Tag Archives: william

Don’t Be Fooled: The North Carolina "Compromise" Doesn’t Actually Protect Transgender Rights

by DelmarFloyd725 Posted on March 30, 2017

Mother Jones

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North Carolina is at it again. On Thursday, state lawmakers approved legislation repealing HB 2, the controversial law that banned cities and counties from passing nondiscrimination ordinances and barred transgender people from using public bathrooms that correspond to their gender identity.

Under a deal that Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper and struck with Republican leaders in the legislature Wednesday night, HB 2 would technically be repealed. But it would be replaced with new legislation that LGBT rights advocates say is just as bad. The new bill, which now heads to the governor’s desk for approval, would prohibit any entity other than the state government from regulating access to bathrooms or changing facilities. Essentially, it would prohibit cities from taking action to protect the rights of transgender people to use the appropriate bathroom. Additionally, it would prohibit local governments from passing any regulations regarding access to public space or private employment practices until 2020. (HB 2 was originally passed in response to a Charlotte ordinance that was designed to protect LGBT rights.)

LGBT advocates and their allies say the new proposal isn’t a compromise at all—they’re actually calling it HB 2.0.

“This so-called compromise it not a repeal,” said Reverend William Barber, the head of North Carolina’s NAACP, on a conference call set up by opponents of the deal. “It’s a Trojan horse, and we can never compromise on fundamental civil rights.” Barber has been one of the most prominent voices in the fight against HB 2.

HB 2 sparked a nation-wide backlash, including an economic boycott, after it was signed by GOP Gov. Pat McCrory last year. Republican lawmakers have downplayed the financial impact of conferences and events avoiding North Carolina in response to HB 2, but the Associated Press reported earlier this week that the state will lose an estimated $3.76 billion over 12 years.

*

The last-minute compromise comes as the National Collegiate Athletic Association is determining where to hold its championship events for the next five years. In response to HB 2’s passage last year, the NCAA removed seven scheduled sporting events from North Carolina. It’s given the state a Thursday deadline to repeal the law if it wants to be considered for the future events. The NCAA didn’t respond to questions about whether the new legislation is sufficient to address its concerns.

In a statement, Cooper said the bill is “not a perfect deal” but begins “to repair our reputation.”

LGBT advocates aren’t buying it. They point out that Cooper was elected in large part because his GOP predecessor was was a strong supporter of HB 2.

“Governor Cooper and legislators must be grownups…and not vote for or sign a bill that merely doubles down on discrimination,” Chris Sgro, executive director of Equality NC, said on the call. “We know that it doesn’t matter if you have a ‘D’ or ‘R’ next to your name. If you vote for this bill, you won’t be a friend to the LGBT or civil rights community.”

The bill, assuming Cooper signs it, appears likely to end up in court. The compromise legislation “in many ways mirrors the Colorado law that was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1996,” said Chad Griffin, the president of the Human Rights campaign. “That was a law that also banned any city, town, or county in the state of Colorado from protecting gay or bisexual people from discrimination.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated the time period over which North Carolina would lose $3.76 billion.

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Don’t Be Fooled: The North Carolina "Compromise" Doesn’t Actually Protect Transgender Rights

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Why Dylann Roof’s Death Sentence May Never Be Carried Out

by CassieO74ss Posted on January 12, 2017

Mother Jones

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On June 17, 2015, Dylann Roof entered a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina, and shot and killed nine worshippers after reading Bible verses with them. As it was later revealed, the 22-year-old Roof was a white supremacist. After an eight-day trial in the Charleston federal district court, on December 15 the jury found Roof guilty of all 33 federal counts—including hate crimes and obstruction of exercise of religion—18 of which carry the federal death penalty. This week, after less than three hours of deliberation, the jury sentenced Roof to death, making him the 63rd person who will be held on federal death row.

Federal law classifies the jury’s decision as a binding “recommendation,” which means, according to Robert Dunham, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, “there’s likely a decade worth of appeals.” Roof could be well into his 30s before he is executed.

He likely will not be executed at all, because a federal death sentence often does not result in a lethal injection. To be eligible for federal death row, the defendant’s crime has to have a national angle, such as bombing a federal building. Boston marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was sentenced to death in 2015 for his role in the 2013 attack, but his appeals process is likely to extend for years. Today, 23 people on death row have exhausted their appeals and are eligible to be executed. Three co-defendants who have been on federal death row for the longest period of time were convicted in a series of drug-related murders: Richard Tipton, Corey Johnson, and James H. Roane Jr. have been awaiting execution since 1993.

