Tag: Recast

Bad Bunny: The Recast Power List

[ad_1]

Earlier this year, Bad Bunny wowed a Grammy audience of millions when he opened the show with a vibrant, turbo-charged performance entirely in Spanish, paying tribute to his native Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic — both of which have seen more than their fair share of natural disaster-induced tragedies.
Later that night, the singer and rapper, whose given name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, won the Grammy for Best Música Urbana Album for the Spanish-language album “Un Verano Sin Ti.”
The album, which was also nominated in the Big Four category of Album of the Year, featured the song “El Apagón,” in which he protests the injustice committed against Puerto Ricans who have suffered through frequent power blackouts, sometimes with deadly consequences.
Bad Bunny has taken to the stage to criticize LUMA Energy, the private company that manages the territory’s power system, for the repeated grid failures — as well as the public officials who awarded their contract. And the music in the nearly 23-minute video for “El Apagón” stops at the 53-second mark to highlight news footage of an explosion that caused a massive blackout across Puerto Rico. Later, at the 4:35 mark, Bad Bunny stops the music once again to highlight a documentary about gentrification in the territory, including interviews with displaced Puerto Ricans.
The singer and rapper, who somehow managed to carve out time from his busy schedule for a small, but hilarious role in the 2022 film “Bullet Train,” is also an outspoken supporter of LGBTQ rights, drawing attention to crimes committed against members of the community, including Alexa Negrón Luciano, a trans woman murdered in Toa Baja, Puerto Rico.
[ad_2]
#Bad #Bunny #Recast #Power #List
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

March 31, 2023
Ketanji Brown Jackson: The Recast Power List

[ad_1]

When Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer announced he was stepping down, the pressure was on for President Joe Biden to nominate the first Black woman to the highest court in the U.S.
But Ketanji Brown Jackson broke the mold of Supreme Court jurist in more ways than one: When she was confirmed by the Senate in April 2022, she also became the first public defender to ascend to the court in a generation.
She joined the court’s all-female liberal wing, who are outnumbered in the court’s 6-3 conservative majority. But she immediately garnered attention for her surgically precise questioning of conservative lawyers. In the first eight arguments the court heard, Jackson spoke 11,003 words, more than double that of Elena Kagan or Sonia Sotomayor, according to the Empirical SCOTUS blog.
For the left, Jackson became a symbol of cautious hope at a time when trust in the Supreme Court is at historically low levels, especially among Democrats. Most memorably, she drew praise from court observers for citing the congressional record to Alabama Solicitor General Edmund LaCour Jr., who urged the court in Merrill v. Milligan to adopt a race-blind reading of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
She made her views abundantly clear — unusually so on a court where justices typically reserve their speechifying for their written opinions.
“I don’t think we can assume that just because race is taken into account that that necessarily creates an equal protection problem,” Jackson said at the time.
“The framers themselves adopted the equal protection clause, the 14th Amendment, the 15th Amendment, in a race-conscious way,” she said, adding that the “entire point” of the 14th Amendment was “to secure rights of the freed former slaves.”
She reprised the role of avid questioner in cases dealing with affirmative action in education, LGBTQ civil rights vs. business owners’ rights, and student debt relief — all cases where the law would have a deep impact on Americans’ daily lives.

[ad_2]
#Ketanji #Brown #Jackson #Recast #Power #List
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

March 31, 2023
Ron DeSantis: The Recast Power List

[ad_1]

Ron DeSantis, for Florida's culture wars

[ad_2]
#Ron #DeSantis #Recast #Power #List
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

March 31, 2023
Karen Bass: The Recast Power List

[ad_1]

