing. A little homage to both, you know? Just kind of mix ’em together.

As a musician, what was the most gratifying thing for you having worked on this record?

Well we did it in two-and-a-half weeks, and I didn’t think we could. I’m scared, you know, it’s like “Uhh, are you kiddIng me? What, more than two songs a day? My voice will sound crappy.” And I sang “Walkin’ After Midnight” and I said “I’m definitely going to have to sing that again, because I can’t sing three songs in one day.” Then I listened to it the next day, and I said, “That sounds good to me.” [Laughs.] So, you know, I think that sometimes it just was easy.

And I had William Whitman with me, whom I’ve been working with on and off since “She’s So Unusual.” Long, long time. He’s a great engineer, he knows my voice. I don’t have to turn around and argue about the cue system. He knows what I want to hear, and I don’t want to argue about anything. After I finish warming up and I’m ready to sing, I want the mic right. I don’t want to argue about your shit-ass cue-system. Oh, excuse my language. I just bring William Whitman, let him take care of it. This way I know my mic. I even bought my German mic with me, but I just used the Neumann 47.

You didn’t really want to hear about the microphone, did you? No, sorry—I don’t know if it’s a 46 or a 47. I can go on and on. Like, the 49 is what Billie Holiday used, but nobody uses that anymore. The 67 is good sometimes, for certain songs. You gotta know your mics, you know? Now you know a little bit.

The revolution is bigger than “Hamilton”: This year’s Tony nods offer much-needed contrast to #OscarsSoWhite

Lupita Nyong’o doesn’t want to be your sassy BFF. In an essay for Lena Dunham’s Lenny Letter, the actress discussed her decision to decamp for Broadway following her Oscar-winning turn in Steve McQueen’s “12 Years a Slave.” Since 2014, Nyong’o has starred in just a handful of films. The Kenyan-Mexican actress had a small role in “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” as Maz Kenata and most recently played a wolf mother in Jon Favreau’s successful live-action adaptation of “The Jungle Book.” Both were CGI roles, meaning that Nyong’o didn’t appear on screen.

“So often women of color are relegated to playing simple tropes: the sidekick, the best friend, the noble savage, or the clown,” Nyong’o wrote. “We are confined to being a simple and symbolic peripheral character—one who doesn’t have her own journey or emotional landscape.” Instead of playing yet another trope, the actress chose to star in “Eclipsed,” which opened off-Broadway at the Public Theater last October before making the move to the John Golden Theatre this March. Its trajectory follows another former Public production: “Hamilton,” the blockbuster musical that was just nominated for a record 16 Tonys. The hip-hop smash from Lin-Manuel Miranda bested the previous benchmark set by “Billy Elliott” and “The Producers.”

The musical, which has become a crossover pop-culture phenomenon, is expected to clean up at this year’s Tony Awards, but what’s equally notable is how many shows featuring people of color in lead roles stand alongside “Hamilton” in the 2016 nominations. In the same category in which “Hamilton” is nominated, Best Musical, the show is in competition with “Shuffle Along,” starring Tony winners Audra McDonald (“Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill) and Billy Porter (“Kinky Boots”). In Best Revival of a Musical, there’s the enormously successful return of “The Color Purple,” including a best actress in a featured role nomination for Danielle Brooks, who Netflix fans know as Taystee in “Orange Is the New Black.” Meanwhile, “Eclipsed” is a frontrunner for Best Play, while oddsmakers predict that Nyong’o will take home her first Tony for starring in the production.

The actress wrote the Lenny Letter op-ed after being asked by a journalist why she would choose a “small play” over the big screen. For Nyong’o, the project was personal. “Eclipsed,” which was written by Danai Gurira (you know her as Michonne on “The Walking Dead”), originated at the Yale Repertory Theater. The play—about a group of kidnapped Liberian women during the country’s civil war in 2003—was Nyong’o’s breakout role on the stage, and it was her star power that brought “Eclipsed” to New York. As Forbes notes, the actress was the “driving force” behind the play’s successful stint at the Public, one that proved groundbreaking for Broadway. “Eclipsed” marked the first time a show on Broadway was produced, written, and directed by a an all-black female creative team.

The Broadway of today is increasingly offering a much-needed contrast to #OscarsSoWhite, the hashtag campaign created by April Reign that pointed out the lack of inclusion at the Academy Awards. For the past two years, the Oscars’ all-white voting body elected a group of nominees that looked exactly like they did; not a single person of color was nominated for an acting award. Even outside of the Tony pool, a number of successful productions spotlight a wave of diverse voices changing the face of theater today. There’s “On Your Feet,” a jukebox musical about the life and career of Gloria Estefan, and “Allegiance,” starring George Takei and Lea Salonga. The latter is based on Takei’s own experience as a victim of Japanese internment during World War II.

