Robert Reich wondered out loud what many people including me have been saying. He posed it as a question. Is Ron DeSantis a fascist? He didn’t even get into the damage that DeSantis has done to teachers, driving them out with low pay, gag orders, censorship, and replacing them with veterans and first responders without experience or knowledge of teaching. He also fired five elected officials and replaced them with cronies. Four were Broward County school board members who were criticized in a state report for the Parkland school shootings, the fifth was a county prosecutor who said he would not prosecute women who sought an abortion. He is on a roll, attacking teachers and anyone he considers WOKE (i.e., concerned about racism, injustice, etc.). He is rising by making hatred his brand.

Robert Reich writes:

I like to tweet. Not as much as I like to write here on…

“The French Lieutenant’s Woman is a 1969 postmodernhistorical fiction novel by John Fowles. The plot explores the fraught relationship of gentleman and amateur naturalist Charles Smithson and Sarah Woodruff, the former governess and independent woman with whom he falls in love. The novel builds on Fowles’ authority in Victorian literature, both following and critiquing many of the conventions of period novels. … Part of the novel’s reputation concerns its postmodern literary qualities, with expressions of metafiction, historiography, metahistory, Marxist criticism, and feminism. Stylistically and thematically, the novel has been described as historiographic metafiction.^[6] The contrast between the independent Sarah Woodruff and the more stereotypical male characters often earns the novel attention for its treatment of gender issues. … Set in the mid-nineteenth century, the narrator identifies the novel’s protagonist as Sarah Woodruff, the Woman of the title, also known as…

“Travesties is a 1974 play by Tom Stoppard. The play centres on the figure of Henry Carr, an elderly man who reminisces about Zürich in 1917 during the First World War, and his interactions with James Joyce when he was writing Ulysses, Tristan Tzara during the rise of Dada, and Lenin leading up to the Russian Revolution, all of whom were living in Zürich at that time. The play is primarily set in Zürich, Switzerland during the First World War. At that time, three important personalities were living in Zürich: the modernist author James Joyce, the communist revolutionary Lenin, and Dada founder Tristan Tzara. The play centres on the less notable Henry Carr, a British consular official (also mentioned in Joyce’s novel Ulysses), as he recalls his perceptions and experiences with these influential figures. As he…

In this Aug. 6, 1965, photo, President Lyndon Baines Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in a ceremony in the President’s Room near the Senate Chambers on Capitol Hill in Washington.

“The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is a landmark piece of federallegislation in the United States that prohibits racial discrimination in voting. It was signed into law by PresidentLyndon B. Johnson during the height of the civil rights movement on August 6, 1965, and Congress later amended the Act five times to expand its protections. Designed to enforce the voting rights guaranteed by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, the Act sought to secure the right to vote for racial minorities throughout the country, especially in the South. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the Act is considered to be the most effective piece of federal

“Hollywood Babylon is a book by avant-gardefilmmakerKenneth Anger which details the purported scandals of famous Hollywood denizens from the 1900s to the 1950s. The book was banned shortly after it was first published in the U.S. in 1965, and remained unavailable until reprinted ten years later. Upon its second release in 1975, The New York Times said of it, ‘If a book such as this can be said to have charm, it lies in the fact that here is a book without one single redeeming merit.’ The Daily Beast described Anger’s book as ‘essentially a work of fiction. There is no doubt that many—if not all—of the stories Anger shares in his slim bible have no merit.’ Film historian Kevin Brownlow repeatedly criticized the book, citing Anger as saying his research method was ‘mental telepathy, mostly’. … The book details alleged scandals of Hollywood stars from the

“When Mario Vargas Llosa, the precocious star of the 1960s ‘boom’ in Latin American fiction, ran for president in 1990 in his native Peru, many of his most avid readers prayed he would lose. As his friend, the Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante, observed: ‘Peru’s uncertain gain would be literature’s loss. Literature is eternity, politics mere history.’  That may have been scant consolation to the vanquished Vargas Llosa when the dark-horse victor, Alberto Fujimori, seized dictatorial powers in 1992 and fell only in 2000 in one of the most bizarre corruption scandals in Latin American history. But for the nearly man, who maintains that he lost the election largely for telling the truth, his candidacy was a ‘terrible mistake’ which he does not regret. ‘It was a very instructive experience, though not pleasant,’ he smiles stiffly. ‘I learned a lot about Peru, about politics and about myself: I learned…

“In the October 1950 Issue of La Gazette du cinema, a young Jean-Luc Godard, writing pseudonymously, penned a sentence that serves, for biographer Richard Brody, as a skeleton key to the legendary director’s often-inscrutable inner workings: ‘At the cinema, we do not think, we are thought.’ Brody, a film critic and editor at the New Yorker, uses this key throughout his rigorous yet readable biographical study, as dauntingly massive as it is helpfully clarifying, to unlock the intensely personal and political influences that shaped the work of an artist as pivotal to the evolution of his chosen medium as Picasso and Bob Dylan were to theirs. Like Picasso, Godard is an artist of many phases, each with enough revolutionary singularity to have sustained the reputation of any other director; like Dylan, he was a meteoric phenomenon of the 1960s who suffered a motorcycle accident and retreated to domestic…

Fiona Hill has studied the words and actions of Vladimir Putin for years as a Russia expert on the National Security Council. Since Trump fired her, she has been at the Brookings Institurion and is free to speak in public.

I think you will find this interview in Foreign Policy interesting.

She thinks Putin is playing mind games with the West.

What a liar he is. He just signed a “historic” deal with Ukraine to allow Ukrainian wheat to reach global markets and ease world hunger. One day later, Russian missiles struck the port of Odessa, where the grain was supposed to be shipped out.