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One Nice Bug Per Day
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Not today Justin
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@teddytutson
Kalief Browder, a Bronx teenager, was accused of stealing a backpack. He spent over a thousand days awaiting trial.
Kalief Browder, a Bronx teenager, was accused of stealing a backpack. He spent over a thousand days awaiting trial.
As Ross Ulbricht's online drug empire mushroomed, he became rich, arrogant, and sloppy. Meanwhile, the feds were closing in.
As Ross Ulbricht's online drug empire mushroomed, he became rich, arrogant, and sloppy. Meanwhile, the feds were closing in.
Soldiers returning from war and athletes are regularly diagnosed with Traumatic Brain Injury -- a complex brain injury caused by a blow or a jolt to the head -- and many subsequently receive support and services for the condition. But domestic violence survivors have been largely left out of the picture.
Soldiers returning from war and athletes are regularly diagnosed with Traumatic Brain Injury -- a complex brain injury caused by a blow or a jolt to the head -- and many subsequently receive support and services for the condition. But domestic violence survivors have been largely left out of the picture.
How the world’s most notorious drug lord was captured.
How the world’s most notorious drug lord was captured.
How a 29-year-old idealist built a global drug bazaar and became a murderous kingpin.
How a 29-year-old idealist built a global drug bazaar and became a murderous kingpin.
In an age of social-media shaming, a single tweet can launch a crusade. But maybe Ricky Gervais should have picked another woman to mess with.
How a group of black social media activists built the nation’s first 21st-century civil rights movement.
How a group of black social media activists built the nation’s first 21st-century civil rights movement.
How an employee at a CD-manufacturing plant became the Patient Zero of Internet piracy.
How an employee at a CD-manufacturing plant became the Patient Zero of Internet piracy.
Six months ago, a teenager was burned alive in a tiny Mississippi town. Police say they still don’t know who killed her or why, leaving the mystery in the hands of amateur online sleuths who may be doing more harm than good. When does a private tragedy become a public pastime?
Six months ago, a teenager was burned alive in a tiny Mississippi town. Police say they still don’t know who killed her or why, leaving the mystery in the hands of amateur online sleuths who may be doing more harm than good. When does a private tragedy become a public pastime?
A terrifying glimpse into life in prison—as a kid
From a nondescript office building in St. Petersburg, Russia, an army of well-paid “trolls” has tried to wreak havoc all around the Internet — and in real-life American communities.
On the evening of June 17th, Matt Heimbach got a phone call from the FBI asking if he knew a Dylann Roof. They probably called Heimbach since he's the next generation of white nationalism.
When Dan Price announced he was setting a minimum salary of $70,000 for his 120 employees, he didn’t foresee the turmoil it would cause for his business.
When Dan Price announced he was setting a minimum salary of $70,000 for his 120 employees, he didn’t foresee the turmoil it would cause for his business.
Cameron Asa is a 21-year-old communications major at the University of Tennessee. He’s also the owner of Tweet Like A Girl, a Twitter account with 1.2 million followers.
Asa doesn’t tweet as frequently as some “parody accounts,” but when he does, he wracks up thousands of retweets. On Nov. 4, he tweeted, “stress goin up on a tuesday”; it’s been retweeted 12,000 times. On Nov. 1, he tweeted, “No shave November aka guys with scruff aka what a time to be alive”; it’s been retweeted 6,000 times.
He told BuzzFeed News that he’s part of an unofficial network of Twitter users, all with massive parody accounts who are regularly responsible for making new memes go super viral. He said the network — which has no corporate sponsor backing it — was responsible for the “Alex From Target” sensation on Sunday.
“I know for a fact it was the parody accounts that started it,” Asa said. “It was just absolutely nuts. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
But randomly flexing their power to launch random cute boys into superstardom is only the tip of the iceberg for Twitter’s unofficial parody account network. The guys running these accounts are also making impressive amounts of money.
Asa said he started messing with novelty Twitter accounts during his senior year of high school. His first big hit was a Carly Rae Jepsen parody account.
“I made a parody account that just made, like, parodies to that song, parody tweets to that song,” Asa said. “And I thought, Hey, it’d be kind of cool to have a Twitter account with a lot of followers.”
