Category Archives: Freedom

The Affordable Care Act Allows Workers to Have More Freedom and Flexibility Common Dreams Dean Baker, co-author of the report, states that It seems nonsensical that policymakers would ignore the benefits of the increased worker freedom the ACA has provided. Presumably, if the ACA were repealed without some comparable system of insurance ... and more »

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The Affordable Care Act Allows Workers to Have More Freedom and Flexibility - Common Dreams

An audience at Freedom Hall enjoys the action during the 2017 AMSOIL Arenacross Tour. 2/4/17(Photo: Marty Pearl/Special to The C-J)Buy Photo

Investors are expressing a willingness to help pay to bring Freedom Hall up to pro basketballstandards, according toJ. Bruce Miller, a lawyer who has tried for years to bring the NBA to Louisville.

But he isn't disclosing any names.

The odds of Louisville's landing an NBA franchise through either league expansionor the relocation of an existing franchise appear long. And the cost to securean NBA team might approach $1 billion.

On top of that, the cost to renovate Freedom Hall may bearound $150 million, said Jason Rittenberry, president and CEO of Kentucky Venues, the newly rebranded Kentucky State Fair Board.Itoversees the state-owned, 60-year-old Freedom Hall situated in the center of the Kentucky Exposition Center.

The NBA office saysexpansion is not in sight. And no existing clubappears inclined to move.In addition, questions have been raised about the ability of the local demographics to support or sustain an NBA team.

Nonetheless, Miller, who served three terms as the elected Jefferson County attorney, continues his relentless pursuit of a Louisville-based NBA club a passion that has persisted for nigh on a generation.

He maintains that if the NBA does expand, Louisville and Seattle are the two primary candidates. And he said the market here would be all of Kentucky, not just Louisville.

In a recent interview, Miller said he is working with no fewerthan three separate investment groups interested in backing Louisville's effort to secureapro basketball team. Miller said each of the three groups is aware that two other groups share the Louisville NBA ambition but they don't know who the potentially competing investors are.

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Rittenberry said that to bring Freedom Hall up to NBA standards, the arena's interior would essentially have to be gutted and rebuilt. In addition,a third level would need to be added, all the seats would need to be replaced, and walls knocked out to widen the concourses.

Rittenberry said, "Many, many things would have to be done. I'm not even sure you could do it."

Reporter Sheldon S. Shafer can be reached at 502-582-7089, or via email at sshafer@courier-journal.com.

A quick look at whether or not an NBA team could be making its way to Louisville. Wochit

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NBA seekers might pony up to redo Freedom Hall - The Courier-Journal

In 1934 the Louisiana legislature passed a law requiring all newspapers, magazines, and periodicals with a circulation of 20,000 or more to pay an annual licensing tax of 2 percent on all gross receipts "for the privilege of engaging in such business in this State." Ostensibly justified as just another run-of-the-mill tax, the measure's true purpose was plain for all to see. The governor at that time was the notorious populist demagogue Huey P. Long, also known as the "Kingfish." The Long administration was famously rife with corruption and criminality and the state's biggest newspapers just happened to be some of the governor's most outspoken critics. So the Kingfish told his allies in the legislature to use the state's vast taxing powers to harass and punish his enemies in the press.

The American Press Company, along with eight other newspaper publishers, promptly filed suit, charging the Long administration with waging an illegal war on the freedom of the press. Their case, ultimately known as Grosjean v. American Press Co., arrived at the U.S. Supreme Court in 1936. The resulting decision stands as one of the great First Amendment rulings of its time.

Library of CongressThe majority opinion was written by Justice George Sutherland, a jurist of classical liberal tendencies who is best remembered today as the intellectual leader of the so-called Four Horsemen, the bloc of justices who regularly ruled against New Deal legislation in the 1930s. Sutherland was no fan of what he called "meddlesome interferences with the rights of the individual," and he made no effort to hide his dismay at the unconstitutional behavior of the Pelican State.