Contrast this with executions on the state level. Between 1988, when the federal death penalty was reinstated, and 2016, the government only put three inmates to death. States have carried out 1,439 executions since the Supreme Court ruled in 1976 that capital punishment does not violate the Constitution. Gulf War veteran Louis Jones Jr. was the last person to be executed by the government, in 2003, for the kidnapping, rape, and murder of 19-year-old Tracie McBride. His was a federal case because the 1995 crime took place on the federal property of a US Air Force base.

There have been no federal executions during President Barack Obama’s two terms. Obama’s efforts to reduce the federal prison population during his presidency and his discomfort with the death penalty, which he described as “deeply troubling,” coincided with the long appeals process and recent questions about the efficacy of lethal injection drugs. The effect was a halt to federal executions. Nationwide support for capital punishment has been dropping steadily over the last two decades. Today, only 49 percent of Americans support the death penalty for murderers, down from 80 percent in 1994. Among Republican voters, however, 72 percent support the death penalty for violent murderers.

President-elect Donald Trump is one of those death penalty supporters. On the campaign trail in December 2015, Trump announced that as president, he would sign an executive order mandating the death penalty for convicted cop killers. As attorney general, Jeff Sessions—who has supported the death penalty—could move this pledge forward by addressing a number of institutional and practical problems that have been obstacles to federal executions.

“It takes a long time and it takes a lot of money to execute folks,” says Monica Foster, a lawyer whose clients include defendants on federal death row. The average cost of defending a federal death penalty case is $620,932. Inmates typically spend more than a decade in the appeals process before entering death row and awaiting execution.

Opponents of capital punishment believe that it’s immoral, racially biased, and not a deterrent for crime. Sixty-two percent of those awaiting death in federal prisons are nonwhite. “The federal death penalty reflects the state penalty system’s problems of racial bias, poor lawyering, and unreliable evidence,” says Miriam Gohora, a law professor at Yale Law School. But Trump’s pick for attorney general disagrees. At a 2001 congressional hearing on racial and geographic disparities in the federal death penalty, Sessions stated he was against a moratorium on the federal death penalty for several reasons, one of them being that “the death penalty deters murder, as studies as recent as this year have found.” A 2008 Death Penalty Information Center survey published in 2009 found that 88 percent of criminologists do not consider the death penalty a deterrent to violent crime.

“I would expect that the incoming administration would be more aggressive in seeking the federal death penalty,” says William Otis a professor of law at Georgetown law school.

If the Trump administration wanted to aggressively pursue the death penalty and carry out more executions, it would have to address the issue of lethal injection drugs. In 2011, the only American manufacturer of lethal injection drugs, Hospira, announced it would no longer produce sodium thiopental, a key ingredient in the serum used to carry out executions. The company originally intended to resume production at its Italian plant, but Italian officials refused to export the drug if it were to be used for executions. Other companies followed suit, leading to a massive shortage. Many states and the federal government were left with no method of execution, forcing a lull in carrying out capital punishments.

Some states sought to use different drug combinations that haven’t been widely tested. In Oklahoma, a new drug combination led to the botched execution in 2014 of Clayton Lockett, who writhed and moaned during the procedure. In the wake of this incident, Obama announced that the government, through the Department of Justice, would be reviewing its death penalty protocols leading to an effective moratorium. The move was considered a victory for opponents of the death penalty.

The state of Texas recently sued the Food and Drug Administration over the withholding of a shipment of lethal injection drugs that the FDA maintains are illegal to import because they haven’t been tested for safety. “Drugs used in executions are not supposed to be safe—they’re supposed to be lethal,” Otis says, adding that the safety requirements would likely be one of the first areas the Trump administration might seek to change.

In death penalty cases like Dylann Roof’s, where there is no question about guilt or innocence, opponents of capital punishment believe that a life sentence without the chance of parole would provide justice. Roof wanted to plead guilty in exchange for a life sentence, but federal officials rejected the offer. Many family members of the victims opposed the death penalty for Roof. The morning after the jury decided on its verdict, Judge Richard Gergel formally sentenced Roof to death, saying, “This trial has produced no winners, only losers.”