Asa’s “Call Me Maybe” account got around 40,000 followers, and it got him thinking about other kinds of things that could do well on Twitter. He tried one he admits was pretty stupid called Retweet Dares that got around 180,000 followers. The tweets would basically dare users to retweet the account.
Asa stumbled upon Tweet Like A Girl in 2012. He said in the beginning the account was meant to make fun of girls.
“Like, for example, one of the tweets would be like, ‘Oh my god, I’m so fat,’ with a picture of a stick or a twig,” he said.
He said he gained 100,000 followers in five days, but Asa hit the wall that all novelty accounts eventually hit: He ran out of material. So he decided it was time to expand Tweet Like A Girl’s scope.
“I transitioned into relatable tweets for girls, and ever since I did that, it’s still been nuts,” he said.
Asa’s new game is keeping his account relevant and relatable — and it’s working. He’s now pulling in pretty massive money. He was a little uncomfortable discussing the amount he makes per retweet, but he said that it can be as high as hundreds of dollars.
“Lately I’ve been posting for different apps, and it can range from anywhere from $500 - $1,000 per post — it’s awesome,” Asa said. “I actually did an app tweet last week and I ended up getting the app 20,000 downloads off one tweet.”
It makes sense that brands are clamoring to work with parody accounts; the engagement for an account like Tweet Like A Girl is astronomical. Asa said he’s hoping to branch out to working with movie studios.
He posted a trailer for the film adaptation of Nicholas Sparks’ The Best of Me and said he was able to send it 13 million impressions. He sent BuzzFeed News a screenshot of his Twitter analytics for a similar movie trailer tweet he posted in July boasting 4 million impressions.
The elephant in the room, though, with Asa’s account — and large female-oriented parody accounts like his — is that at the end of the day, he’s a 21-year-old guy tweeting as a teenage girl.
“People ask me all the time,” Asa said. “I know, it’s kind of weird. I kind of made the page and I have to run it. I really do enjoy running it.”
Asa said that he’s met and communicates regularly with the people running about a dozen or so of the largest parody accounts on Twitter. They all communicate with each other over direct message.
He said at the most there are only about four women running relatable parody accounts, noting that Common White Girl — one of the largest female-oriented parody accounts with over 4 million followers — is run by a woman.
A way these accounts keep momentum going is by a retweet-sharing deal organized amongst other large parody pages. A large Twitter account like Tweet Like A Girl will make a three-retweet deal with another large Twitter account, like Dory or Fat Amy. Each account retweets three of the other account’s tweets. Usually one of those three retweets is a paid ad.
That system helps these independent accounts drive up advertising rates, which usually have a variable included for clicks. Essentially, by working together, each of these guys can make his own independent Twitter media network go viral.
David Rhodes is a 29-year-old from Toronto, Canada, who has been running a network of parody and novelty Twitter accounts since 2012. His largest account is Sex Facts Of Life, which has 1.8 million followers and is also one of the few relatable novelty accounts on Twitter to be verified. Rhodes’ second-largest account is Not Will Ferrell, a Will Ferrell parody account.
Those two are just the largest peaks, however, in his incredibly large Twitter network. Rhodes also runs a Brick Tamland parody account, Sarcastic Wonka, Hilarious Ted, and a handful of picture-based accounts like Wow Pics Of Life and Wow Food Porn.
Rhodes’ network is so large, he hired a friend as a independent contractor to help him manage all the content.
Rhodes told BuzzFeed News that someone running parody accounts could easily make six figures a year. He was able to start monetizing his parody Twitter accounts in 2012 and quit his job shortly after; his Twitter network is a full-time gig.
“I’ve always treated it as a business. It’s all about integrity,” Rhodes said.
Rhodes said that Asa’s tactic of targeting young girls with an account is a great market to try to tap into.
“You see a lot of people running those kinds of accounts, a lot of guys running those girly teen accounts,” Rhodes said. “I think part of the reason, in terms of engagement, is females are usually the most engaged.”
He said the key across the board for anyone to put together a successful novelty Twitter account, though, is finding content that people can relate to.
From an outsider’s perspective, this can seem pretty vague and confusing: a group of twentysomething guys who scour the internet for “content” on places like Facebook, Vine, and Tumblr, and then push to their large Twitter networks to help them support a backchannel advertising system.
