Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Marc Dion: The Heart of America (Creators Syndicate)
As near as I can understand Alabama's abortion law, it arises from two things: 1. It's in the Bible. 2. The school system in Alabama stinks.
Ted Rall: Long Form, Long Form, Long Form! Is the Future of Print Journalism (Creators Syndicate)
The New Yorker and The Economist are prospering because they doubled down on their commitment to detailed long-form journalism about ongoing issues. Graphically, they contain no evidence the web exists. They carry words, lots and lots of them, occasionally punctuated by hand-drawn illustrations. Some articles weigh in at 5,000, even 10,000, words. These publications don't break news; they can't. They deep dive. You already know what happened. Long-form analysis tells you what it means. Long form, long form, long form. Long form is the future!
Mark Shields: Democrats' (Not Entirely) 'Bleak Prospects' (Creators Syndicate)
Lately, however, Democrats are less bullish. The economic news, even with talk of a trade war with China, has been exceptional: The nation has its lowest unemployment rate in a half-century. Hourly earnings are up by 3.2% over last year, and U.S. economic growth as well is up by 3.2% as in the last quarter. In the Gallup poll, some 91% of Republicans approve of President Trump. You're almost tempted to say to Democrats nervous about next year's election, "Cheer up. Eventually, things will get worse."
Lenore Skenazy: The Real Holiday Moms Need (Creators Syndicate)
What we need is a holiday somewhere between Mother's Day and the Fourth of July. It would be a mashup that celebrates the right of moms to let their kid wait in the car while they run into the store for red, white and blue cupcakes.
Susan Estrich: The Supreme Court Is Not Going to Overrule Roe v. Wade (Creators Syndicate)
First of all, it doesn't need to. Roe v. Wade has already been thoroughly decimated by a thousand different regulations, all of which the Supreme Court has, or will, uphold. Second, the Alabama geniuses could not have been stupider in the way they set things up for the court. And third, smart Republicans - and that includes a chief justice who worries about the legitimacy of the post-Kavanaugh court - know that it would be the worse thing they could do to the party and to the court.
Susan Estrich: The Big Joke About Privacy (Creators Syndicate)
On the way back from lunch the other day, my assistant and I stopped in a cosmetic store she had never heard of so I could see if it had my shade. She never took out her phone. She certainly wasn't looking for overpriced makeup. When she got home, she was inundated with ads for the makeup. Because her phone, supposedly asleep in her purse, was, of course, not asleep at all. It was busy communicating that she was in the store, as well as all the other things they already know about.
As someone who did not know Sir Terry Pratchett personally, but enjoyed his books, did you ever get the impression that he was angry through his writing? (Quora)
"Yes. I often got the impression that he was very, very angry. That doesn't mean he raged or that he swore or that he threw things, metaphorically or literally. We misunderstand anger as a terrible force that destroys. Pratchett knew it was simply fuel for what you do next. Sam Vimes is the embodiment of that. As an atheist who created gods of his own for his Discworld, Pratchett had a keen sense of right and wrong: Sin starts with treating other people as things." - Holly Root-Gutteridge, who has read all of Discworld more than once
Laura Shortridge: Terry Pratchett is angry, but anger is magic (Y24)
I always knew Granny had a willpower of iron, and Commander Vimes, and Terry Pratchett. I've always known it's their best quality. I've just never fully understood what drives that willpower. It's the anger. And something clicks. I'm angry as well.
Neil Gaiman: 'Terry Pratchett isn't jolly. He's angry' (The Guardian)
From the archive: Terry Pratchett may strike many as a twinkly old elf, but that's not him at all. Fellow sci-fi novelist Neil Gaiman on the inner rage that drives his ailing friend's writing.
Bishop Kenneth L. Carder: John Wesley on giving (The Interpreter)
Stewardship is at the heart of the Wesleyan revival, and John Wesley considered it an integral component of Christian discipleship. It was a consistent theme of his preaching and personal practice. Giving of financial resources was a necessary spiritual discipline of every member of the Wesleyan classes and societies. For Wesley, no one was exempt from the commandment to love God and neighbor, and giving was an expression of that love.