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Why Dylann Roof’s Death Sentence May Never Be Carried Out

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North Carolina’s Bathroom Bill Is Still on the Books Because Republicans Pulled a Bait and Switch

by Ernest73It Posted on December 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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In a surprising move, North Carolina lawmakers ended a special session on Wednesday without repealing House Bill 2, one of the country’s most sweeping anti-LGBT laws. The decision to leave the “bathroom bill” on the books came as a shock after Governor-elect Roy Cooper announced earlier in the week that leaders in the Republican-majority Legislature had promised to get rid of it. It seemed like a done deal, but on Wednesday the state Senate opted against a repeal, while the House adjourned without voting, leaving the law intact. “The Republican legislative leaders have broken their word to me and they have broken their trust with the people of North Carolina,” Cooper told reporters.

But why, and what went wrong?

To understand the drama in North Carolina, you need to first understand why Republicans had initially agreed to repeal HB2—which blocks transgender people from bathrooms of their choice and leaves other people open to discrimination. Republican leaders in the Legislature supported the law but told Cooper they’d get rid of it in exchange for something else: Charlotte, the state’s biggest city, had to nix a local nondiscrimination ordinance that protected LGBT people in the city. (Charlotte’s ordinance was a main reason why Republicans had wanted to pass HB2 in the first place, because, among other things, HB2 prohibited other cities from creating similar nondiscrimination ordinances.) With the offer on the table, Charlotte took the next step. After getting a call from Cooper, the Charlotte City Council on Monday voted to repeal key parts of its ordinance, and then Republican Gov. Pat McCrory—a passionate supporter of HB2—called for a special session of the Legislature to do away with the controversial law.

Problems quickly arose. On Tuesday, Republican leaders accused the Charlotte City Council of acting in bad faith by keeping parts of its nondiscrimination ordinance in place—the council had only gotten rid of the section dealing with LGBT protections in public accommodations and bathrooms, not the sections that prevented discrimination by city contractors or taxi drivers. “I think the city of Charlotte has been as disingenuous as anybody I’ve ever seen,” said Republican state Sen. Harry Brown, according to the Charlotte Observer. Charlotte’s city attorney said council members thought they’d done enough by addressing the issues around the public accommodations in HB2, but GOP leaders were not appeased.

On Wednesday morning, hours before the Legislature was set to meet for its special session, the Charlotte City Council called a rare emergency meeting and repealed the rest of its ordinance—effective immediately. When the special session began, however, Democrats did not get what they had hoped. A Republican leader in the Senate introduced a bill that would repeal HB2 in part but would still temporarily ban cities like Charlotte from creating nondiscrimination ordinances to protect LGBT people. LGBT rights groups were outraged—the National Center for Transgender Equality called the Republican proposal “unacceptable” and referred to the Legislature as a “national disgrace.” Cooper urged Democrats not to support the proposal, and in the end it didn’t get enough votes in the Senate. The House adjourned without voting on the repeal, leaving HB2 on the books.

Protesters immediately gathered outside the Senate chamber shouting “Shame!”

“Today the Legislature had a chance to do the right thing for North Carolina, and they failed,” Governor-elect Cooper told reporters. “I’m disappointed for the people of North Carolina—for the jobs that people won’t have,” he said, referring to the companies that have protested the law by scaling back business in the state. “I’m disappointed that we have yet to remove the stain on the reputation of our great state.” North Carolina has lost millions of dollars in revenue because of the law—companies like PayPal and Deutsche Bank decided not to expand operations in the state, musicians like Bruce Springsteen canceled performances in protest, and the NCAA pulled its championships from the state.

The city of Charlotte did not respond to a request for comment, but in a statement the city council pledged that its “commitment to maintaining and protecting diverse and inclusive communities remains unchanged.” Meanwhile, a majority of North Carolinians remain opposed to HB2, according to Public Policy Polling. The Rev. William J. Barber II, a progressive leader in North Carolina and president of the state’s NAACP, said Thursday he would ask the national NAACP to call for an economic boycott of the state. And though Republicans in the Legislature seem dead set on fighting Cooper, the governor-elect vowed to keep pushing for a full repeal of the law: “This was our best chance,” he said. “It cannot be our last chance.”

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North Carolina’s Bathroom Bill Is Still on the Books Because Republicans Pulled a Bait and Switch

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NBC News: Putin Personally Directed Anti-Clinton Hacking

by BrodieGetty6520 Posted on December 15, 2016

Mother Jones

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NBC News tells us today that the CIA assessment of Russia’s hacking goes further than previous reports have suggested:

Two senior officials with direct access to the information say new intelligence shows that Putin personally directed how hacked material from Democrats was leaked and otherwise used. The intelligence came from diplomatic sources and spies working for U.S. allies, the officials said.

