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Bill Perkins, who for 24 years as a legislator from Harlem championed his community by, among other things, challenging Donald J. Trumps aggressive demand for the death penalty when five teenagers, who were later exonerated, were arrested in connection with a rape in Central Park in 1989 died on Tuesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 74.

His death was announced by his wife, Pamela Green Perkins. She did not give a cause, but Mr. Perkins had undergone treatment for colon cancer and, according to Richard Fife, a family spokesman, had developed dementia.

Raised with his brothers and a cousin by a single mother, Mr. Perkins was a relentless advocate in the New York City Council and the New York State Senate for raising the minimum wage, protecting children from being poisoned by lead paint in their apartments, instituting health screening programs in municipal hospitals, and protecting the rights of gay, lesbian and transgender people.

In 1989, when five Black and Hispanic teenagers were charged with the rape of a white jogger in Central Park, Mr. Perkins was among the first Black civic leaders to publicly raise questions about the evidence and to suggest that there had been a rush to judgment. At the time he was president of the tenants association of Schomburg Plaza, the Manhattan apartment complex where several of the defendants lived.

Few other public officials or civic leaders, white or Black, questioned the police investigation at the time, particularly since the defendants had confessed.

Mr. Perkins also took on Mr. Trump, then a wealthy real estate developer, who took out full-page advertisements in city newspapers after the attack calling for New York State to adopt the death penalty for murder cases. Mr. Trump did not explicitly call for the death penalty for the five defendants, but he made clear that he was referring to that case.

This was taking a moment, a very unfortunate and one might say racially tense moment in our city, and fueling a lynch mob, Mr. Perkins said when Mr. Trump was running for president in 2016.

The defendants, who became known as the Central Park Five, were convicted and imprisoned. But they were exonerated in 2002 after another man confessed to the crime.

In our darkest hours, when it seemed like the whole world was against us, Bill Perkins bravely stood behind and with us, one of the defendants, Yusef Salaam, said in a statement after Mr. Perkinss death. His bravery and commitment to justice were unwavering, and he is a big reason we were eventually exonerated.

William Morris Perkins was born on April 18, 1949, in the Bronx to Helen Perkins. He said he never knew his father.

Inspired by his mothers faith in education, he won scholarships to the Collegiate School in Manhattan and Brown University in Providence, R.I., where he graduated with a bachelors degree in 1972.

He was a community organizer, a social worker and a tenant leader before running for the City Council. He served there from 1997 to 2006 and again from 2017 to 2021, ultimately rising to deputy majority leader. From 2007 to 2017 he was a state senator, representing Harlem, the Upper West Side and Washington Heights.

Among his major accomplishments was sponsorship of the Childhood Lead Paint Poisoning Prevention Act of 2004, which required landlords to ameliorate hazardous paint conditions in their properties.

The Daily News columnist Juan Gonzalez wrote of Mr. Perkins, who was a marathoner, It took the stamina of a long-distance runner to prevail against the citys powerful landlord lobby, which has resisted stronger lead paint removal laws for decades.

Andrea Stewart-Cousins, the State Senate majority leader, said in a statement after Mr. Perkinss death that he never waited for the right thing to become popular before taking action.

He had no qualms about challenging Khalid Abdul Muhammad, a Nation of Islam minister known for his anti-white diatribes. And in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary campaign, when Senator Hillary Clinton of New York was running, he was among the first Black elected officials to endorse Barack Obama.

In 2021, when he was already ailing, he lost a primary to retain his Council seat.

In addition to his wife, Mr. Perkins is survived by his children, Kiva Perkins-Watts, Medjha White, William Perkins, Margaret Perkins, Maximilian Perkins and Rebecca Marimutu; his brothers, Gerry, Richard and Michael; and four grandchildren.

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Bill Perkins, Defender of His Harlem Constituents, Dies at 74 - The New York Times

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By Selim Algar and Josh Christenson

May 19, 2023 | 5:19pm

Critics bashed an online profile Friday of the wife of expected presidential contender and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, calling the piece misogynistic and vicious.

The Politico article, The Casey DeSantis Problem: His Greatest Asset and His Greatest Liability, quoted anonymous former DeSantis staffers, alleged insiders and Democratic strategists who accused the first lady of Florida of being blindly ambitious in an effort to help her husband become the next US president.

