Jack Mirkinson
32.9K posts
@jackmirkinson
Editor @thenation / @discourse_blog Bluesky: https://t.co/0wYidsHwMI Email: jmirkinson @ thenation dot com / jack @ discourseblog dot com
The Hill: Senator John Fetterman (D-PA) threatens to leave the Democratic Party if it turns its back on Israel “If our party ever becomes — and just makes it official — the anti-Israel party, that’s when I would leave because that’s been a moral clarity for me,” Fetterman said during an interview at the Hill Nation Summit in Washington. Link to article: thehill.com/homenews/senat…
Like anyone who’s spent any time around politics, I have many Lindsey Graham stories. This is perhaps my favorite… I was covering Congress (Best! Beat! Ever!) for the NYT when the Mother Emanuel shooting happened in Charleston. It was summer, but I was wearing pants and a sweater that day because it was always SO freezing in the Capitol. Anyhow, news of the shooting came down, and the DC Bureau chief called me with an order: Get yourself to Charleston ASAP and glue yourself to Graham’s side. She wanted a piece on the senator grappling with the unimaginable. So I headed straight to the airport, arriving in Charleston with just my backpack and what I’d be wearing to work that day, and linked up with Graham. He had me meet him at a restaurant, where I told him I needed to shadow him for the next 48 hours. And he looked at me, with amused distaste, and said: “You are sticky. And you are icky. If you want to shadow me, go buy some nice new clothes—maybe a dress—and take a shower, and then we’ll talk.” (He was not wrong; I was sweaty and gross). So I drove to a local big box store, bought a dress (he seemed to have a strong preference for a dress), and spent the next few days with him, resulting in this piece (which, for reasons not worth getting into, ended up being fairly different than the original assignment): nytimes.com/2015/06/20/us/…
“Nothing comes close to what the place actually is, how horrible the place actually is.” Read what Palestinian former political prisoner Leqaa Kordia has to say about the year she spent in ICE jail. bit.ly/4vRdNLU