Putin’s objectives were multifaceted, a high-level intelligence source told NBC News. What began as a “vendetta” against Hillary Clinton morphed into an effort to show corruption in American politics and to “split off key American allies by creating the image that other countries couldn’t depend on the U.S. to be a credible global leader anymore,” the official said.

….The latest intelligence said to show Putin’s involvement goes much further than the information the U.S. was relying on in October, when all 17 intelligence agencies signed onto a statement attributing the Democratic National Committee hack to Russia….Now the U.S has solid information tying Putin to the operation, the intelligence officials say. Their use of the term “high confidence” implies that the intelligence is nearly incontrovertible.

This comes from William Arkin, Ken Dilanian, and Cynthia McFadden, who are all pretty careful reporters. Arkin adds this via Twitter:

This makes sense. Nobody had any idea that Donald Trump would run, let alone win the Republican nomination, when the hacking operation started. And even after Trump did win the nomination, nobody thought he had much of a chance to win. All of Putin’s hacking would have been for nought if he hadn’t had some help from James Comey and a rogue group of FBI agents in New York.

So yes, Putin got lucky. But that’s the way intelligence operations work. You try a lot of stuff and hope that a fraction of it pans out. This probably seemed like a low-cost-low-probability exercise when it was first started, and ended up succeeding beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.

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NBC News: Putin Personally Directed Anti-Clinton Hacking

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Pat Buchanan Defends Donald Trump

by MauriciWestall Posted on October 22, 2016

Mother Jones

Jay Nordlinger and I don’t agree on much, but I’ve never held that against him. However, with 17 days left until we go to the polls, I do hold against him the five minutes of my life that I lost from reading Pat Buchanan’s latest column. But you know what? If I have to suffer, so do you. Ladies and gentlemen, here is Buchanan’s latest defense of Donald Trump:

What explains the hysteria of the establishment? In a word, fear.

….By suggesting he might not accept the results of a “rigged election” Trump is committing an unpardonable sin. But this new cult, this devotion to a new holy trinity of diversity, democracy and equality, is of recent vintage and has shallow roots. For none of the three — diversity, equality, democracy — is to be found in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Federalist Papers or the Pledge of Allegiance.

….Some of us recall another time, when Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas wrote in “Points of Rebellion”: “We must realize that today’s Establishment is the new George III. Whether it will continue to adhere to his tactics, we do not know. If it does, the redress, honored in tradition, is also revolution.” Baby-boomer radicals loved it, raising their fists in defiance of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew. But now that it is the populist-nationalist right that is moving beyond the niceties of liberal democracy to save the America they love, elitist enthusiasm for “revolution” seems more constrained.

Nordlinger comments:

Around the world, there are many, many places that lack the “niceties of liberal democracy.” You don’t want to live there. You would quickly discover that the niceties are more like necessities — a rule of law necessary to live a good, decent, and free life.

Is this just garden-variety Buchanan? It’s been years since I’ve read or listened to him. He’s always been a bit of a lunatic, but it seems like he’s gotten even crazier in his old age.

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Pat Buchanan Defends Donald Trump

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You Thought 2016 Was Intense? Watch This Exclusive Clip of the Gore Vidal vs. William F. Buckley Brawl

by Elyse Corder Posted on October 1, 2016

Mother Jones

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Best of Enemies co-director Robert Gordon confessed to me a while back that his biggest fear was that “people won’t go see this movie because they think it’s going to be boring.” It isn’t. The documentary—which premieres October 3 at 10 p.m. on PBS (Independent Lens)—chronicles the often fiery debates between William F. Buckley Jr. and Gore Vidal that ABC aired during the 1968 election cycle in an effort to boost ratings. “It sounds like a dry documentary because people forget how witty these two guys are,” Gordon told me.

Gordon and co-director Morgan Neville—whose Twenty Feet From Stardom won the 2014 Oscar for best documentary—skillfully weave archival footage together with interviews with the likes of Christopher Hitchens, Brooke Gladstone, Dick Cavett, and Buckley’s brother Neil. The movie climaxes during one of the duo’s final debates at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago where, while discussing Vietnam War protesters, Vidal calls Buckley a “crypto-Nazi.” The latter’s response, which could even make Donald Trump blush, was perhaps the first viral sound bite in modern media history. “Now listen, you queer,” Buckley retorted, twitching with anger. “Quit calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in the goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered.”

Indeed, the televised verbal brawls between these two brilliant intellectuals anticipated the culture wars that would define, for decades to come, America’s political struggles—and how the media would cover them. I sat down with Gordon in San Francisco not long ago to chat about the de-evolution of our political discourse and the challenge of making a film about conversations that took place decades ago.