Gov. DeSantis is expected to announce his bid for the presidency next week.

The story labeled the 42-year-old former Jacksonville TV anchor, breast-cancer survivor and mom of three paranoid and vindictive while quoting a male DeSantis supporter who said she needed to take a more traditional role and a Trump operative who called her similar to Lady MacBeth.

If youre a Democrat and a woman, youre fierce or an unapologetic or whatever, a senior DeSantis adviser raged to The Post. If youre a Republican or a conservative, you turn into a cartoon villainess.

The double standard is shameful. And the people who do this are always the most outspoken feminists on Twitter.

The Politico piece cited a months-old quote from longtime Trump loyalist Roger Stone on his Telegram account that read, Have you ever noticed how much Ron DeSantis wife Casey is like Lady Macbeth?

Nate Hochman, a speechwriter for DeSantis, responded while referring to a Politico article last year that covered how gender roles can still be weaponized in political attacks against women such as former Secretary of State and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, first lady Jill Biden and Gisele Fetterman, the wife of Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.).

Politico, November 2022: Comparing women in politics to Lady Macbeth is a sexist trope, Hochman tweeted.

New York Times opinion columnist Ross Douthat referred to the Friday articles inclusion of a quote from ex-Republican strategist Rick Wilson, who said, Never cross Casey.

The fascinating arc of history in which the founder of a NeverTrump organization is touting a piece about Casey DeSantis organized around a Lady MacBeth analogy thats based on a quote from, um, Roger Stone, Douthat wrote.

A disgusted Twitter user added, I just started seeing these attacks on Mrs. Desantis, and WOW.

These people have no shame from behind their keyboards, sad sad time we live in.. you dont have to like or support her husband, but you also should be a decent human being!

DeSantis staffers disputed all the characterizations in the article.

When activist media like @politico et al have no real access but want to push their narrative anyways about @GovRonDeSantis or @CaseyDeSantis, they quote liberal activists and pretend theyre insiders, the governors press secretary, Bryan Griffin, seethed on Twitter.

Christina Pushaw, a former press secretary for Ron DeSantis, responded in support of Griffin,Fact check: TRUE.

Casey DeSantis recently accompanied her husband on a four-leg world tour, with visits to Japan, South Korea, Israel and the UK to tout Floridas economic strength.

The couple met in 2006 while the Florida governor, a Harvard Law School grad, was stationed as a Navy officer in Jacksonville and were married three years later at Disney World.

On Friday, he traveled to New Hampshire to talk about his record as the twice-elected governor of the Sunshine State ahead of his anticipated campaign launch next week.

He was photographed at a roundtable in Bedford, NH, kissing babies and slamming diversity, equity and inclusion consultants for raking in cash while hectoring people about how capitalism is racist.

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Critics rip scathing Politico profile of 'Lady Macbeth' Casey DeSantis as sexist, shameful - New York Post

Updated May 19, 2023, 03:40pm EDT

The FBI misused a digital foreign surveillance tool nearly 300,000 times on U.S. citizens, including January 6 insurrection suspects and protestors in the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, according to a heavily-redacted court report obtained by multiple outlets Friday, as the FBI comes under increased pressure over its policies.

The report, from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, found a series of abuses of the FBIs querying procedures between 2020 and 2021 that were persistent and widespread, and could require potential changes to the number of FBI personnel with access to a database intended to gather foreign intelligence called Section 702.

According to the report, the FBI failed to present a foreign intelligence purpose to use the database and instead used it to collect information on U.S. citizens, potentially shooting itself in the foot as the Biden Administration hopes to renew the federal act that created Section 702, which is set to lapse at the end of the year.

Among the findings in the report is a list of 133 identifiers of people used in searches in connection with civil unrest and protests during a three-week period in June 2020, the same time as the Black Lives Matter protests against racial injustice following the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.

The FBI also searched in more than 23,000 queries on people believed to be involved in the January 6 Capitol riot, as well as a batch of queries into more than 19,000 donors to a congressional campaign, according to the report.

The FBI introduced corrective measures to resolve the issue in the summer of 2021, causing the use of the database to drop dramatically, according to a report released in March and obtained by the New York Times.