The Louisiana law is "a deliberate and calculated device in the guise of a tax to limit the circulation of information to which the public is entitled in virtue of the constitutional guarantees" set forth in the First Amendment, Sutherland declared. "A free press stands as one of the great interpreters between the government and the people. To allow it to be fettered is to fetter ourselves." The law was invalidated 9-0.

Grosjean v. American Press Co. still resounds today as a landmark defense of the freedom of the press. But Sutherland's majority opinion accomplished even more than that.

Nowadays we take it for granted that the provisions contained in the Bill of Rights impose limits on both federal and state officials. But that was not always the case. When the batch of amendments that comprise the Bill of Rights were first added to the Constitution in 1791, those amendments were understood to apply solely against the federal government; they did nothing to bind the states. For illustration, consider the opening text of the First Amendment, which is quite explicit on this point: "Congress shall make no law."

But things changed in 1868 with the ratification of the 14th Amendment, which forbids the states from infringing on the privileges or immunities of citizens and from denying any person the right to life, liberty, or property without due process of law. What does that sweeping language mean? According to Republican Senator Jacob Howard of Michigan, who introduced the 14th Amendment in the Senate in 1866 and then spearheaded its passage in that chamber, it was designed to protect both certain unenumerated rights (such as economic liberty) as well as "the personal rights guarantied and secured by the first eight amendments of the Constitution." The purpose of the 14th Amendment, Howard explained, was "to restrain the power of the States and compel them at all times to respect these great fundamental guaranties."

Yet the Supreme Court did not give the First Amendment its due under the 14th Amendment until the 1925 case of Gitlow v. United States, in which the Court first held that "freedom of speech and of the presswhich are protected by the First Amendment from abridgment by Congressare among the fundamental personal rights and 'liberties' protected by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment against the states."

Gitlow was still in its relative infancy 11 years later when the censorious Louisiana newspaper tax arrived at the Supreme Court. Which brings us back to Justice Sutherland. His majority opinion in Grosjean v. American Press Co. both reinforced the Gitlow holding and extended its reach. "Certain fundamental rights, safeguarded by the first eight amendments against federal action... [are] also safeguarded against state action," Sutherland declared. "Freedom of speech and of the press are rights of the same fundamental character."

In sum, Grosjean v. American Press Co. is a good precedent to have on the books. Not only does it tell power-hungry politicians to respect the freedom of the press, it compels all levels of government to obey the First Amendment.

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When SCOTUS Stopped a Government-Led Attack on Freedom of the Press - Reason (blog)

The most quoted foreign policy statement in the President's speech was: "My job is not to represent the world. My job is to represent the United States of America." His formulation does not come as a surprise. Trump has never intended to lead the free world, and nor would the free world put him in charge. But as Trump's predecessors have learned, there is no keeping America safe or prosperous when the world is not. As a global businessman with interests on all continents, Trump's blindness to the interconnectedness entrenched by technology, the global economy, travel, trade and media is willful and worrying. On a broader level, this willful ignorance spotlights three ways in which Trump's remarks on foreign policy were alarming. First, he displayed a propensity to view the US role in international affairs almost entirely through a military lens. He has already appointed military generals to head not only the Department of Defense but also his National Security Council (twice over, including the deposed Michael Flynn and now H.R. McMaster) and the Department of Homeland Security. In his words, "To those allies who wonder what kind of friend America will be, look no further than the heroes who wear our uniform." By putting a military face on American solidarity around the world, Trump confirmed the serious concerns of diplomats and top military officials alike who have expressed worries about Trump's announcement of budget proposals that would effect a $54 billion increase in defense spending partly through drastic cuts in the budget of the State Department. More than 120 retired generals and admirals have signed a letter of protest. Meanwhile, Trump conspicuously omitted mention of economic ties or global concerns like climate change and human rights. His worldview is a more extreme version of the approach taken during the first term of the George W. Bush administration when singular emphasis on military force, or "hard power," drew the United States into draining wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, squandered the global goodwill engendered by the 9/11 attacks, caused anti-Americanism to spike and frayed American alliances. Despite an obsession with his own personal brand, Trump seems oblivious toward the brand value of what Joseph Nye has called the "soft power" that comes from projecting appealing aspects of American society and character abroad. He is also indifferent to my own concept of "smart power," or the imperative to engage a broad range of tools of statecraft, from diplomacy to aid to private sector engagement to military intervention. Trump's tunnel-vision foreign policy, centered on the military, will leave other elements of the US foreign policy toolbox idle while incurring significant expense and risk for troops pressured to become the solution to all of America's foreign policy challenges.

