It's Kate Winslet's Birthday!

 

 

Actress Kate Winslet was born on this day in 1975. One of her best-known roles was in Titanic, whose opening she missed to attend the funeral of Stephen Tredre, her first love, after he died from bone cancer. He had urged her to break off their relationship so that she could focus on making the movie, but she subsequently expressed regret that she hadn’t been with him at the end. As related by T. Rivas in Positive Memories:

“British academy-award winning actress Kate Winslet had a relationship with her colleague Stephen Tredre that began when she was 15 and lasted for about five years, from 1991 to 1995. Tredre was almost 13 years her senior.

"Shortly after he died of cancer in 1997, Kate Winslet confessed he had been the love of her life.

“She confirmed this again for an interview in 2008 connected to her performance in The Reader:

“'He was very much the love of my life during those years.’"

https://www.vulture.com/2008/12/three_out_of_four_the_reader_s.html

The Inquirer's Confusion Reflects Why Democrats Are Losing

 

The Philadelphia Inquirer has an article reporting on the fact that Democrats have been losing ground to Republicans among working-class Philadelphians. The article itself is marked by a terminological conflation that precisely reflects the reason many Democrats don't understand why this is happening.

It says, "[W]orking-class voters in Philadelphia, a once reliable voting bloc for the party, have drifted right in recent years." Variations on this are repeated several times in the article. Yet not an iota of evidence is presented that working-class Philadelphians have become more conservative ideologically -- only that more are voting for the GOP, at least when its nominee is Trump.

It's not working people who've been moving to the right; it's the Democratic Party that's done so, leaving workers less reason to vote for it. In the absence of a mass workers' party, it's primarily the Republicans that benefit.

But this shift also increases the opportunities for a solution to this problem. The more workers see Trump as the lesser evil, the more can make Vote Pacts with those who still see Harris in that light -- freeing both to vote for a real pro-worker alternative like the Green Party.

FIRE: Penn takes a hammer to academic freedom

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression has issued the following statement about the University of Pennsylvania's sanctioning of Professor Amy Wax:

 

Yesterday, the University of Pennsylvania completed its years-long end run around academic freedom to punish law professor Amy Wax. FIRE's working hard to ensure Penn's dubious tactics won't become the new playbook for private universities, which, unlike public universities, are not bound by the First Amendment.



Long under pressure to "do something" about the controversial Wax — who's been widely criticized for her views on race and gender — Penn finally got its woman yesterday.

After conducting a nearly two-year investigation of Wax, which extended more than a year since the last real hearing in her case, Penn announced the professor would indeed be sanctioned for "unprofessionalism." She'll keep her tenured faculty role and serve a one-year suspension at half-pay. She'll also keep her benefits, an important fact given that Wax has been fighting cancer while battling Penn administrators.

Penn is a private school that nonetheless makes First Amendment-like promises to respect its students' and faculty members' right to free expression. Whether on a contractual or moral basis, Penn should have kept those promises. Instead, it abandoned principle for the sake of expediency.

While it remains to be seen whether Wax will keep her promise to sue Penn if she's punished, I told The New York Times yesterday that the university's decision "should send a chill down the spine of every faculty member, not just at Penn but at every private institution around the country."

Penn's dubious procedural efforts — which stripped Wax of many of the due process protections tenure affords — paid off. If that's all it takes to sidestep tenure, the rights of even the most protected private college faculty are tenuous at best.

FIRE has long defended Wax, and we continue to do so for two reasons. First, because her comments are unquestionably protected by academic freedom. And second, because the same principles that protect her right to hold both her views and her job also protect faculty who represent a range of viewpoints around the country.

In our hyper-polarized political moment, faculty increasingly find themselves called "unprofessional" for their views on Israel and Gaza. Or on race. Or gender. Or abortion, or immigration, or the police, or COVID-19, or politics more broadly. Often the only thing standing between the angry college administrator — or the disgruntled donor, or the social media mob, or the local legislator coming for that professor's job — is the time-honored principle of academic freedom.

