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Eleven-year-old Lizzie Goldberg-Jones is a big fan of watching SpongeBob. Shes also a good kid. So because her little brother Petey loves watching Dusty, a giant, purple, animated dustball that airs on public television, she cheerfully enters a contest to have her family featured on Dustys award-winning television program.

TV matters. It matters to everyone, Lizzie says in her video entry, which wins the prize.

But when Lizzie and Petey turn out to have two proud, married daddies, Dusty and his creators find themselves in hot water with the White House, where the newly-appointed Presidents Special Counsel on Children and Child Welfare wants to yank the programs federal funding and stop the episode from airing.

At the Marthas Vineyard Playhouse through July 29, Cusi Crams political comedy Dusty and the Big Bad World is a fast-paced and funny take on the culture wars of the last Republican administration, sparing neither the right nor the left as both sides struggle over Dustys survival.

Kevin Cirone and Zada Clarke. MJ Bruder Munafo

Entering to the strains of Hail to the Chief, Charlotte Booker plays incoming special counsel Marianne, so in love with her new job that she rapturously sniffs a box of pencils as she plans to make public television more public by defunding shows like Dusty that give air time to gay families.

Ms. Booker, who originated the role in its 2008 world premiere, plays Marianne with vigor and self-confidence.

The people have spoken again, and here we are, she trills to her assistant Karen, played with hilarious awkwardness by Zada Clarke.

Wobbling anxiously in her office pumps and trying not to look at the large portrait of George W. Bush on the wall, Karen is wary of her new boss. Still, deeply grateful to have any kind of job, she gradually allows Marianne to befriend her. But when she gets wind of Mariannes intention to give Dusty the sack, Karen rebels and starts digging into her bosss past, sharing the dirt Deep Throat-style with Dustys writer Nathan (Kevin Cirone), whos already up to his eyeballs in paranoia.

Caught between the panicking Nathan and threats from the head of the Public Broadcasting System who happens to be a sorority sister of Mariannes is Dustys producer Jessica, powerfully played by Victoria Adams-Zischke.

At first, unable to believe that a show with seven Emmys and a Peabody could be canceled over a single episode, Jessica comes to realize that there is nothing you do with great love that wont at some point punch you in the stomach.

Charlotte Booker (left) originated the role of Marianne in 2008 production. MJ Bruder Munafo

And then theres young Lizzie, arguably the most level-headed of the lot, who joins forces with Nathan to invade Mariannes office and demand that Dusty be spared.

I have no idea how they got in here, Karen gasps to her boss. One of my dads founded ACT UP, thats how, Lizzie retorts.

But while Dustys defenders think they have Marianne cornered, shes still got some tricks in her political playbook.

Playhouse artistic and executive director MJ Bruder Munafo directs the excellent cast, which includes two local actors sharing the role of Lizzie. Nina Moore and Kaya Seiman, both of Oak Bluffs, are alternating performances in what Ms. Bruder Munafo said is a common practice with child actors on Broadway, but a first for a playhouse production.

Lisa Pegnatos elegantly simple set encapsulates the two worlds that clash in Ms. Crams play. To the audiences left are the offices where Jessica and Nathan labor in adjoining cubicles at WGBH in Boston. On the right of course is Mariannes office with its view of the Capitol. Center stage is the Union Station coffee shop where Karen and Nathan plot to bring the special counsel down.

Island musician and educator Brian Weiland wrote the Dusty theme song, with words by Ms. Bruder Munafo. The play has two acts with a 15-minute intermission and a total running time of about two hours. The show continues through July 29.

For tickets and information, visit mvplayhouse.org.

See the rest here:
Dusty and the Big Bad World Adds Levity to the Culture Wars - The Vineyard Gazette - Martha's Vineyard News

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This time, it seems like TrumpCare may really be dead.

On Monday night, Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) officially jumped ship from the Senate health-care bill. That brought the official "no" vote count to four, which is two more than Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) could afford to lose. Then, on Tuesday, McConnell's "plan C" to simply repeal ObamaCare also met a swift defeat when three Republican moderates announced they couldn't support it.