David Bruce's Amazon Author Page
David Bruce's Smashwords Page
David Bruce's Blog #1
David Bruce's Blog #2
David Bruce's Blog #3
David Bruce's Lulu Storefront
David Bruce's Apple iBookstore
David Bruce has over 100 Kindle books on Amazon.com.
Presenting
Michael Egan
took the day off.
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
from Bruce
Anecdotes
• On 3 April 2012, British journalist Laurie Penny absent-mindedly almost walked into the path of a taxi on 6thAvenue in New York City. Actor Ryan Gosling saw what was happening and yelled, "Hey! Watch out!" and grabbed her before she was hit by the taxi. A woman standing nearby told Ms. Penny who had rescued her and said to her, "You lucky bitch." Ms. Penny tweeted, "I literally, LITERALLY just got saved from a car by Ryan Gosling. Literally. That actually just happened." However, she also wrote a funny article on Gawker expressing her amazement at the amount of celebrity worship in the United States. She wrote, "People do lovely, considerate things for other people all the time. I don't believe that the fact that A-list celebrities occasionally act like human beings is in itself news - it might have been slightly newsworthy had Mr. Gosling simply floated by on a cloud of his own cultural significance whilst a young woman got smeared into the tarmac, but lucky for me, even the most chiseled-jawed of us are usually boringly dependable in times of minor peril."By the way, it has not been confirmed that Mr. Gosling said to Ms. Penny, "Hey, girl. When a state passes a law sanctioning medically unnecessary transvaginal ultrasounds but Viagra is still covered by medical insurance, it is time to stop denying that the United States is waging a war on women."
• Louise Brooks made a film titled Beggars of Life with Wallace Beery, and he drove her to a location where they would shoot for 16 days. She was not scared when he drove fast, although normally she got scared whenever anyone drove faster than 40 miles an hour. He even skidded off he road briefly to avoid hitting a dog, but she still was not scared. Louise said to him, "You must be the best driver in the world." Wally replied, "Not only the best but the safest." Louise knew that Wally was a man of courage, and she said to him, "Some directors call you a coward." This did not bother him at all. He simply replied, "That's because I won't do the stunts and fight scenes that my double is hired to do. Have you got a double for location?" Yes, she did, she said, Wally then told her, "Then don't let that crazy [director Billy] Wellman talk you into doing any stunts yourself because he says it will make the picture better. That's a lot of bunk. Nobody seeing the picture will know the difference, while you are liable to be dead or in a wheelchair." Actually, Mr. Wellman did talk Ms. Brooks into doing one dangerous stunt - jumping onto a boxcar of a train. She nearly fell under the wheels of the fast-moving boxcar.
• Walt Disney had many talents, but speaking French was not one of them. In the summer of 1949, he and his family traveled to Europe, and in a French restaurant, he once ordered fried camel. Such mistakes did not bother him. Walt was a kind man, as you would expect. The property on which his house sat had fruit trees, and his gardener complained that animals were eating all of the fruit. Walt told the gardener, "Plant more. Plant enough for everybody." His property was large enough for a miniature train, and he had a half-mile circuit of one-eighth size train tracks. He even had a bridge and a tunnel for the train. He had the tunnel made in an S shape so that when the train entered the tunnel no one could see the end of the tunnel. One of the workers building the tunnel told Walt that making the tunnel straight would be a lot cheaper, Walt logically replied, "It's cheaper not to do it at all." Visitors got a ride on the train, and Walt told them, "It's my pride and joy, and I simply love it." Of course, people often asked Walt for an autograph. He carried autographs in his pockets so that whenever someone asked him for an autograph, he could pull one out of his pocket and give it to the autograph-seeker.
• John "Duke" Wayne, of course, is a movie icon. Movie critic Gene Siskel once interviewed him in Chicago in the middle of the night when Mr. Wayne was shooting on location. At 3 a.m. Mr. Wayne wanted something to eat. Mr. Siskel said, "We walked into an all-night greasy spoon. He threw an arm over my shoulder. I felt protected. We sat down in a booth. The waitress came over, took one look at him, and made the Sign of the Cross. She was almost trembling when she asked him what he'd like to have. 'Eggs! And plenty of 'em!' How would he like them? 'Staring at me.'" Mr. Wayne could be funny. He once told movie critic Roger Ebert, "Tequila makes your head hurt. Not from your hangover. From falling over and hitting your head."
