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Their backgrounds, gender and — especially — their politics are different, but the Republican president and the outspoken freshman Democratic congresswoman from New York share at least one similarity: Neither has been shy about using social media to pummel the press. And like Trump, Ocasio-Cortez has been cheered on by millions of followers when she does so.
Ocasio-Cortez has squared off on Twitter against such varied media outlets as the New York Post, The Washington Post, Politico, the Hill newspaper, CBS News, Fox News and Glenn Beck’s BlazeTV for statements she deemed offensive, inaccurate or just tone-deaf. And that was just in her first two weeks as a member of Congress.
Colbert then framed his question this way: “On a scale from zero to some, how many f---s do you give” about such comments?
Ocasio-Cortez tweeted: “I actually didn’t say this, so while I know ‘brown women cursing’ drives clicks, maybe you accurately quote the whole exchange instead of manipulating people into thinking I said this sentence instead of just the word ‘zero.’ ” The Hill’s article did, in fact, quote the exchange.
The response hints at another way in which Ocasio-Cortez is like Trump: She sometimes misstates or exaggerates facts, and is reluctant to own up to it when called on it.
Asked about this statement, she replied, “I think that there’s a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually and semantically correct than about being morally right,” an approach that drew some criticism.
Alerted by aides that Kessler’s column was forthcoming, @AOC replied with pre-emptive sarcasm. She tweeted, “Me: ‘I don’t think billionaires should concentrate wealth while employing people who are sleeping in cars working a zillion hours to survive.
Hard to imagine Trump doing that.
The Minnesota Golden Gopher men's basketball team overcame a small halftime deficit to top Illinois 86-75 Wednesday night at Williams Arena. The Gophers, who have now won back-to-back games, are now 16-5 overall this season and 6-4 in the Big Ten.
Amir Coffey led Minnesota with 18 points, including a handful of spectacular dunks, while Jordan Murphy added 16 points and ten rebounds for the Gophers in the win.
Illinois sophomore guard Trent Frazier led all scorers with 30 points.
The Gophers will play at #17 Purdue Sunday morning. Tip-off is set for 11 a.m. on AM 1390, Granite City Sports.
While the average listener may not be familiar with Brook Pridemore's extensive career, they may know the New York antifolk scene that he immersed himself in since the onset of his time as a working musician. "Through hearing about antifolk — this was when the Moldy Peaches were still together, so the phrase was on the tip of everyone's tongue — I found my way to the Sidewalk Bar and Restaurant," Pridemore says. "That was ground zero for antifolk."
Beginning his long life as an underground mainstay in 2003 with Metal and Wood, Pridemore has remained a stalwart friend to the antifolk scene and all of its unorthodox techniques.
Pridemore's most recent work, Metal is My Only Friend, is a disparate compilation of influences that the singer has held dear for most of his career. But, his 2018 LP synthesizes them, spotlighting Pridemore's abilities as a sonic chemist.
"I chose to play most of the instruments on Metal is My Only Friend myself because I'd been having a hard time communicating with my band mates exactly what I wanted from them," the songwriter says. "I wanted to make a 'solo' record, but have it be more than just my voice and guitar."
Pridemore lists a wonderful group of artists as inspirations for the album's sound. From Swans to Smog, Wilco to Wu-Tang, he's got a musical melting pot cooking on Metal is My Only Friend.
Like a slow headbang on a hitchhike across the Midwest, "Who's Gonna Build My Deathray?" thumps its way into the next phase of Brook Pridemore. The singer's guitar tone is so heavily distorted that the only thing relating back to the tonal theme is the smack of acoustic guitar strumming in the background. Pridemore transitions from smooth vocal projections to a cracking scream on a dime.
"Cupcake Empire" gives Pridemore's absurd lyrics a playground that's caked in thudding basslines. "The Cupcake Empire's crumbling/ the culture is a lie/ and I have nowhere left to hide," he sings with conviction.
"As I was writing these songs, I started to want to introduce little bits of the metal I've been diving into the last few years," Pridemore says. "Metal was new to my life in about 2012, and I noticed over time that the heavy music I was drawn to bore a lot of similarity to the austerity of a lot of the more 'folk' music I like."
While you won't hear anything that compares to the latest Sunn O))) album in heaviness, there is a defiant crunch to the guitar and slow-burst drums on some tracks that feel like a lost Black Sabbath demo.