The second jarring aspect of Trump's foreign policy vision was the absence of any conception of the United States as a standard-bearer for freedom worldwide. While the United States has been at best an imperfect exemplar of freedom, often contradicting its own professed ideals, its self-conception as an inspiration and lifeline to democrats and dissidents around the world dates back to the Second World War at least.

In a large and growing number of countries the will of the people is not expressed through strong democratic institutions and processes. While the United States has limited influence globally and indeed must never try to dictate how other nations govern themselves, it has strived to be an ally and champion of those struggling to defend and promote freedom and democratic reforms. The support of new and emerging democracies in Eastern Europe, Africa, Latin America and Myanmar are among some of the United States' proudest achievements in recent decades. Trump's none-of-my-business pledge to let all nations plot their own course, coupled with the proposals he made earlier to dramatically reduce US foreign aid, offers nothing to those around the world who long for freedom and lack it.

Relying on Cabinet appointments, tax cuts and corporate subsidies to help the wealthy, Trump made clear his vision of diplomacy is not beholden to a practical, a political nor least a moral compulsion to uphold many decades of US leadership worldwide as an exemplar and defender of freedom.

Trump has been told -- but refuses to believe -- that American global leadership is not a public service to the rest of the world but rather an insurance policy for our own people, one that has kept war, plague and economic devastation mostly off-shore for many decades. Trump's disdain for the burdens and benefits of US global leadership -- so clearly articulated in his declaration that his job "is not to represent the world" -- won't simply leave a gap. The space created by the United States' withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, its equivocations on the Paris Climate pact and its insults toward the United Nations is already being filled by China, Russia and others.

By ceding the United States' global leadership role, Trump may ensure his successors cannot claim it back.

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'America First' puts freedom and leadership last (opinion) - CNN.com - CNN

The March4Trump rally March 4 at Freedom Hill County Park in Sterling Heights became heated before its scheduled start.

A man within a small group of anti-Trump protesters tried to knock away a pro-Trump sign carried by a woman who stood away from, but chanted with, a few dozen backers of the president who were among the early arrivals on opposite sides of the main drive into the park. That sparked a brief but heated verbal skirmish before cooler heads, Macomb County Sheriffs deputies and Sterling Heights police, stepped in to separate the two sides before the event officially got underway at noon.

An enthusiast crowd of approximately 300 people came out on a sunny day with temperatures in the 20s to show their support for Trump. The event was one of many like it scheduled around the county, including almost a dozen in Michigan. Two were slated in Oakland County.

Following remarks by Republican State Rep. Peter Lucido of Shelby Township, about 100 of those attending the rally in Sterling Heights patriotically carried their message with them during a walk along the Macomb County hike-bike path along Metropolitan Parkway.

The small group of counter-protesters who oppose Trump had a Russian flag, among others, and an anti-conservative banner while trying to counter the majority supporters of the president at the march.

Macomb County voters last year were a huge factor in helping Trump win Michigan against Democrat Hillary Clinton. Trump topped Clinton in Macomb County, 54 percent to 41 percent. Within Macomb County, Trump prevailed in 19 out of 24 communities (votes by residents of villages Romeo, Armada and New Haven are tabulated in neighboring communities).

In raw numbers, the difference was 48,000 votes more than three times the total margin that Trump scored over Clinton statewide.

Digital First Media staff report

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Enthusiastic Trump supporters rally at Freedom Hill - Shelby Township Source Newspapers

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Freedom's Meaning: What Once United Us, Now Splinters Us Up and Divides Us CNSNews.com If there is one thing that has always united, and can even still unite Americans, it is our love for freedom. Indeed, the mere mention of freedom has always served as an inebriating rallying cry that opens up seemingly infinite possibilities of ...

