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Wheeler needs to finish with more than 50% of the vote in order to win a second term outright in the primary.

PORTLAND, Ore. Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler has a big lead in early returns, but it remains unclear if he'll finish with the support needed to win a second term in Tuesday's primary. Wheeler needs to finish with more than 50% of the vote in order to win a second term outright.

If he doesn't, Wheeler, and the candidate that receives the second-most votes, who is Sarah Iannarone, will be in a runoff in the November general election.

Wheeler faced tremendous pressures in his first four years in office, from his handling of the Portland Police Bureau, to homelessness and culture wars.

He went up against a number of credible candidates, among them Iannarone, who finished third in the 2016 and had no intention of being swept aside in 2020.

She sued Wheeler following an Oregon Supreme Court ruling for receiving large campaign violations that violated a city law passed by voters in 2018. The suit came just after an Oregon Supreme Court decision upholding such laws.

During the campaign, Wheeler was called out for claiming endorsements that were not true, among them support from the Thorns and Timbers and City Commissioner Chloe Eudaly.

In a final indignity, the city auditor fined Wheeler $500 the day before the primary for having donor information on his campaign mailers so small it could not be read.

The Oregonian asked each of candidates to respond to a series of key policy questions. Read their answers here.

Read the original here:
Portland mayor election results: Wheeler with big lead, but November runoff possible - KGW.com

Late last week, as she was leading the charge to push the Democrats $3 trillion pandemic relief package through the House, Speaker Nancy Pelosi strode the floor of the capitol in a fuchsia pantsuit, red pumps, white shell and a coordinated red, white and green cherry-print face mask.

This was the day after Ms. Pelosi had stood at a podium for a news conference in a black dress with a complementary dark green and white foliage-print face mask which was itself not long after she had appeared in a shell-pink pantsuit with a matching shell-pink mask.

Hillary Clinton took note, posting a photo on Instagram with the caption: Leader of the House majority, and of mask-to-pantsuit color coordination. The post has been liked more than 250,000 times.

Since late April, when she began wearing silk scarves that were color-coordinated with her suits and shells orange and orange, blue and blue and cream and brown and that she had worn bandanna-style around her face, Ms. Pelosi has also modeled a purple suit with a purple/blue, black and white geometric face mask and a white suit and blue shirt with the same.

And though it would be easy to categorize Ms. Pelosis masks as fun! and all about self-expression! and yes fashion!(as many style watchers have done), her track record and the way her approach contrasts with those around her suggests something more nuanced though the stratagem is covered, natch, by the accessibility of patterned cloth, the kind we all have to wear and to which we can all relate.

After all, why simply don a face mask when you can also use it to make a political point?

Indeed, the sheer variety of her masks stands out like a beacon amid her sea of aides in generic white or blue medical masks and her dark-masked protective detail. It suggests a commitment to consciously choosing a mask every single day that, more than simply demonstrating good mask habits, civic awareness and solicitude for those around her, or even support for small businesses, demands attention. (Many of her masks come from Donna Lewis, a small store in Alexandria, Va., where she also buys some of her suits; for each mask sold, one is donated to Johns Hopkins hospitals.)

As the president continues to eschew the mask in his public appearances over the weekend he went without one when meeting in the Rose Garden with Girl Scouts and small business leaders Ms. Pelosi is making her mask-wearing, and the contrast with those around her, impossible to ignore. Doing so is a constant reminder of the difference between the heads of the executive and legislative branches.

Official Washington may have come relatively late to this particularly emotive symbol of the contemporary culture wars, but it has now fully arrived.

Ms. Pelosi is not the first government official to match her masks to her outfit. That honor goes to the Slovakian president, Zuzana Caputova, whose image went viral in late March at the swearing in of her new coalition government when she wore a burgundy face mask that coordinated perfectly with her burgundy sheath dress. And, apparently, she instructed her new cabinet to wear identical masks (blue) and gloves (white) for the group photo, hence both distinguishing herself from the group and creating a perfectly harmonious picture of civic care.

Likewise, Emmanuel Macron donned a navy mask with a discreet red, white and blue grosgrain ribbon at the side to match his navy suit and little red, white and blue lapel pin on a visit to a school earlier this month.

Melania Trump, too, matched her basic white face mask to her basic white shirt when she appeared in her PSA for mask-wearing in early April. As did Ivanka Trump, who wore a black mask with a black jumpsuit to tour a Maryland produce distributor last week (though that mask had the effect of making her look unsettlingly like a movie bank robber, despite the little American flag pin on the side).