Take the darkly comic "I Will Drink Your Blood," as an example of Pridemore's lyrical skills. He effortlessly flows rhyme after rhyme with a skip in his voice. "Even if we never find our way to the well/ I was raised by wolves/ I can still raise hell/ Even if we only get the light from above/ I am filled with love/ I will drink your blood," in one of the album's most poetic dashes.
"No Tiger, Ever" acts as a startlingly affecting ballad with minimal lyrics. "No tiger ever changed its stripes/ But I would gladly bleed to death/ To lay down in your paws again," he slowly sings. The sounds of reversed notes slowly leak out the song's wounded heart as it fades.
"Spiritually, the record was inspired by the death of my mother, and my own journey toward finding god," Pridemore says.
Album closer "Carrie Fisher" has Pridemore exploring and ruminating on the life events he was subjected to. In a morose triumph, he comes to a conclusion about misfortune. "If I lose my place at breakfast/ buddy, I could make myself a sandwich/ Breaking bread with other heathens/ Seems to me the point of eating," he says while the guitar clips one last time.
As his prolific discography hints, the singer has new music that he's working on. "After a long period of not really writing — I got more into painting, the last couple years — the last few months have found a number of songs coming out of me," he says.
Pridemore says the next album will be about his life growing up and adds that the album after that will be 'Nick Drake, but with harsh noise.'"
IOWA -- A diagnosis of Parkinson's isn't deadly, but it can be seen as a life sentence.
“You don't die from it, it just wrecks your life,” said Mark Blaedel.
The 73-year-old has been living with Parkinson’s for the past decade. He has the telltale signs of the disease: a tremor that is only still when he sleeps. Blaedel decided to fight the symptoms of his incurable disease by doing things he’s never done until now.
“I'd never sung before. No, I was not a singer in any way,” he said.
But soon, he would find his voice for his very own fight song.
“I’ve heard them say, well it's a select group, you have to have Parkinson’s to be in this group,” said Dr. Elizabeth Stegemoller, a Kinesiology professor at ISU.
While there's plenty of singing, don't mistake them for a choir. They are part of a research group led by Stegemoller, who is studying the effects of music therapy on Parkinson’s.
“There’s a lot of research out there right now trying to find a cure or the exact cause of it. I try to focus on improving the quality of life for people who are living with the disease,” she explained.
Her goal isn't to make them better singers; she wants them to improve their breathing and help them strengthen their muscles so they can swallow and speak. And it’s working.
“We don’t know what it is that helps Parkinson's disease,” said Blaedel.
But he's up for the fight. When he isn’t singing, you can often find Blaedel shadow boxing. Like music therapy, something about each roll and hook makes him feel better.
“It takes a lot of coordination. Especially the footwork is difficult for me,” he said.
There's nothing fancy about the footwork. The movements in this class are all about function.
“A lot of them have issues with gait and shuffling so we try to--like during the taps for example--make them lift their feet off the ground as much as possible,” said Olivia Meyer, a national boxing champion at ISU, who teaches the class.
“It's crazy that he could be happier now that he has this really bad progressive, neurological condition, but he's a happier person,” said Mark’s wife, Deborah.
She says they’ve learned to live in the moment.
“I prefer to think of myself as his corner man. That just appeals to me that I’m his support person and I pick him up and push him into the ring,” she said.
Every fighter in this class is doing their best to punch holes in the theory that Parkinson’s wrecks your life.
“Mark sings a lot now. Maybe he has, but I'm more aware of it now. He sings around the house. He just sings a lot,” said Deborah.
“I've been lucky so far,” said Mark.
Some of the findings from Professor Stegemoller's study have already been published in Medical and Rehabilitation Journals for Parkinson's Disease.
Lost in the shuffle recently, as the horrors in Aleppo unfolded, are the horrors – different in kind but the same in degree – in Palestine.
Look at it this way: If you’re a Palestinian well into middle age, who has grown up in the West Bank, that tiny remnant of land that Palestinians still cling on to, albeit precariously, after the dismemberment of their ancestral patrimony in 1948, then you are someone who has known nothing throughout your life but the rule of the gun by a foreign occupier, an occupier determined to control your everyday existence and your political destiny. But what has passed largely unnoticed is the ongoing assault on the building blocks underpinning the Palestinian people’s culture.