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Freedom's Meaning: What Once United Us, Now Splinters Us Up and Divides Us - CNSNews.com

Paul* fled East Africa with only the clothes on his back to come to the United States in June 2016.

Now a resident of Freedom House, Paul said he first arrived in Houston not being able to speak English but heard about Freedom House in Detroit through word-of-mouth.

The good thing about Americans is they like to share everything, he said.

For over two decades, asylum seekers--those fleeing from persecution based on their race, sexual orientation, nationality, political and religious beliefs--from all over the world have sought refuge in Detroits Freedom House because it provides shelter and legal service.

An exceptional 86 percent of Freedom House Detroit clients are able to achieve political asylum statusmuch higher than the national average, Ashley Veenstra, a representative from Freedom House, said.

Wayne States Medical Students and Asylum and Immigration Law Clinic are partners of Freedom House Detroit.

Rachel Settlage, the director of the Asylum and Immigration Law Clinic, said the clinic partnered with Freedom House because, [Freedom House] provides an invaluable service for asylum seekers.

In December 2016, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development notified Freedom House their grant, would not be renewed due to shifting priorities, Veenstra said.

Freedom House is appealing the decision, but must find alternative sources of funding while the appeal moves forwardand in the event that the rejection still stands, she said.

Settlage said Freedom House is an essential because it provides transitional housing for asylum seekers while students in the clinic work on residents cases.

Asylum seekers come from all over the country to Detroit because of Freedom House, its one of the very, very few organizations like this in the country, Settlage said. Without [Freedom House] theres really no place asylum seekers can go.

Executive director of Freedom House, Deborah Drennan, said it is not uncommon for the residents at Freedom House to come with academic degrees and from prestigious careers in their home countries.

Paul said that when he fled from his home countrywhere he was a certified engineerhe left six children and his entire family behind. The familial environment of Freedom House helped Paul regain that emotional attachment during a troubling time in his life, he said.

My mother died in my country, but I have a new mom, Paul said.

The residents refer to Drennan as Mom Deb and she refers to them as her sons and daughters Drennan said.

They want to help, Paul said. They dont want to see anyone in bad condition.

Paul said he has benefited from many of the programs at Freedom House since arriving, including the physical and behavioral health services as well as the English as a second language courses.

Before coming [to Freedom House], everything was difficult because of communication, Paulwho is a native French speakersaid.

Paul is a member of the Residence Council, which is a group of residents who are nominated by their fellow residents to help the staff welcome newcomers and organize nightly dinners, Drennan said.

Paul said being on the council gives him something to do, its, good for me, [Im] not just eating and sleeping.

Paul said he wants to learn everything and fully immerse himself in American culture. The relationships he built at Freedom House gave him sense of permanence and emotional support in his new country.

Im at home, he said. This is family.

Paul hopes to someday bring his kids to the U.S. and get a job in mechanics, but he, [doesnt] want to go too far from Mom Deb.

*Name has been changed for safety reasons.

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Refugee finds asylum at Detroit Freedom House - The South End

She is reading Derrida in a Tim Hortons, wearing sweatpants and drinking tea for a cold. This is her lifenow.

He is having a quesadilla, a couple of samosas, and a handful of vitamins for dinner. Or: the epitome of beingsingle.

She has eaten bacon and chocolate, preparing to fall asleep before the sun sets. Happy Fourth of July! Anyone between the ages of 22 and 32 who uses social media, reads modern first-person fiction, or watches certain autobiographical television shows will recognize the content and tone of these miniature pseudo-confessions. They are typical of a style Ive come to think of as competitiveabjection.

A capsule definition would go something like this: putting on display sordid or pathetic aspects of ones life with a kind of abashed defiance, to pre-empt feelings of embarrassment or the possibility ofscorn.

If this sounds hyper-specific, its because the attitude being expressed is the product of this particular moment, and its particular place at the intersection of Internet culture, feminist discourse, and what commonly gets called latecapitalism.