Mother Jones: How did this project come to pass?

Robert Gordon: In 2010, a friend of mine acquired a bootleg DVD of the debates and shared it with me, and I was like, “Oh my God, this is today’s culture wars expressed by these two guys.” As a documentarian, you are always looking for that cache of film you can use to build a movie from; there was 2.5 hours of raw debate. It seemed so relevant to the division in the country that I just thought, “Let’s get on this immediately.”

MJ: Had you worked with Morgan Neville before?

RG: This is our fifth film together. Between the fourth and fifth, he made 20 Feet From Stardom and got the Academy Award. I called him up and said, “Way to go Morgan! You’re really putting the pressure on us now.” But it’s a big help having that accolade. People who don’t know us are more willing to trust us; it’s the stamp of legitimacy.

MJ: Was it challenging to get backers on board with such an unconventional documentary subject?

RG: Yes, it took a while. Most said to us, “This is all very interesting, but why do you see it as relevant today?” And since the movie has been made, the response has been, “I can’t believe how relevant to today this footage is.”

Gore Vidal (front) and William F. Buckley get primped for their clash. Independent Lens

MJ: Most of your past work has involved music. What made you want to stray from that subject?

RG: Most everything I’ve done has been about music, but music as a way to talk about bigger social issues, bigger cultural moments or movements. I don’t see it as that big of a leap. The debates are the operatic vignettes that recur, and it’s quite musical to me. The important thing to me is that my documentaries are about changes in America, and so is this.

MJ: It was quite a year, 1968. How did you decide what historical and cultural context to include?

RG: There were cultural touchstones that have been investigated over and over and over, and we didn’t want to redo those. And there are a lot of them to work with. I mean ’68, like you said, it’s rife with material, with cultural disagreement, violence, internationally—it’s all there. But we wanted to focus on our guys and what they stood for and where those changes occurred in relation to them.

MJ: But you did incorporate some major historical events into the film, like the riots outside of the DNC in Chicago.

RG: Yeah, totally, but only because it was there. It felt like the fighting on the street was being played out by these two guys in front of the glare of the national TV camera.

MJ: Was there anything that surprised you while researching these two men?

RG: I was surprised at the vigor with which Vidal pursued Buckley and his other enemies. Vidal seemed to thrive on animosity and on feuding, and at the same time could be very charming. You see him on Dick Cavett, and there’s a certain charm to him, you like to watch him, you like to see him talk, and I thought, “Well, surely this ‘man of ice’ was a put-on.” But then you read things like his obituary on Buckley, and, you know, he is a man of ice.

MJ: So did you feel like you had to hold back your own opinions about Vidal and Buckley?

RG: The film wasn’t about our personal views and our personal politics. That would have undermined the film’s potential. One of the interesting things I learned in the course of it was Buckley, whose politics I tend not to agree with, was strong enough to publicly change his mind on the Iraq War. He had come out very for it when it began, and over time, when he learned more about it, he changed. And that’s a brave position for someone in his situation. I think it’s very honorable and admirable.

MJ: There is that moment after the famous blowup between Buckley and Vidal when you pan through all the interviewees in the documentary sitting in shocked silence. And then Dick Cavett goes, “The network nearly shat.” Were those really these people’s reactions?

RG: That’s taking liberty in the editing room, is what it is. It was Cavett’s response that suggests that those were their real responses, because I asked Cavett about it and you see him turn and think, and he has a long silence, and then he gives that very funny answer, and we thought, “Wow, what if we extend that silence? Because that’s kind of musical in a way.” And we tested it and it was like, “Ohhh, this is funny.” And it never hurts to be funny.

The showdown Independent Lens

MJ: Yeah, the film has a lot of funny moments; Vidal and Buckley are very entertaining to watch.

RG: These guy were so smart, and they had a command of so many things: history, philosophy, economics, and, people forget, of humor as well. They were smart, witty guys.

MJ: I was struck by how intellectual their rhetoric was. It seems ironic that these debates helped inspire the trashy political debate we now see on cable.

RG: Yes, TV is pursued for the lowest common denominator. Networks, which had been civil to a fault up to that point in time, have worked themselves up to the point where all they are is a series of Roman candle explosions. The reason that the audience built for Buckley and Vidal is that, in addition to their cattiness, they were offering a lot of ideas and a lot of exchange, and they were humorous, too. It wasn’t just that explosive moment that made this what it was. But TV today seems to want to have you come back from a commercial and go right into a fight turned up to 10, and three minutes later go into a commercial—and that’s success! People have been introducing the show in theaters as “delicious,” and I think that suggests an appetite for more integrity on television; more intellectual exchange, less vacuous shouting.