Salonga told Indiewire that she didn’t think she’d ever see the day where a show like “Allegiance” was produced, let alone receive such a warm embrace from audiences and critics. “Whether it’s providential, coincidence, or meant to be, the fact is what’s happening on Broadway is so diverse it’s almost utopian,” the Tony winner said. “It shows how many stories are out there that should be told, and can be told—so many experiences that make America what it is.” Adding to Broadway’s recent list of firsts is “Spring Awakening,” the first-ever musical to feature a performer in a wheelchair. The production, which also features ASL interpretation, was brought to Broadway by DeafWest, which specializes in theater for the disability community.

To make Broadway more inclusive, these shows are changing the architecture of how the industry operates—from the ground up. As Mashable notes, casting Ali Stroker in “Spring Awakening” meant that the theater in which the show was housed, Brooks Atkinson Theater, would have to become more accommodating to the disability community. “Stroker’s casting meant that for the first time, the backstage of a theater had to be made 100% accessible,” Mashable’s Aliza Weinberger notes. However, it will remain a challenge to bring other theaters up to the same standards: “Broadway theaters are very old, which means they’re also small—with limited accessible seats, many stairs, and few 100% accessible bathrooms.”

In order to change the Great White Way, many shows are also focused on changing its audience. In a demographic study by the Broadway League, the group found that 80 percent of its patrons are white and predominantly middle-to-upper class. When Samuel L. Jackson appeared in Katori Hall’s MLK-themed play “The Mountaintop,” the actor told USA Today, “It is called the Great White Way. The people who will see it are either affluent or black people who have saved some money for a special event, or maybe someone got them tickets.” The same issue has faced previous Broadway productions like “The Trip to Bountiful” and “A Raisin in the Sun”: You can build it, but will the audience the show is meant for be able to afford to come?

But shows are tackling the problem of financial accessibility in innovative ways. “Eclipsed,” for instance, pledged to bring young women who would not otherwise have the luxury to experience a Broadway production as part of its 10,000 Girls initiative. Tickets for “Hamilton” will set you back hundreds of dollars, unless you’re one of the lucky winners of the daily lottery. Miranda, however, has been committed to performing scenes from the show on the streets outside the theater—for those who aren’t lucky enough to get their hands on a $10 ticket. As the New York Times reported, “Hamilton” also pledged to “bring 20,000 New York City 11th graders, all from schools with high percentages of students from low-income families” to the show.

2016 marks an incredible step forward from last year, when “The King and I” was the only production to win a Tony for a performer of color, but a great deal of work remains left to be done. As The Guardian’s Alexis Soloski pointed out in 2015, the season featured “no new plays by women or writers of color—no old ones either.” Soloski writes: “As reported in American Theater, last season less than a quarter of plays produced in America and written in the last 50 years were by women, despite women making up a preponderance of the theatergoing population. An accounting of the previous three seasons showed only 12% of American plays were penned by writers of color.” Last year, the Manhattan Theater Club sparked outrage when it was revealed that every single production in its yearly schedule was penned by a white man.

Broadway’s renaissance of diversity, it must also be said, is way overdue. Long-running shows like “Les Miserables,” which debuted in Paris back in 1980, only recently welcomed a person of color to the lead cast. Kyle Jean-Baptiste, who passed away earlier this year following a tragic accident, was cast as Broadway’s first-ever black Jean Valjean in 2015. The year prior, Norm Lewis became the first African-American to don the white mask in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s long-running “Phantom of the Opera.” Oscar-nominee Sophie Okonedo (“Hotel Rwanda”) joined Saoirse Ronan in this year’s revival of Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” but how many white actresses got to play the part before Broadway decided audiences could accept a black Elizabeth Proctor?

Other shows will continue the historic push to make Broadway, a industry long known for favoring white stories made for white audiences, look like America today. Following the success of “The Wiz” on NBC earlier this year, the musical is slated for a 2016-2017 revival. Playbill also notes that there’s talk of bringing “Sweat” to the Public next season “if there is demand.” The play, which follows a diverse group of blue-collar steel tubing plant workers in one of the poorest cities in the country, was written by Lynn Nottage, who is a woman of color. “Ruined,” for which Nottage won the Pulitzer prize, stalled off-Broadway in 2009. As Indiewire’s Shoshana Greenberg writes, “works by women of color with strong roles for women of color rarely make it to Broadway.”

