A federal judge has granted accused killer and White supremacist Dylann Roof’s request to represent himself in a federal trial that could result in his execution if found guilty.
Prosecutors say the 22-year-old high school dropout targeted the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston in June 2015 to start a race war.
Roof attended their Bible study for almost an hour before removing a pistol from his fanny pack and killing nine parishioners. Five people survived the massacre, two by hiding in a nearby office.
Legal experts say by representing himself, Roof could potentially cross-examine survivors and family members of the deceased, putting them face-to-face with the accused racist killer during his trial.
Some people can’t figure out how to explain males wearing makeup to their children. It’s not that complicated. Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian, hosts of The Young Turks, break it down.
“When 17-year-old James Charles was named the first male ambassador for CoverGirl this month, the company’s message was simple: “All of our CoverGirls are role models and boundary-breakers, fearlessly expressing themselves, standing up for what they believe and redefining what it means to be beautiful,” the makeup brand said in a press release. “James Charles is no exception.”
But one mother did take exception to the brand’s inclusive message, penning an article for the Homeschool Conservative lamenting the impact a male CoverGirl had on her 6-year-old son.
“Mommy, why doesn’t daddy wear makeup,” 6-year-old Mark reportedly asked his mom Sarah.
“Both of us were caught off guard, we didn’t know how to answer,” Sarah wrote. “I don’t know why, but the most logical thing we could think of at that moment was to say, ‘No, that’s a girl.’”
When it became apparent that Charles is in fact a male, she told her kid, “Daddy doesn’t wear makeup because makeup is for girls.”…
“Thank god we homeschool,” the mother added.
Sarah said she’s now forced to find a new makeup brand because she “can’t support” CoverGirl’s latest GoverGirl. She noted that the company’s decision to include a male in makeup makes her “hesitant to let [her son] go over to a friend’s house.
“Our world is headed in a direction where my 6-year-old son is having to grow up so much faster than I want him to,” Sarah wrote.”
President-elect Donald Trump met with retired General David Petraeus Monday, as a senior official with the transition said the former CIA director is being considered for secretary of state amid open infighting among Trump’s advisers about who to pick for the post.
Sam Bowman, Executive Director of the Adam Smith Institute and Mariana Mazzucato, Professor of Economics from Sussex University, debate executive pay ahead of the government’s green paper.
Republicans may be rejoicing after Donald Trump’s upset victory in the 2016 presidential election, but in North Carolina – a state that our nation’s President-elect won – Republicans are pulling out all the stops post-Election Day in a brazen attempt to hold on to the governor’s mansion.
Gov. Pat McCrory lost the North Carolina governor’s race and seems to be orchestrating an attempt to steal it. Not only did Republicans lose the race, they also lost control of the state’s Supreme Court, four to three.
In the aftermath of the 2016 election, North Carolina Republicans are trying to add two new seats to the state’s High Court so the governor can appoint right-leaning judges and pack the court. If successful, the North Carolina Supreme Court would remain under Republican control.
In the aftermath of the election, much has been said about what liberal government, media, businesses failed to do: contextualize his rise to office and connect with his voters to change their minds. In this episode, Laura interviews Adam and Arlie Hochschild, the duo who have each spent their careers documenting the complexities of political behavior.
Arlie Hochschild, with pragmatic energy, undertook the work we’d all like to do: she left the liberal haven of Berkeley, CA to go to the Louisiana Bayou — a stronghold of the conservative right. Hochschild interviews Trump voters about their “deep story,” what drives them and how they feel left behind by the same liberal policies they need the most. Her new book — a National Book Award finalist–, Strangers in their Own Land, hopes to find common ground with Tea Partiers and “alt righters” beyond politics.
Adam Hochschild is a celebrated writer, cofounder of Mother Jones magazine, whose new book Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War. Hochschild, author of eight books, writes with what the New York Times calls prose “constantly vivid yet emotionally restrained” about the struggle of young Americans who joined Spanish Republicans during the Spanish Civil War. In our current politically fraught time, Hochschild speaks to the hallmarks of fascism and how to mark its ascent.
All this, and an F-Word from Laura on the media vs. Trump, why it’s not just about alternative news but about finding an alternative to news.
We await the crisis. It could be economic. It could be a terrorist attack within the United States. It could be widespread devastation caused by global warming. It could be nationwide unrest as the death spiral of the American empire intensifies. It could be another defeat in our endless and futile wars. The crisis is coming. And when it arrives it will be seized upon by the corporate state, nominally led by a clueless real estate developer, to impose martial law and formalize the end of American democracy.
When we look back on this sad, pathetic period in American history we will ask the questions all who have slid into despotism ask. Why were we asleep? How did we allow this to happen? Why didn’t we see it coming? Why didn’t we resist?
Why did we allow the corporate state to strip away the rights of poor people of color and force them to live in terror in mini-police states? Why did we build the world’s largest system of mass incarceration? Did we not see that the rest of us would be next? Why did we agree that those defined by the state as terrorists could not only be deprived of their rights but be assassinated? Did we think the state would restrict itself to persecuting and murdering Muslims? Why did we remain silent as the state arrogated to itself the right to detain and prosecute people not for what they had done, or even for what they were planning to do, but for holding religious or political beliefs that the state deemed seditious? Why did we stand by and permit the state to torture? Did we not see that once rights became privileges the state would one day revoke them?
The failure of our capitalist democracy was collective. It was bred by ignorance, indifference, racism, bigotry and the seduction of mass propaganda. It was bred by elites, especially in the press, the courts and academia, who chose careerism over moral and intellectual courage. Our rights as citizens were taken from us one by one. There was hardly a word of protest.
In the face of a putrid and poisonous election cycle that ended with Trump’s presidential victory, liberals and conservatives are quick to argue that Americans have fallen prey to a culture of incivility.
It’s true that in the run-up to the presidential election, Donald Trump strategically showcased incivility in his public appearances as a mark of solidarity with many of his white male followers. However, it is a mistake to lump the racism, bigotry, misogyny and ultra-nationalism that Trump has played upon under an obscuring and euphemistic notion of “incivility.” And it is simultaneously a mistake to delegitimize the anger that oppressed people feel about racism, sexism or class exploitation by categorizing protests over these injuries as merely “incivility.”
Understanding the ramifications of current discourses of incivility will be one key to understanding the results of the presidential election and Trump’s ascension. Clearly, Trump’s embrace of incivility (in addition to his embrace of racism and xenophobia) was a winning strategy, one that not only signaled the degree to which the politics of extremism has moved from the fringes to the center of American politics, but also one that turned politics into a spectacle that fed the rating machines of the mainstream media.
Always Question Authority 