Well, time to add Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s name to the growing list of Representatives Who Game. Just hours after responding to director Aaron Sorkin’s ridiculous assertion that Democratic freshmen should “stop acting like young people,” the congresswoman helped a British YouTuber and gamer raise over $340,000 for transgender youth by making a casual appearance on his charity Twitch stream, where she advocated for “equal rights for all.”

On Friday, gamer Harry Brewis, also known as Hbomberguy, told his YouTube followers of his intent to start and finish Donkey Kong 64 without interruption. After parenting website Mumsnet launched a defunding campaign against Mermaids, a charity supports transgender kids, Brewis wanted to raise money for the organization through a video game livestream — a goal that caught the attention of Ocasio-Cortez, who tweeted in support of Brewis and then joined his stream as he was entering his 50th hour of gaming.

If you’d like to use this as a good moment to support the queer community, there’s a charity twitch stream going on for @Mermaids_Gender: https://t.co/vCvvqRhAwb
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) January 20, 2019

To a live audience of approximately 17,000 viewers, Ocasio-Cortez called for “equal rights for all, no asterisks, no fine print,” and said, “Trans rights are civil rights are human rights.” She then launched into the issues of housing and healthcare for trans people, and how discrimination both aggravates and is a source of economic insecurity.

https://www.thecut.com/2019/01/ocasio-cortez-joins-charity-twitch-stream-for-trans-youth.html?utm_source=tw&utm_campaign=thecut&utm_medium=s1

PARIS — “Would you like to speak to the president?”

That was about the last question I expected from a stranger on a Friday night in Paris.

I was at a brasserie in the Latin Quarter, enjoying dinner with James McAuley, The Washington Post’s Paris correspondent. We had finished our meals and were continuing our conversation as we waited for the check to arrive.

We had been talking for two hours or more, about all manner of things, including American politics, the president and the Democratic field for 2020. A man at an adjacent table, whose back was to us, turned around, cellphone in hand, and asked me, “Would you like to speak to the president?”

I was more than surprised by his words and at first wondered which president he was talking about. Because we were in Paris and had also been talking about Europe and related issues, I thought he might be talking about embattled French President Emmanuel Macron.

That made no sense, however, as the man with the phone was clearly an American. Still, the idea that it was President Trump on the other end seemed too weird to be real.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/would-you-like-to-speak-to-the-president/2019/01/19/bcde9398-1bd7-11e9-8813-cb9dec761e73_story.html

Reports that were never classified before are suddenly considered top-secret.

President Trump doesn’t much care for efforts to monitor and report on wasteful Pentagon spending and other military inefficiencies. This month, he ordered acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan to withhold battlefield reports from inspectors general in order to keep the information from becoming public.

“The public means the enemy,” Trump explained. “Those reports should be private reports.”

This order doubles down on a worrying trend at the Defense Department since Trump took office toward increasing unnecessary secrecy.

While it’s true that the Pentagon has always kept its share of secrets, and for good reason, it is working toward a new level of opacity, classifying all sorts of information that has been public in the past — including the inspection grades on America’s nuclear-weapons infrastructure, records of Navy aviation accidents, and Government Accountability Office assessments of Pentagon waste. The Defense Department has also stopped revealing publicly the numbers of troops it has deployed in each theater of the war on terrorism.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-01-21/pentagon-secrecy-a-campaign-to-keep-the-public-uninformed?utm_source=twitter&utm_content=business&utm_campaign=socialflow-organic&cmpid=socialflow-twitter-business&utm_medium=social

PARIS — There is an enormous void in the heart of Paris.

The millions of visitors who walk over, around, and through the empty space every year take little notice, and most are only dimly aware they tread where a grand palace, home to kings and emperors, once stood. It is just not there after all.

But when the great Chinese-American architect I.M. Pei was commissioned to rethink, restore, rebuild, and, one might almost say, resurrect the Louvre Museum in the 1980s, that nothingness became something of an obsession.

What’s missing is the Tuileries Palace, the royal residence that once formed the western side of the Louvre complex. Without it, the symmetry of the city, the harmony, the feng shui, if you will, is seriously askew.

