#Joe Dallet

[denimbex1986]

'Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s three-hour dramatization of the life of the man who directed the building of the atomic bomb, opened to mostly rapturous reviews last month. It depicts the rise to eminence of the brilliant theoretical physicist who was selected during World War II to run the secret laboratory at Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the atomic bomb was built. General Leslie Groves, overall director of the Manhattan Project, passed over several Nobel laureates, including men who had directed major experimental physics projects. By contrast, J. Robert Oppenheimer had never organized anything more complicated than a graduate seminar. And yet he recruited, assembled, and managed hundreds of prickly egos and made them into a cohesive team, solved innumerable logistical and scientific problems, and produced a working bomb within three years. Lauded as one of America’s greatest scientists after the war, in 1954 he was humiliated by the loss of his security clearance after facing accusations of having Communist sympathies and for opposing development of the “Super,” or hydrogen, bomb.

Oppenheimer is visually arresting, well-acted, and reasonably faithful to the historical facts. It offers a nuanced portrait of Oppenheimer, who was a tormented person even before he was forced to live with the knowledge that the bomb he and his fellow scientists had created immolated tens of thousands of people and raised the specter of a nuclear holocaust. But the film gets one very important feature of Oppenheimer’s life wrong.

Like the book that inspired it—the Pulitzer Prize–winning biography by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin called American Prometheus—the movie maintains that Oppenheimer was truthful when he denied ever being a member of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA).

Following the lead of Bird and Sherwin, Oppenheimer acknowledges that many of its subject’s relatives—including his wife Kitty, brother Frank, and sister-in-law Jackie—had been party members, as had numerous friends and graduate students Oppie taught and mentored. It mentions his generous donations to causes supported by the CPUSA, most notably during the Spanish Civil War. It details his support of the efforts by the Communist-aligned Federation of Architects, Engineers, Chemists, and Technicians to unionize the radiation laboratory at Berkeley. But it also accepts, even stresses, Oppenheimer’s own denials of party membership and repeats Kitty Oppenheimer’s insistent testimony that Robert had never joined the party. This echoes the claims of Bird and Sherwin that Oppenheimer was never more than a Communist fellow traveler—someone who shared the party’s beliefs and policy prescriptions but never actually joined it or submitted to the party’s rules and discipline.

Even when Bird and Sherwin published their award-winning biography in 2005, there was already abundant evidence that Oppenheimer had indeed once been a member of the Communist Party of the United States. Their efforts to explain away or obfuscate the clear evidence that Oppenheimer lied under oath about it have been further eroded by material that has emerged from Russian archives since. But to this day, Bird (Sherwin died in 2021) has not responded to that evidence, and the writer-director Christopher Nolan did not look deeper into the question when he crafted his screenplay. That is unfortunate, because reckoning with the truth about Oppenheimer would have deepened the movie’s portrait of this singular American and added more layers of ambiguity and complexity to what is already a remarkably ambiguous and complex work of portraiture.

Even before the evidence from the Russian archives, proof that Oppenheimer had been a Communist did not emerge from his enemies or from unreliable witnesses or ambivalent phrases in sketchy documents. Several of his friends, acquaintances, and graduate students—all of whom remained left-wingers—wrote memoirs or gave interviews in which they detailed Oppie’s membership in the Communist Party. In an interview for Gregg Herken’s 2002 book, Brotherhood of the Bomb, Haakon Chevalier—a professor of French literature—said that he and Oppenheimer had been members of “a ‘closed unit’ of the Communist Party” at the University of California at Berkeley. (A “closed unit” means a “secret unit.”) In 1964, Chevalier had written to Robert to inform his one-time intimate that in a forthcoming memoir called Oppenheimer: The Story of a Friendship, he was going to confirm they had both been Communists. Oppenheimer responded angrily, threatening a lawsuit, and in the published version Chevalier called their unit a Marxist discussion group. Chevalier’s widow allowed Herken to read her private journal and memoir, in which she confirmed that both her husband and Oppenheimer had been members of a closed CPUSA unit and noted, “Oppie’s [Oppenheimer’s] membership in a closed unit was very secret indeed.”

