In 1984, Mitch McConnell hired Roger Ailes to help him win elections. He’d soon learn what that really meant.
politics
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Story
When Mitch McConnell Met Roger Ailes: An Early Lesson in Winning At All Costs
In 1984, Mitch McConnell hired Roger Ailes to help him win elections. He’d soon learn what that really meant.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
A Brutal Dictator, and the Wall Street Hedge Fund That Gave Him $100 Million
Mugabe’s men were setting up command centers for torture and killing in areas that voted for the opposition, the man told McGee, and regional party leaders like him were told to draw up lists of people to target. The ambassador learned that Mugabe’s government had landed critical funding, totaling $100 million, only days after the […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
A Brutal Dictator, and the Wall Street Hedge Fund That Gave Him $100 Million
Mugabe’s men were setting up command centers for torture and killing in areas that voted for the opposition, the man told McGee, and regional party leaders like him were told to draw up lists of people to target. The ambassador learned that Mugabe’s government had landed critical funding, totaling $100 million, only days after the […]
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Quotes, Uncategorized
The ‘SNL’ Skit on Racial Profiling That Never Made It to Television
Robert Smigel, writer: It wasn’t until my last season that the network refused to air a “TV Funhouse.” It was a live-action one that was meant to be about racism and profiling, an airline-safety video with multilingual narration, and whenever you heard a different language, they would cut to people of that nationality. First, typical […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
A Step Back for The Civil Rights Movement
Over the next three decades, Hank Sanders became a fixture in the statehouse, ascending to the chairmanship of the Senate’s Finance and Taxation Education Committee. From his expansive office just off the Senate floor, he controlled Alabama’s Education Trust Fund, the largest operating budget in state government. Sanders tried to exercise his power to represent […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Hidden Truth About the Cold War Roomba
Over at Paleofuture, Matt Novak looks back at the 1959 Cold War cultural exhibitions hosted by both the United States and the Soviet Union. For the United States, the Moscow exhibition was a chance to show off the newest products and technology from companies like IBM, Sears and Kodak—and perhaps the most important innovation of […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Rebecca Solnit on the Political and the Trivial
Apolitical is a political position, yes, and a dreary one. The choice by a lot of young writers to hide out among dinky, dainty, and even trivial topics—I see it as, at its best, an attempt by young white guys to be anti-hegemonic, unimposing. It relinquishes power—but it also relinquishes the possibility of being engaged […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Steven Soderbergh on Getting to ‘Yes’
This country is too fucking big. I honestly think… In nature, if a cell gets too big, it divides. You can’t come up with a set of rules that’s going to work for 350 million people. You’re just not. So we’re stuck. Robert Kennedy had this great quote: “20 percent of people are against everything, […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Quest for Native American Voting Rights
What would Martin Luther King do? “About Native voting? He sure as hell wouldn’t dither about technicalities,” says Four Directions consultant Healy, a former head of the South Dakota Democratic Party. “Read Dr. King’s ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ on the subject of waiting for rights.” In the 1963 letter, King decries the man “who paternalistically […]