Monday, April 10, 2017

A Harsh Dose of Electoral Reality: Democrats Have Uphill Battle in '18 and Need to Elect Governors to Fight Gerrymandered GOP Monopoly @alternet

A Harsh Dose of Electoral Reality: Democrats Have Uphill Battle in '18 and Need to Elect Governors to Fight Gerrymandered GOP Monopoly @alternet: The Dems failed so badly during the Obama years, it may be a long time before they break the GOP lock in many states. Since President Donald Trump and the GOP-led Congress took office, Democrats are taking to the streets to defend women’s rights, immigrants and Obamacare, and thousands are contacting party officials and progressive groups to explore running for state and federal office in 2018. But do these would-be candidates, fired-up grassroots groups and energized party officials know how steep and difficult their climb back into power will be?

Unbelievable: One Chicago Cop Accused of Framing 51 People for Murder @alternet

Unbelievable: One Chicago Cop Accused of Framing 51 People for Murder @alternet: Guevara was granted impunity by the system, while the people he allegedly framed are still locked up. Horrific acts of Chicago Police Department brutality, from killings to racial profiling to harassment of youth, do not spring from a few bad apples alone.

America Has Become a War Machine—and It Has Destroyed Our Ability to Function as a Democracy @alternet

America Has Become a War Machine—and It Has Destroyed Our Ability to Function as a Democracy @alternet: “Violence abroad breeds violence at home. On successive days recently, I saw two museum shows that caught something of a lost American world and seemed eerily relevant in the Age of Trump.  The first, “Hippie Modernism,” an exploration of the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s (heavy on psychedelic posters), was appropriately enough at the Berkeley Art Museum.  To my surprise, it also included a few artifacts from a movement crucial to my own not-especially-countercultural version of those years: the vast&n

Mania, Depression, Psychosis, Oh My! A Whirlwind Tour Through the Episodes of Bipolar Disorder @alternet

Mania, Depression, Psychosis, Oh My! A Whirlwind Tour Through the Episodes of Bipolar Disorder @alternet: Going skydiving because you think it’s cool is normal. Going skydiving because you temporarily believe you’re an invincible god is not normal. The following is an excerpt from the new book Welcome to the Jungle, Revised Edition: Facing Bipolar Without Freaking Out by Hilary Smith (Conari Press, March 2017):

Media Fakery and the Distortion of History