If there were ever a time to change that, now is the moment.

America’s pill popping is making our fish anxious and possibly getting into our vegetables

In America’s never-ending pursuit to be number one in all things, it has achieved top billing in a number of troubling areas, including where overmedication is concerned. We are the most pill-popping country on earth, with an astounding 70 percent of us regularly taking one prescription drug and about half of us taking two. A quarter of us take five or more prescription medications, according to the Mayo Clinic—which for the record, is a lot.

What goes into our bodies ultimately must come out, and that’s as true for meds as it is for anything else. Without getting into the elephant in the room (the question of what it means when a good portion of the population is taking enough drugs to kill said elephant?), let’s turn to another issue. That is, when some of those pharmaceuticals are excreted—meaning peed out by users—they generally end up in our toilet water. From there, they enter our waterways and recycled water supplies, the latter of which are used to irrigate food crops. Ultimately, new research finds, those drugs can unwittingly be re-absorbed both by humans and fish who never signed up for a prescription.

A new survey released in March by the University of Jerusalem confirms that crops can bear the fruit, so to speak, of our prescription drug use. Researchers looked specifically at the cycle of carbamazepine, a pharmaceutical anticonvulsant generally used in the treatment of epilepsy that is also “ubiquitously detected in reclaimed wastewater, highly persistent in soil, and taken up by crops.” According to Science Daily, researchers had subjects eat produce—“tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and lettuce”—irrigated with treated wastewater for seven consecutive days. At the end of the week “all members of the first group exhibited quantifiable levels of carbamazepine” in their urine.

“Treated wastewater-irrigated produce exhibited substantially higher carbamazepine levels than fresh water-irrigated produce,” study lead Ora Paltiel, director of the Hebrew University-Hadassah Braun School of Public Health and Community Medicine, told Science Daily. “It is evident that those who consume produce grown in soil irrigated with treated wastewater increase their exposure to the drug. Though the levels detected were much lower than in patients who consume the drug, it is important to assess the exposure in commercially available produce. This study demonstrates ‘proof of concept’ that human exposure to pharmaceuticals occurs through ingestion of commercially available produce irrigated with treated wastewater, providing data which could guide policy and risk assessments.”

Before you start losing sleep about the drugs you’re taking in through the items in your crisper drawer, note that the study group later spent a week eating fresh-water treated crops. Researchers examined the urine again and found that the carbamazepine levels had returned to baseline levels. But Ars Technica points out why these results still deserve further inquiry:

While the amounts of the drug in produce-eater’s pee were [10,000 times lower] than what is seen in the pee of patients purposefully taking the drugs, researchers speculate that the trace amounts could still have health effects in some people, such as those with a genetic sensitivity to the drugs, pregnant women, children, and those who eat a lot of produce, such as vegetarians. And with the growing practice of reclaiming wastewater for crop irrigation—particularly in places that face water shortages such as California, Israel, and Spain—the produce contamination could become more common and more potent, the authors argue.

For fish, the widespread use of mental health drugs is turning out to have not so great collateral consequences. A report from Medco Health Solutions indicated that in 2010, more than 20 percent of American adults were taking “antidepressants, antipsychotics, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder drugs [or] anti‐anxiety” medications, up by 22 percent over a decade prior. Another 2014 study found one out of 13 American schoolchildren takes at least one medicine for “emotional or behavioral difficulties.” Brian Bienkowski, writing atEnvironmental Health News, notes that about 250 million antidepressant prescriptions are filled each year in the U.S., making antidepressants the country’s most prescribed medications.

While those mood lifters might be helping some Americans cope with their days, they seem mostly to bum fish out. Bienkowski cites a study out of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee that looked at the effect of putting low doses (one part per billion) of fluoxetine, more popularly known as Prozac, into water containing male fathead minnows. The result: not good.

Male minnows exposed to a small dose of the drug in laboratories ignored females. They spent more time under a tile, so their reproduction decreased and they took more time capturing prey… When the dose was increased, but still at levels found in some wastewater, females produced fewer eggs and males became aggressive, killing females in some cases.

The drugs seem to cause these behavioral problems by scrambling how genes in the fish brains are expressed, or turned on and off. The minnows were exposed when they were a couple of months old and still developing. There appeared to be architectural changes to the young minnows’ brains.

The new findings build on [study head and UWM professor Rebecca] Klaper’s previous research, which tested minnows with the gene changes to see how well they avoided predators. They swam longer distances and made more directional changes, which suggests that the drugs induced anxiety.