MJ: Yeah, I mean, it’s hard to imagine someone citing Pericles on network TV now!

RG: Yeah, I watched the Vidal-Buckley debates with a dictionary the first few times because I wanted to learn the words, and they were saying things I didn’t know, and what did it mean, and why were they choosing those words, and whom were they quoting? Wouldn’t you like to watch a half an hour of political TV and then take your notes and go look up what they were talking about? You glean what you need to glean, and then afterward you can take home more—it’s a prize that comes in the box!

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You Thought 2016 Was Intense? Watch This Exclusive Clip of the Gore Vidal vs. William F. Buckley Brawl

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If Music Be the Food of Love, Play on, Rufus Wainright

by LatiaAddis Posted on June 25, 2016

Mother Jones

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Jacob Blickenstaff

Rufus Wainwright, the son of critically admired folk singers Loudon Wainwright III and Kate McGarrigle, grew up amid a bramble of musical siblings, aunts, in-laws, half-siblings and close family friends. (Wainright also has a daughter with Lorca Cohen, daughter of Leonard Cohen, whom he co-parents along with his husband.)

While maintaining the family legacy of incisive songwriting, Rufus has stood on his own as a genre-expanding songwriter, incorporating elements of classical music, opera, and the American songbook into visceral contemporary music, beginning with his self-titled debut in 1998.

He has made those influences more explicit during the last decade with 2007’s Rufus Does Judy at Carnegie Hall—a live, song-for-song re-creation of Judy Garland’s Live at Carnegie Hall album, and an opera, Prima Donna, which Wainwright composed and produced in 2009 and released as an album in 2015.

Earlier this year, Wainwright released another classical work, All My Loves, which presents nine Shakespeare sonnets in both dramatic recitations and composed arrangements. The eclectic treatment under producer/arranger Marius de Vries—who previously collaborated on Wainwright’s lush albums Want One and Want Two—involves a varied cast that includes soprano Anna Prohaska; pop singers Florence Welch (of Florence & the Machine) and sister Martha Wainwright; and the actors Helena Bonham Carter, Carrie Fischer, and William Shatner. I caught up with Wainright recently as he swung though New York to reprise Rufus Does Judy at Carnegie Hall. He is now touring in Canada and Europe.

Mother Jones: Shakespeare’s sonnets explore longing, betrayal, and lust and its consequences, themes that are present in your songs as well. Did you have a sense of that connection as you worked on this project?

Rufus Wainwright: I feel like the sonnets are the gift that keeps on giving. Certainly in terms of my life—anybody’s life—you go through death, childbirth and marriage, glory and defeat, and so on. The last 10 years for me have been all of that, so the sonnets have been there with me. I’ve been able to lean on them profoundly for many years, and they’ve given me a wider perspective of what’s going on, really, on the inside. If my songs can do that as well, then I’m a lucky guy.

MJ: You began working on musical settings for the sonnets some years ago, while your mother was fighting cancer.

RW: I wrote the music for the majority of them during her illness. It wasn’t planned out that way, just coincided. But I was happy to not have to write lyrics while that was going on in my life—it was so painful.

MJ: Part of the scholarly debate about the sonnets is whether they were autobiographical or written on behalf of someone else. Do you feel there are parallels in songwriting, the autobiographical vs the universal?

RW: I wouldn’t categorize my work as mysterious as the relationship between Shakespeare and his world, because that is one of the great mysteries: How could someone have written all that he did? Was it only one person? And why do we know so little about it? I don’t take that mantle, but I will say that I strive for what you do find in Shakespeare’s work—that there is a definite humanity and a definite character behind the writing in the sonnets, and it’s very real because it’s so deeply personal. I try to aspire to that in what I do.

MJ: Are there qualities in his material that you are trying to bring into your songwriting?

RW: I can’t really gauge that. I just keep chugging along and I hope that in doing work with the sonnets or the operas—or singing Judy Garland shows—that all gets in there. It’s not up to me to judge that, either; that’s for the public to do. But I want to deepen as an artist, and working with Shakespeare definitely points in that direction.

MJ: Sonnet 20, which addresses the “master-mistress of my passion,” is most discussed and interpreted in context of homosexuality, and the longing of one man for another. What’s your take on it?