David Orr refers to the whole setup as “social influencer” marketing. Orr is a 23-year-old entrepreneur from Effingham, Illinois, and he’s been able to pivot on his Twitter following to a position as COO of a company. He starts his new role next month, though would not tell BuzzFeed News what company he’s joining, only saying that it was a fairly large one.
His largest account is a Bill Nye-themed parody account called Ya Boy Bill Nye. It tweets things like “rims on the prius” or “shouts out all my kids out there grindin through AP tests like ‘this shit a game to me homie’ getting high scores and college credit I SEE U.”
“I’m definitely in this for the marketing aspect, and at the end of the day, obviously the revenue,” Orr told BuzzFeed News. “I’m not a writer. I do not write most of my content. I find it [in] other places.”
Obviously, going at content creation with a purely revenue-centric mind-set can be problematic. Orr, Rhodes, Asa, and the parody account owners like them all face a tremendous amount of criticism for plagiarism. Orr said rampant plagiarism on Twitter is Twitter’s problem, not the people who use it.
“Unfortunately Twitter limits us. I don’t think in 140 characters we can add a source,” Orr said. “Should Twitter allow for a place to link for a source, I’m sure everyone would be definitely open to that and do it.”
To understand the true scope of what this Twitter illuminati can accomplish, you need to look no further than Nov. 2’s “Alex From Target” sensation. On the night of Nov. 4, Dil-Domine Leonares, CEO and founder of a tech startup called Breakr,took credit for Alex LaBeouf’s viral explosion.
Leonares claimed it was Breakr’s network that rallied people around Alex From Target. Leonares couldn’t back any of his claims up, but Asa and his parody account can.
Asa, Orr, and Rhodes all agree that it was the swarming of their networks that really bolstered support for LaBeouf early on.
“The parody accounts were the real reason Alex From Target became so famous. They gave him the initial exposure he needed to kind of get the ball rolling,” Orr said.
But it wasn’t coordinated in the way you’d think. It wasn’t a planned campaign; large parody accounts say fans of the band 5 Seconds of Summer engaged with the original tweet and swarmed it.
Rhodes said what happened with Alex From Target was only unusual in the sense that it exploded beyond Twitter. He said that parody accounts are constantly creating worldwide trending topics, and that he used to sit on Twitter at night and start globally trending hashtags for fun.
As for whether or not parody accounts capable of manipulating all of Twitter are ultimately a good thing for social media, Orr wasn’t too certain.
“If I didn’t think it could have negative effects, I’d be trading retweets on all of my accounts, but I’m not,” Orr said. “I don’t know the long-term effects.”
For Asa, though, he’s just having a tough time wrapping his head around the scope of all of this.
“I’ve been doing this for a really long time now,” Asa said, “but sometimes I’ll be in class and get on my page and I’ll just look at it and just be like, Wow, this is crazy.” -- Ryan Broderick, BuzzFeed
Over the summer, media outlets across the country fixated on the mounting death toll of young people in inner cities across America. “11 shot, including 3-year-old boy, as Chicago gun violence worsens,” read the large headline of one major U.S. newspaper, while another, the Chicago Tribune, published a painfully graphic photo essay that chronicled the degree to which gun violence in particular had shocked and destabilized entire neighborhoods in 2014.
This fall, television reporters still stand nightly outside of dimly-lit apartment buildings and row houses, telling yet more stories of children felled by bullets and showing new heartbreaking scenes of mothers wracked by sobs. And yet, other headlines suggest that this nation is far safer and much less violent than it used to be. They note that gun violence has plummeted a startling 49 percent since 1993 and, aside from some brief spikes and dips in the last few years, most policymakers seem to feel quite good about America’s overall crime rate, which is also at a noticeable low.
Why is it then that some American neighborhoods, from the south side of Chicago to the north side of Philadelphia to all sides of Detroit, still endure so much collective distress? Might there be something about these particular neighborhoods, pundits wonder, that make them more prone to violence?
According to one well-respected scholar, "high rates of black crime" continue to exist despite declining crime rates nationally because African Americans live in highly segregated and deeply impoverished neighborhoods. Not only does his work suggest that both segregation and poverty breed violence but, more disturbingly, that the ways in which poor blacks decide collectively and individually to protect themselves seems only to "fuel the violence," and gives it "a self-perpetuating character."