As Bienkowski notes, the World Health Organization says the amount of pharmaceuticals in our drinking water exists at levels that are about 1,000 times too low to have any real impact. But for marine animals, taking in antidepressants and other pharmaceuticals is a whole other matter.

“Fish do not metabolize drugs like we do,” Klaper told Bienkowski. “Even if environmental doses aren’t thought to be much for a human, fish could still have significant accumulation, and, it appears, changes in their brain’s gene expression.”

(This article first appeared on Alternet) 

Does Klingon belong to everyone? “It’s a language — the whole point is to use it!”

Who owns a made-up language? It sounds like a joke, but the question has become dead serious in a California district court. That’s because Paramount Pictures is suing the Star Trek fan film “Axanar” for using the Klingon language, invented for “Star Trek III: The Search For Spock” by the linguist Marc Okrand.

To Paramount, Klingon belongs to the studio. To Star Trek cultists who’ve been using the language since its 1984 creation, or to groups like the Language Creation Society, it belongs to anyone who speaks or writes or hears or reads it. “Now, with 250,000 copies of a Klingon dictionary said to have been sold,” The Hollywood Reporter notes, “Klingon language certification programs being offered, the Microsoft search engine Bing presenting English-to-Klingon translations, one Swedish couple performing their marriage vows in Klingon, foreign governments providing official statements in Klingon and so on, the Language Creation Society is holding up Klingon as having freed the ‘bounds of its textual chains.’ “

Salon called David J. Peterson, a language creator who has created languages for “Game of Thrones,” “Penny Dreadful,” and “Thor: The Dark World.” He’s also the author of “The Art of Language Invention,” which has an online adjunct on YouTube.

We spoke to Peterson from his home in Orange County, California: The interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

One of the issues that sits behind all of this is how rigorous and demanding it must be to develop a language. It must be an enormous amount of work.

That goes without saying. A language is basically three things — a sound system or a phenology, a series of atoms. You need the grammar — how the things built up into words relate to each other. And you need the tokens and spells lexicon.

To give you a sense of how long this takes: The sound system can be done in a day and maybe revised later. The grammar takes anywhere from three months to a year, depending on how quick you work and how much time you have. And the lexicon can take the rest of your entire life. The languages we speak have hundreds or thousands of words. The language I’ve created, Dothraki, that has the most words of all of them — about 4,000 words over seven years.

It takes a lot of time to do this. Especially when creating a naturalistic language. We model a language from an old state to a modern state, modeling how the sounds change over time, how the words change over time, and how language itself has evolved.

I imagine there’s a range of how intricate and filled-out a language is. How does Klingon fit in, from simplest to most complex?

It actually is not a high bar to pass to get a language that can translate whatever you need, especially if the translator has a bit of ingenuity on their side. What’s difficult is finding something that works differently from something else, and that works in an interesting way. It’s more difficult to create a naturalistic language — [an organic one] that looks like it exists on Earth — versus creating something like Esperanto, which is very regular and tries to mirror the way Indo-European languages work.

Klingon is somewhere in the middle, between something like Dothraki and something like Esperanto. It’s regular but its grammar is totally different from what most English speakers are familiar with. Consistent and regular, but totally out there.

As far as completeness goes, I’ve met fans who are totally fluent – they’ve translated texts ranging from Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” to Gilgamesh, and last I heard they were working on their translation of The Old Testament.

Wow – that’s pretty filled out. It’s not just a few hundred words.

I figure if you are translating “Hamlet,” you’re pretty good.

So given all this, with grammar, thousands of words, and a lot of work to design, should a language be copyrighted or should it quote-unquote belong to everyone?

If you think about the various types of artists we have, and think about a famous chef, producing a meal. He can’t copyright ingredients or their combination. He can write them down, and copyright the book, and sell the book. He can’t prevent other people from making that meal.

And he can’t get angry if his recipe shows up in another book unless it’s copied word for word. So that’s where we fall when we talk about a created language.

Those documents that Marc Okrand wrote up, creating the language, absolutely can be copyrighted. His dictionary, absolutely can be copyrighted. But as with any dictionary, you can copyright the book but not the words in it or how people use them. Whether it’s on their own, or in some fan film with a lot of dialogue. You can’t control that – it’s simply language.

It sounds like you come down the way the fans do – that the language was invented, but it’s changed, grown, become a living language so they can use it freely.

I agree with that, but also with the larger issue: The minute it’s created, anyone can use it. Just like if a movie comes out and tries to introduce new slang word, anyone can use it… It’s a language — the whole point it to use it!

What made you want to create languages?