Its also because the people who most often express the attitude are upper-middle-class twentysomethings with university degrees in the humanities. Despite that, the style is elastic enough to show up in all kinds of cultural fields, and to be deployed by a wide demographic range. Lena Dunham does it, but so does Louis C.K., when he talks about scarfing down stale Cinnabons in the airport and guzzling the seminal syrup that comes with them. It goes all the way up the cultural chain and all along the spectrum of light and dark: from the founder of the Stay Home Club, a lifestyle brand devoted to asociability, tweeting that her baby farted on a slice a pizza; to the novelist Sheila Heti writing about accidentally flashing a child on the instructions of her sexually dominant boyfriend inToronto.

This style of self-expression, imploring the world to look while the hand dives into the bag of Doritos, or worse, offers a window into how the most characteristic artists of this generation see the problems of being alive, and the solutions they envision. Confronted with all-seeing social media, the empty promise of have-it-all feminism and the shallow yuppie dream, they pursue escape through an emancipatory humiliation. If that seems like a mad or self-defeating answer, well, consider the question: How to be intelligent, sensitive, and sane in the year2017?

The books Leaving the Atocha Station and I Love Dick have influenced competitiveabjectification.

The obvious way to dismiss the new abjectifiers is to say they are merely a mirror image of the sort of people who upload gym selfies and night-out glamour shots, or cap Instagram posts with the hashtag #blessed. This kind of straightforward vanity is still common enough, and ridiculous enough, to invite wholesale rejection by anyone with a sense of irony. But why the rejection should entail a kind of parroting, in which people too savvy to boast online humiliate themselves instead, isnt obvious. Self-flagellation is not, after all, so different from patting yourself on theback.

To this, a vast tradition of autobiography and autofiction answers: because the self is an irresistible subject. Artists have always put themselves on display, including their ugliness and shame. Think of Henry Miller, Jean Genet, or the George Orwell of Down and Out in Paris and London. At a glance, competitive abjection falls neatly into that line of compulsively confessional writers who take perverse pleasure in serving up what is most grotesque or offensive in themselves forinspection.

But something has changed in the way writers wallow. Compare Henry Miller, whose debauched rambles through 1930s Paris are chronicled in Tropic of Cancer, to his ersatz successor, Ben Lerner. Both are American novelists who have written about bumming around a European city and coping with the strange animal that is thebody.

But apart from that cursory description, Leaving the Atocha Station, Lerners first novel, has little in common with Millers Tropic books. For one, significant thing, Lerner has more money. Millers life in those books is properly bohemian, complete with lice and cold and venereal disease. In Leaving the Atocha Station, Lerner is spending a year in Madrid on a cushy fellowship modelled on the Fulbright, and only vaguely anxious about making ends meet. His abjection comes not from living rough but from overindulging in incongruous forms of pleasure, like when he eats white asparagus from the jar, masturbates, and then reads Spanish poetry on the roof of hisapartment.

In this sequence, there is a quality typical of the competitive abjection practised by writers of his generation: a sheen of class privilege. Most of todays abjectifiers are comfortably upper middle class, their failures and weakness undergirded by a deep confidence that things will turn out all right. That is not to say they have no grounds for complaint. First world problems are still experienced as problems. But it doesnt allow for an easy diagnosis of the pervasive malaise that Lerners generation seems to give off,either.

The most attractive explanation is that their attitude amounts to a rebellion against what the English anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer called the ethical duty to enjoy oneself. If that peppy American ethos was widespread enough for Gorer to notice in 1965, it has only become more so. Facebook has made sure of that. And, in the meantime, the duty to be happy feels like it has been debased, such that the most current vision of the good life compulsive exercise, foodieism, the curating of a living space that looks like a Wes Anderson set; all shared incessantly online has become so expensive, so onerous, and yet so shallow that the very idea of self-cultivation can seemrepellent.