• In 1975, Clint Eastwood directed and starred in The Eiger Sanction. In one scene of the movie, his character dangles from a wire thousands of feet up in the air while mountain climbing. Mr. Eastwood told film critic Roger Ebert, "I didn't want to use a stunt man because I wanted to use a telephoto lens and zoom in slowly all the way to my face - so you could see it was really me. I put on a little disguise and slipped into a sneak preview of the film to see how people liked it. When I was hanging up there in the air, the woman in front of me said to her friend, 'Gee, I wonder how they did that?' and her friend said, 'Special effects.'"
• Stephen Spielberg was so impressed by Pete Postlethwaite's performance as the villainous William S. Holabird in the Spielberg-directed movie Amistadthat he called Mr. Postlethwaite "the best actor in the world." Wittily, and modestly, Mr. Postlethwaite said that Mr. Spielberg must have been misquoted: What Mr. Spielberg most likely said was that Mr. Postlethwaite "thinks he is the best actor in the world."
• "Why are you trying so hard to fit in when you were born to stand out?" From the movie What a Girl Wants.
***
© Copyright Bruce D. Bruce; All Rights Reserved
***
Bonus Links
Jeannie the Teed-Off Temp
Reader Comment
Current Events
I sure would hate to be the jockeys (& horses) who finished behind the horse (Bodexpress) who ran the Preakness without his jockey!
Jeff Tiedrich tweet:
why didn't anyone warn Trump about Flynn, but more importantly why didn't anyone warn Trump not to be a skeevy two-bit criminal and inept tinpot fascist waddling around in a shapeless suit and looking like he got his big dumb pumpkin head caught in a cotton fucking candy machine.
Whether you want to read the article or not, this is a GREAT opening, and I totally agree about the "not dead" warning:
This morning the internet awoke to find Fran Lebowitz, of all people, trending on Twitter. Not gonna lie, my heart stopped for a moment, and Twitter really needs to start putting "NOT DEAD" beneath people's names when they trend. As it turns out, the reason for this beautiful living saint trending on Twitter was because she said a THING on Bill Maher last night and the right is really, really upset about it and they are all sobbing their faces off on the Twitter about how Fran Lebowitz, a person they have never heard of because they're just not that well read as a people, wants their beloved president to be murdered.
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
JD is on vacation.
Visit JD's site - Kitty Litter Music
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
20° warmer in PA than LA.
Newly Restored
'The Shining'
Thirty-nine years later, Jack is still not a dull boy.
In a new pristine restoration, Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining" premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on Friday evening. It was the second straight year that a Kubrick movie landed on the Croisette, following last year when Christopher Nolan brought what he termed an "unrestored" cut of "2001: A Space Odyssey."
This time around, Alfonso Cuaron introduced the film, alongside Kubrick's daughter, Katharina Kubrick, and Leon Vitali, Kubrick's longtime assistant. Vitali was himself profiled in the 2017 documentary "Filmworker," also a Cannes entry.
Cuaron's presence in Cannes was notable. His film "Roma" was set to premiere at the French festival last year. But when Netflix and the festival couldn't agree on distribution terms for the streaming giant's films, Netflix pulled out of Cannes and "Roma" headed instead to the Venice Film Festival, where it won the Golden Lion prize.
Cuaron didn't oversee "The Shining" restoration. That role went to Steven Spielberg, whose 2018 sci-fi thriller "Ready Player One" included a lengthy homage to "The Shining." But Cuaron lavished praise on "The Shining" while playfully prodding conspiracy theorists that dig into the film for hidden meanings.
'The Shining'
Red Carpet Demonstration
Cannes
Ahead of Saturday's premiere of an Argentine documentary on abortion, dozens of women demonstrated for abortion rights on the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival in France.
