Portside

Massachusetts poet Anne Champion raises a protest against the sale of guns and weapons of mass destruction.

Two pieces sum up the Court's decisions on Harris v. Quinn and Hobby Lobby. The first, from Constitutional Accuracy Center, describes how the Court has been ruling in favor of big business. The second, from BillMoyers.com, provides a round-up of commentary on the cases.

Keep one thing in mind: the rebellions of the past three years were led by Arab millennials, twentysomethings who have decades left to come into their own. Don’t count them out yet. They have only begun the work of transforming the region.

In the liberal political imagination, the Supreme Court is an institution that must vindicate principles rather than practice politics. As the philosopher Richard Rorty once acknowledged, liberals “turn to the judiciary as the only political institution for which we can still feel something like awe.

Ruby and Ossie were extraordinarily generous and bold, lending their celebrity to a host of leftist causes and holding affiliations with a variety of groups including some associated with the demonized CP. They fought Joe McCarthy's anti-communist witch-hunt and supported its victims, organized to restore Paul Robeson's passport, rallied for the Rosenbergs, and Che Guevara. While the media celebrates her life as an actress, they don't acknowledge the obstacles she faced.

Harris v. Quinn has set the stage for the eventual overruling of Abood; it has confused and perverted the concept of free-riders; and it has created an impossible standard for unions to meet.

Examining actual weapons would be a breach of confidentiality: how they’re made and put together is secret, and the fewer people that know what’s inside a nuclear bomb, the better. Luckily, a group of scientists have devised a way to use math, and neutrons, to figure out if something’s actually a nuclear weapon, without learning anything about what’s inside it.

Developing a democratically oriented alternative to capitalism can’t be done overnight. This work requires a different sense of time and a deep sense of commitment—the bargaining chips are decades of our lives. But the shifts are already happening in places like Cleveland and Boulder. What we’re seeing is the prehistory, possibly, of the next great change, in which a movement is built from the grassroots that becomes the foundation of a new era.

Not only has Japan failed to compensate the surviving comfort women, but Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has led a nationalist campaign to adamantly deny Japan’s shameful criminal past, has revised history textbooks that previously contained information about Japan’s military sex slaves and is also threatening to revise the Kono Statement.

Systematic undercounting of sexual assaults in the US disguises a hidden rape crisis.