Portside

Almost from the day Donald Trump announced his candidacy for the White House in 2015, California, along with the rest of the country, has experienced an uptick of reported hate and bias incidents. As Capital & Main’s new series reveals, most of these attacks have been directed at immigrants and people of color. But this is hardly new – the Golden State has a long history of violence and discrimination against nonwhites and the foreign born.

The Republican presidential candidates are wrong. Supreme Court nominees can and should be confirmed in election years.

The right-wing Illinois governor is slashing programs for the state and threatening bankruptcy for Chicago Public Schools instead of offering any revenue raising solutions.

The Center for Medical Progress is led not by well-meaning bioethics geeks but by some of the most virulent members of the anti-choice movement.

The shortlists for the long-running American genre awards, won in the past by names from Kurt Vonnegut to Ursula K Le Guin and voted for by fans, were announced this weekend to uproar in the science fiction community, after it emerged that the line-up corresponded closely with the slates of titles backed by certain conservative writers.

Nevada coverage of the Bundy standoff has made it clear that Bundy is breaking the law, right-wing media, and Fox News in particular, have propped up his cause with a PR campaign that romanticizes his lawlessness and the armed militia groups that helped him force a standoff with federal agents - even as Bundy and his supporters were engaging in revolutionary, insurrectionist rhetoric and repeated threats of violence against government authorities.

On the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy, many are focused on the political atmosphere in the country and the world - specifically the role of the ultra-right in whipping up hysteria, and the machinations and secret plots of the "hidden government," the spy agencies, the FBI and CIA. Now we have previously unreleased material (from the National Archives) about secret negotiations between JFK and Fidel Castro,. Was this the reason to kill?

The ultra Right tastes blood in the snafu that threatens "Obamacare"; they are gleefully throwing everything into their last, best chance to overturn any expansion of health care. A "broader" coalition, both domestic and international, is feverishly doing its all to abort efforts at easing tensions with Iran.

If the Tea Party is going for a smaller party that's more pure, they're not necessarily deterred by getting beaten. [With incidents like the shutdown,] they just feel like they got sold out, so they redouble their efforts. At some point, this process will curdle on itself and collapse, but I don't think we've reached that point yet. I think the Tea Party's going to keep fighting. If the Republican caucus in Iowa for president was next week, I think Ted Cruz would win it.

A Supreme Court case being argued could take away a tactic that's kept unions alive. The case, Unite Here Local 355 v. Mulhall, involves the constitutionality of "card check neutrality agreements" between unions and companies they're trying to organize. The case now facing Antonin Scalia and company could be "the most significant labor case in a generation."