Portside

Occasionally entertainment and politics intersect. Sunday Meryl Streep tearfully addressed the stars assembled at the Golden Globes about her anxieties and distress at the advent of the Trump era in the United States. She made the powerful point, which is that no human experience is really foreign to us as human beings if only we can find the tools to understand it, emotionally and intellectually. And Trump does not.

Duterte's campaign to rid the Philippines of drug users and pushers through extrajudicial executions elicited shock even among the most hardened observers. And his now legendary cursing of President Obama as a "son of a bitch" - part of an angry farewell to a long-standing alliance with Washington and an embrace of China - upended Asian geopolitics.

Hit that old song again, loud and clear! "Over there, over there, Send the word, send the word, That the Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming." Yes, sirree! Shades of 1918 and the Battle of the Marne! Shades of 1944 and the beaches of Normandy! But no, not just shades and not just words have already been sent. The U.S. is sending significant military assets to Germany, and to countries bordering Russia.

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The form of political action that Clinton defenders in labor advocate is a suffocating loser. It seeks accommodation when confrontation is required. It is more concerned with the longevity of the union as an institution – an important consideration for labor, but one that demands a more courageous vision – than with the overall strength of its members vis a vis their employers, which in fact is the only guarantor of institutional survival.

The author argues that a key factor in unifying the fractious 13 colonies in opposition to British rule during the Revolution was the patriots' effort to link British oppression to extant colonial fears about insurrectionary slaves and homicidal Indians. America's founders were chief among those spreading tales of British agents inciting blacks and Indians to take up arms against the American rebellion, making racial prejudice a foundation stone of the new republic.

Ahead of President Obama’s farewell speech in Chicago this week, the author of a celebrated book about the city explains how it works as a microcosm of the US, with its legacy of policies reinforcing ethnic and economic divisions.

The question is whether public schools owe disabled children “some” educational benefit — which courts have determined to mean just-above-trivial progress — or whether students legally deserve something more: a substantial, “meaningful” benefit.

Taken together, these sitcoms remind us of the centrality of race, not just to our conversations but to policies around income inequality.

According to the article AFSCME would agree to a four-year wage freeze in an attempt to get get the Rauner administration back to the bargaining table". AFSCME Council 31 Executive Director Roberta Lynch said, "Employees would pay more for health insurance in three of the four years...".