RW: I think it is about attraction in general. That’s what is so brilliant about it. There’s no question that the writer projects a sort of startling situation in that because he’s a man he can’t quite do all that he wants to with this other man. But he focuses more on the effect of beauty—what it makes one do emotionally and how it breaks down the barrier between man and woman. That’s part of the subtlety that Shakespeare is the best at, ever, in any art form.

MJ: Something that perhaps was under-noticed on your earlier pop albums is how much classical music is a part of it. For example, the opening track of Want One, “Oh What A World,” takes directly from Ravel’s Bolero. When did you first start to integrate classical into your pop songwriting?

RW: My love of classical hit pretty early. I was 13 when it occurred, and that was really the only music I listened to for many, many years. I went to a conservatory, but I always knew I would be in the pop world, because A) it was more fun and B) you didn’t have to practice as much and you could go out more. But I immediately saw this opportunity to inject my material with these sounds that most members of my generation really didn’t know about, so it was a great way to differentiate myself from the pack. Now I’m paying back the favor a little bit.

MJ: Tell me about your collaborations with Marius de Vries.

RW: Marius is one of the great and most versatile musicians of our time. He’s really able to keep a keen eye on what’s going on in the pop world, but by the same token introduce all sorts of musical influences be they classical, ethnic music, or whatever—so he’s a great unifier. I really needed someone like that to do this album because I’m going out on so many limbs.

I let him go out and see what he can bring back, and oftentimes it’s great, and sometimes we know immediately it won’t work. We give each other a lot of leeway because we respect each other’s taste, and also sometimes our lack of taste, because we’re not afraid to do things a little out of the ordinary.

MJ: This new album takes a very eclectic approach, both in the performers involved and the musical settings.

RW: I feel that the sonnets can take it. They are so wildly varied and so sturdy in terms of their form and geometry and light, so it was fun to throw all these different musical styles at them and see what sticks. And of course they all stick if you do a good job at it, because they are limitless.

MJ: As a husband and father, have you had to temper your artistic ambitions?

RW: The only big change is that I have to rest a lot more now! I think my imagination and my passions are still firing away, but it’s really the body that starts to make up the rules. It’s not a major problem; it’s just when you get a little older you realize how much your body thanks you when you are good to it. I haven’t changed much.

MJ: Judy Garland was coming out of a rough time when she made those live recordings. Do you feel any affinities with her and where she was in her life at that time?

WR: Well, I have a lot of advantages: I’m not addicted to horrifying pills. I also have surrounded myself with far more caring and upright individuals. And I wasn’t abused as a child, so I’m doing okay!

MJ: Sorry, I wasn’t trying to put you in the same redemptive narrative box.

WR: I mean, I love Judy Garland! I worship at her altar in so many ways. But really when it comes to me getting on stage and performing that material, that’s when I call to the songwriters and the lyricists and musicians and really make it about that. If you try to unsettle her spirit and bring it into the room, it’s a double-edged sword. If you are going to try and do battle with her, you’re going to lose, so I make it about the music.

MJ: I wonder what the dynamic was, and still is, between you and your intensely musical family.

RW: I’m very blessed, mainly because even though my family is mostly in show business, it’s really centered around music. My parents were very successful in many ways, but they weren’t necessarily top of the charts. We were never wealthy because of music. We always had to work and we always had to struggle a little bit, and I think at the end of the day that’s been very good for me, because I have a sense of it being very ephemeral. I don’t have a sense of entitlement in terms of being some kind of spoiled brat. Musically I’m able to keep going, because it’s not about money and it’s not about success. It’s a challenge.

This profile is part of In Close Contact, an independently produced series highlighting leading creative musicians.

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If Music Be the Food of Love, Play on, Rufus Wainright

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Brexit Now Looking Like It Will Probably Fail

by JenniGerken Posted on June 21, 2016

Mother Jones

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Peter Eavis says that Brexit is likely to lose and Britain will remain part of the EU:

Asking people to predict a result of an election has, over time, provided more accurate forecasts than asking people their voting intentions, according to a study by Justin Wolfers, a University of Michigan economist and an Upshot contributor, and David Rothschild, of the Microsoft Research and Statistics Center.

When Survation asked, “Regardless of how you plan to vote, what do you think the result will be?” just shy of 40 percent of people said the “remain” camp would win. Only 26 percent said that “leave” would prevail.

The betting markets agree:

The betting odds for the EU referendum changed direction over the weekend and now firmly favour a Remain vote with just three days to go….Ladbrokes has given just a 27% chance of a Vote Leave while William Hill has it as 28.5%. Ladbrokes added that 95% of betting on was a Remain vote on Monday.