It’s just something I started to do as a sophomore in college. I had a larger goal to learn as many languages as I could – I was already an English major, and by then I’d taken two semesters of Arabic, a semester of Russian, a semester of Esperanto, and a semester of French… And then my mother urged me to take a linguistics course. One class, and by the end of it I was hooked. It was amazing that that counted as work. I loved it and found it really easy. And it was in that course that I came up with the idea of creating my own language. I started creating it right there in my notebook in class, and basically kept it up for the next 16 years.

Wow — so how fully developed and sophisticated are the languages Tolkien came up with? I think the main one was Elvish.

He had many different languages the elves speak, depending on which elves they are. Tolkien did some things that were incredibly innovative. First of all, he’s the first person we have a record of who created languages for fun. There were probably other people but we lost the records to the ages.

Tolkien created them because he loved languages. He was a philologist and wanted to create his own family of languages, his own world. He did what he learned in philology – you start out with an old language, a proto-language, and he evolved it into other languages. That was very far-sighted of him.

He worked on several for quite a bit and those are quite interesting. Unfortunately, his language creation was a victim of his fame: Once he started writing these books, the books became very popular and demanded more of his time, and his fame demanded more of his time. So he stopped working on languages – and what exists now are fragments. Some are built up quite a bit. For other cases all they have is a notebook page.

Top conservative pundits lash out in disbelief after Ted Cruz and John Kasich fail to stop Donald Trump: “We are going to get our asses kicked in the general election!”

It’s a hard pill to swallow for most of America, but for die-hard #NeverTrump conservatives (not Bill Kristol) who failed to stop the controversial reality TV star from becoming the face of the GOP, Donald Trump as the “presumptive” presidential nominee of the Republican Party is more like an existential crisis than a hangover.

Erick Erickson’s Red State:

Erickson’s flagship Redstate blog turned on Trump early, disinviting the controversial candidate after he attacked Fox News’ Megyn Kelly last August.

On Wednesday, Redstate Managing Editor Leon H. Wolf vowed to remain aboard the #NeverTrump train into November – unlike Bill Kristol — even calling on Republicans in the Senate to finally move forward with hearings for President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland “before it is too late.”

“The fact that Merrick Garland still exists as an option right now is a gift that should not be squandered,” Wolf wrote, calling him “not a great choice, but is not a terrible one, either.”

“If I were the Republicans, my main concern right now would be that Barack Obama would withdraw Garland’s nomination today,” Wolf wrote, predicting a Clinton win in November. His fellow conservative Red State editors appeared to agree on Twitter Tuesday night after Trump’s win:

I strongly believe the Senate should move forward on Garland at this point. #SCOTUS

— Ben Howe (@BenHowe) May 4, 2016

Glenn Beck’s The Blaze:

Coming to terms with Trump as the face of the Republican Party on Wednesday, the emotional conservative admitted that “that makes us pretty racist.”

“I don’t want my children to look at that man and say, ‘yeah, he is my president,'” Beck insisted on his Blaze program. “I wont tolerate it,” the commentator asserted. According to Right Wing Watch, has lost nearly half a million dollars in an effort

“Hillary Clinton is going to win,” Beck predicted, adding that with Trump at the top of the ticket this fall, “You will never elect another GOP person to high office ever again!”

“Goodbye, Republican Party,” Blaze blogger Matt Welsh wrote Wednesday afternoon in a post that has already been shared more than 8,000 times.

“Good riddance. Your wounds are self-inflicted anyway,” Welsh continued, blaming Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly and Laura Ingraham for Trump’s rise before ultimately holding Republican voters responsible:

The Republican Party, we should remember, is made up of Republicans. And most of the Republicans are voters, not politicians. So even if nobody else will say it, I must make it clear that I’m leaving because of these voters. Whatever else can be said of citizens who want a man like Trump to run the country, it cannot be said that they’re anything resembling conservative. Nor can it be said that we have anything much in common.

Mark Levin: 

Right-wing radio talker and self-described “Great One” Mark Levin lashed out at Fox News, as he is wont to do from time to time, after Cruz’s crushing defeat in Indiana. The longtime Cruz backer blamed the conservative cable news giant for giving air to Trump’s last-minute conspiracy theory that Cruz’s father was somehow associated with the assassination of JFK.

“Several of the people on The Five thought this was hilarious, [and] as a matter of fact, they were defending the National Enquirer,” Levin complained on Tuesday night. “That’s why it’s not the Fox News Channel — it’s the Fox Channel, and the Donald Trump super PAC.”