Segregation and poverty are indeed serious problems today, and too many of America’s poorest all-black and all-brown communities also suffer a level of violence that, if one disregards the horrific killing sprees in places like Columbine, Seattle, or Sandy Hook, is largely unknown in whiter, more affluent neighborhoods. Whereas the violent crime rate in the mostly black city of Detroit was 21.23 per 1,000 (15,011 violent crimes) in 2012, that same year the virtually all-white city of Grosse Point, Michigan nearby reported a rate of only 1.12 per 1,000 (6 violent crimes).
Notwithstanding such seemingly damning statistics, though, we have all seriously misunderstood the origins of the almost-paralyzing violence that our most racially-segregated communities now experience and, as troublingly, we have seriously mischaracterized the nature of so much of the violence that the residents of these communities suffer.
To start, locating today’s concentrated levels of gun violence in hyper-segregation and highly concentrated poverty is quite ahistorical. As any careful look at the past makes clear, neither of these social ills is new and, therefore, neither can adequately explain why it is only recently that so many children of color are being shot or killed in their own communities.
Indeed, throughout the twentieth century, racially-segregated communities have been the norm. Everything from restrictive covenants to discriminatory federal housing policies ensured that throughout the postwar period, neighborhoods in cities such as Detroit or Chicago would be either all white or all non-white and, until now, none of these segregated spaces experienced sustained rates of violence so completely out of step with national trends.
To suggest, as both scholars and the media have, that the violence experienced by all-black or all-brown neighborhoods today stems in large part from their residential isolation is problematic for other reasons as well. It leads some to suspect that if people of color simply spent more time with white people, lived next to them, and went to school with them, they would be less violent—they would perhaps learn better ways to resolve disputes and deal with stress and anger. Again, though, history belies this logic.
White Americans also have a long history of violence—not only when asked to share residential space with African Americans or even to treat them as equals in schools or on the job, but also when nary a person of color is near. From the lynching of blacks in the Jim Crow era to the crimes committed against African Americans every time they tried to move onto a white block after World War I and World War II, ugly incidents of white violence were both regular and unremarkable. Even among those who look just like them, whites historically have engaged in a variety of violent behaviors that would make many shudder—from their propensity to engage in brutal duels and to “eye gouge” their fellow whites in the decades before the Civil War, to their involvement in mass shootings in more recent years.
Just as hyper-segregation doesn’t explain the violence that so many have to endure today in America’s inner city communities while still raising children, attending church, and trying to make ends meet, neither does highly-concentrated poverty. Because of their exclusion from virtually every program and policy that helped eventually to build an American middle class, non-whites have always had far less wealth than whites. From the ability to maintain land ownership after the Civil War, to the virtual guarantee of welfare benefits such as Social Security and FHA loans during the New Deal, to preferential access to employment and housing in the postwar period, white communities have always had considerably more economic advantage than communities of color. And yet, no matter how poor they were, America’s most impoverished communities have never been plagued by the level of violence they are today.
But if neither racial segregation nor the racial poverty gap can account for the degree to which poor communities of color are traumatized today, then what does? What is altogether new is the extent to which these communities are devastated by the working of our nation’s criminal justice system in general and by mass incarceration in particular.
Today's rates of incarceration in America's poorest, blackest, and brownest neighborhoods are historically unprecedented. By 2001, one in six black men had been incarcerated and, by the close of 2013, black and Latino inmates comprised almost 60 percent of the nation’s federal and state prison population. The numbers of incarcerated black women are also stark. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, young black women ages 18 to 19 were almost five times more likely to be imprisoned than white women of the same age in 2010.
When President Lyndon B. Johnson passed the Law Enforcement Assistance Act in 1965—legislation which, in turn, made possible the most aggressive war on crime this nation ever waged—he was reacting not to remarkable crime rates but to the civil rights upheaval that had erupted nationwide just the year before. This activism, he and other politicians believed, represented not participatory democracy in action, but instead a criminal element that would only grow more dangerous if not checked.