Imagine, for a moment, that this is 1870. If you stood at the front door of the Tuileries and looked in the general direction of the setting sun your eye traveled straight down the main promenade through the Tuileries Gardens, through the Place de la Concorde, where an obelisk stands like the needle in a gun sight, and on upward along the Avenue des Champs Élysées to the Arc de Triomphe.

Such was the Grand Axis of Paris, the spine of a city that dearly loves its classical proportions, grand perspectives, and carefully calculated geometry.

Goethe, alluding to the Pythagorean roots of harmony, both aural and visual, said, “Architecture is frozen music.” Part of the wonder of walking through Paris is its architectural harmony, like a frozen classical symphony.

But in this part of the city, once you took away the Tuileries Palace, things didn’t quite line up anymore. The rest of the Louvre complex, developed on much older foundations, is not square with the axis.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/les-tuileries-the-phantom-palace-of-paris?source=twitter&via=desktop

We know what happens when we allow police to police themselves. Too often, they escape punishment when they abuse the people they are supposed to protect. A lack of meaningful police accountability not only skirts justice, but people’s lives are in danger when officers who repeatedly harm civilians keep their jobs.

The Rochester City Council in New York introduced a draft bill this week that addresses this fundamental problem. The bill would create a civilian-controlled Police Accountability Board with the power to investigate complaints from residents and to discipline officers who the board determines have abused people. Rochester would be the first municipality in New York State — and one of just a handful in the country — with a civilian board that has the power to discipline officers.

Most civilian review boards only have the power to make recommendations for what consequences officers should face, with final disciplinary decisions usually left up to the chief of police. Rochester already has a civilian review board, but that board lacks the authority to conduct its own investigations or to impose punishments. This bill would change that.

The Rochester bill is part of a national trend towards creating independent mechanisms for oversight and accountability of police. This trend encompasses calls for the appointment of special prosecutors to investigate police killings, inspector generals to oversee police policies, and even legislation that takes decisions about acquiring surveillance tools out of the hands of police departments.

The people of Rochester, like Americans across the country, regularly see reminders in the media of why we need greater police accountability.

https://www.aclu.org/blog/criminal-law-reform/reforming-police-practices/rochester-could-break-through-thin-blue-line

(CNN) — Tempted by the deal offering homes for just over $1 in the town of Sambuca on Italy's island of Sicily?
You and everyone else.

Since CNN Travel broke the news about the €1 ($1.14) offer aimed at revitalizing a beautiful but depopulated community, there's been a stampede to buy.

Within 48 hours of the story going live, the town has been inundated with tens of thousands of inquiries from people hoping to grab their piece of the rural Italian dream.

Giuseppe Cacioppo, the town's deputy mayor, says he's excited by the level of interest, but is freaking out.

"This is great, I'm flabbergasted by the response," he says. "I haven't come up for air since the story appeared.

https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/sambuca-sicily-one-euro-home-stampede/index.html?sr=twCNN011819undefined1020AMStory

...

Sims describes Trump as he watches TV in his private dining room off the Oval:

He consumed TV like the late Roger Ebert must have watched movies. ... He commented on the sets, the graphics, the wardrobe choices, the lighting, and just about every other visual component of a broadcast. Sure, he liked to hear pundits saying nice things about him or White House officials defending him from attacks, but everything came back to how does it look?

With that in mind, the most Trumpian tactic the comms team employed was arguing with TV networks about the "chyrons," the words displayed at the bottom of the screen that act as headlines for whatever the commentators are discussing.

"People watch TV on mute," the President told me, "so it’s those words, those sometimes beautiful, sometimes nasty little words that matter." ...

When the President would deliver a speech somewhere outside of D.C., the research team would take screenshots of all the chyrons that aired while he was speaking. Then, adding those images to headlines and tweets from influential reporters and pundits, they would race to print out a packet before Trump made it back to the White House.

The goal was for Sarah or Hope or me — or whoever hadn’t traveled with him — to meet him on the ground floor of the residence and hand him the packet to review mere moments after Marine One landed on the South Lawn.

https://www.axios.com/donald-trump-cable-news-chyrons-team-of-vipers-a0ab3573-baaa-4879-828a-d6f75668a11f.html?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=organic

Stood with @SenateDems today to tell President Trump enough is enough – end this hurtful and unnecessary shutdown.