That's why, regardless of whether you care for Amy Wax's opinions, you should care what happens to her. If our colleges and universities are to achieve their missions as bastions of academic excellence, faculty like Wax must remain free to speak their minds.

— Alex Morey, Vice President of Campus Advocacy

Voting As a Communal Activity

 

Ideally, voting should a communal civic activity, with a holiday set aside and related festivities organized around it. It's also something to which people should apply their critical judgment to the greatest extent possible. For this reason, I'm not an advocate of voting by mail except when it's a practical necessity. Voting by mail means voting early, which means that if you acquire new information close to Election Day after you've already mailed in your ballot, it's too late to change your mind. I don't approve of campaigns encouraging people to vote by mail merely in the name of convenience, since careful and fully informed deliberation, not convenience, should be the priority when it comes to exercising this civic responsibility.

In the spring of 2020 I applied for a mail ballot for the primary election on account of the pandemic. As it so happened, the ballot hadn't arrived by the weekend before the election, so I contacted the office of Al Schmidt, then one of Philadelphia's City Commissioners with whom I'm acquainted, and he swung by on Sunday afternoon to hand me an emergency ballot. I took a few minutes to go to a private spot to fill it out and then seal it, then brought it back to him, whereupon he dropped it in a portable ballot box right in front of me. Now Pennsylvania's secretary of state, he's a real public servant.

Since that primary, I haven't assessed contagion concerns as being sufficiently serious to argue against in-person voting for most people. But as of last November I've become a standby poll worker, serving in a different polling place than my own, so I've resumed voting by mail rather than having to take time out from my duties to go back to my own polling place and vote. My general opposition to voting early stands, however. So, even though my mail ballot arrived yesterday, I don't intend to fill it out and return it until about ten days before the election. That should be sufficient guarantee that it will be received before the deadline.

SEPA's First Braver Angels Debate

The Southeastern Pennsylvania Alliance of Braver Angels, the organization promoting cross-partisan dialogue in the United States, held its first debate last Saturday, September 28, at the Warminster public library. I was first up as a lead speaker for the pro side on the resolution, "Local communities should receive more federal funding to address homelessness." It appeared that all in attendance agreed that the ensuing discussion helped them understand each other's perspectives and additional ideas were brought forward to help bridge the divide, such as Citizens' Assemblies to ensure local control of programs while receiving federal funds.

 

This was the first Braver Angels event I've attended in person as well as my first time as lead speaker, but I've taken part in a few online, including a debate several months ago about school library censorship. I used my turn in part to share a childhood experience contradicting what other speakers on both sides seemed to be assuming about certain kinds of material being "inappropriate" for young people.

New Study Finds Nonpartisan Primaries Reduce the Influence of Wealthy Donors

 

As more and more states look into and pursue nonpartisan open primary initiatives and legislation, partisan insiders are finding more creative ways to attack including claiming that nonpartisan primaries are more susceptible to dark money expenditures. But in a new piece in RealClearPolitics, Researcher and Democracy Fellow at Unite America, Rich Barton points out this couldn’t be further from the truth: “Nonpartisan primaries significantly reduce the influence of wealthy donors in elections.”

Using data from the Federal Election Commission he analyzed all campaign contributions from Political Action Committees (PACs) and independent expenditures from Super PACs and found that:

“Ideological PACs like Club for Growth Action on the right and Protect our Future on the left, bankrolled by millionaires, have much less influence in states with nonpartisan primaries. In fact, nonpartisan primaries curb the power of ideological PACs by about two-thirds relative to partisan primaries.”

Break the Duopoly!

Great news: there's now an online platform you can use to make an end run around "lesser evil" blackmail with a Vote Pact. It's called break the Duopoly and you can check it out here: https://www.breaktheduopoly.com This will allow you to get matched with someone who's "on the other side" of the Red/Blue dichotomy but is just as disgusted as you are with feeling blackmailed to vote for a "lesser evil" to stop a "greater evil."

                                                                  #DRexit

Tell Gov. Walz: Stand up for justice!