Notably, the national policy embrace of targeted and more aggressive policing as well as highly punitive laws and sentences—the so-called “War on Crime” that led eventually to such catastrophic rates of imprisonment—predated the remarkable levels of violence that now impact poor communities of color so disproportionately.
In fact, the U.S. homicide rate in 1965 was significantly lower than it had been in several previous moments in American history: 5.5 per 100,000 U.S. residents as compared, for example, with 9.7 per 100,000 in 1933. Importantly, though, whereas the violent crime rate was 200.2 per 100,000 U.S. residents in 1965, it more than tripled to a horrifying 684.6 per 100,000 by 1995. Though mass incarceration did not originate in extraordinarily high rates of violence, mass incarceration created the conditions in which violence would surely fester.
The quadrupling of the incarceration rate in America since 1970 has had devastating collateral consequences. Already economically-fragile communities sank into depths of poverty unknown for generations, simply because anyone with a criminal record is forever “marked” as dangerous and thus rendered all but permanently unemployable. Also, with blacks incarcerated at six times and Latinos at three times the rate of whites by 2010, millions of children living in communities of color have effectively been orphaned. Worse yet, these kids often experience high rates of post-traumatic shock from having witnessed the often-brutal arrests of their parents and having been suddenly ripped from them.
De-industrialization and suburbanization surely did their part to erode our nation’s black and brown neighborhoods, but staggering rates of incarceration is what literally emptied them out. As this Pew Center of the States graphic on Detroit shows, the overwhelmingly-black east side of the Motor City has been ravaged by the effects of targeted policing and mass incarceration in recent years with one in twenty-two adults there under some form of correctional control. In some neighborhoods, the rate is as high as one in 16.
Such concentrated levels of imprisonment have torn at the social fabric of inner city neighborhoods in ways that even people who live there find hard to comprehend, let alone outsiders. As the research of criminologist Todd Clear makes clear, extraordinary levels of incarceration create the conditions for extraordinary levels of violence. But even mass incarceration does not, in itself, explain the particularly brutal nature of the violence that erupts today in, for example, the south side of Chicago. To explain that, we must look again carefully and critically at our nation’s criminal justice system.
The level of gun violence in today's inner cities is the direct product of our criminal-justice policies—specifically, the decision to wage a brutal War on Drugs. When federal and state politicians such as New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller opted to criminalize addiction by passing unprecedentedly punitive possession laws rather than to treat it as a public health crisis, unwittingly or not, a high level of violence in poor communities of color was not only assured but was guaranteed to be particularly ugly. This new drug war created a brand-new market for illegal drugs—an underground marketplace that would be inherently dangerous and would necessarily be regulated by both guns and violence.
Indeed, without the War on Drugs, the level of gun violence that plagues so many poor inner-city neighborhoods today simply would not exist. The last time we saw so much violence from the use of firearms was, notably, during Prohibition. “[As] underground profit margins surged, gang rivalries emerged, and criminal activity mounted [during Prohibition],” writes historian Abigail Perkiss, “the homicide rate across the nation rose 78 percent…[and] in Chicago alone, there were more than 400 gang-related murders a year.”
As important as it is to rethink the origins of the violence that poor inner city residents still endure, we must also be careful even when using the term “violence,” particularly when seeking to explain “what seems to be wrong” with America’s most disadvantaged communities. A level of state violence is also employed daily in these communities that rarely gets mentioned and yet it is as brutal, and perhaps even more devastating, than the violence that is so often experienced as a result of the informal economy in now-illegal drugs.
This is a violence that comes in the form of police harassment, surveillance, profiling, and even killings—the ugly realities of how law enforcement wages America’s War on Drugs. Today, young black men today are 21 times more likely than their white peers to be killed by the police and, according to a recent ProPublica report, black children have fared just as badly. Since 1980, a full 67 percent of the 151 teenagers and 66 percent of the 41 kids under 14 who have been killed by police were African American. Between 2010 and 2012 alone, police officers shot and killed fifteen teens running away from them; all but one of them black.
This is the violence that undergirded the 4.4 million stop-and-frisks in New York City between 2004 and 2014. This is the violence that led to the deaths of black men and boys such as Kimani Gray, Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell, Oscar Grant, and Michael Brown. This is the violence that led to the deaths of black women and girls such as Rekia Boyd, Yvette Smith, and 7-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones. And this is the violence that has touched off months of protests in Ferguson, Missouri just as it also touched off nearly a decade of urban rebellions after 1964.