The essayist Mark Greif addresses that problem in his recent collection, Against Everything. The books best pieces are self-help manuals for people who deplore the self-help culture: jeremiads against working out, foodieism, and makeover shows (the world of life maintenance, he calls it) that double as blueprints for how to live alternatively. By reaching back to Wilde, William James, and Epicurus, he offers a hope that our destiny could be something other thangrooming.

The abjectifiers join Greif in rejecting the impossible and brain-dead way of life set forth by the sort of people forever listening to life-hacking podcasts on their way to the gym. But they arent able to join him in seeing past an idea of the self that dwells on petty success or, in their case, petty failure. Hippies found the mainstream shallow, so went out and founded free-love colonies in Vermont and California. Punks had their squats and heroin addictions. Discontented Gen-Xers slacked off. Today, pater la bourgeoisie entails a regimen of self-cultivation and self-display almost as rigorous as the bourgeoissown.

Again, Greif has a suggestion for what might have changed. In a 2005 essay on the music of Radiohead, he posits a glass house of constant inspection erected around us by a world of broadcast images (and reflected in the paranoia of Thom Yorkes music). Uncannily, Greif was writing at a time before the smartphone: of course, our glass houses have only grown harder and clearer since then. Not incidentally, a sense of surveillance emerges often in the new literature of abjection. In an exchange on the tyranny of a life well lived, in Maisonneuve magazine, the writer Naomi Skwarna allows that the good life for me sometimes seems like being free of that need to be seen in the bestlight.

Lena Dunhams show Girls is typical of a style Eric Andrew Gee has come to think of as competitiveabjection.

HBO

Little wonder, given its relation to shame and performance and the body, that women should so predominate in using competitive abjection as a style. A crop of first-person TV comedies about women in their 20s and 30s have taken the style to a wider audience than anything else. They have used Sex and the City as a template, then stripped away its illusions to give a picture of life as an ostensibly liberated modern woman that consists largely of sexual awkwardness, practical incompetence, social anxiety, and bingeeating.

Youll notice it in Mindy Kalings The Mindy Project, Lena Dunhams Girls, or Broad City, by the comedians Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson. Picture Dunhams Hannah Horvath character feeding herself pad Thai out of the fridge, or half-heartedly playing a juvenile drug addict while her boyfriend masturbates over her body. Or the Abbi character in Broad City nervously hiding weed in her vagina to avoid detection by police on the subway. These moments, replicated a dozen times over with slight variations in each show, seem to revel in the depredations they depict. The cumulative effect is a kind of giddy lowering ofstandards.

Something like this seems to be what Sheila Heti has in mind at a crucial point in How Should A Person Be?, her celebrated autobiographical novel of 2010. About two-thirds of the way through her ethical quest, Heti decides that she has set her sights unrealistically high or at least toward the pinnacle of the wrong mountain. I dont need to be great like the leader of the Christian people, she writes. I can be a bumbling, murderous coward like the King of the Jews. The line crystallizes a running subtext in the book, which says in effect, if the game can only be won by using alien rules, and is rigged anyway, perhaps better not to play and better still to send up its objectives by performing them in mockingpastiche.

Its in this spirit that so many young writers today posit the solution to social anxiety not in solitude but in humiliation. In Out of Sheer Rage, his pseudo-memoir about trying and failing to write a book about D.H. Lawrence a pioneering text in this new canon Geoff Dyer dilates on the advantages of appearing ridiculous: Only those with dignity can ever lose it. Its along this axis of reasoning that so many of Dyers successors have built a connection between humiliation and liberation, often in virtually those exact words. Embarrassment is liberating, if you press into it, wrote Alexandra Molotkow, in a Globe and Mail essay on Kate Bush and her dance-like-no-ones-watching performance style. In Leaving the Atocha Station, Lerner calls his ritual ingestion of anti-anxiety medication a little humiliating, a littleliberating.

If freedom and humiliation seem oddly matched here, its worth considering what these people are trying to avoid being ashamed about. The list runs to mental illness, a preference for ones own company, eating unhealthy food, not feeling attractive a litany of failures to be smoothly bourgeois, or deftly feminine, or some combination of the two. Its not hard to imagine that embracing a humiliation so narrowly and badly defined might seem attractive, not to sayliberating.