278,000. Thats how many times the FBI used Section 702 between 2020 and early 2021, according to the report.

The report comes as the FBI wrangles with increased scrutiny from the right, following the release of a report this week from Special Counsel John Durham, which found the FBI should not have launched its investigation into allegations then-candidate Donald Trump had sought information from Russia on his opponent Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential election. In January, House Republicans launched a new committeecalled the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Governmentand tasked its members with investigating the FBI and the Department of Justice, which launched probes into former President Donald Trump and his role in the January 6 riot as well as his alleged mishandling of classified White House documents discovered at his Mar-A-Lago resort during an FBI raid. Trump has repeatedly dubbed the investigations a witch hunt, a criticism echoed by his allies in Congress who argue Trump has been unfairly attacked during and after his time in the Oval Office.

Special Counsel John Durham: FBI Should Not Have Launched Trump-Russia Probe (Forbes)

I am a Boston-based reporter. Before joining Forbes, I covered the environment, local government and the arts for a small-town newspaper on Nantucket. My previous work includes NPR, WBUR, WCAI and Nantucket Today. I am a graduate of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, with a degree in political science. Email me at bbushard@forbes.com

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FBI Misused Foreign Spy Database To Target Jan. 6 Suspects And BLM Protesters - Forbes

The bipartisan political group No Labels is stepping up a well-funded effort to field a unity ticket for the 2024 presidential race, prompting fierce resistance from even some of its closest allies who fear handing the White House back to Donald J. Trump.

At the top of the list of potential candidates is Senator Joe Manchin III, the conservative West Virginia Democrat who has been a headache to his party and could bleed support from President Biden in areas crucial to his re-election.

The centrist groups leadership was in New York this week raising part of the money around $70 million that it says it needs to help with nationwide ballot access efforts.

The determination to nominate a ticket will be made shortly after the primaries next year on what is known as Super Tuesday, March 5, said Nancy Jacobson, the co-founder and leader of No Labels. A national convention has been set for April 14-15 in Dallas, where a Democrat-Republican ticket would be set to take on the two major-party nominees. (Mr. Biden is facing two long-shot challengers, and Mr. Trump is the Republican front-runner.)

Other potential No Labels candidates being floated include Senator Kyrsten Sinema, an Arizona independent, and former Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland, a Republican, who has said he would not run for the G.O.P. nomination and is the national co-chairman of the group. But Mr. Manchin has received most notice recently after speaking on a conference call last month with donors.

Were not looking to pick the ticket right now, former Representative Fred Upton, a Michigan Republican and longtime associate of the group, cautioned in an interview on Wednesday as he prepared to meet with donors and leaders in New York. Our focus is getting on the ballot.

The drive has already secured ballot spots in Alaska, Arizona, Colorado and Oregon and is now targeting Florida, Nevada and North Carolina. But gaining ballot access nationwide is a challenging and expensive effort, and the group still has a long way to go.

Ms. Jacobson called the project an insurance policy in the event both major parties put forth presidential candidates the vast majority of Americans dont support.

Were well aware any independent ticket faces a steep climb and if our rigorously gathered data and polling suggests an independent unity ticket cant win, we will not nominate a ticket, she said.

Caveats aside, the effort is causing deep tensions with the groups ideological allies, congressional partners and Democratic Party officials who are scrambling to stop it. Third-party candidates siphoned enough votes to arguably cost Democrats elections in 2000 (Al Gore) and 2016 (Hillary Clinton). Republicans say the same thing about Ross Perots role in blocking George H.W. Bushs re-election in 1992.

If No Labels runs a Joe Manchin against Donald Trump and Joe Biden, I think it will be a historic disaster, said Representative Dean Phillips, a Minnesota Democrat and, until now, a strong supporter of the organization. And I speak for just about every moderate Democrat and frankly most of my moderate Republican friends.

People close to Mr. Manchin have their doubts he would join a No Labels ticket. He must decide by January whether to run for re-election in his firmly Republican state. But he does see an avenue to return to the Senate.

The states popular Democrat-turned-Republican governor, Jim Justice, is running for the Republican nomination to challenge Mr. Manchin, but so is West Virginias most Trump-aligned House member, Alex Mooney, who has the backing of the deep-pocketed political action committee Club for Growth.