“They may be laughing today, but they’re going to be rubbing their own faces in their own feces, I’ll tell you that, after this general election, because they have humiliated themselves,” Levin bluntly added, before also taking shots at “Fox and Friends” and “Outnumbered” for failing to ask Trump follow-up questions about his “ludicrous” conspiracy theory.

“They think this is funny?” he asked. “We are going to get our asses kicked in the general election, ladies and gentlemen!”

The New York Times’ Ross Douthat:

Literally the only thing giving me pause about Trump's certain defeat is my religious imagination + all the devil's luck he's had to date.

— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) May 4, 2016

Washington Examiner’s Managing Editor Phillip Klein: 

I have officially de-registered as a Republican. pic.twitter.com/DjRI21Oyvx

— Philip Klein (@philipaklein) May 4, 2016

The Volokh Conspiracy: 

The nation’s top conservative legal blog ran at least two prominent #NeverTrump posts, even after it became clear the movement had officially died.

With Donald Trump now the presumptive GOP nominee, I’ll chime in to add that I will never ever vote for him,” Orrin Kerr wrote at the Washington Post’s conservative blog. “I’m disgusted that Trump is going to be the GOP nominee. It’s a sad day for the GOP — and for the USA.”

“Polls suggest that Trump will likely lose to Hillary Clinton in November. I sure hope so.”

 

Washington Post’s George Will:  

“If Trump is nominated, the GOP must keep him out of the White House,” the conservative Fox News commentator headlined his latest Washington Post column:

A convention’s sovereign duty is to choose a plausible nominee who has a reasonable chance to win, not to passively affirm the will of a mere plurality of voters recorded episodically in a protracted process.

“Donald Trump’s damage to the Republican Party, although already extensive, has barely begun,” Will warned days ahead of Indiana, reminding voters that “Trump would be the most unpopular nominee ever.”

They didn’t heed his warning.

The Trump-ocalypse is upon us: America can’t afford to misunderstand what his nomination means

Not to rub it in, but so many pundits were so extremely wrong about Donald Trump.

“The notion that Mr. Trump should be considered a strong front-runner based on current polls is understandable, but inconsistent with recent history,” resident New York Times wonk Nate Cohn wrote in December.
“The voters’ hopes for transformation will give way to a fear of chaos,” opined David Brooks, who for unclear reasons compared electing a president to shopping for rugs.
“I don’t think that Donald Trump is very likely to win the nomination in part because he’s not really a Republican,” said polling guru Nate Silver.
“Trump won’t help the GOP’s eventual nominee, but—barring a third-party run—it’s hard to imagine a world in which he’s dispositive,” Slate’s Jamelle Bouie wrote in a piece that failed to address whether it was Trump who might actually be the nominee.

As Larry Sabato and company wrote last August, “If Trump is nominated, then everything we think we know about presidential nominations is wrong.”

Being so wrong is a professional hazard of the dumb game of covering politics like a sports match. But it’s worth exploring more specifically why.

The immense power of conventional wisdom can swamp all but the most powerful contrary evidence—evidence like, say, Trump becoming the presumptive nominee yesterday. There were lots of clear messages that the rules of the game weren’t holding, such as when, last July, Trump insulted John McCain for being captured in Vietnam and suffered zero concrete consequences. Pundits weren’t listening.

Trump’s rise should not have been incomprehensible. Much available evidence has long suggested that today’s Republican Party is capable of anything. In recent years, government shutdowns became the norm, a huge fan of Ayn Rand was elevated to House Speaker, and somewhere near half of all Republicans said they believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim. Meanwhile, everything hinted that Jeb Bush’s candidacy might prove to be the very nonstarter that it was. But no matter.

Wonks typically make predictions from big data sets that are in reality drawn from presidential elections—something that, in numerical terms, have happened a very small number of times. If journalists are only good at describing what passes for normal over a few decades, journalism is not very useful at understanding reality when things get interesting. And as things have gotten more interesting, journalists have played catch up every time, from the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street to Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. It’s been clear since the financial crisis that American politics are fragmenting under the stress of enormous income inequality — toward the socialist left and, on the white right, a toxic quasi-fascist stew that conflates middle-class decline with growing racial diversity.

Trump is tapping that deep current of white anger, one that is simultaneously economic, racial and cultural. Yesterday, Nate Silver published a piece entitled “The Mythology Of Trump’s ‘Working Class’ Support” in an effort to dismiss this interpretation, arguing that many Trump supporters are in fact relatively affluent. Trump supporters’ median household income is $72,000, higher than the overall median household income of $56,000.

Silver is right to point out that plenty of wealthy people support Trump, an important reminder that conservative movements, from Richard Nixon to the Tea Party, have never been largely comprised of poor people. It’s also true that racism is not the sole preserve of poor whites, as much as wealthy whites like to exculpate themselves by blaming it all on white trash.

