Leid Stories – Election 2016: It’s Judgment Day, Kinda – 06.07.16

It’s a big day in presidential primaries—with contests in California, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Dakota and South Dakota that will further enshrine Donald Trump as the Republican nominee and help Hillary Clinton finally to put Bernie Sanders out of her field of dreams. By the end of the day, the delegate count will “predict” the outcome of the parties’ nomination conventions next month (July 18-21 in Cleveland for the Republicans, and July 25-28 in Philadelphia for the Democrats).

Trump’s 1239 delegates (1,237 needed for nomination) and stunning, though controversial, victories that edged out 16 other candidates in primary contests have all but secured his position as standard bearer in the general election. But Clinton hasn’t been able to shake a persistent Sanders, despite delegate/superdelegate support (1,812/571, respectively) that yesterday brought her to the 2,383 threshold and the advantages of political longevity, big-money donors and a well-oiled campaign machine.

Leid Stories looks at where the 2016 political season stands right now and why, with today’s roster of primaries, it’s Judgment Day, kinda.

Leid Stories – Lessons Learned from Detroit, Flint and the Indiana Primaries – 05.04.16

And on the third day, there’s school. The Detroit Federation of Teachers has ended a two-day sickout that shut down 94 of its 97 public schools on Monday and Tuesday. Teachers were told over the weekend that the state’s largest school district would run out of money by June 30 and their salaries for summer school and thereafter could not be guaranteed.

Meanwhile, President Obama today visits Flint, Mich. He’ll get “briefings” there on the city’s water-contamination crisis—two years after it came to light. And in Indiana, the presidential primaries delivered many surprises. Leid Stories discusses the lessons to be learned from all three events.

Mike Feder – Heil To The Chief!

I can’t say or write anything about Donald Trump that isn’t being said or written everywhere—and, for the most part, by people who are more articulate and informed than I am. But still, since there isn’t anything I can do about him and his followers I feel a need to say or write something—if only to join with other, like-minded souls who are experiencing the same sense of dread and despondency about what’s happening now and what might happen in the future. And I want to write something so I can tell myself, no matter what happens later on, that I didn’t just shake my head, wring my hands and watch this final “reality” show in passive silence.

Trump does not seem real to me. That feeling could derive from the fact I don’t want him or his political “movement” to be real; the consequences are too terrifying to imagine (Germany in the late 1920’s and early ‘30s). Or this feeling could be because there is about him a quality of inhuman-ness—as if he were a machine that operates without the basic spark of animation; something with the form of a human but without an actual mind, heart or soul.
When I listen to him speak I don’t feel the existence of any meaningful process of thought or depth of feeling behind his absurd pronouncements and daily contradictions. His words, even the puerile hostility and sarcasm, his main form of expression, seem to be uttered randomly, without any psychological context or an awareness of cause and effect; like a robot that has experienced a breakdown in its original programming.
He even looks made-up (and I don’t mean all the actual make-up), I mean that he appears to be the creation of some alien life-forms that were working without any original concept or diagrams of what a human actually looks like.

Leid Stories – 02.29.16

Hillary’s Triumph in South Carolina An Object Lesson in Political Slavery

In a series of programs leading up to the presidential primaries in South Carolina, Leid Stories has been explaining the pivotal role the South would play in the political fortunes of presidential candidates. The Feb. 27 Democratic primary in the former Confederate state delivered a stunning victory for Hillary Clinton—the result, says Leid Stories, of political slavery.