If Mr. Mooney can knock out Mr. Justice, or damage him badly by bringing up the governors centrist record and days as a Democrat, Mr. Manchin sees a path to re-election, and no real prospect of actually winning the presidency on the No Labels ticket.

But he is keeping his options open, at least as he raises money under the No Labels auspices.

Lets try to make people come back together for the sake of the country, not just for the sake of the party, Mr. Manchin told the groups donors on a recent conference call leaked to the news site Puck this month.

Opponents are mobilizing to stop No Labels. Maines secretary of state, Shenna Bellows, sent a cease-and-desist letter this month to the groups director of ballot access, accusing the organization of misrepresenting its intentions as it presses for signatures to get on the states presidential ballot.

The Arizona Democratic Party sued this spring to get No Labels off the states ballot, accusing it of engaging in a shadowy strategy to gain ballot access when in reality they are not a political party.

One of No Labels founders, William Galston, a former policy aide to President Bill Clinton, publicly resigned from his own organization over the push. In an interview, he pointed to polling saying that voters who dislike both Mr. Trump and President Biden double haters say overwhelmingly they would vote for Mr. Biden in the end. Given an alternative, that might not be the case.

And Democratic members of the Problem Solvers Caucus, a centrist coalition aligned with No Labels that actually does No Labels legislative work, are in open revolt.

I can think of nothing worse than another Trump presidency and no better way of helping him than running a third-party candidate, said Representative Brad Schneider, Democrat of Illinois.

No Labels has long had its detractors, variously accused of ineffectuality, fronting for Republicans and existing mainly to raise large amounts of money from wealthy corporate donors, many of whom give primarily to Republicans.

But the grumbling criticism took on a more urgent tone when Puck posted a partial transcript of a leaked conference call that No Labels held with its funders. On it, Ryan Clancy, the groups chief strategist, said ballot organizers were at 600,000 signatures and counting, and nearing slots on the ballot in roughly 20 states, with their eyes on all 50.

Mr. Manchin joined the call as the closer: The hope is to keep the country that we have, and you cannot do that by forcing the extreme sides on both parties, he said.

Mr. Manchins political appeal beyond West Virginia is questionable. The loudest discontent among Democrats with Mr. Biden has come from young voters, many of whom are animated by the issue of climate change, and they are not aligned with the coal-state Democrat on that.

Mr. Manchin is not a climate denier in the traditional sense. He has repeatedly referred to the climate crisis caused by human activities.

Yet Mr. Manchin, whose state produces some of the highest levels of coal and natural gas nationally and who has earned millions from his familys coal business, has long fought policies that would punish companies for not shifting more quickly to clean energy and has accused Mr. Biden of promoting a radical climate agenda.

But Democrats worry. The southwestern suburbs of Pittsburgh abut West Virginia, and it would not take many Democrats bolting to Mr. Manchin to hand Pennsylvania to Mr. Trump, they warn.

Ms. Jacobson, on the leaked conference call, said No Labels had been Pearl Harbored by a March memo from the Democratic centrist group Third Way. The memo was bluntly titled: A Plan That Will Re-elect Trump.

It wasnt exactly a sneak attack, Third Ways longtime leader, Matt Bennett, countered in an interview. We are enormously alarmed.

Lisa Friedman contributed reporting from Washington.

Originally posted here:
No Labels Eyes a Third-Party Run Against Biden and Trump. Is Joe ... - The New York Times

When I saw a WIRED piece on my Twitter feed this week emblazoned with the title Pete Buttigieg Loves God, Beer, and His Electric Mustang, I assumed that only one of two things could possibly be happening. Either this was a piece of vintage Butti-ganda from circa 2019 that was remaking the rounds, or I had inadvertently bitten into an accursed Proustian madeleine and been swept back in time. But the interview/adulatory write-up on Americas secretary of transportation is indeed, somehow, from the Year of Our Lord 2023.

To call it hagiographic would be something of an undersell. The piece incidentally penned by someone who in 2016 described Hillary Clinton as an idea, a world-historical heroine, light itself opens with two stanzas that similarly make the former mayor of Indianas fourth-largest city sound like a fusion of Jesus Christ and Aristotle:

The curious mind of Pete Buttigieg holds much of its functionality in reserve. Even as he discusses railroads and airlines, down to the pointillist data that is his current stock-in-trade, the US secretary of transportation comes off like a Mensa black card holder who might have a secret Go habit or a three-second Rubiks Cube solution or a knack for supplying, off the top of his head, the day of the week for a random date in 1404, along with a non-condescending history of the Julian and Gregorian calendars.