Women, including the filmmakers and activists seen in the film, waved green handkerchiefs and carried a large banner while walking the Cannes carpet at the premiere of Argentine director Juan Solanas' "Let It Be Law." The documentary depicts Argentina's battle to legalize abortion.
Argentina's Senate last year rejected a bill to legalize abortion, prompting protests in Buenos Aires streets. Green handkerchiefs have come to be symbol of the movement. A modified version of the bill is to be presented to Congress on May 28.
The film's debut comes as abortion rights are also being fiercely contested in the U.S. On Tuesday, the Alabama Senate passed a bill that would outlaw almost all abortions in the state, including those involving pregnancies from rape or incest.
Many in the movie industry in Cannes have followed the developments in the U.S. with concern.
Cannes
Discrimination Case
Mississippi
A Mississippi jury has awarded a total of more than $3 million to five African American strippers after a federal judge found the women worked under worse conditions than their white colleagues.
U.S. District Judge Henry T. Wingate ruled in the discrimination case last year. After a trial that lasted nearly a week on the question of damages, jurors decided Wednesday that the women would split $3.3 million for back pay and past and future suffering.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued Danny's years ago, saying the Jackson club limited when black women could work and fined them $25 if they didn't show up for a shift. The commission said white strippers had flexible schedules at the club and were not subjected to fines for missing work.
It also said a Danny's manager used racial slurs against a black dancer, and Danny's owners forced black women to work at another Jackson club they owned called Black Diamonds, where conditions and security were worse and dancers were paid less.
Marsha Rucker, the EEOC's regional attorney in Birmingham, Alabama, said in a statement that the commission "will protect employees in any industry who are subjected to such blatant and repeated discrimination."
Mississippi
Hopes To Topple Starbucks
Luckin
Chinese coffee chain Luckin, battling to dethrone Starbucks in the Asian giant, has raised $561 million ahead of its Wall Street listing, an IPO consulting firm said Thursday.
The Chinese company, which will debut on the Nasdaq Friday, set its share price at $17, at the high end of the range it announced in May.
It sold 33 million American depository receipts (ADRs) after initially marketing 30 million, said Renaissance Capital, which specializes in initial public offerings. The listing values the firm at more than $3.9 billion, according to Bloomberg.
ADRs allow foreign companies to list in America without being subject to strict rules that apply to US-based companies.
Since it was founded in 2017, the chain has built 2,370 stores in China as of March 31, focusing on offering customers quick grab-and-go service at its small stores or fast delivery to their homes and offices.
Luckin
At Least
1,700 Additional Children
The Trump administration has identified at least 1,712 migrant children it may have separated from their parents in addition to those separated under the "zero tolerance" policy, according to court transcripts of a Friday hearing.
U.S. District Court Judge Dana Sabraw ordered the Trump administration to identify children separated before the zero tolerance policy went into effect in May 2018, resulting in the separation of over 2,800 children.
Sabraw previously ordered those migrant families to be reunited, but the additional children were identified more recently when the Inspector General for Health and Human Services estimated "thousands more" may have been separated before the policy was officially underway.
Other potentially separated migrant children could still be identified. The government has reviewed the files of 4,108 children out of 50,000 so far.
The effort to identify additional separated children is an inter-agency process, with HHS first flagging and then sending records of children it suspects were separated to the Department of Homeland Security for further review.
1,700 Additional Children
First Congressional Republican
Justin Amash
Rep. Justin Amash has become the first congressional Republican to call for the president's impeachment based on special counsel Robert Mueller's report.
The self-identifying libertarian Republican and frequent Trump critic shared his "principal conclusions" on Saturday, including his assertion that "President Trump has engaged in impeachable conduct" in a Twitter thread on Saturday after reading the full redacted report.
Amash said that the 448-page report "identifies multiple examples" of the president's conduct "satisfying all the elements of obstruction of justice."
In his lengthy post, Amash stated that partisanship is getting in the way of our system's checks and balances.
"When loyalty to a political party or to an individual trumps loyalty to the Constitution, the Rule of Law-the foundation of liberty-crumbles," he said.