No one has pursued this logical thread further or more daringly than Chris Kraus. Her first novel, I Love Dick, was published in 1997 but has recently been championed by a younger generation of prominent female artists like Dunham and Heti. Its an account of erotic obsession recorded in a series of letters written by Krauss character to the titular Dick, an English cultural theorist living near Los Angeles. The book is so much denser and more sophisticated than the quotidian tweet bemoaning the takeout-and-sweatpants routine that it almost seems an insult to compare the two. But merely on the level of attitude, there is a comparison to be made. Performative abjection abounds: Kraus tells us about defecating in the yard and brewing coffee out of boiled snow when the pipes freeze, and urinating in a Styrofoam cup on the way to adate.

What many feminist critics have found redeeming in these scenes is that Krauss abjection is inflicted not so much by a man, as by the idea of man she falls in love with Dick after just one meeting and thereafter invents a kind of persona for him that sustains her obsession. In a foreword to I Love Dick, the poet Eileen Myles praises Kraus for marching boldly into self-abasement and self-advertisement, not being uncannily drawn there, sighing or kicking and screaming. This bit of jiu-jitsu suggests a bleak possibility: that female abjection is inevitable, and that the only question is whos going to cause it, the woman herself or the patriarchal world atlarge.

Its hard to decide whether it would be more disturbing if Myles was right, or if a cohort of young women who dont really face her dilemma accepted its logic and pressed themselves into an abasement that need not be theirs. A few of those who imitate Kraus in blas Instagram posts about the dismalness of a third straight night ordering from UberEATS and watching The Bachelor suggest the second scenario may be truer, and that performing abjection has become something closer to a cool-kid reflex than a feminist survival tactic at thispoint.

And yet (here, Krauss voice seems to interject), isnt it just as likely that the ubiquity of this new mode of expression, especially as it emanates from a generation of young women, has something to teach us? Grating as it can be, doesnt it almost by definition reflect something important about the experience of being alive and sensitive in a world of constant digital disclosure and inspection? And anyway, isnt one of Krauss great revealed truths the low-level psychic violence inflicted on women when their stories are ignored or deemed trivial? Isnt that what gives I Love Dick its power, and its wide appeal? If answering yes to these questions has produced a generation of women who publicize the banal debasements of everyday life, isnt the source of that impulse worth takingseriously?

Chris Kraus replies, near the end of I Love Dick, with an exhortation of almost martial intensity: If wisdoms silence, its time to play thefool.

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Finding freedom in humiliation - The Globe and Mail

Yfat Yossifor , San Angelo Standard-Times 1:43 p.m. CT March 5, 2017

Tom Vaccarella, owner of S.A.F.E. K9 Transports, drives the truck with 58 dogs out of Lubbock en route to Washington. (Photo: Yfat Yossifor, San Angelo Standard-Times)Buy Photo

SAN ANGELO Tom Vaccarella pulled his truck into the Curry County Fairgrounds at about 6 p.m. It has been a long day of traveling, but the day is not over yet.

Vaccarella and his worker, Douglas Hardin, have special cargo in their truck 58 dogs that left Texas that morning en route to Washington.

Vaccarella is the owner of S.A.F.E. K9 Transports. His itinerary for Monday, Jan. 30, was to pick up the dogs for the second Freedom Ride of 2017; an effort to find homes for the dogs in other states.

I needed a job with meaning, something I could feel good about at the end of the day, he said.

Vaccarella was a diesel mechanic, and after 10 years on the job, he needed a change.

Ive always loved animals. I thought it would be good to help animals since they dont have a voice, they need us to help them, he said.

His day started at about 6 a.m. when he loaded up in his truck with freshly cleaned dog crates and headed out to his first stop.

At 10:30 a.m. he arrived at the Home Depot parking lot in San Angelo. Most of the dogs were waiting for him there with their foster parents from various rescue groups in the area.

At a stop along the drive, Vaccarella and Hardin checked on the dogs. They made sure the dogs were clean and healthy.