As Secretary Buttigieg and I talked in his underfurnished corner office one afternoon in early spring, I slowly became aware that his cabinet job requires only a modest portion of his cognitive powers. Other mental facilities, no kidding, are apportioned to the Iliad, Puritan historiography, and Knausgaards Spring though not in the original Norwegian (slacker). Fortunately, he was willing to devote yet another apse in his cathedral mind to making his ideas about three mighty themes neoliberalism, masculinity, and Christianity intelligible to me.

Following the absurd suggestion that the likes of Buttigieg and President Joe Biden may represent a nascent renaissance of the religious left (Buttigieg is an Episcopalian and Biden is a Catholic) we get to the interview itself. To give Buttigieg his due, he is better at sounding profound than your average liberal politician. Like Barack Obama, still the undisputed virtuoso of the shtick, he has a knack for communicating bland centrist orthodoxies with a superficial sheen of depth. He is capable of speaking about politics at some level of abstraction. He makes references to history. He refers to concepts like modernity and occasionally borrows words from other languages.

Throughout the conversation, most of what Buttigieg actually says is pretty conventional. He has the views and opinions on current events that one would reasonably expect an educated person of his background and class location to hold: liberal democratic capitalism is good; the utopian possibilities of 1990s globalization have failed to realize themselves; the invasion of Ukraine has been disruptive to the world order; traditional conceptions of masculinity are retrograde and conservative. The relevant issue here isnt whether you agree or disagree, because the substance of the views themselves is almost beside the point. What matters is that Buttigieg exudes the right aura of sophistication and wonkish intelligence.

His act fares a bit less well in the second half of the interview, which is mostly taken up by a discussion of the role of faith in public policy. A few of the exchanges like this one, in which Buttigieg swings dizzyingly from a reference to Paul the Apostle to a slogan you might associate with a sleazy evangelical salesman trying to hawk a used car almost defy belief:

Q: Running [the Department of Transportation] seems to suit you. Are there more ways the challenges of transportation speak to your spiritual side?

A: Theres just a lot in the scriptural tradition around journeys, around roads, right? The conversion of Saint Paul happens on the road. I think we are all nearer to our spiritual potential when were on the move.

The closest we actually get to a description of how Christian faith informs Buttigiegs political decision-making comes in the form of cookie-cutter compassion: When youre making public policy, youre often asking yourself, How does this choice help people who would have the least going for them? So thats part of it.

Its unclear how the likes of stranded passengers forced to pay larcenous fares by under-regulated corporate airlines or underpaid railworkers being forced back to their jobs without sick pay fits into this pristine moral equation, but it ultimately doesnt matter. When politics are reduced to pure fan culture, the affectations of intelligence or compassion take on a greater salience than their application in the real world. Politics become something you have rather than something you do. And over the past decade or so, Buttigieg has had as many different political identities as he has fawning profiles referencing his tastes in literature and his socks.

Hes been both a declared champion of quality public services and a corporate consultant pushing for their privatization. Hes unequivocally backed universal health care but also been its fierce opponent. Hes liberalisms golden boy du jour but courted the Tea Party during his first run for elected office in 2010. A profile or interview that was even remotely interested in interrogating Buttigieg beyond the level of gesture and affect might have thought to probe these shifts at least a little bit.

But again, doing so would ultimately be beside the point. The political and media culture that produces and celebrates figures like Pete Buttigieg isnt remotely concerned with ideological consistency. Its devotees are not looking for champions of a particular program, legislative agenda, or belief system, but rather mascots who bear the right credentials and cultural signifiers.

What really lies inside the cathedral mind of Americas Secretary of Transportation? As mere mortals, its not for us to know. He comes off like a Mensa black card holder who reads Knausgaard or might cite a random day of the week from 1404 and, evidently, thats all that really matters.

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WIRED's Gushing Pete Buttigieg Profile Is an Embarrassment to ... - Jacobin magazine