My sense—though I’d prefer actual data if anyone has collected it—is that secession votes usually follow a pattern: the leavers get an upward bump a few weeks before voting day, but stayers get a bump in the few days before voting day. A fair number of people flirt with the idea of leaving, but then get scared at the last minute and decide to vote for the status quo instead. Basically, in any secession referendum, I figure that Leave needs to be polling at 55 percent or higher to have a realistic chance of winning.

As of today, the polls are still tied, so my guess is that Brexit will fail on Thursday. If I’m right that about 5 percent of the leavers will get cold feet and change their minds, the final tally will be something like 53-47 percent in favor of remaining in the EU. We’ll find out in a couple of days.

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Brexit Now Looking Like It Will Probably Fail

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White Nationalist Party Claims More of Its Members Are Now Trump Delegates

by Maryann3677 Posted on May 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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On May 10, Los Angeles attorney William Johnson resigned as a delegate for Donald Trump to the Republican National Convention after Mother Jones reported that Johnson is the leader of the white nationalist American Freedom Party. The Trump campaign, which selected Johnson as one of its California delegates, blamed his inclusion on a “database error.” But white nationalist leaders, including one who has contributed to an online hate forum, are now claiming that other members of their movement have become delegates for Trump.

“Here is what they don’t know: we have more delegates!” the American Freedom Party wrote on its Facebook page last week, in response to the Mother Jones report.

Johnson said in an interview that he is not directly involved with the AFP’s Facebook page, but he confirmed that the page is run by Robert H. DePasquale, whose covert activism as a white supremacist is well documented. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, DePasquale is a web designer in New York City who has built sites for white supremacist groups and has pseudonymously posted more than 20,000 racist and anti-Semitic messages on Stormfront, a leading online hate forum. (The forum’s motto is “White Pride World Wide.”) DePasquale did not respond to requests for comment. The AFP’s Facebook post, captured by Mother Jones in this screen shot, was soon deleted:

The AFP has come to see the Trump campaign as its path to taking white nationalism into the mainstream. In recent months the group and a related super PAC have produced and funded pro-Trump robocalls, set up a “political harassment hotline” for Trump supporters, and promoted Trump on a talk radio show.

But movement leaders appear torn about how much to shout from atop the Trump bandwagon versus staying in the shadows. Johnson told Mother Jones that he knows of at least one other AFP member who has been selected by a state party to attend the GOP convention this July. Johnson declined to identify the person for fear of compromising the person’s involvement with the GOP, but he disclosed that he is an “honorary” delegate for Trump from an eastern state. So-called honorary delegates do not have voting power, but typically are selected by state parties to attend the convention, often as a perk in exchange for political donations.

At Johnson’s request, the AFP delegate for Trump agreed to be interviewed by Mother Jones, but later backed out. Johnson said there are additional white nationalist Trump delegates who have been in touch with movement leaders, though “I don’t actually know who they are. There are people who are surreptitious,” he said.

“Right now people are still a little bit afraid because they will have the same reaction that happened to me,” Johnson explained. “We just have to give it a few more months before people feel comfortable.”

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Led by Johnson since 2009, the American Freedom Party “exists to represent the political interests of White Americans” and aims to preserve “the customs and heritage of the European American people.” The AFP has never elected a candidate of its own to public office and is estimated to have only a few thousand members, but it is “arguably the most important white nationalist group in the country,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Mark Potok.

Johnson believes that Trump’s rise will motivate other white nationalists to express their views publicly. “You’ve got to realize that I’m out in the open and upfront, but a lot of people aren’t there yet,” he said. “Talk to me in eight months and more people will be out. Particularly if Donald Trump gets elected.”

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White Nationalist Party Claims More of Its Members Are Now Trump Delegates

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Donald Trump Selected a White Nationalist as a Delegate in California. Here’s His Campaign’s Reponse.

by AthenaRucker Posted on May 10, 2016

Mother Jones

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Mother Jones‘ Josh Harkinson reported earlier today that the Trump campaign selected white nationalist leader William Johnson as a delegate in California.

Trump campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks just issued this statement about it to the Washington Post:

Yesterday the Trump campaign submitted its list of California delegates to be certified by the Secretary of State of California. A database error led to the inclusion of a potential delegate that had been rejected and removed from the campaign’s list in February 2016.

Read Harkinson’s full story.

UPDATE, 5:48 p.m. ET: “Database error” was apparently the Trump campaign’s second attempt at an explanation.

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Donald Trump Selected a White Nationalist as a Delegate in California. Here’s His Campaign’s Reponse.

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