Chevalier also identified Oppenheimer as the author of two 1940 pamphlets put out by the “College Faculties Committee, Communist Party of California.” Oppenheimer, who was the scion of a wealthy New York family, had also paid for the printing and distribution of those pamphlets. Herken interviewed Philip Morrison, a former Oppenheimer graduate student and then Communist, who claimed that he, Morrison, had taken to the printer a third pamphlet written by Oppenheimer justifying the Soviet invasion of Finland. Still another graduate student, David Hawkins, could not confirm that Oppenheimer was a party member but agreed that Oppenheimer had hosted CPUSA meetings at his home.

Gordon Griffiths, a graduate student and Communist at Berkeley from 1940 to 1942 and later a prominent historian, late in life wrote an unpublished memoir that discussed his role as party liaison with the small Communist faculty group that included both Chevalier and Oppenheimer. In Griffiths’ words, the faculty group

met regularly, to the best of my recollection, twice a month, in the evening at Chevalier’s or Oppenheimer’s house. I brought party literature and collected dues from [Arthur] Brodeur [a scholar of ancient Icelandic sagas] and Chevalier. I was given to understand that Oppenheimer, as a man of independent wealth, made his contribution through some special channel. Nobody carried a party card. If payment of dues was the only test of membership, I could not testify that Oppenheimer was a member, but I can say, without any qualification, that all three men considered themselves to be Communists.

FBI wiretaps at the time and made public decades later provided more corroboration that senior Communist officials considered Oppenheimer to have been a party member. In 1940, the Bureau learned of a private meeting of senior Communists that was to be held at Chevalier’s home. Surveillance revealed Oppenheimer’s car parked outside the house (a moment depicted in the movie). In December 1943, FBI listening devices picked up a conversation between Steve Nelson, the party’s leader in the Bay Area, and Bernadette Doyle, its organizational secretary. In that conversation, Nelson and Doyle spoke of both Robert and his brother Frank as CPUSA members, but Nelson noted that Robert had become inactive. As late as 1945, a bug at a meeting of the North Oakland Communist Club overheard one official state that Oppenheimer was a party member and another call him “one of our men.”

Nelson had been a close friend of Kitty Oppenheimer’s second husband, Joe Dallet, a Communist Party official killed while serving in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain a few years before Kitty and Robert married. When Nelson moved to the Bay Area in 1939, where one of his tasks was to serve as a liaison with Soviet intelligence agencies, he became friendly with Kitty and Robert. Before Robert joined the Manhattan Project, he told Nelson in general terms about the beginnings of the research into an atomic bomb. In March 1943, an FBI wiretap recorded Joe Weinberg, an Oppenheimer graduate student and ardent Communist, telling Nelson that Oppie was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with his Communist graduate students. Nelson pressed Weinberg for information about the atomic project and indicated that Oppenheimer had previously told him in general terms about it but had recently become more reticent. A week later, Nelson met with a Soviet intelligence officer from the San Francisco Soviet consulate.

To Bird and Sherwin, none of this evidence was dispositive (and the movie avoids mentioning it). In their eyes, because Oppenheimer never had a party card, he was not a “formal, card-carrying member.” But this is wrong-headed. Many Communists never held party cards. Those belonging to professional groups were treated differently from regular Communists. Most important, they were exempted from the work required of most recruits—selling the Daily Worker, manning picket lines, attending rallies, etc.,—because doing so would have revealed their identities.

Finally, just because Oppenheimer did not pay regular dues did not mean he was not a Communist. In August 1939, a senior CPUSA official gave a report to the Communist International in Moscow on the organizational status of the American party. He presented three levels of membership. The first was made up of “enrolled” members. These were people who had joined the CPUSA and were carried on its membership rolls. Next came “registered” members. These were persons who had newly registered or reregistered with a local party unit. Finally, the smallest number represented “dues-paying” members. So whether you paid dues, annually registered with a local party unit, or had enrolled in the party in the previous few years, you were a Communist in the eyes of the CPUSA. The party regarded all three definitions as signifying membership with different degrees of current participation. Now note how Bird and Sherwin view it. They acknowledge that the financial records of the Bay Area party obtained by an FBI surreptitious entry (or burglary) show that contributions by someone code-named X-1 totaling $1,800 a year (the equivalent of close to $40,000 today) were made by Oppenheimer, but Bird and Sherwin insist that “he made contributions to causes, but never paid dues at all”—as if contributions well in excess of dues were not accrued by the CPUSA. Following Bird and Sherwin, Christopher Nolan shows Kitty testifying during the 1954 hearing on the revocation of Robert’s security clearance that his contributions went through the Communist Party but not to the CPUSA—and portrays this bizarre act of hairsplitting as though it were obviously and undeniably true.