And though most of Congress has now been converted to mask-wearing, as the recent Senate hearings on Covid-19 revealed, with Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina modeling a University of North Carolina booster mask and Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, a red-and-black tie-dye bandanna. Still, they mostly seem to have resorted to the gimmick mask, the current equivalent of the gimmick tie (see also Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and his Washington Nationals mask), the patriot mask (Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina in a stars and stripes and eagles number) or the OK-Ill wear-it-if-I-have-to face mask that Vice President Mike Pence wore when he visited the General Motors and Ventec ventilator production plant in Indiana last month.

But no other elected official has embraced the mask with as much relentless and considered eye-catching range as Ms. Pelosi.

In this her resolve is fully in line with the Speakers approach to image-making, which has always involved every tool at her disposal, be it a clapback at the State of the Union or her Speakers mace pin. She understands that there are ways to make herself and her positions heard even when she isnt saying anything at all. That at a time when almost all communication is taking place within the confines of a small box, these kinds of details matter.

Continued here:
The Many Masks of Nancy Pelosi - The New York Times

Eminems second major-label album was a compelling but lurid whodunit. The Marshall Mathers LP wasnt a murder mystery, per se, though plenty of characters met their demise. It was a mystery of realness.

This remained a hip-hop conundrum 20 years ago especially after the still-unsolved deaths of the Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur. Were rappers real or fake? If you claimed to be a product of the drug trade, had you actually moved weight? After Eminems unprecedented success for a white rapper, via The Slim Shady LP in 1999 and its follow-up, questions abounded. Was he a prankster, an industry plant, a generational voice? (The last was asserted in 2003 by the Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney). Were his lyrics truth or fantasy? Was he a public danger?

These days, a rappers rhymes are rarely more than a Twitter trending topic. But in 2000, multitudes were engrossed: a United States Senate committee about entertainment and violence (where vice-presidential wife Lynne Cheney said Eminem advocates murder and rape); feminist and gay activists; parents groups and religious activists.

In the often very catchy pop songs of The Marshall Mathers LP, Eminem got into it with all these people, plus his family, other musicians (famous or obscure), celebrities and the media. As a result, virtually every bystander had an opinion cocked, locked and ready to rock, to quote another Motor City madman, Ted Nugent. Eminem was a one-man internet before the internet really became the internet.

With his troika of identities Marshall Mathers, Eminem, Slim Shady appearing together for the first time, multisyllabic mockery, metrical slaloms of disdain and lots of funny voices, he exorcised trauma like a street magician flourishing cards, lyrics whirring around your ears. In 2020, having gone platinum 10 times, The Marshall Mathers LP hits differently. But its still a vivid snapshot of the late culture wars, when a foul-mouthed white rapper was our worst public health scare.

All music previews and full tracks provided by Spotify. Warning: Many tracks contain strong language.

Read more from the original source:
Eminem's 'The Marshall Mathers LP': Hear What Came Before and After - The New York Times

One thing I will say about Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words is that its perfectly titled. There is almost nothing in this two-hour production that isnt in the words of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

His wife, Virginia Thomas, gets a bit of screen time, but shes totally in sync with her husbands version of history and the events in his life. If you want a two-hour production that feels more like hagiography than what I think of as a documentary with balancing voices, then Created Equal is for you. The question is whether such a one-sided, in his own words version of the life of a figure as controversial as Thomas is what public television should be offering in prime time. The answer to that question goes straight to the heart of our culture wars. Clarence Thomas and Michael Pack, the films director and producer, bring plenty of culture war baggage with them to the table.

Thomas, generally considered the most conservative member of the court, will forever be linked in the public mind to the charges of sexual harassment leveled against him by Anita Hill during his confirmation hearings to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1991. During the hearings, Thomas denounced them as a circus a national disgrace a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks.

As for Pack, he has become a culture wars hot potato since he was nominated to lead the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees such operations as Voice of America. Some analysts see his nomination as part of an effort by President Donald Trump to create a global right-wing media messaging machine much as he has tried to do in the U.S. with Fox News, Breitbart News Network, the Sinclair Broadcast Group, One America News Network and other platforms.

As Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee worked to block his nomination, Trump himself intervened to get Pack, who has made two films with former Trump aide and Breitbart editor Steve Bannon, confirmed by the Senate.

If you hear whats coming out of the Voice of America, its disgusting, Trump said in April, voicing his anger about VOA coverage of Chinas role in the pandemic and the Senates failure to confirm Pack. The things they say are disgusting toward our country. And Michael Pack would get in and do a great job, but hes been waiting for two years. Cant get him approved.

A planned committee vote on Packs nomination was postponed Thursday. And later in the day, Sen. Robert Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat and ranking member on the committee, said the office of the attorney general for the District of Columbia had informed the panel that it was investigating allegations that Pack funneled $1.6 million in funds from a nonprofit group he runs to his for-profit film company. The story was first reported in The Washington Post.