Watching all this go down, I keep coming back to one of MSNBC host Christopher Hayes' favorite phrases: "political gravity."

Democracy is supposed to be a feedback loop between voters and politicians: The politicians try to pass bills, those bills actually affect voters' lives, voters respond with activism and votes, and politicians respond by changing course. But a lot of political reporting implicitly assumes that the consequences of bills don't affect their fates. All that matters is legislative and political strategies: the most inventive partisan games, the cleverest salesmanship, the most creative deal-making. It can take real work to pause and remind yourself that, as Hayes puts it, "the basic political gravity of whether you make people's lives better or worse matters."

TrumpCare has been one of the most dramatic tests of Hayes' thesis in years.

Washington insiders love to say that it's virtually impossible to cut or eliminate big entitlements like Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid once they've been established. If you give people generous cash aid or affordable health care, you're going to make their lives meaningfully better. Spread those benefits over a large enough portion of the population, and no politician will touch them. They may make a lot of noise about cutting them. They may even get overly enthusiastic and try to cut them, like the GOP did with Social Security privatization back in 2005. But they'll inevitably chicken out when they see how their constituents would be affected.

Ever since its creation, it's been unclear if ObamaCare's subsidies were enough to cross this threshold into political invincibility. But in its zeal, the Republican Party decided to go beyond just repealing the health-care law and tried to massively cut pre-ObamaCare funding for Medicaid as well. So it looks like Hayes' political gravity theory checks out.

But there's a wrinkle.

If the human destruction wreaked by cutting Medicaid and ObamaCare's subsidies is ultimately what killed TrumpCare, you'd expect Republican moderates to be the ones who stuck the knife in. But three of the four hard "no's" Lee, Moran, and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) sit on the Republicans' extreme right. They scuttled the bill because it didn't cut and destroy enough.

Does this overturn the political gravity thesis? I don't necessarily think so. The key is understanding what the Republican base wants.

The GOP is actually fairly fractured. Its white working-class voters sign up for the party's culture wars, but dislike its economic platform in practice. Meanwhile, its rich supporters salivate over its economic platform and donate accordingly but find some of its cultural excesses off-putting. The real Republican base the voters on board with both the party's economic and cultural agendas consists primarily of well-off, socially right-wing older white people. But that's a group that's becoming a smaller and smaller portion of the electorate. Meanwhile, Americans who lean left on economics have always been a majority, and Americans who lean left on culture are expanding their share of the population. So the Democrats' natural base is expanding, while the GOP's natural base is shrinking. The Republican base knows this and so they're becoming increasingly angry and more extreme.

The political gravity that Hayes speaks so eloquently about made sure the GOP couldn't scrap ObamaCare and replace it with nothing. Even TrumpCare, cruel as it may be, is just a badly designed adjustment to ObamaCare. But this other big political force the increasingly radical impulses of the GOP also played an important role in the end of TrumpCare. The Republican base knew TrumpCare was just ObamaCare-lite, and they weren't willing to settle for it.

That second force was pushing up as political gravity was pulling down. And TrumpCare got crushed in between.

Read the original:
The political forces that destroyed TrumpCare - The Week Magazine

BUFFALO, N.Y. Bioethical arguments related to abortion and embryonic stem cell research often depend on first answering questions of origins. When do humans come into existence? Does fertilization represent creations flash point? Or does existence require the glow of consciousness or perhaps separation from the birth mother?

These questions of our origins, along with discussions pertaining to personal identity, represent the dual themes of this years Romanell Conference (formerly the PANTC Conference) presented by the University at Buffalo Department of Philosophy.

Three preeminent philosophers will visit UB to defend their positions on these issues as part of the two-day event on Friday, July 28, and Saturday, July 29, from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. each day in 280 Park Hall on the universitys North Campus, a space unofficially renamed the Theresa Monacelli Conference Room in appreciation of the retired philosophy staff members contributions to previous conferences.