In the end, the words of Oppenheimer’s friends and the evidence from the wiretaps and burglary, according to Bird and Sherwin, all amounted to nothing more than a case of mistaken identity. Oppenheimer left the impression that he was a Communist, so friends and party members naturally assumed he was and spoke of him as Communist. In fact, Bird and Sherwin even suggest he may have fooled himself: “For a brief time,” they write, “he may well have thought of himself as an unaffiliated comrade” even though he wasn’t. No, Oppenheimer was an ardent New Dealer and FDR loyalist.

If he had been, why would he have written fiercely anti-FDR pamphlets in 1940 during the period when the Nazis and Soviets were in an alliance and Oppenheimer actively supported the Soviet invasion of Finland? Bird and Sherwin write that at that moment, Oppenheimer’s “rational style had abandoned him” and that his “words reveal someone primarily worried about the impact on domestic politics of a world teetering on the brink of a great disaster.” What they cannot admit is that he was parroting the CPUSA’s anti-interventionist, anti-FDR, anti-New Deal line—and this after thousands of disillusion-ed close allies of the CPUSA abandoned (some permanently, some temporarily) their alignment with the party because of its new friendship with Hitler. Several hundred members openly quit the CPUSA because it had abandoned the putative anti-fascism that had led them into the party. Odd behavior, indeed, if Oppenheimer had been only a dedicated liberal.

Bird and Sherwin are not alone in brushing aside any suggestion that Oppenheimer had been a party member. To give them a tiny bit of credit, they at least mention contrary evidence if only to explain it away with casuistic sophistry. Other biographers have been more cavalier. In his 2004 book, Oppenheimer, Jeremy Bernstein simply states, “I believe Oppenheimer.” David Cassidy’s J. Robert Oppenheimer (2005) notes the evidence but, without confronting it, judges that “there is so far no conclusive evidence that Oppenheimer was ever [a] member of the Communist Party.” Jennet Conant’s 109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos (2005) never addresses the matter of the Berkeley faculty CP unit and, even as she discusses security officials’ suspicions about Oppenheimer, dismisses the whole matter via a reference to his “earlier dabblings in left-wing politics.” Priscilla McMillan, in The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer (2005), is decidedly ambiguous in her treatment of the evidence but suggests he had been only a fellow traveler. Charles Thorpe’s Oppenheimer (2006) asserted “there is no conclusive or firm evidence that Oppenheimer ever joined the Communist Party.”

Only Barton Bernstein, a Stanford University historian who has written several detailed analyses of the Oppenheimer controversy, has followed in Herken’s path in judging the evidence carefully. He began as a skeptic about Oppie’s party membership, but in a 2023 essay on the Washington Decoded website, Bernstein concluded that material from Russian archives “seems even further to tighten an already very substantial case: Robert Oppenheimer had been a secret CP member for a few years.”

What is that new evidence?

It comes from the Vassiliev Notebooks. These are copies and summaries of documents from the KGB archive that we discussed extensively in our 2009 book, Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America. The notebooks document that prior to 1943, the GRU, or Soviet Military Intelligence, was leading the effort to recruit scientists on the West Coast and fruitlessly tried to recruit Oppenheimer as an active agent passing secrets. By the end of 1943, the KGB took over the effort. Several messages sent between Moscow and San Francisco urged recruitment of Oppenheimer, in which he was described as a secret or undeclared member of the CPUSA. In February 1944, the KGB’s Moscow Center prepared a report that listed Oppenheimer, who had been given the code name “Chester,” as a prime target for recruitment. Moscow Center identified Oppenheimer as a “secret member of the fellowcountryman org.,” the term used to describe the CPUSA. But it warned that because Oppenheimer was “kept under special security … the fellowcountryman organization received orders from its center to break off relations with ‘Ch[ester]’ to avoid his exposure.”