Silver, however, still gets the class argument wrong. Trump supporters, after all, have a significantly lower median income than Kasich backers, and equivalent income to Cruz’s. Working class is not, as Silver seems to assume, the same thing as poor. A two-earner household with kids earning less than $50,000 a year (the income of roughly a third of Trump voters) does not add up to a hell of a lot of money. Neither, really, does a combined income of $72,000— what a couple with one partner working on the low-rungs of the white collar world and another laboring as a cement mason might earn. And it feels like even less money if you’re downwardly mobile, paying $5,000 for health insurance if your company provides it, and haven’t saved for retirement. Nearly a third of Americans have neither retirement savings nor a traditional pension plan. And Trump voters skew older.

Finally, Trump supporters are overwhelmingly white. And it’s not that useful in terms of political analysis to simply note that white Republicans have higher incomes than Democratic voters who are much more heavily black and Latino. White people, thanks to centuries of government policy geared toward protecting white supremacy, have greater wealth. By Silver’s logic, since every Republican candidate’s base earns more than the median household income, none are a candidate representing poor and working class Republicans. That, of course, is wrong: Trump supporters having the lowest median income among Republicans, combined with Trump’s economic populist railing against free trade and support for Social Security, suggests very much that he is that candidate.

Trump support is highly correlated with areas that have less educated people; that have seen a decline in manufacturing, and where the white death rates are spiking. And Trump supporters are the most likely to fear the coming white minority. The factors are related because the human mind doesn’t categorize fears and anxieties into neat categories like “economic” or “racial.” If one’s world is changing for the worst, and one also notices a lot of non-white people around, economic pain can very easily translate into white nationalism and a demand for security delivered by a strong leader. Tellingly, Trump appears to have significant support from law enforcement and the military.

At the New Yorker, Evan Osnos had an early insight into how Trump’s appeal lands squarely at a rather unpleasant intersection of race and class. Trump supporters, he writes, comprise a

“confederacy of the frustrated—less a constituency than a loose alliance of Americans who say they are betrayed by politicians, victimized by a changing world, and enticed by Trump’s insurgency…During a half-century of change in the American labor market—the rise of technology and trade, the decline of manual labor—nobody has been hit harder than low-skilled, poorly educated men.”

Hillary Clinton will most likely beat Trump, though the punditocracy’s primary season failure should give them a little bit of humility when they say this. But Clinton can’t muster the forceful response necessary to effectively confront Trumpism, a symptom of a larger demographic slide toward a politics of xenophobic populism. Rallying a coalition of bipartisan status-quo defenders and scared progressives is good enough to win. But to win what?

“With Sanders, I’ve little doubt that every Republican and conservative would quickly—and happily—line up behind Trump,” writes Corey Robin. “It’s only because Clinton does not pose a threat to core GOP commitments that these apostates from Trump can even think about straying from the fold.”

Mainstream Republicans can stomach Clinton because she will maintain the very immiserating policies that fostered Trump’s rise. Discounting racist white anger, and waiting for the arrival of white nationalists’ feared minority majority, is one option. Building a multi-racial populist movement right now is the other. If the Democratic Party simply hopes that Trump’s extremism will turn off a slim majority then there’s not much good to hope for this November.

Hunger shouldn’t be a crime: This is what a humane response to food insecurity looks like

It may ultimately not establish a legal precedent anywhere, but should be an object lesson in what justice, tempered with mercy, can look like. In Italy this week, the country’s highest court tossed out the conviction of a homeless man who’d been sentenced to six months in prison and a fine 100 euros — for taking less than five dollars worth of cheese and sausage because he was hungry.

Thirty-six year-old Ukrainian man Roman Ostriakov was originally sentenced back in 2013, after a fellow customer in a Genoa supermarket spotted him trying to leave with the extra food in his pocket, after he’d paid only for some breadsticks. Attorneys appealed the decision, but it was upheld in 2015.

More recently, General Prosecutor’s Office in Genoa appealed again, arguing that since Ostriakov didn’t make it out the shop with the merchandise, his charges should be reduced to attempted theft. Speaking with the New York Times, Valeria Fazio, an attorney with the office said they had hoped the action would result in a more lenient sentence. Instead, Fazio says that the Supreme Court of Cassation decided that he “doesn’t have to be punished at all.”