A close look at the violence that today haunts America’s most impoverished and most segregated cities, in fact, fundamentally challenges conventional assumptions about perpetrators and victims. America’s black and brown people not only don’t have a monopoly on violence, but, in fact, a great deal of the violence being waged in their communities is perpetrated by those who are at least officially charged with protecting, not harming, them. As residents of Ferguson well know, for example, in the same month that Michael Brown was shot to death by a police officer, four other unarmed black men were also killed by members of law enforcement.
Indeed, the true origins of today’s high rates of violence in America’s most highly segregated, most deeply impoverished, and blackest and brownest neighborhoods—whoever perpetrates it—are located well outside of these same communities. Simply put, America’s poorest people of color had no seat the policy table where mass incarceration was made. But though they did not create the policies that led to so much community and state violence in inner cities today, they nevertheless now suffer from them in unimaginable ways. -- Heather Ann Thompson, The Atlantic
Watch this euphemism, as it just became the most important in the Obama administration’s vocabulary now that the US has resumed air strikes in Iraq: force protection.
The F/A-18 strikes that the US launched Friday morning came with a rationale as plain as it was misleading – or, viewing it through the lens of Iraq’s complicated diplomacy, usefully ambiguous for America’s aims.
“To stop the advance on Irbil, I’ve directed our military to take targeted strikes against ISIL terrorist convoys should they move toward the city. We intend to stay vigilant, and take action if these terrorist forces threaten our personnel or facilities anywhere in Iraq, including our consulate in Irbil and our embassy in Baghdad,” Barack Obama said in a statement from the White House late Thursday.
A more precise rationale becomes visible when you consider both where the strikes took place and where, months after Isis upended Iraq’s fragile post-Saddam status quo, they haven’t.
The two fighter jets hit a target outside of Irbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, an autonomous region notable both for its consistent embrace of the United States and for its stability throughout 11 years of war. The target was mobile Isis artillery that had been shelling Kurdish Peshmerga who have fallen back to defend the city where, Pentagon press secretary Rear Admiral John Kirby noted, “US personnel are located.”
Those US personnel are among the special-operations advisers and diplomats Obama deployed for a “joint operations center” in Irbil. There, they assess and plan, with the Kurds – usually just referred to as Iraqis, another useful ambiguity – options for stopping Isis’ advance. Until this week, few thought Kurdistan was at risk of falling to Isis. Now that’s a real possibility. Out come the laser-guided bombs for the first air strikes Obama has ordered in Iraq since the 2011 withdrawal. A second round of strikes began Friday evening local time, including the first US drone strike in Iraq since 2011.
Yet the Obama administration faces a significant constraint in declaring a threat to Iraqi Kurdistan a threat to US interests. American diplomats are attempting to stitch together a new and ostensibly more inclusive government in Baghdad. For months, Obama has resisted Baghdad’s entreaties to launch airstrikes against Isis. Arab Iraqi politicians can be forgiven for wondering why the US is unwilling to fly Super Hornets from the deck of the USS George HW Bush to defend their interests.
Citing a need to protect US forces in Irbil, then, is a convenient elision. Isis finds that the US is willing to attack its forces as they assault Iraqi Kurdish positions. The US gets to avoid, or at least defer, explicit preferential treatment for the Kurds, since protecting US forces is unambiguously a US necessity. Conspicuously, the US has yet to attack the Isis positions threatening Iraqi Yazidis at Mount Sinjar, whose dire conditions ostensibly prompted Obama’s first step toward making the Iraq crisis an American one.
On the ground by Irbil, these distinctions are less meaningful. The F/A-18s might not have explicitly provided close air support for the Peshmerga – that would require coordination between the Peshmerga and the US Navy pilots – but the strikes nevertheless provide the Peshmerga with a measure of air cover, an advantage over the better-armored Isis fighters. It rhymes with close air support, at least: the Kurds get a chance to fortify the defense of Irbil.