Despite frequent entreaties from KGB headquarters in Moscow in 1944 and 1945 to use Oppenheimer’s secret party membership as a lever to recruit him as a spy, and various efforts to use different Communist acquaintances to cultivate him, the KGB had no luck. Recalled to Moscow in 1944 because of his lack of success, Gregory Kheifets, the KGB station chief in San Francisco, wrote a report explaining that his efforts to contact Oppenheimer and his brother Frank had fallen apart after Isaac Folkoff, a Communist Party liaison with the KGB, told him that “due to their special military work, the [party’s] connection with them was suspended.”

Taken as a whole, these messages confirm that the KGB was anxious to recruit Oppenheimer as a spy, expected that he would be receptive, and was frustrated by his coldness on the few occasions when Communist friends were able to meet him after he had begun working on the Manhattan Project. General Leslie Groves had selected Oppenheimer to direct the laboratory where the atomic bomb would be built in the fall of 1942. Whether Oppenheimer recognized and acted on the need to insulate himself from his Communist past in order to participate in the Manhattan Project, or whether he had a sudden epiphany about the seriousness of security, or whether he was responding to his wife’s wishes, he began to distance himself from his Communist graduate students, pay more attention to security, and then dropped out of the CPUSA.

One scene in the movie deals with this. In the period prior to joining the Manhattan Project, his Berkeley colleague, the Nobel laureate physicist Ernest Lawrence, strongly counsels Oppenheimer to cease his political activities and focus strictly on science. What is not mentioned in the movie is that Lawrence, one of the original scientists selected for the Manhattan Project, was sponsoring Oppenheimer’s recruitment. Whatever initiated his shift, Oppenheimer’s views continued to evolve. By the late 1940s, those views were well within the mainstream of anti-Communist liberalism, so much so that a 1950 KGB document in Vassiliev’s Notebooks labels Oppenheimer as one of several “leading reactionary scientists” whom the KGB should seek to discredit.

The question of whether Oppenheimer had been merely a fellow traveler or a member of the CPUSA is more than a matter of semantics. As the movie makes clear, even after Groves had chosen Oppenheimer as director, Army security balked at giving him a security clearance and had to be ordered to do so by Groves in July 1943. Suspicions about Oppenheimer had intensified in the winter of 1942–43 just before he left for Los Alamos. Haakon Chevalier privately told Oppenheimer that a friend, the chemist George Eltenton, had proposed that Oppie transmit scientific information to an acquaintance Eltenton had in the Soviet consulate. We see this in the movie, in a scene set in a kitchen. Both Chevalier and Oppenheimer later agreed that the latter had angrily rejected the overture. But Oppenheimer did not report the recruitment effort to security officials until six months later. While naming Eltenton as someone to watch as a potential spy, Robert initially withheld both his own name and Chevalier’s. This initial interview is depicted in the movie—in which Oppenheimer is grilled by a counterintelligence officer played by Oscar-winner Casey Affleck—and comes off as just as awkward as it likely was. In later interviews with Army security, Oppenheimer finally admitted he had been approached, but he continued to refuse to name Chevalier or anyone else who might have been involved. Not until December 1943, in response to a direct order from Groves, did he name Chevalier (which we do not see).

In addition to his bewildering behavior about the Chevalier incident, over the years Oppenheimer lied on numerous government security questionnaires. He flatly denied that he had ever been a party member, admitting only that he had been a left-winger with numerous Communist friends and a contributor to causes also supported by Communists. When he faced a hearing on the revocation of his security clearance, Oppenheimer could have taken the option of being honest and candid about his Communist past and explained why he had dropped out. After all, many Communists of the time became ex-Communists and even anti-Communists. But his record of lies might have cost him his security clearance in any case. Perjury is obvious grounds for the denial of a security clearance, since it opens up the perjurer to blackmail—or prosecution. Oppenheimer might have hesitated about getting friends and relatives into trouble, or deeper trouble. Or he might have been reluctant to give ammunition to the many enemies he had made among military leaders and such physicists as Edward Teller by opposing development of the hydrogen bomb after World War II.