Few jobs in government are as unforgiving as being mayor of Los Angeles. Leading America’s second-largest city is a gig that has for decades derailed promising political careers. An ever-growing, seemingly intractable homelessness crisis has only made the job more difficult.
But don’t tell that to Karen Bass.
The longtime congresswoman and vice presidential finalist took what many political observers classify as an unusual step: She left a safe seat to lead a city in turmoil. Los Angeles’ homeless population has ballooned to nearly 42,000 people, a population larger than many California cities. Of the 230,000 unsheltered homeless people across the U.S., 1 in 5 is in Los Angeles County — and most live in the city of Los Angeles.
Rather than scare Bass off, these issues pushed her back to the city where she got her start as an activist and community organizer more than three decades ago. Her main motivation: anger over the city’s inability to tackle homelessness.
“If we had addressed it and taken care of it, I wouldn’t be running for mayor,” she said in an interview during the campaign. “I’d be running for reelection to the House.”
Bass didn’t waste any time in her new gig, launching an outreach program that has placed around 1,000 previously unsheltered people in temporary housing, and declaring a state of emergency that gives her office more decision-making authority that would typically be shared with an often fractious city council.
She’ll face her first big test this year, as the county’s Covid-era moratorium on evictions is set to expire, putting thousands more at risk of losing their homes.
[ad_2]
#Karen #Bass #Recast #Power #List
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

March 31, 2023
Bennie Thompson & Liz Cheney: The Recast Power List

[ad_1]

Bennie Thompson, son of the segregated south and staunch liberal ally of Nancy Pelosi, and Liz Cheney, scion of a conservative political dynasty, would make unlikely partners in any context.
But the pair teamed up to helm one of the most influential congressional investigations in history: Diving headfirst into Donald Trump’s effort to subvert the transfer of power after losing the 2020 election. And they did it by embracing bipartisanship, calling out white supremacy among the insurrectionists and highlighting the bravery of the women who came forward to testify at the hearings.
Thompson, as chair of the committee, had the monumental task of casting the Jan. 6 attacks as an attempt at sedition — leaning on his own background as a Black Mississippian and drawing connections during the hearings between Trump’s “Stop the Steal” campaign and the “Lost Cause” effort to mythologize the Confederacy.
Cheney, besides cloaking the committee in some legitimacy as a high-profile Republican, was a central player in a group of women — including Sarah Matthews and Alyssa Farah Griffin — who convinced Mark Meadows aide Cassidy Hutchinson to testify in front of the cameras.
For 18 months, Thompson and Cheney used their complementary strengths, leaning into their own lived experiences to piece together a damning narrative about Trump and his allies’ continued efforts to overturn and plant doubt in the electoral process.
“I’m convinced that our hearings reinforced the greatness of our country, that we settle our differences at the ballot box,” Thompson said.
[ad_2]
#Bennie #Thompson #Liz #Cheney #Recast #Power #List
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

March 31, 2023
Elon Musk: The Recast Power List

[ad_1]

For Elon Musk, buying Twitter in October for $44 billion was part of a grand plan for creating a “super app” — called an “X-App” — modeled after China’s WeChat.
But Musk, a self-proclaimed free speech absolutist, also had another goal in mind: his investment, he tweeted, was “important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated.”
Since then, Musk has emerged as a central figure in America’s culture wars.
As head of Twitter, he fired chief executive Parag Agrawal, as well as the board, appointing himself as sole director. As a result, some critics say, he’s removed some safeguards implemented by the previous regime to mitigate hate speech and the spread of misinformation, which disproportionately target marginalized communities.
Hate speech toward Black Americans spiked 500 percent within the first 12 hours of Musk’s Twitter coup and has sustained a 200 percent increase over the last several months. Another study found that derogatory tweets and retweets that mention the LGBTQ+ community and “grooming” skyrocketed 119 percent since Musk’s acquisition, according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate. In yet another report, the rate of antisemitic tweets increased by 105 percent when comparing the four-month time periods before and after Musk’s purchase.
Politically, Musk has aligned himself with conservatives, reinstating formerly suspended users such as former President Donald Trump and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.). Musk has also signaled his support of the expected White House run of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, while relishing in trolling Democrats.
His Twitter takeover has firmly cemented him at the center of American politics at a time when the app continues to be the dominant platform used by lawmakers — on both sides of the aisle.

[ad_2]
#Elon #Musk #Recast #Power #List
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

March 31, 2023