Overflow - when five seeds just aren't enough
Some days, there's just too much stuff on the Interwebs ...
... and the next day, the "On Hold" folder will be empty... *** sigh ***
1) Harley-Davidson lovers in Milwaukee discuss Trump, tariffs … and time
2) How the U.S. economy turned six good jobs into bad ones
3) Colin Kaepernick is out of the NFL but he is more powerful than ever
4) Ajit Pai Is Suddenly Very Concerned About Whether Tech Companies Are Censoring Conservatives
5) Space station air leak : someone drilled the hole, say Russians
6) Ayanna Pressley Just Won Her Primary And Is Close To Becoming Massachusetts' First Black Woman In Congress
7) Parkland father rejects White House excuses after Kavanaugh fails to shake hands
8) How (un)popular is Donald Trump?
9) Get Sick, Go Bankrupt and Die
10) The next decade is on the ballot in 2018
If anyone objects to this "sixth seed", I will delete one of the five others... until tomorrow...
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Milwaukee is a pretty city. On any normal day, visitors can walk around the genteel downtown area, taking in a slew of neo-gothic buildings, or look to the east, where sailboats bob on Lake Michigan.
But this Labor Day weekend, it had a distinctly grittier feel. The air was filled with the roar of motorcycle engines, booming guitar music and the smell of smoke, both exhaust and cigar. It was the 115th anniversary celebration of Harley-Davidson and the bikers were in town.
The quintessential American motorcycle brand was founded in Milwaukee in 1903. The company is still headquartered here, and still makes some of its bikes in the city. For the past few decades, large-scale celebrations of the fact have taken place every five years.
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Changes in the labor market have upended myriad jobs that used to pay well, dragging down wages and leaving millions of American workers feeling misled and frustrated.
To illustrate this dynamic, we isolated six industries that provided an above-average weekly paycheck in the 1990s but now pay less than an average wage. As policymakers try to understand why wages aren’t growing faster despite nearly record-low unemployment, this is one part of the story.
These downgraded jobs have one thing in common: They don’t require a college degree . The share of workers with only a high school education is rising in all six jobs and now constitutes the largest portion in all but one of them, according to labor analytics firm Burning Glass Technologies .
The careers used to provide less educated workers an avenue to the middle class, but not anymore. And the well-paying jobs of today are often in fields such as health care and finance, which require additional education and training.
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M ore than 20 months have passed since Colin Kaepernick played in an NFL game, but the most famous unemployed man in America continues to cast an outsized shadow over the country’s richest sports league and the culture at large. That influence was given mainstream corporate backing on Monday when Nike confirmed that Kaepernick would be the face of a new ad campaign for the 30th anniversary of their ‘Just Do It’ slogan.
The big reveal ahead of the NFL’s regular-season opener on Thursday night came as more of a surprise than it should have, given the lengthy track record of the sports apparel company, which has been out in front of social trends for decades. Nike put money behind prominent African American coaches like Georgetown’s John Thompson before doing so was popular. They made a black teenager the face of their company when Tiger Woods turned professional with the provocative Hello World campaign that sparked controversy (and, lest we forget, even boycotts ) by leaning into America’s thorny racist past.
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Federal Communications Commission chair Ajit Pai, the Donald Trump administration plant behind the repeal of net neutrality, is now very concerned about the neutrality of other tech companies.
Following weeks of conservative furor spearheaded by bullshit claims from the president of “ SHADOW BANNING ” on Twitter and blacklisting on the Google homepage, Pai has penned a letter on the eve of congressional testimony from Twitter’s Jack Dorsey. In the letter, Pai asks tech companies for more transparency about whether they are censoring people willy-nilly. As flagged by Engadget , Pai argued that users have “virtually no insight” into how these platforms reach content moderation or demonetization decisions—something that is true—and implored citizens to “seriously think” about “new transparency obligations.”
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An air leak on the International Space Station might have been sabotage, according to the head of Russia’s Roscosmos space agency, and an investigation is under way.
Dmitry Rogozin said the hole detected last Thursday in a Russian Soyuz module docked at the ISS was caused by a drill and could have been done deliberately, either back on Earth or by someone in orbit.
“There were several attempts at drilling,” Rogozin said late on Monday in televised comments, adding that the drill appeared to have been held by a “wavering hand”.
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Ayanna Pressley, a Boston City councilor and a sexual assault survivor, on Tuesday became the first black American woman to win a House primary in Massachusetts, ushering into Congress a new era of fierce, activist leadership in the mold of Shirley Chisholm and Adam Clayton Powell Jr.
Incumbent Rep. Michael Capuano, a 10-term lawmaker who until now had never been seriously challenged for his seat, conceded to Pressley early Tuesday night as votes were still being counted. Pressley presented 2018 as an urgent tableau, drawing for voters a stark contrast between the insufficiency of a progressive voting record and her own personal biography in an era where progressives are demanding an end to inequality.
"It seems like change is on the way," Pressley said in her victory speech to supporters. "I am so humbled to be standing before you tonight, victorious." She later added, "It's not just good enough to see the Democrats back in power, but it matters who those Democrats are."
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When the father of a school shooting victim held out his hand to Donald Trump’s nominee for the supreme court on Tuesday, Judge Brett Kavanaugh looked at him, then turned without saying a word and walked out.
“I put out my hand and I said: ‘My name is Fred Guttenberg, father of Jaime Guttenberg, who was murdered in Parkland,’ and he walked away,” Guttenberg said in an interview with the Guardian.
The moment was captured in dramatic photographs, as well as on video from several different angles. In a statement after the incident, a White House spokesman said that “an unidentified individual” had approached Kavanaugh as he was preparing to leave for the confirmation hearing’s lunch break and that “before the Judge was able to shake his hand, security had intervened”.
"If you watch the video, you see that’s not the case, ” Guttenberg said. “What the White House said was not true.”
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How (un)popular is Donald Trump?
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Let’s be honest: Despite his reputation as a maverick, John McCain spent most of his last decade being a very orthodox Republican, toeing the party line no matter how irresponsible it became. Think of the way he abandoned his onetime advocacy of action to limit climate change.
But he redeemed much of that record with one action: He cast the crucial vote against G.O.P. attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act. That single “nay” saved health care for tens of millions of Americans, at least for a while.
But now McCain is gone, and with him, as far as we can tell, the only Republican in Congress with anything resembling a spine. As a result, if Republicans hold Congress in November, they will indeed repeal Obamacare. That’s not a guess: It’s an explicit promise , made by Vice President Mike Pence last week.
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It sounds absurd, but Democratic voters might actually be underestimating the significance of the midterm elections.
By now, it’s well understood that the outcome will be enormously consequential for the future of Donald Trump’s presidency. But these coming elections are not just a battle to control Congress next year — they’re a battle to control it for the next decade.
Whoever emerges victorious in key November races will have a huge amount of power over the next congressional redistricting — a crucial event in national politics that comes up only once every ten years. Last time around, Republicans dominated the process and walked away with such slanted district maps that they’ve held the House of Representatives easily ever since.
“The next decade is essentially on the ballot in the fall of 2018,” David Daley, an author who wrote a book about the last redistricting , told me. “And if Democrats don’t win key elections this fall that allow them to have seats at the table in 2021, the party could face another decade in the wilderness.”
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