Culture, of course, is the very foundation of a people’s sense of self, that amalgam of social norms and religious beliefs that express the continuities of meaning in a life held in common by a people, a life whose ensemble of symbolic codes is accumulated as if moment by moment, touch by touch, encounter by encounter over generations. No people that calls itself a people is without a culture. Thus assault – and finally destroy – that culture and you obliterate those people more definitively than you could by force of arms.
And that has been Israel’s plan, sinister in the extreme, since the get-go, the latest manifestation of which became gist for correspondents based in Palestine last week. According to a news report filed by William Booth and Ruth Eglash on December 12, on the front page of the Washington Post, lawmakers in Israel’s parliament are now pushing legislation – hold on to your hat – to ban mosques in Palestine, including occupied Jerusalem, from using loudspeakers to issue the daily izzan, or call to prayer.
The adhaan is a sound that has been a part not only of every Palestinian’s, but every Muslim’s, essential repertoire of consciousness ever since the melodious voice of the first Muazzen, the African-Arab Bilal, uttered it 1,400 years ago, a sound that has resounded around every corner of our being everyday of our lives. Israelis, we are told, are bothered by “the noise.” The bill, known as the “Muazzen Law,” is now being debated, and its sponsors hope to pass it in the coming weeks.
There is some something more sinister afoot – an attempt to assault yet another rampart in Palestine’s culture that enables Palestinians to continue to hold on to their identity. Without culture, I say, a people lose their sense of place, and become a nameless, faceless community. Consider, as a case in point, what the Israelis did to the Institute for Palestine Studies in Beirut during their invasion of Lebanon in 1982, and why they did it.
Of course, Israeli forces focused there on defeating the PLO, but they focused even more on what the Palestinians had been able to preserve of their heritage at the Institute for Palestine Studies, which held the world’s largest collection of archives on Palestine’s cultural, social and political history.
Before they left, these soldiers, in a vindictive display of rage at the idea that Palestinians had a culture to preserve and a national identity to protect, smashed filing cabinets, desks, furniture, heating equipment and the rest of it, leaving the place a husk, littered with debris and twisted metal shelves.
Now, that is telling. Very telling. Clearly, these soldiers, along with the political leaders who had sent them to invade Lebanon, were more threatened by the endurance of the word ‘Palestine’ than by the guns of PLO fighters. And well they might have been, for so long as there is a Palestine, Israel’s identity, indeed legitimacy, remains in question. It is not unreasonable then to believe that Israel’s aim is to eradicate all memory of that ancient Arab land – a difficult endeavor, if there ever was one.
You cannot eradicate a people’s historical memory very simply because that memory is the foundation of that people’s archetype. They grow up with it like they grow with their skin. And in Palestinian culture, as in the religious faith which gave that culture birth, memory of the past beats inside us all like a second heart. It is imprinted, almost in the manner of genetic information, on our contemporary sensibility. That is why an enduring Palestinian heritage represents to Israel a threat deadlier than any stone-throwing, gun-toting or knife-wielding intifada.
What Israel is thus attempting to do – has been attempting to do ever since Zionism set foot in Palest – is no less than cultural cleansing, which, like ethnic cleansing, is an adjunct of genocide. Their strategy is to destroy Palestinian society from the inside out – bit by bit, one colony at a time, one check-point at a time, one curfew at a time, one land grab at a time – much in the manner that a worm slowly devours an apple.
Yet, though Israel is on the right side of military prowess, the Palestinians are on the right of history. So have your pick as to who will end up the victor.
Fawaz Turki is a Palestinian-American journalist, lecturer and author based in Washington, DC.
Can Putin’s Palestine peace plan succeed?
April 30, 2013 (Ramona)- -Things haven't gotten any better at the Ramona Unified School District in the few months since we last wrote about the district's budgetary woes.
Ramona is the only school district in the county to have never passed a bond measure. Last year, the district floated Proposition R, which would have raised $55 million, a chunk of which Ramona Unified could have used to pay off old loans it took out to renovate district schools in 2004. The bond failed, leaving district officials scratching their heads as to how to pay off the old debts.
A few key things have happened since then, and the two sides in the dispute, the district and the local teachers union, remain far apart in their assessments of how deep Ramona Unified's financial problems go, and how they should be fixed.
Let's take a look at what's happened.
In December, the district was asking teachers to take a pay cut of almost 10 percent.
The district had declared an impasse in labor negotiations with the Ramona Teachers Association and Superintendent Robert Graeff was playing down the district's prior borrowing. He said the repayments on the old loan accounted for just $500,000 of the estimated budget shortfall of $3.5 million shortfall.
