Material of Interest to People on the Left

Portside Snapshot - December 15, 2017

The Victory in Alabama - Black Voters Crucial - How Roy Moore Was Defeated (four perspectives)


Bill Fletcher, Jr.; Ally Boguhn; Kira Lerner; Douglas Williams and Bryan Conlon

Portside
98 percent of black women and 93% of black men voted for Democratic Senator-elect Doug Jones yesterday in Alabama, a state where black people make up a quarter of the population. Black voters made up 28% of the electorate on Tuesday, a turnout that hasn’t been seen since President Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns. Since those numbers started to trickle in late last night and early this morning, one thing became clear: black voters saved America from Roy Moore.

Sheryl Crow Criticizes Country Stars for Not 'Taking a Stand' on Gun Control


Lois Beckett

The Guardian
Sheryl Crow, who is releasing a song dedicated to Newtown victims, says country musicians are afraid of speaking about gun laws and losing their audience. Money and fear have kept country music artists from speaking out about gun laws, the nine-time Grammy Award-winner said, even after thousands of country fans were targeted in October in the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history.

Asia’s Other Nuclear Standoff


Conn Hallinan

Foreign Policy in Focus
By roping India and Japan into its standoff with China, the U.S. is raising the nuclear stakes in Asia — including, dangerously, between India and Pakistan. With the world focused on the scary possibility of war on the Korean Peninsula, not many people paid much attention to a series of naval exercises this past July in the Malacca Strait, a 550-mile long passage between Sumatra and Malaysia through which pass over 50,000 ships a year.

Tidbits - December 14, 2017 - Reader Comments: Alabama Black Voters Key; GOP Tax Bill; Jerusalem; Jeremy Corbyn; Red Cross; Genocide and Hitler; Nobel Peace Prize Award; Why contribute to Portside; Announcements; and more....




Portside
Reader Comments: Alabama Grassroots and Black Voters key to Defeating Trumpite Racist Sex Offender; GOP Tax Bill is Class War Against the People; Jerusalem; Jeremy Corbyn; Holiday contributions to charity other than Red Cross; Genocide and Hitler; Nobel Peace Prize Award; Why contribute to Portside; Resources; Announcements: Los Angeles, New York, Washington, DC, Houston; and more....

Was Aaron Burr the Embryo Caesar?


Eric Foner

London Review of Books
Little is known about the veracity of the so-called Burr Conspiracy, the alleged effort by Aaron Burr to split off the western territories to form a separate nation in the early 1800s. People, the book's author writes, clung to familiar stories; they ‘embraced different certainties’ regardless of new information and revelations. Burr was judged on what was viscerally believed in a politically divided United States, whose easy acceptance of felt truths resembles our own.
 
 

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