John Lizza, professor of philosophy at Kutztown University; Don Marquis, professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Kansas; and Marya Schechtman, professor of philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago; will each deliver a separate keynote address.

The Romanell Conference, the fifth annual event exploring bioethics and the philosophy of medicine, is free and open to the public. A complete schedule of presenters and their topics is available online.

These issues go right to the heart of the culture wars abortion, control over ones body, sexual identity, personal identity, the social construction of the self and hastening death, says David Hershenov, a professor in the UB Department of Philosophy who joined the keynoters on a panel about personal identity and death at the American Philosophical Associations national meeting last year in Chicago.

This conference will not be a dry philosophical debate.

There is no philosophical consensus on when a human being comes into existence, according to Hershenov.

If we persons were never early mindless embryos, then we couldnt have been harmed by an abortion or embryonic stem cell research that destroys an embryo, he says. Early abortion would be more akin to contraception in that it prevents someone from coming into existence rather than killing an existing individual, preventing them from having a valuable future.

Some philosophers think existence begins two weeks after fertilization when twinning can no longer occur.

If we came into existence before identical twins were formed, then twinning might have involved our deaths as the embryo that we were identical with splits in two.

Other philosophers believe persons are essentially thinking entities, so there is no existence without consciousness. Fertilization in this case cant represent existence since the fetal brain requires 20 weeks of post-fertilization development before it can support consciousness.

There are even some philosophers who believe we dont come into existence until we are separated or at least separable from our mothers, he says. They dont think we could ever have been a part of another human being. That would mean there is a larger human being composed of a smaller human being.

Marquis, author of the seminal article, Why Abortion is Immoral believes existence occurs two weeks after fertilization. Schechtman, the most famous promotor of the narrative account of personal identity has a more fluid belief on existence and is exploring the idea that our origins stretch across the entire pregnancy. Lizza, an expert on death and a proponent of the constitution idea, uses the analogy of a sculptures differences from that of unformed clay. He sees humans as minded beings that dont exist until weve formed the capacity for thought.

The conference will be entertaining for many reasons, including the fact that many of the participants are long-term philosophical rivals and so quite willing to bluntly and sarcastically express their criticism of each other, says Hershenov.

Other conference highlights include a talk on the transgender category of personal identification by Barry Smith, SUNY Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and director of the National Center for Ontological Research. In addition, Catherine Nolan, affiliate assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Dallas, will discuss intersex children; and Stephen Kershnar, SUNY Fredonia professor of philosophy will discuss whether physicians deserve the high compensation they receive.

Kershnar is a libertarian, says Hershenov. I suspect he will answer they are entitled to that money and should hardly be taxed.

Read more here:
Philosophers to discuss origins and identity during two-day UB conference - UB News Center

Joanna AndreassonIn a new online feature, Mike Riggs looks at the decades-long effort to legalize MDMA and other psychedelic drugs for medical use:

In January 1967, roughly 20,000 young people gathered at Golden Gate Park for the Human Be-In, a kind of outdoor conference for hippie counterculture. The event introduced the word "psychedelic" to the American mainstream, and the psychedelic evangelist Timothy Leary to San Francisco.

California and Nevada had banned LSD a year earlier, following New York, which banned it in 1965. Leary, a psychologist who'd recently been canned from his faculty gig at Harvard for sharing psychedelic drugs with undergraduates, believed there was no longer any point in negotiating with the powers that be. His message was blunt: "Drop out of high school, drop out of college, drop out of graduate school."

The Manmostly government, but also society and authority figures of all kindswas attempting to eradicate psychedelic drugs and the liberation they bestowed. That required a proportionately rebellious response: "Turn on, tune in, drop out." Students around the country heard Leary's words, and many did as he exhorted. The Man heard him, too, and doubled down on its efforts to bury the psychedelic drug era under a mound of criminal sanctions and red tape. Within a few years, psychedelic drugs were completely regulated out of recreational settings, then therapeutic settings, and finally research settings.

