I, like much of the country, watched #Lemonade this weekend. Beyoncé’s visual album is some next-level “take your pain and turn it into art” shit. I love how deep she goes, not only into her own pain, but how it connects to previous generations of women in her family, and to the pain of all Southern black women. It’s amazing. A thought occurred to me as I watched it that had more to do with the wider music industry, and the way in which women are received and talked about in it.

After the deaths of David Bowie and Prince, many have questioned whether there is anyone out there who would be their like again. Now, of course, each of these musicians was unique, and made indelible contributions to music, changing the face of it forever. But the word GENIUS is thrown about, and we act as though “music is dead.”

I think of women like Madonna, and I wonder how she’ll be hailed when she inevitably passes away. She’s arguably had as huge and as lasting an impact on music as either Bowie or Prince, and yet I wonder if they’ll be throwing the word GENIUS around. They’ll chalk her impact up to “good marketing,” or say she was a “savvy businesswoman” the way they do with all women who manage to succeed, never attributing it to anything like talent. Or, as if the only talent women are allowed to have is self-promotion (when we’re not criticizing them for seeking attention).

When Prince or Bowie played with gender or were sexually charged, they were pioneers. They were challenging. Prince could be a “Sexy MF,” while Madonna was expected to constantly apologize for being sexual. Now that she’s older, she doesn’t have to apologize, but she is expected to cover up and stop it already. I wonder if Madonna will be talked about the same way as Prince, or as Michael Jackson was. Will things like her artistic vision, her songwriting, her producing, her creativity, how she inspired and continues to inspire — will any of that matter?

http://www.themarysue.com/can-women-be-music-geniuses/

An employee of Planned Parenthood in Portland, Oregon smacked down a critic of the organization on his Tumblr account with a righteous rant about what his employer actually does when it comes to teens who need help navigating young adulthood and sex.

Damien — who describes himself as a “opinionated, big brother, mentor” — wrote on his Tumblr page recently about providing advice to a teen whose single mom brought him in.
--snip--
When a commenter linked to the post and wrote, “It is the parents’ duty to have ‘the talk’ with their kids, not a government funded organization that murders babies,” — Damien slapped him back.

“First of all f*cktruck: I am not a government employee. My wages are not paid by the government,” He replied. “Second: zero babies have ever been murdered in a planned parenthood. I didn’t say a god damn word about abortion but you had to get your f*cking tighty whiteys in a bunch because an organization that you know nothing about is doing good things for millions of people and you hate it. Shut your face up about shit you don’t understand you f*cking dump truck.”
http://www.rawstory.com/2016/04/planned-parenthood-employee-opens-a-can-of-whoopass-on-conservative-troll-and-its-awesome/

Robert Reich has been one of the more prominent supporters of the Bernie Sanders campaign, even though he was the Secretary of Labor for the President Bill Clinton administration. Reich has bent over backward to endorse the economic plans of Sanders, even as those with access to a calculator have wondered where he was getting his numbers from. However, now that Sanders has lost New York badly and has basically no chance of being the democratic nominee, Robert Reich is telling his fellow Bernie fans to tone down the negativity toward presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton.

“Reading through many of your comments about today’s New York primary, I want to urge that Bernie supporters tone down negative characterizations of Hillary,” Robert Reich posted to Facebook late last night, then going on to urge “Hillary supporters do the same with regard to Bernie.” Seemingly hedging his bets now that he knows Clinton will be the nominee, and realizing the party will need to be brought together under her, Reich went on to explain: “I know both candidates personally. Both are thoughtful and dedicated people who care deeply about this nation. Either of them would be a thousand times better president than any of the Republican candidates.”

Howeve, Reich did go on to cover all his bases this morning with a followup post in which he blamed the media for not paying more attention to the influence of superdelegates. As a renowned economist, it seems odd that he’s ignoring the basic math which says Hillary Clinton is winning the nomination in a blowout by hundreds of delegates and millions of votes, even without the superdelegates. But his call for party unity last night seemed a clear signal that he now realizes he’s going to have to help pivot his fellow Bernie fans toward Hillary before much longer.

Sanders’s call for a political revolution to create jobs, make the economy work for everyone not just the one percent and end the corrupting influence of money on politics should have found fertile ground in New York State. The thousands who rallied with the Vermont Senator in Washington Square Park, Prospect Park and Hunter’s Point South Park seemed to be evidence that “the Bern” was spreading in Hillary’s home state.

And then folks voted.

According to the exit polls, Sanders won 67 percent of voters age 18 to 29. Clinton won all the others. Sanders eked out a 51 percent to 49 percent win over Clinton for the white vote. But Clinton won 75 percent of the African American vote and 63 percent of the Hispanic vote. 79 percent of Black woman supported Clinton. With the exception of the 50-50 split with Sanders of voters who have attended “some college,” Clinton won all education brackets. Those with a high school diploma or less (70 percent), a college degree (53 percent) and postgraduate degrees (56 percent) all went for Clinton.

Now for the unexpected part: Clinton evenly split the votes of those identifying as “liberal.” I thought for sure beforehand that result would have been more lopsided in favor of Sanders. Despite Sanders’s economic message geared toward the 99 percent, Clinton won all income groups. Her highest support (59 percent) was among those voters earning less than $30,000. Although Sanders did win 57 percent of the vote from those who said “income inequality” was the “most important issue”, Clinton won 59 percent of the vote of those who said the economy and jobs were their “most important issue.”

Sanders and his campaign have repeatedly argued he has the best chance to beat Trump in November, yet 65 percent of exit poll respondents said they believe Clinton has the “better chance to defeat Trump”. He spent the last days before the vote raising questions about her qualifications and trustworthiness, yet 60 percent answered “yes” when asked, “Is Hillary Clinton honest and trustworthy?”