Just as important, admitting past false statements may have been particularly psychologically difficult for Oppenheimer, whose arrogance was considerable and whose tolerance for those he regarded as fools was very limited. (Haakon Chevalier wrote a thinly disguised novel about him with the title The Man Who Would Be God that provides glimpses of Oppenheimer’s imperious nature.) Whatever the reason, confessing to lies about his political past was not a step Oppenheimer was willing to take. In the end, he made a particularly poor witness and his testimony did not help his case to maintain his security clearance. In the movie, Kitty angrily confronts Robert for refusing to fight back more strongly against the attacks on his character and actions. Left unexplored is whether his knowledge of his own deceit helped paralyze him.

Knowing what we know now, America’s public interest would have been best served if Oppenheimer had been able to continue in his role as a consultant to the government on various atomic projects. The evidence by the mid-1940s was that he had left his earlier Communist allegiance behind and was anything but a party sympathizer. But one of the major contributing factors to his loss of security access was his own unwillingness to provide a candid and honest account of his earlier Communist ties and why he had put them aside. If he continued to lie about such matters, how could he now be trusted?

None of this detracts from the greatest achievement of Oppenheimer’s life and one of the great scientific and engineering achievements in human history. It does, however, complicate the morality-play version of his life. Unquestionably, the hearing that denied the renewal of his security clearance (and that is portrayed so powerfully throughout the movie) was stacked against him. His archnemesis, Lewis Strauss (played by Robert Downey Jr.), orchestrated a dishonest and biased attack, deprived Oppenheimer and his lawyer the opportunity to see key evidence, and distorted some of his views and behavior. But Oppenheimer’s lack of candor made him a contributor to his own destruction. That truly makes the story of his life a Greek tragedy. As good a movie as it is, Oppenheimer would have been richer still if it had plumbed these deep waters.'

[demdread]

Oliver Law was a member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, he was among the African Americans who supported Ethiopia in its battle against the Italian invasion of that African nation. Law was born in west Texas on Oct. 23, 1900. He was 19 when he joined the U.S. Army and served as a private in the 24th Infantry Regiment, an all-Black unit stationed on the Mexican border. He was in the military for six years. After being discharged from service, he moved to Indiana, where he worked in a cement plant. He arrived in Chicago as the Great Depression was gradually sweeping the land. He drove a taxi before finding work on the city’s waterfront as a stevedore. In this capacity, he became a member of the International Longshoremen’s Association. Law opened a small restaurant but financially failed. He joined the federal Works Project Administration, and because of his versatility, he was able to work in a number of jobs. Law was among a coterie of activists of this era who marched in defense of the Scottsboro Boys, nine youths accused of raping two white women. This commitment put him in close association with other passionate activists, and soon he was a member of International Labor Defense and assisting people who had been evicted from their homes. During the demonstration, Law, Joe Dallet, Steve Nelson and 11 other activists were arrested and badly beaten by the police. Two weeks after the beatings, Law had recovered sufficiently to march with 75,000 demonstrators to demand unemployment insurance. In 1932, he joined the Communist Party. He was arrested in 1935 for his fiery speeches in support of Ethiopia, which was at war with Italy. By 1936, Law was a member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, and by the turn of the year, he was on his way to Spain to join the fight there against the nationalists and their leader, Francisco Franco. His first assignment was with a machine gun unit, where his military experience immediately elevated him to a leadership position. His leadership was tested again and again during the battle at Jarama River. The Abraham Lincoln Brigade and its allies suffered tremendous losses. Fighting in hot summer weather. https://www.instagram.com/p/CHihvnHFdZ0/?igshid=1e5q7sydk48oy

[savetopnow]

2018-04-04 12 NEWS now

NEWS

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[democratsunited-blog]

Shell-shocked Democrats regroup in Wisconsin

https://uniteddemocrats.net/?p=4021

Shell-shocked Democrats regroup in Wisconsin

OSHKOSH, Wis. — Donald Trump’s romp through white, working class America in 2016 was nowhere more traumatic for Democrats than in Wisconsin, which flipped Republican in a presidential race for the first time since 1984.

Now, two years after his stunning victory in the state, shell-shocked Democrats are beginning to pick up the pieces, pouring money and resources into the state in a test run for a rematch with Trump in 2020.

Story Continued Below

Interviews with nearly two dozen local party officials, candidates and operatives here describe an ongoing effort marked by unprecedented organizing and millions of dollars from out-of-state donors — a reflection of the party’s urgency in reshaping the 2020 landscape in the upper Midwest, a Democratic bulwark that Trump toppled in 2016.