While the full ruling has not been released, the appellate court did announce that “The condition of the defendant and the circumstances in which the merchandise theft took place prove that he took possession of that small amount of food in the face of the immediate and essential need for nourishment, acting therefore in a state of need,” and that his action “does not constitute a crime.” Former Supreme Court of Cassation member Gherardo Colombo told reporters that the ruling was likely based on the doctrine of “Ad impossibilia nemo tenetur” — “No one is expected to do the impossible.”

Contrast that logic, if you will, with the kind of warped sense of right and wrong so deeply entrenched it inspired “Les Miserables.” Last month in New Orleans, 34 year-old Jacobia Grimes found himself facing 20 years to life for shoplifting $31 worth of candy from a New Orleans Dollar Store. Granted, Grimes was taking candy and likely not acting in “a state of need,” and his five prior theft convictions put him on the fast track for a heavier punishment. But when he appeared in court in April, even Criminal District Court Judge Franz Zibilich had to question the District Attorney’s office’s choice to throw the book at the accused quite so hard. “Isn’t this a little over the top?” Zibilich asked. “It’s not even funny. Twenty years to life for a Snickers bar, or two or three or four.” Grimes later rejected a plea deal that would have sentenced him to four years. He is set to return to court Thursday.

In 2013, Texas man Willie Smith Ward, thanks in large part to his previous felony convictions, was sentenced to 50 years in prison for trying to shoplift a $35 rack of pork ribs. Assistant District Attorney J.R. Vicha said at the time that “This verdict shows that the citizens of this county will not tolerate a continued disrespect and disregard for other people and their property. People who choose to do so will be dealt with seriously and appropriately.” Because fifty years in jail is “appropriate.” And in 2015, after Jamycheal Mitchell — a paranoid schizophrenic — was arrested for stealing $5 worth of cake, candy and soda. He died after spending three months in a Virginia jail, where he’d been held because there were reportedly no beds at the state mental health facility.

You can argue that those cases in the U.S. were not driven by extreme poverty or hunger, but it’d be hard to make the case that lengthy prison sentences for pocketing food are in the service of the community. And sometimes, in places all across the world, hungry people are punished for just trying to eat. Here in the U.S., several cities have over the past few years implemented restrictions on programs that feed the homeless out of doors. Two years ago in the UK, Guardian writer and welfare expect Matthew Oakley shared his story of how, “feeling like it was my only option, I pocketed a sandwich from a supermarket. I was arrested and fined £80. I had no way of paying and spent a week in prison for non payment” and soon after, lost his apartment. But in Italy, where a quarter of the population now lives in poverty, this week’s ruling could serve as an example of a new way of considering what happens after someone makes a desperate choice — the choice to eat. And Gherardo Colombo observes, “Under the Italian Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, everyone has a legal right to dignity. If you can’t eat because you have absolutely no money, and cannot sustain yourself without taking something you don’t own, in this case, the Italian criminal law justifies this theft.”

This is how GOP candidates get Trump-like social media buzz: By ending their campaigns

Donald Trump has embodied what it means to be a Twitter candidate. No one else managed to have quite the same effect on social media. So how to do you get Donald buzz on the web? All you have to do is suspend your presidential campaign, according to Brandwatch.com, a social media analytics company. That’s right, in the wake of the Indiana primary Tuesday night, the two other GOP hopefuls finally amassed, social statistics that resembled Trump.

Data from Brandwatch shows that since May 3, the day of the Indiana primaries, the three (at the time) remaining GOP candidates accumulated more than 2.3 million Twitter mentions combined. The only instance where John Kasich and Ted Cruz’s Twitter mentions approached — and in one case eclipsed — Trump’s, was when they announced their campaign suspensions. The chart below says it all.

When looking at the mentions of the two former GOP candidates hour-over-hour, Cruz’s peak occurred as he announced his campaign suspension between 8 and 9 p.m. EST. Over this span of time,  he gained nearly 171,000 mentions. Kasich’s mention spike also occurred as news of his campaign’s conclusion spread on Wednesday, with nearly 41,000 mentions within the hour of 12 p.m. EST, but they never topped Trump.

BrandWatch also analyzed each candidate’s conversation sentiment and found that two of the candidates had positive conversations, while one was a 50/50 split. While most of the positive conversation was about Trump at 67.6% (undoubtedly propelled by his Indiana victory,) Ted Cruz also had a positive percentage of 55.4% within categorized mentions.
John Kasich’s conversation was split, with 51.3% negative.



As it is looking entirely certain that the real-estate mogul will now win the Republican nomination, if he makes in the general election, he would be the first “social media” president in the White House. At the very least, he has proven himself as the first major U.S. politician to use social media in a way that truly amplifies his message beyond traditional campaigning.