In short, Tuesday’s primary results definitively show that New York wasn’t feelin’ the Bern.

New York Rep. Charles Rangel (D) acknowledged Monday that while he agrees with Bernie Sanders on some issues, he doesn't think the Independent Vermont senator would be an effective president.

"You bet your life ... except he can't get it done," the Democratic heavyweight, a supporter of Hillary Clinton, said during an interview on CNN's "New Day," mentioning a focus on big banks and immigration reform.


"With all due respect to Bernie Sanders, nobody can think — of all of the years he's been in the House and Senate — what he's ever done ... legislatively," Rangel said.

Rangel, who introduced Clinton at a campaign event Sunday in his home state of New York, also weighed in on video of Sanders supporters throwing a thousand $1 bills at Clinton's motorcade over the weekend as she arrived at actor George Clooney's house in Los Angeles for a high-dollar fundraising event.

"Isn't that stupid?" Rangel asked. "I think it's stupid. I think that they have money to throw away, literally, and that it's not changing anything."

Rangel then suggested that Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, "collect that money" to support efforts to elect Democrats.

"Maybe if he tried to get some Democrats — instead of socialist Democrats — elected, maybe it would help him and the country and the Democratic Party," Rangel said.

"If he thinks that he is going to become president, he ought to have more than one person in the Senate endorsing him," Rangel added.

“Medicare-for-all will never happen if we continue to elect corporate Democratic whores who are beholden to big pharma and the private insurance industry instead of us,” he said at the rally on April 14.

After facing a backlash, Song insisted he wasn’t referring to Sanders’ Democratic rival, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

“I want to apologize to Secretary Clinton for my insensitive use of the word ‘whores’ and to adamantly profess that this was never intended nor directed at her, as some have incorrectly interpreted,” Song wrote.

After Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall announced his retirement, President George H.W. Bush announced on July 1, 1991, his pick for Marshall's successor: Clarence Thomas, a 43-year-old US Court of Appeals judge. The nomination was political from the start — Thomas's record was decidedly more conservative than that of the civil rights icon he'd be replacing.

But Thomas's road to the Supreme Court would become much more dramatic after the public learned about a woman named Anita Hill, a 35-year-old black attorney whose allegations of sexual harassment against Thomas — her former boss at the Department of Education and later the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission — were leaked to the public just days before his confirmation hearing.

The ensuing three-day hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee was a monumental moment of political theater and is now the basis of HBO's new film Confirmation, starring Kerry Washington and Wendell Pierce, premiering April 16.

But as the film shows, this wasn't just partisan drama — its themes of racism, sexism, and the intersection of the two resonate 25 years later. And although allegations of racism against Thomas derailed the conversation about Hill's accusations in the moment, the hearing irrevocably changed the way Americans view sexual harassment in the workplace.

Let me set the record straight about my publication Daily News Bin

Hi, I’m Bill Palmer. I’m the creator, publisher and owner of Daily News Bin. I’ve been an indie journalist for about thirteen years, covering various other fields. I started this site last year and decided to try my hand at political reporting because I couldn’t stand one more day of the false and misleading narratives I kept hearing on cable news, and I decided to fight back. I’ve had the good fortune to find a rather large audience, and a number of people I respect have told me (publicly and privately) that they appreciate my willingness to aim straight for the truth. But it’s also brought some bizarre false claims out of the woodwork by those who don’t care for the truth. So I want to clear up every bit of malarkey that’s been put into circulation about me and Daily News Bin over the past nine months.

I’ve quickly learned that the trouble with reporting on an election from a factual place is that those whose preferred candidates aren’t doing well are going to blame the messenger. In the instance of some of these individuals, they’ll spread the most ridiculous coordinated lies about you and your publication in the hopes of scaring people away from reading it. When you’re a new publication, the bystanders who hear these crazy claims are left unsure what to think. I would prefer to ignore this kind of nonsense, but I tried that approach early on and found that when up against this level of false noise, I have no choice but to persistently fight back. So if you’re here for that reason, let’s shoot down the nonsense point by point:

No, we’re not a “satire” or “fake news” site

For the first few months of our existence, when cable news was routinely reporting state polls as if they were national polls to try to make certain races look more close than they were, we focused on pushing the real poll numbers out there daily. This offended the fans of a certain losing candidate so thoroughly that they took to social media and told everyone who would listen that we were “satire” or “fake news.” They felt that if they could trick enough people into believing it, anything we put in a headline would be ignored. Before long I made a point of publicly pushing back against this lie, so they moved onto the next one.

We are not “owned” or “funded” by anyone

Last fall, these same rather dedicated individuals moved on to their new coordinated lie about us: that we’re secretly being operated or funded by a candidate, campaign, party, or SuperPAC in this election. Anyone who’s taken a look at our rather scrappy looking site can figure out that we’re not “funded” by anyone – and anyone familiar with how indie news sites operate knows that they don’t need external support to begin with. Still, this has become the de facto false claim about us on the part of anyone who resents that we’re reporting on how poorly their preferred candidate is doing.

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork/AP) — Gov. Andrew Cuomo has signed a law that will gradually raise the state’s minimum wage to $15 and also establishes paid family leave for New York workers.

Cuomo and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton marked the occasion Monday at a victory rally at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in Manhattan with labor leaders and workers.

PHOTOS: $15 Minimum Wage Rally In NYC

Cuomo said the law will grow the state’s economy and improve New Yorkers’ lives.

“At $9 an hour you can’t afford to raise a family in New York and that’s why we’re going to raise it to $15 an hour to restore fairness and decency,” Cuomo said.