Pack declined to comment when I asked about his nomination. But thats what I mean about bringing culture war issues with him just like the subject of his film.

The format of Created Equal is Thomas sitting at a table talking to an off-camera interviewer, Pack. Thomas is thus literally narrating his life story for this PBS offering with occasional prompts and queries from Pack. Thomas previously wrote about his life story in his 2007 memoir, My Grandfathers Son.

Clarence Thomas story is a classic American Horatio Alger story, coming from dire poverty in the segregated South to the highest court in the land, Pack said.

It is a remarkable journey with him coming from further behind than almost any American political figure, especially when you take into account the segregation and racism he suffered, the filmmaker continued. His intellectual journey is also remarkable from being raised by his grandfather and Irish nuns with traditional hard work values, to rejecting those values and then finally coming back to them later in his life.

The narrative is a powerful one, and Pack uses it skillfully to engage and even move the viewer emotionally as he chronicles Thomas climb from Pin Point, Georgia, to Yale University and then the highest ranks of American conservative politics.

I was OK with the education-of-a-young-man narrative that drove the film from Thomas childhood to Catholic school and then the seminary and college life. Its when Thomas enters the realm of American politics as President Ronald Reagans chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 1982 and then the Supreme Court nominee of President George H.W. Bush that the one-sided, in-his-own-words approach became seriously problematic to me.

I originally thought I would make more of a traditional documentary and interview a wide range of people on all sides of all these issues. But it would take a lot of people on all sides to deal with the many things that come up from affirmative action and busing to the Anita Hill charges themselves. And I thought I would lose Clarence Thomas voice, Pack said of his structural and editorial choices.

So, I thought it was better to have him tell his story, the filmmaker added. And its Clarence Thomas in his own words, so we dont hide that fact. Its not pretended to be the objective truth about his life. Its his subjective truth. And I think because weve made essentially that deal with the audience and we stick to that deal, the film has integrity.

Integrity is not a word I would use in connection with this film. I think some of its messages are not just one-sided; they are dangerous in the way they add to the deep political divide plaguing this nation.

In talking about his Senate confirmation hearings, Thomas says in the film, Most of my opponents on the Judiciary Committee cared about only one thing: how would I rule on abortion rights. You really didnt matter. And your life didnt matter. What mattered is what they wanted. And what they wanted was this particular issue.

As Thomas continues that thought, the camera starts a slow pan down the faces of the committee members: Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware, the committee chair, the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (Democrat, Massachusetts), who was seated next to Biden, and straight down the committee, of white, male Democrats.

I felt as though in my life I had been looking at the wrong people as to the people who would be problematic to me, Thomas says. We were told, Oh, its going to be the bigot in the pickup truck. Its going to be the Klansman. Its going to be the rural sheriff. And Im not saying there werent some of those who were bad. But it turned out through all of that, ultimately the biggest impediment was the modern day liberal, that they were the ones who discount all those things, because they have one issue or they have the power to caricature you.

The segment ends with the camera focused on Biden as he gavels the session to a close.

If you dont think there is a political, culture wars component to such moments in the film, consider this exchange between Fox News host Laura Ingraham and Pack in a video from her show that posted May 12 on the Fox News website.

After showing a clip from the film of Thomas warning those who issue accusations or back those who would accuse people like him that their time in the Tower of London will come, Ingraham says, Michael, how ironic that Biden is now on the other side of this one.

Indeed, hes got his own Anita Hill, Pack says referencing Tara Reade, who has accused Biden of sexually assaulting her in 1993 when she was a staff assistant in his Senate office.

I am not surprised that Ingraham says she loves Created Equal and will be supporting it in social media in coming days. Thats the way it works in the right-wing messaging machine.

What surprises me is that PBS is scheduled to air this film Monday, and in prime time no less. Thats surprising and tremendously disappointing as to the state of public television in the age of Donald Trump.

Created Equal is scheduled to air Monday at 9 p.m. EDT (check local listings).

(David Zurawik is The Baltimore Suns media critic. Email: david.zurawik@baltsun.com; Twitter: @davidzurawik.)

2020 The Baltimore Sun

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David Zurawik: If you want a one-sided, right-wing, celebratory version of the life of Clarence Thomas, PBS has just the ticket. Yes, PBS - The...

As we approach the middle of the ninth week of UK lockdown, it appears the scale of the economic Armageddon we are undergoing or, perhaps more accurately, which awaits us in full form around the corner is yet fully to be grasped. The legitimate fear and anxiety is still very much pinned on COVID-19 as a severe public health threat, while the matter of financing this level of national inactivity remains a distant bridge to be crossed once we have caught our breath.

