Chicago -
Another Beachwood Special Report
The mayor announced this week that Chicago’s public libraries will no longer issue fines for overdue books and we thought, what’s next, no more books? Precisely! The Beachwood has learned from a whistleblower that a lot more changes are on the horizon.
* Policy change 2.0: Just keep the book – no one cares.
* 3.0: We’ll fine you if you return it.
* 4.0: Librarians start throwing books at random passersby.
Posted on October 2, 2019
By The Center For Cartoon Studies and Mikva Challenge
The annual Annenberg Constitution Day Civics Survey finds that only 26% of Americans can name all three branches of government. The Mikva Challenge and The Center for Cartoon Studies, two non-profit organizations, are teaming up to increase that number.
This is What Democracy Looks Like: A Graphic Guide to Governance is a 32-page comic book that will be distributed to classrooms in Detroit, Chicago, Madison, Milwaukee and more this fall. This comic book is the result of a collaboration of educators and word-class cartoonists, and is designed to help teachers who are working hard to prepare students to be empowered, informed, and civic-minded.
At each school, CCS instructors will give away comics and work with teachers to help students gain a deeper understanding of how their government works (and doesn’t work) and how they can make a difference in their communities and beyond.
Posted on September 24, 2019
By The ACLU
The Department of Justice has filed a lawsuit against Edward Snowden over his new book, Permanent Record. The lawsuit alleges that Snowden published his book without submitting it to the agencies for pre-publication review, a process that prohibits millions of former intelligence agency employees and military personnel from writing or speaking about topics related to their government service without first obtaining government approval.
“This book contains no government secrets that have not been previously published by respected news organizations,” says Ben Wizner, director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project and attorney for Snowden.
“Had Mr. Snowden believed that the government would review his book in good faith, he would have submitted it for review. But the government continues to insist that facts that are known and discussed throughout the world are still somehow classified.
Posted on September 23, 2019
By Jerome M. O’Connor
Four decades after the launch of World War II, a new book journeys us to places few have been.
In The Hidden Places of World War II: The Extraordinary Sites Where History Was Made During The War That Saved Civilization (Lyons Press/Rowman & Littlefield), Navy veteran, award-winning journalist, and recognized historian Jerome M. O’Connor takes readers back to the world’s biggest and most significant war, to the overlooked places to describe little-known events where history was made.
Many of the sites were thought to be closed or locked away forever or believed to never have existed. Some of the war-changing events described here were ignored for decades by military historians. With historical and contemporary photos, the book opens the eyes of both a new and older generation of readers, in an exploration of the actual locations that changed history.
Posted on September 13, 2019
By New America
When Jason DeParle moved into the Manila slums with Tita Comodas and her family three decades ago, he never imagined his reporting on them would span three generations and turn into the defining chronicle of a new age – the age of global migration.
In a monumental book that gives new meaning to “immersion journalism,” DeParle paints an intimate portrait of an unforgettable family as they endure years of sacrifice and separation, willing themselves out of shantytown poverty into a new global middle class.
At the heart of the story is Tita’s daughter, Rosalie. Beating the odds, she struggles through nursing school and works her way across the Middle East until a Texas hospital fulfills her dreams with a job offer in the States.
Posted on August 29, 2019
By Brigandi Coins & Collectibles
Chris Brigandi and Jimmy Spence of JSA Authentication, at the 2019 National Sports Collectors Convention earlier this month.
Posted on August 22, 2019
By Thom Hartmann/Independent Media Institute
There’s a direct link between a sociopathic killer in 1927 and the GOP’s willingness to embrace a sociopathic president like Trump. That link runs through the work of Ayn Rand.
When Donald Trump was running for the GOP nomination, he told USA Today’s Kirsten Powers that Ayn Rand’s raped-girl-decides-she-likes-it novel, The Fountainhead, was his favorite book.
“It relates to business, beauty, life and inner emotions,” he told Powers. “That book relates to . . . everything.”
Trump probably knew that anything by Rand would be the right answer for Republicans; the party has embraced her for decades, to the point that Paul Ryan required interns to read her books as a condition of employment.
Posted on August 20, 2019
By New America
Christopher Leonard’s Kochland uses the extraordinary account of how one of the biggest private companies in the world grew to be that big to tell the story of modern corporate America.
The annual revenue of Koch Industries is bigger than that of Goldman Sachs, Facebook, and U.S. Steel combined. Koch is everywhere: from the fertilizers that make our food to the chemicals that make our pipes to the synthetics that make our carpets and diapers to the Wall Street trading in all these commodities. But few people know much about Koch Industries and that’s because the billionaire Koch brothers want it that way.
Posted on August 16, 2019
By Steven Rosenfeld/Independent Media Institute
A new book by one of the nation’s foremost civil liberties lawyers powerfully describes how America’s constitutional checks and balances are being pushed to the brink by a president who is consciously following Adolf Hitler’s extremist propaganda and policy template from the early 1930s – when the Nazis took power in Germany.
In When at Times the Mob Is Swayed: A Citizen’s Guide to Defending Our Republic, Burt Neuborne mostly focuses on how America’s constitutional foundation in 2019 – an unrepresentative Congress, the Electoral College and a right-wing Supreme Court majority – is not positioned to withstand Donald Trump’s extreme polarization and GOP power grabs. However, its second chapter, “Why the Sudden Concern About Fixing the Brakes?,” extensively details Trump’s mimicry of Hitler’s pre-war rhetoric and strategies.
Posted on August 12, 2019
By Robert Myers/The Conversation
In a manifesto posted online shortly before he massacred 22 people at an El Paso Walmart, Patrick Crusius cited the “invasion” of Texas by Hispanics. In doing so, he echoed President Trump’s rhetoric of an illegal immigrant “invasion.”
Think about what this word choice communicates: An enemy that must be beaten back, repelled and vanquished.
Yet this sort of language – what I call “warspeak” – has relentlessly crept into most aspects of American life and public discourse.
Posted on August 9, 2019