Fifty years and a few months later, at a Marriott hotel 14 miles from Golden Gate Park, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) hosted nearly 3,000 researchers, students, and enthusiasts for Psychedelic Science 2017, a six-day conference on what's being done to turn illegal psychedelic drugs into legal pharmaceutical products. Once again, the avatars of psychedelic culture had gathered to compare notes, share their experiences, and talk strategy.

This time, the message was different: Stay in school. Apply for research grants. Design clinical trials. Show your work.Evangelize, yes, but with a new audience in mindnot the counterculture, but the Man himself.

"Regulators, governments, health economists, health systems, insurers, health-care professionals, andmost importantlypatients," said George Goldsmith, the former CEO of McKinsey & Company's TomorrowLab, and an advocate for the kind of therapeutic innovation psychedelic researchers are hoping to achieve. "That's the next community that actually needs to be engaged here."

Sitting onstage next to Goldsmith was Thomas Insel, a psychiatrist and former director of the National Institute of Mental Health. Insel, who's spent a lot of time in recent years bemoaning the paucity of effective psychiatric drugs, was blunter still. "I would encourage you to be more Catholic than the Pope. You've got to be more rigorous than the people working in the pharmaceutical industry studying more traditional compounds that aren't controlled [substances]." One adverse patient reaction for which clinical investigators were not prepared, he argued, could "poison the well."

"I know you don't want to hear that," he added. "But it's really easy to mess things up."Today's psychedelic drug community is fiercely committed to avoiding a repeat of the 1960s' culture wars, in no small part because their tie-dyed predecessors lost. Insel and Goldsmith, while not psychedelic researchers themselves, reflect the current movement's willingness to work with more staid actors in the field of medicine.

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New at Reason: Medical Researchers Are Steps From Legalizing Ecstasy. Here's How They Did It. - Reason (blog)

AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) - A group of Texas business leaders urged state lawmakers on Monday to abandon plans to pass a bill to restrict bathroom access for transgender people, calling such a measure bad for the economy.

The Republican-dominated legislature begins a 30-day special session on Tuesday with 20 items on the agenda, including one of the "bathroom bills" that have been a flashpoint in U.S. culture wars.

Supporter of the legislation have said it is a common-sense measure that protects public safety. Critics call it discriminatory.

Texas, the most powerful Republican-controlled state, could lose about $5.6 billion through 2026 and businesses could find it difficult to recruit top talent if such a measure is enacted, according to the state's leading employer organization.

"The distraction of a bathroom bill pulls us away from being competitive as a state," Jeff Moseley, chief executive of the Texas Association of Business, told a rally outside the Capitol.

"On this discussion, conservatives can disagree with conservatives," said Moseley, whose group has typically aligned itself with the state's Republican leaders.

The legislation restricts access to places like bathrooms and locker rooms based on the gender listed on people's birth certificates and not the gender with which they identify.

A similar law in North Carolina, partially repealed in March, prompted the relocation of sporting events and economic boycotts that was estimated to have cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars.

The stakes are higher in Texas, which has an economy larger than Russia's.

A bill similar to North Carolina's passed the Texas Senate in the regular session and was killed by pro-business Republican leaders in the House, who ran out the clock on the measure.

The bathroom bill's main backer, Republican Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, a social conservative who sets the state Senate's legislative agenda, has said economic losses would be inconsequential.

"(The Texas Republican majority) want to maintain separate restrooms, locker rooms and shower facilities for men and women and boys and girls, and they dont care if the media thinks it is politically incorrect," his political campaign said in a statement on Monday.

Republican House of Representatives Speaker Joe Straus and companies including IBM, American Airlines, Apple and Southwest Airlines have spoken out against the bill.

"On the bathroom bill, there is no real compromise because even the most mild bill is going to be interpreted as discriminatory," said Mark Jones, a political science professor at Rice University in Houston.

Reporting by Jon Herskovitz; Editing by Peter Cooney

View original post here:
Texas business leaders call on lawmakers to drop 'bathroom bill' - Reuters