Yet the latest economic figures make grim reading. The Office for Budget Responsibilitys latest scenario analysis suggests that public sector borrowing for 2020-21 will hit 273 billion, or 13.9% of GDP a peacetime record for the UK. The previous record was in 2009-10, in the aftermath of the financial crisis. Analysis by J. P. Morgan released today depicts a growth in unemployment of 300,000 during the first quarter of 2020; with hundreds of thousands of currently furloughed workers facing redundancy when their employers eventually go bust. The bomb of post-COVID joblessness is yet to explode. One in three 18-24 year-olds have lost their jobs, vacancy advertisements are down 92%; in September thousands of graduates will find their post-university offers of employment to have evaporated.

All this would make one assume the nation must be itching to get things moving again. Things cannot go on like this, surely? Eventually people will fall behind on their rent, homeowners will default on their mortgages, asset prices will crash. As soon as is feasible the British people will want to get the show back on the road.

Or so youd think. Research by Ipsos Mori for Kings College London finds that out of three broad categorisations of feeling towards coronavirus lockdown the Accepting, the Suffering and the Rejecting the Accepting is the largest group on 48% (the Suffering sit at 44%); just 9% have serious feelings of doubt or misgiving about the scale of the measures. Over 90% of the first two categories support lockdown measures with over 80% favouring increased police powers. Teachers have been told by their unions to defy government instruction to restart schools chatterati orthodoxy about listing to the science notwithstanding.

In truth, lockdown has become something of a hobby for many British people if not quite yet attaining the level of a religion, then certainly a national pastime. With the absence of televised sport, live entertainment or even a good old pub to visit, not the mention the normalising effect of face-to-face social contact, coronavirus culture fills the vacuum.

To an extent this is understandable. We are facing the largest public health crisis for a generation, while the thought of losing elderly relatives and loved ones is too much to bear. At the same time, coronavirus news obsession has taken the nation by storm, and have-a-go epidemiology is the latest craze.

We needed to lock down 2 weeks sooner, THAT would have solved things insist critics; The modelling was completely wrong! They used a totally rubbish system, cry others. Amid the maelstrom of speculative froth and oversupply of information, how can we know who is right?

Frankly, it has all become rather wearisome. And while the economic catastrophe is bad, the COVID crisis has revealed and inflamed aspects of British culture that are somewhat unseemly. Curtain-twitching, whether physical or online, has been in the ascendancy. The passion for call-out culture and bluntly correcting ones neighbour on their behaviour (in the past it was un-PC word choices or voting for Brexit; now its going shopping once too often) has found a new world of opportunity in which to vent a feeling of moral superiority. Nasty (though sometimes funny) memes about the stupidity of lockdown-breakers and deniers abound online. And, as ever, criticism of the NHS or of any dimension of perpetual lockdown orthodoxy makes one a traitor at best, a granny-killer at worst.

Even the government seems to have been surprised by the egg it has laid. Jacob Rees-Mogg conceded in the most recent edition of ConservativeHome podcast that the governments stay-home-at-all-costs advice may have been too effective (governments always price in levels of non-compliance whenever making a decision). Its hard to work out whether the confusion of current guidelines should be attributed simply to chaos at the heart of the government communications machine or whether it is a deliberate tactic. Fudge the advice and you will get a slow trickle-back to work rather than opening the floodgates, while the naturally cautious stay home longer.

Its disappointingly predictable to map attitudes to COVID-19 fanatical lockdown enthusiasm versus stoical compliance and a desire to get back to work onto either culture wars or the Brexit divide, but there are certain tribal traits that can be identified here. It seems to be the most fanatical Remainers, the type who would blame Brexit voters personally for voting to ruin the country, who seem most likely to favour locking down, well, forever.

Someof the very people who said no government would ever vote to make its people poorer are now calling on the government not to ease restrictions or allow schools to open, favouring an approach that lookslikelyto impoverish the nation further and destroy opportunity for a whole generation, not to mention torpedoing the tax base from which we fund the beloved health service.

Perhaps this is simply a psychological misfire caused by fear. But thats precisely the point: amateur covidology, like astrology or alchemy, represents a frantic attempt to overcome the unfamiliar sensation of being unable to defeat nature and control the unknown.

Perhaps if the Government had acted differently outcomes would have been statistically significantly different, but somehow I doubt it. The what-ifery, whataboutery and finger-pointing is unbecoming of a nation that prides herself on unity and teamwork in a crisis.

The objective should be clear: beat this thing as quickly as possible, but recognise that the state is not omnipotent and we cannot fully prevent the tragedy of humans falling ill. Proportionality and sanity will need to be restored. Lets hope the culture hasnt been too badly shattered along the way.

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Covid Britain: A nation hooked on lockdown and stuck fighting a wearisome culture war - Reaction