Justin Amash
Politicizing (And Personalizing)
The Pardon Process
A president's power under the Constitution to "grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States" can be an important safety valve when the criminal justice system fails or when an offender has served his time and turned his life around. But the pardon power must be exercised for good reasons and free of political favoritism, or else its legitimacy is degraded.
Don-Old Trump (R-Crass) doesn't seem to understand that. For him, the quality of presidential mercy often seems to depend on whether the offender is an admirer. Or a political supporter. Or the beneficiary of lobbying by celebrities or coverage on his favorite news channel. It's as if he were still starring on a reality TV show that ended every week with a climactic "You're pardoned!"
On Wednesday Trump issued two pardons: one for former newspaper proprietor Conrad Black, who served 37 months in federal prison for fraud and obstruction of justice, the other for Pat Nolan, a former Republican state legislative leader in California who spent years in prison after pleading guilty in the "Shrimpscam" FBI sting in the 1990s. (Nolan maintained his innocence and said he pleaded guilty to avoid a sentence that could have kept him away from his family longer.)
Even if one thinks Nolan's pardon is justified by his good works on criminal justice reform after his release, it's also true that he was a prominent official in the president's party. The Black pardon has the additional - and familiar - element of extending clemency to people who are personally connected to or politically in sync with the president. Black, a longtime associate of the president, is the author of a biography with the Trumpian title "Donald J. Trump: A President like No Other."
The Black pardon follows pardons for Arizona's Sheriff Joe Arpaio, a vocal Trump supporter who was absolved of a contempt-of-court conviction, and conservative provocateur Dinesh D'Souza, who pleaded guilty to a campaign-finance violation. In pardoning D'Souza, Trump essentially endorsed the commentator's claim that he was the victim of a "vindictive political hit" by the Obama Justice Department. D'Souza then released a film that likened Trump to Abraham Lincoln.
The Pardon Process
Judge Fines Motorcycle Club
Mongols
A federal judge on Friday fined the Mongols Motorcycle Club $500,000 following its conviction in a racketeering case, but declined to strip the group of its trademark protected logos, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's Office of Central California said.
U.S. District Court Judge David O. Carter in February had said he would not strip the Mongols of its trademarked logo, citing constitutional protections against intrusions on free speech and excessive fines.
A jury convicted the Mongol Nation in December of racketeering in a case in which prosecutors said the group also operated an organized criminal enterprise involved in murder, attempted murder and drug distribution. The jury decided that the Mongols could be stripped of its logo, which Carter in February declined to approve.
Stephen Stubbs, lead attorney for the Mongols, called the judge's decision to not strip its trademarked logo a victory, but said that the $500,000 would be a "major burden" for the group. He said the group plans to appeal the entire case.
Federal prosecutors have been trying for more than a decade to get at the Mongols' trademarked logo, which they say forms the core of the identity of what they have called a motorcycle gang.
Mongols
Has Blown Up
Quiet Effort
Back in February, as the United States obsessed over whether President Trump would force a second government shutdown, Ohio state senator Kristina Roegner quietly introduced a bill that is now part of a flood of laws threatening abortion rights across the country.
Signed into law in April, the "heartbeat" abortion bill made good on a near seven-year effort to ban women from having terminations after six weeks into pregnancy - before many even know they're pregnant.
"The point for me, for this heartbeat bill, and all the pro-life legislation, is to save the unborn," Ms Roegner told The Independent this week of the bill, which has been introduced in every legislative session in the state since at least 2011. "It's to save innocent life."
The bill is one of eight of its kind to be passed in the US this year, and follows 40 years' incremental work to suppress abortions. Their emergence has spurred a national reckoning over abortion rights, and led virtually every American who has much of an opinion on the issue to wonder: is this the end of Roe v Wade, the landmark Supreme Court case that made abortion a right for women across the US?
For supporters of abortion bans - including the Ohio bill and one recently signed law in Alabama, which would send physicians to prison for life for terminating a pregnancy at any stage - the strategy is pretty clear, and puts these red states on a collision course with the Supreme Court.
Quiet Effort
| CURRENT MOON lunar phases |