Whatever their fears about the Yazidis’ humanitarian emergency, Obama administration officials this week have been deeply worried by the vulnerability of Kurdistan. If Kurdistan falls, the war is transformed. The last unambiguously pro-US bastion of Iraq will be gone. Nato ally Turkey will face increased vulnerability to Isis. Baghdad’s fractious politics will lose a moderating force, and the US will lose an extraction point of last resort should Baghdad fall. Isis will be at Iran’s mountainous doorstep. The much-persecuted Kurds would be at risk of a new bloodbath. Quietly, there are calls for the US to funnel weapons to the Peshmerga; expect them to intensify.
Ever since Obama and Nato launched an air- and sea-based assault on Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya in 2011, observers worldwide have wondered Why There And Not Elsewhere. Obama administration officials, including the many “strategic communications” specialists in the government, have struggled for three years to answer that question. They want to avoid entangling the US in yet another bloody Middle Eastern war that does not lend itself to American solutions. That extremely understandable reluctance has been consistently put to the test by adversaries – from Bashar al-Assad to Isis – who want to explore Obama’s threshold of pain.
In the days and weeks ahead in Iraq, Obama will have to decide where his threshold is. If Isis cannot cross into Kurdistan, will Obama use air power to help the Peshmerga take back territory from Isis, a challenge Isis has never faced since it took Mosul in June? Will he bomb Isis positions crossing into Baghdad? The downside of war-by-euphemism is that it leaves actual US goals ambiguous to both allies and adversaries, and encourages strategic improvisation – the first step in mission creep.
After all, there are hundreds of US special operations “advisers” in Baghdad as well, all of whom may increasingly need aerial protection. -- Spencer Ackerman, The Guardian
Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis said Thursday she is “seriously thinking” about mounting a formal challenge to Rahm Emanuel.
“I’m a little sick of the mayor and I don’t see anyone stepping up,” Lewis told the Chicago Sun-Times by telephone Thursday evening. “I am seriously thinking about it.”
She denied a WMAQ-Channel 5 report that she has met with election lawyers about her own campaign possibilities, saying she has spoken with attorneys about CTU members who are running for office.
Lewis has made no bones about wanting to oust Emanuel, with whom she’s sparred since he took office in 2011 and who supposedly shouted, “F - - - you, Lewis” in an early meeting with her.
Lewis has been Emanuel’s chief adversary throughout his administration. And she has not only stared him down, she has defeated him. He raised the strike threshhold, and she and her members blew past it. She took her members out on strike for first time in 25 years — and got the better of the deal that ended the walkout.
She blamed him again Thursday for the layoff of an additional 1,150 Chicago Public Schools staffers, saying, “Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his Board continue their war on our educators by doing nothing to salvage school budgets other than forcing principals to terminate valued teachers and staff. . . . This decision further demonstrates the disdain for public education and the lack of leadership and vision for the city from our mayor and his handpicked board. Do we want ‘Star Wars’ museums or public, neighborhood schools? Do we want presidential libraries or librarians for every child?”
The mayoral election takes place in February. Former alderman Robert Shaw has declared his candidacy, along with housing consultant and former Mayor Richard M. Daley staffer Amara Enyia.
Emanuel, meanwhile, has raised well over $7.4 million, even before the tally from last week’s fundraiser headlined by former President Bill Clinton. And that doesn’t count the super PAC formed last week by a mayoral ally to push Emanuel’s agenda and attack his opponents.
“There’s plenty of time for politics,” said Peter Giangreco, Emanuel’s campaign spokesman. “The mayor is focused on moving every Chicago neighborhood forward.”
Lewis has praised the leadership style of Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle as “less confrontational” than Emanuel’s and said a few weeks ago that Preckwinkle would defeat him in a head-to-head race.
A Sun-Times poll in May put Lewis in third place behind Emanuel and Preckwinkle, who is running unopposed for election in November. She has refused as recently as Thursday afternoon to rule out a race for mayor. That poll also showed that only 29 percent of those surveyed and 8 percent of African-Americans would support Emanuel.
“I’m not looking to make anybody’s election year easy at all, especially someone who doesn’t want to make our lives easy,” Lewis said in May after a speech at the City Club of Chicago. “So if there’s a way we can have some reasonable conversation, then sure, but if not, it’s going to be contentious, absolutely, as it should.”