One of the dogs had gotten carsick. Vaccarella cleaned up the crate while gently talking to the dog.

Its going to be OK, youre going home, he told the dog.

He gave the dog a treat stuffed with medicine, and made sure to check of him frequently for the rest of the ride.

He made two more stops, one in Abilene, and another near Lubbock, to pick up the remaining dogs.

He has lived for 10 months in the shelter. We have taken him to every event, we fostered and have done all these things to try to get him adopted, said Donna Austin, president of Paws Pet Adoption in Plainview.

Plainview is such a hard place to adopt dogs out, so we have to ship him out, and I know he will get a home, she said. I know he will be happy, and that all that matters.

With his truck full, Vaccarellaheaded back on the highway toward Clovis, New Mexico.

The stop at the fairgrounds was to feed and walk the dogs before bedtime.

It takes a while but its all for their best interest. The dogs are happy and comfortable in there, Vaccarella said.

The truck is climate controlled,with a temperature gauge in the cab for Vaccarella to check while driving. At night, he sleeps in living quarters on the truck, so he is never far from the animals.

All the dogs ate before each dog had a chance to walk around the grassy area. Its a chance to stretch their legs, do their business and get one-on-one attention from the humans.

While Hardin walked a dog, Vaccarella sanitized the crate and replaced the pad on the bottom. When that dog was back in the crate, the duo moved on to the next dog.

Four hours later, the dogs were all settled back in their crates and Tom drove over to the nearest truck stop for the night.

The restaurant at the stop was already closed for the night. Without having dinner, Vaccarella and Hardin checked on the dogs one last time before all the occupants settled down for the night.

At 7 a.m. Vaccarella was already armed with coffee and a quick breakfast. He drove back over to the fairgrounds to use the grassy area for the dogs again.

He stood in the field with a fawn colored dog standing up its hind legs, hugging him. Vaccarella patted and scratched behind his ears.

You make each dog as happy as possible and treat them like they are your own, he said. At drop off, Ive had workers that tell me they want to take out a particular dog, say goodbye. Thats when you know you made a difference.

Like this guy, he just wants love and up there hopefully he will find it, Vaccarella said with his voice hitched with emotions.

Again, each dog was fed, walked and watered. The crates cleaned and the pads replaced.

58 dogs walks later, the truck pulled away and onto the highway to repeat the long day again.

To donate to Project Freedom Ride visit their fundraising page atwww.youcaring.com/projectfreedomride-763368

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Freedom Ride: Working to save canine lives - San Angelo Standard Times

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Supporters of President Donald Trump gathered at Macomb County's Freedom Hill Saturday, as well as scores of other places around the country in marches to show their pride in his presidency.

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Detroit Free Press staff Published 1:20 p.m. ET March 4, 2017 | Updated 57 minutes ago

March4Trump rally held at Freedom Hill in Sterling Heights.

March4Trump participants rally at Macomb County's Freedom Hill.(Photo: Jim Schaefer, DFP)Buy Photo

Supporters of President Donald Trump gathered at Macomb County's Freedom Hill Saturday, as well as scores of other places around the country in marches to show their pride in his presidency.

Saturday's "March 4 Trump" demonstrations are also intended to show unity in the face of what organizers call "a seditious fringe" aiming to sabotage his vision for the country.

During the rally at Freedom Hill in Sterling Heights, a group of anti-Trump supporters got into a yelling match with the pro-Trump group. A small physical scuffle was also reported and police were able to break things up quickly.

A 'March 4 Trump' rally also brought out several hundred supporters, waving pro-Trump signs at the state Capitol in Lansing.

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Trump supporters have held rallies in recent weeks to counter demonstrations against him, including women's marches the day after his inauguration and protests over his since-blocked executive order halting acceptance of refugees and temporarily barring citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries from traveling to the U.S.

There were pro-Trump demonstrations in Monday in cities ranging from Denver to Atlanta. Trump himself also held a campaign rally in Florida Feb. 18.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Supporters gather at Freedom Hill for 'March4Trump' rally - Detroit Free Press