For its part, the union was blaming the district's past decisions for putting teachers in a bad spot.
"Even if we worked for free, they couldn't pay off the loan, and it's not fair to ask us to work for free because they made a bad choice," Ramona Teachers Association Donna Braye-Romero told us at the time.
After 18 months of negotiations between the district and the union failed to produce an agreement on how to handle Ramona's deficit, the district convened a "fact-finding" panel. The panel of three representatives included one union rep, one district rep and a neutral member who served as the panel's chairperson.
The panel concluded that the district's ability to continue to pay full salaries and health benefits was "unsustainable."
“For all these reasons, the chair concludes that the district meets its heavy burden of proof and does have an inability to continue to pay personnel costs, including salaries and benefits, at the current level,” the panel chairwoman wrote in her final report.
The two sides met once more after the report was released to try to come to an agreement.
At issue, union President Donna Braye-Romero said, was both the extent of the salary and benefit cuts teachers were being asked to take and the district's insistence on an inflexible multi-year agreement.
After the two sides failed to agree, the district imposed a contract on teachers that includes salary cuts, mandatory unpaid furlough days and health benefit cuts. The amount each teacher must absorb in cuts depends on his or her family situation, but the union estimates the average teacher will lose thousands of dollars a month and said the cuts are draconian and will lead to teachers losing their homes.
Aside from the size of the cuts, the union also opposed the district's multi-year approach to a labor agreement.
The state's education budget is in remarkable flux at the moment. After voters passed Proposition 30, there will now be a new flow of education dollars from Sacramento. But nobody really knows how much each district will end up getting.
There's further confusion over Gov. Jerry Brown's proposal to radically change the way school districts are funded.
For a small, rural district like Ramona, the governor's plans could have a significant effect in the next couple of years. But the governor needs to persuade the state Legislature to approve his plan, and opponents to the move are already lining up.
Braye-Ramero said the union wanted the district to include "restitution" language in its agreement with teachers. That would basically mean that if more money comes in in future years, the cash goes to teachers. But the district would only agree to a clause allowing the two sides to "reopen" or renegotiate the contract if the state's finances improve, Braye-Romero said.
Graeff said that sticking point was moot.
"My promise is that if the budget gets better, we will if course pass along those improvements to employees," he said. "Why wouldn't we?"
For now, however, Ramona teachers are bound by the contract that's been imposed on them. Their only real option now may be to strike.
The Ramona Teachers Association will hold a "strike authorization vote" on May 7. The vote would essentially give union leaders approval to strike if and when they deem necessary.
Braye-Romero wouldn't say whether she thinks a strike's likely.
"I hope it doesn't happen," she said. "Nobody wants to go on strike."
The union could conceivably reopen its negotiations with the district at any time. But that doesn't seem likely. California Teachers Association spokesman Bill Guy said Graeff appears set on breaking the union.
"The superintendent is trying to bust the union," Guy said. "At our meeting, we offered to take the first-year cuts, just not all three years. They responded by saying that if we didn't accept the deal, they would impose even stricter cuts, and they did."
Graeff said Guy was mistaken.
"What ridiculous person would say such a thing?" he said. "I was a member of the CTA for 11 years as a teacher. That would be a ridiculous assertion."
Will Carless is an investigative reporter at Voice of San Diego currently focused on local education. You can reach him at will.carless@voiceofsandiego.org or 619.550.5670.
ALAN PARDEW'S job is not under threat despite Crystal Palace's dismal run in the Premier League, according to reports.
Palace have not won in the top flight for 13 games, since a 2-1 win at Stoke in mid-December.
They have plummeted down the Premier League, from sixth before Christmas to 16th now, with just eight games to play.
It is claimed the Palace board are yet to discuss the idea of sacking former Newcastle boss Pardew, who was appointed by the London club in January last year.
The 54-year-old helped steer the club to a 10th-place finish last season.
This year the Eagles sit just seven points above the drop zone and are not safe from relegation just yet.
So You Think You Can Dance contestant to hold workshop in his trademark style in the city.
Popping his way to India, dancer Robert Muraine of So You Think You Can Dance (Season 4) fame is all set to train enthusiasts in the city in his trademark hip-hop style. “This is my first trip to India and I’m excited to teach the art of popping to interested dancers at this workshop” says Robert.