November 1, 2014
"The digital track and chase in eastern Long Island — part of the National Republican Congressional Committee’s effort to catch up with Democrats’ sophisticated voter targeting — is an integral part of the modern ground game. Now campaigns know where you eat, what you watch, what you read, where you work, if you commute — and are tracking it in real time, delivering specifically tailored messages to individual voters and hounding them until the ballots are cast."

— G.O.P. Ads Chase Voters at Home and on the Go - NYTimes.com

2:24pm  |   URL: https://tmblr.co/ZyYY7w1UYMzvA
November 1, 2014
"Democrats are nervously counting on an enduring edge among female voters in most states to prevent a Republican rout in Tuesday’s elections. Yet so great is the uncertainty that even before the returns are in, some are second-guessing the party’s strategy of focusing more on issues like abortion and birth control than on jobs and the economy"

— Democrats Count on Edge With Women to Limit Election Losses - NYTimes.com

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November 1, 2014
"Anticipating how his letter would be received by his critics, Francis declared that “land, housing and work are increasingly unavailable to the majority’ of the world’s population,” but said “If I talk about this, some will think that the Pope is communist.” “They don’t understand that love for the poor is at the centre of the Gospel,” he said. “Demanding this isn’t unusual, it’s the social doctrine of the church.”"

— Pope Francis: ‘Caring for the poor does not make you a communist’ - Europe - World - The Independent

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October 25, 2014
"In fact, roughly 100,000 more people are working in the 10-county region now than during the height of the steel industry four decades ago. Flanagan, executive vice president of corporate relations for the Allegheny County Conference on Community Development, spoke about “Pittsburgh’s Ongoing Transformation” during a breakfast business meeting Tuesday in Charleroi. He made it clear that “Pittsburgh” represents the 10-county region. Employment in that region dipped to its lowest point in 1983, when the Metro Pittsburgh area’s unemployment rate hit 18 percent. In Beaver County alone, the rate was 29 percent. “It was not a recession, it was a depression - a steel depression,” Flanagan said. The Pittsburgh region was one of the first in the nation to regain the jobs lost following the Great Recession, which spanned the second half of 2008 through the first quarter of 2009. “We led the nation out of the Great Recession,” Flanagan said."

— Allegheny official sees bright future | TribLIVE#axzz3GsbbAUOn

12:58pm  |   URL: https://tmblr.co/ZyYY7w1T-IcA7
October 25, 2014
"when most workers fail to share in the fruits of economic growth, the public sector will be hard-pressed to lean against the inegalitarian tide. In the five years since the official end of the Great Recession, wages have only kept up with inflation, while family and household incomes have barely budged off their recessionary lows and remain far below their pre-recession peak. The share of national income going to wages and salaries is at its lowest point in nearly half a century, and businesses have found ways of raising production without hiring more workers, at least in the United States. The majority of workers who have found new jobs are earning less than they did prior to the recession, and the number of people working part-time who want full-time jobs remains very high"

— The New Challenge to Market Democracies: The Political and Social Costs of Economic Stagnation | Brookings Institution

12:56pm  |   URL: https://tmblr.co/ZyYY7w1T-ICLx
October 25, 2014
"In Iraq the critical error was the decision to completely pull US troops out in 2011 forfeiting both the military capability, the backbone they provided to the Iraqi security forces, but also, and probably more important, the bulwark against sectarianism in the Iraqi government. In the absence of the American military’s counterterrorism capabilities but also the loss of American political leverage that diminished with the departure of troops, a sectarian government lost the trust and the support of the Sunni people. Maliki fired the Sunni leadership in the Army, replacing them with political cronies unable to fight a war when ISIS emerged. America fights these wars for her own interests. While the invasion of Iraq was a mistake, once it happened, containing the damage done remains very strongly an American interest. We failed to keep several thousands of American troops in Iraq in 2012, and now we need to put several thousands back in 2014 to fight against an ISIS that was able to reemerge because of the absence of US advisors and political leverage."

— Knife Fights: John Nagl’s Reflections on the Practice of Modern War | Small Wars Journal

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October 25, 2014
"Governance is definitely the hardest part. It has been said correctly that if you are being defeated by an insurgency, you are not being outfought, you are being outgoverned. An insurgency wins whenever the government is unable to meet the perceived needs of a group of its people. You have a competition between the insurgent group and the government to see whether the government can reform itself fast enough while simultaneously conducting military operations to defeat the insurgents. This challenge of good governance that earns the support of the local people is in itself enormously difficult. A common demand in these wars is to have better local partners to work with in delivering good governance. This question of how you do armed state-building or nation-building where the apparatus of the state is not powerful enough, competent enough, honest enough is a crucial variable in thinking about defeating insurgencies."

— Knife Fights: John Nagl’s Reflections on the Practice of Modern War | Small Wars Journal

12:46pm  |   URL: https://tmblr.co/ZyYY7w1T-FMoZ
October 25, 2014
Rather, they don’t really believe in evil as an enduring reality in human life. If their feverish rhetoric means anything, it is that evil can be vanquished. In believing this, those who govern us at the present time reject a central insight of western religion, which is found also in Greek tragic drama and the work of the Roman historians: destructive human conflict is rooted in flaws within human beings themselves. In this old-fashioned understanding, evil is a propensity to destructive and self-destructive behaviour that is humanly universal. The restraints of morality exist to curb this innate human frailty; but morality is a fragile artifice that regularly breaks down. Dealing with evil requires an acceptance that it never goes away.
No view of things could be more alien at the present time. Whatever their position on the political spectrum, almost all of those who govern us hold to some version of the melioristic liberalism that is the west’s default creed, which teaches that human civilisation is advancing – however falteringly – to a point at which the worst forms of human destructiveness can be left behind. According to this view, evil, if any such thing exists, is not an inbuilt human flaw, but a product of defective social institutions, which can over time be permanently improved.
12:38pm  |   URL: https://tmblr.co/ZyYY7w1T-DOPz
October 25, 2014
juniusworth: “Perez guns down Pence in game 3 of the World Series October 24, 2014 AT&T Park San Francisco, CA Photo: DAVID EULITT/The Kansas City Star ”

juniusworth:

Perez guns down Pence in game 3 of the World Series

October 24, 2014

AT&T Park

San Francisco, CA

Photo: DAVID EULITT/The Kansas City Star

(via mightyflynn)

12:37pm  |   URL: https://tmblr.co/ZyYY7w1T-D6kj
(Notes: 62)
  
October 11, 2014
"Routine overwork is, here, just another full-time job.
For part-time workers, unpredictability is an even greater burden. In interviews for our book, over and over we heard $10-an-hour nursing assistants say they wanted extra hours. Why? Nursing homes would schedule them in advance for 24 or 32 hours a week, that is, for three or four eight-hour shifts. But the average nursing assistant’s income was $21,000 per year; many were single mothers with incomes of $16,000 or less (even including additional shifts). As a result, they were desperate to work more hours, which meant picking up an unscheduled shift whenever the nursing home had one available. But lean staffing policies create havoc in workers’ lives. Even if a part-time worker is able to pick up one unpredictable shift for a full-time schedule one week, it might be different the next."

— Unpredictable Schedules Inflicted on Workers are Wrecking People’s Lives

11:58am  |   URL: https://tmblr.co/ZyYY7w1SucU2h
October 11, 2014
mightyflynn: “Sister Flavia Baes & Sister Cletus Mayer, 1982 Kauffman Stadium Kansas City, Missouri Photo by Pete Leabo/AP via @NYTSports ”

mightyflynn:

Sister Flavia Baes & Sister Cletus Mayer, 1982

Kauffman Stadium

Kansas City, Missouri

Photo by Pete Leabo/AP via @NYTSports

11:45am  |   URL: https://tmblr.co/ZyYY7w1SuZ1NA
(Notes: 54)
  
October 11, 2014
"Tua gratia, “your grace”, is the subject of all these verbs. We want God, by means of grace we do not merit, always to be both before and behind us. We want His help so that we, fallen and weak, may be always attentive to the good works which, informed by faith and God’s grace, will help us to heaven and benefit our neighbor."

— WDTPRS: 28th Ordinary Sunday - “God crowns His own merits in us” | Fr. Z’s BlogFr. Z’s Blog

11:33am  |   URL: https://tmblr.co/ZyYY7w1SuVrMI
September 28, 2014
"If Christ stands for anything, he stands for the radical, revolutionary idea that we are no longer going to be energized by, order our lives to, or take pleasure in hating our enemies. We are going to try to live instead by rigorous honesty, vulnerability, and the childlike heart that persists in feeling the full force of our yearning to have everyone around the table—without using violence to achieve it. The kind of almost insane courage required to even say such things out loud, never mind try to live them out, itself tends to engender the worst kind of violence—as Christ well knew."

— Are We Catholics First or Americans First? - Aleteia

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September 28, 2014
"But the emotional element in nationalism isn’t just atavistic; it points to something more practically and prosaically desirable, which is the possibility of true self-government. Of course larger entities as well as smaller ones can be self-governing; again, nobody is arguing that Scotland is being tyrannized or seeing its rights and interests trampled. But as anyone involved in American politics can attest, scale and diversity and complexity and centralization are all impediments to feeling like your government is actually your government — something in which you have a stake, a sense of ownership, a genuinely meaningful say. And while of course the U.S. is far vaster than the U.K., we also don’t possess regions or states (yes, Texas and Greater Deseret and the Deep South and New York City notwithstanding) with the kind of distinctive sense of political identity that more than a thousand years of history supplies to Scotland; none of our constituent parts would have nearly so easy a time swiftly reconstituting themselves as nations as an independent Scotland would if “yes” prevails today. That has to count for something, it seems to me"

— Scotland, Self-Interest and Self-Government - NYTimes.com

12:46pm  |   URL: https://tmblr.co/ZyYY7w1Rtm0RS
September 28, 2014
"It’s a steamy Saturday morning, and Jeter is standing in the first-floor dining room of the brick 1830s West Village townhouse he’s renting. “Come on in,” he says. He’s wearing a gray, maize, and blue University of Michigan T-shirt in anticipation of his beloved Wolverines’ football game tonight against Notre Dame. At 40, he is ancient for a major leaguer, but up close he is leaner than he appears in uniform. With his shaved head, light-green eyes, and coiled serenity, Jeter could pass for a charismatic yoga instructor.Instead, he is, of course, New York’s reigning sports star on its most glamorous team. And yet, despite being on our television sets seven months a year for the past 20 years, despite the regular appearances at charity events and a social life that seems to have included dating three-quarters of the Maxim Hot 100, he’s always felt just out of reach, available for all to adore but somehow still protected by an impenetrable, cannily constructed bubble of privacy. Opening the door to his home is a hint of a looming shift in Jeter’s life, and in Jeter, Inc.
Tomorrow is Derek Jeter Day at Yankee Stadium. It’s his latest stop on a cross-country farewell tour celebrating not just Jeter’s Hall of Fame–caliber playing career but his humility and rectitude off the field."

— Derek Jeter Opens the Door. – NYMag

12:44pm  |   URL: https://tmblr.co/ZyYY7w1RtlE_N
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