From DropSite News:

Two months ago, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison completed a comprehensive review that exonerated a Native American man named Brian Pippitt who is currently serving a life sentence for a first-degree murder that took place decades ago.

But the rural county prosecutor whose office imprisoned Pippitt in the first place is refusing to abide by the state’s exoneration and continues holding Pippitt behind bars to this day. AG Ellison’s investigation found substantial issues with the prosecution, including unreliable witness testimony. To read more about this case, read Drop Site News’ full coverage here.

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz has a chance to stand up for justice and stop this prosecutor’s obstruction!

Unlike many other states, Minnesota allows its governor to step in and reassign jurisdiction in instances like this.

Sign the petition asking Governor Tim Walz to remove the case from the county prosecutor and hand it over to the attorney general’s office.  

Mt. Holly: We Don't Need No Stinkin' Constitution

 

This message arrived from Team Kennedy this morning:

Friends,

Regarding Kennedy 24 Presidential Campaign plans for a campaign table on the public sidewalk in front of the Mt. Holly, New Jersey Post Office today:

We regret to inform you that the local authorities in Mt. Holly acted to violate our constitutional rights to free speech this morning. They demanded that we leave the area, as they insisted that their local codes took precedence over the U.S. Constitution. 

We had looked forward to meeting you today, but, unfortunately, that will not now be possible.

We will be consulting our attorneys about legal remedies that the Campaign will be pursuing, in response to this harassment.

Thank you for your support. 

Happy Birthday, George Hamilton!

 

 Actor George Hamilton is eighty-five years old today. In observance of his birthday, here’s a story about one of his early experiences:

“'When I was very young, twelve, I had a relationship with my stepmother,' he told the ladies of the View on Thursday.

 

"The tanned star released his memoir Don’t Mind If I Do on Tuesday which includes the revelation that he slept with the wife of his father, bandleader George 'Spike' Hamilton.

 

“It actually went on for a short period of time when I was twelve and then strangely enough when I was of age, and I was an actor in Hollywood, I met her again and she was as beautiful as ever and we had a sort of follow-up,' Hamilton said.

 

"The star of The Godfather Part III and Zorro, The Gay Blade said that his stepmother was about 28 or 30 at the time of the first sexual encounter.

 

“My father never knew about it, and it was a very strange thing. But it was very normal, in a strange – she didn’t make me feel bad about it,' Hamilton said on the program. It wasn’t dirty.'

 

"Hamilton said that his stepmother called it 'cuddling' and he didn’t feel abnormal about it.

 

“'I was molested?' he said. 'Damn, I’m down for it again.'” (from a October 17, 2008 Fox News story reprinted in Positive Memories by T. Rivas)

 

Note: until a couple years ago, the Wikipedia article about Hamilton read a bit differently. It claimed Hamilton described himself as a victim in his memoir, which in light of the above quotes is obviously not accurate. It also failed to mention that it happened more than once, and that Hamilton renewed the relationship as an adult. Evidently the previous editor of the article was more concerned with political and moral "correctness" than with factual correctness, something that is true of many pages on that site these days. Of course I fixed it.

Team Kennedy Is Adopting the Vote Pact Strategy #DRexit

 

For some time I've been urging independent politics activists, including fellow participants in Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s presidential campaign, to adopt Sam Husseini's VotePact concept. I even came up with a new hashtag, #DRexit, to help popularize it. So I was thrilled last Sunday, during a national webinar updating people on the campaign's progress, to hear that they're going to do so, calling it Kennedy Match. Coincidentally, this is the same day Husseini posted a new article about this strategy on his blog.

The idea is that disaffected voters with opposite ideological leanings, who are frustrated by the sense that they're obligated to vote for a "lesser evil" to stop the "greater evil" and are blocked from taking effective action to seek something better, can team up to break with both establishment parties at the same time while leaving the balance between them unaltered. This has the added enormous advantage that it incentivizes people to step outside of their ideological comfort zone by developing dialogue and trust with people of different perspectives. Some guidance on how to do so may be found on the Braver Angels website.

This approach can also be seen as an application to electoral strategy of Robin Hanson's "tugging sideways" concept.