“We’ve all played with the calculator,” said Joe Zepecki, a Democratic strategist who worked on President Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign and on Democrat Mary Burke’s unsuccessful run for Wisconsin governor in 2014. “The number of paths that are back in play for Democrats if you can count on Wisconsin and Michigan – there’s a hell of a lot of ways to 270 [electoral votes].”

Already, more than $7 million has been committed this year toward efforts to reclaim Wisconsin. In recent months, billionaire Democrat Tom Steyer’s NextGen America has designated $2.5 million to register and turn out young voters. Eric Holder’s National Democratic Redistricting Committee has spent $675,000 on the midterm elections so far. The Democratic Governors Association has reserved about $4 million in air time in preparation for a top-of-the-ticket brawl with Gov. Scott Walker in the fall.

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Mocking the Republican governor at the state Democratic Party’s convention recently, Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Ind., told a cheering crowd that Wisconsin Democrats could “use Scott Walker to send a message” to the rest of the country. The midterm elections in Wisconsin, he said, are the “canary in the coal mine” for the party’s improving prospects nationwide.

The intensity of the Democratic Party’s focus on Wisconsin stands in contrast to 2016, when Hillary Clinton did not campaign in the state at all during the general election — a slight still grumbled about by many Democrats.

Prospective 2020 presidential candidates appear determined not to make the same mistake. Buttigieg, Steyer and Holder are all potential candidates, as is Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), who trekked to Wisconsin this month to conduct a full day of campaign appearances with the state’s Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin.

Yet the Democratic Party was ailing here long before Trump captured the state. Walker, a conservative reviled by Wisconsin’s once-powerful union interests, won election statewide three times, including in a recall election that demoralized Democrats who had spent millions of dollars in defeat.

“That took a lot of the wind out of people’s sails… That was huge,” said Randy Bryce, the ironworker-turned-Democratic-celebrity running in outgoing House Speaker Paul Ryan’s district.

For several years, Wisconsin Democrats approached elections with a sense of trepidation, culminating in what Kelda Roys, one of several Democrats running for Wisconsin governor, called “the catastrophe of 2016.” One of her rivals, Tony Evers, lamented months following the election in which he said there was “a lot of recrimination, a lot of people going below the surface and kind of hunkering down for a while.”

Now, said Evers, Wisconsin’s state schools chief, the “switch has been flipped a little bit here.”

In a special state Senate election in January, Democrat Patty Schachtner carried a western Wisconsin district that Trump won in 2016, beating a well-funded Republican by more than 10 percentage points. Three months later, Democrats claimed a rare statewide victory when Rebecca Dallet, a Milwaukee County Circuit Court judge, won a seat on Wisconsin’s state Supreme Court in a race that drew national attention. In a special election on Tuesday, Democrats picked up a state Senate seat long controlled by the GOP.

Brian Weeks, political director for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, said that if Democrats in Wisconsin this year can build and sustain an effective political operation, “I think that could be a roadmap for 2020.”

In a bid to compete with the Wisconsin Republican Party’s vaunted organizational advantages under Walker, the state Democratic Party hired an organizing director in early 2017 — an unprecedented move for Democrats here in an off-year — then added seven full-time staffers. The party now employs more than 30 people statewide and will keep staff on following the midterm elections in preparation for 2020, said Martha Laning, chairwoman of the state Democratic Party.

“If you compare this to 2016, a presidential year, even at this time we had like one or two people in the coordinated campaign,” Laning said. “In 2014, we had nobody … So this is a huge difference.”

In previous years, Laning said, “there were areas of our state that we just never reached out to.”

The Democrats’ efforts have been aided by the Democratic National Committee, which has invested $190,000 in the state this election cycle for organizing, training and voter registration activities. Steyer’s group said it will hire at least 53 organizers on at least 35 college campuses throughout Wisconsin by November, while Holder’s organization campaigned for Schachtner and Dallet and is supporting two Democrats running in special state legislative elections next week.

Holder, President Barack Obama’s former attorney general, described his group’s work in Wisconsin, which is focused on redistricting reform, as “a multi-cycle effort that is designed to have an impact … not only in 2018 and 2020 and 2021, but even beyond that.”

Republicans have reacted to Democrats’ advances with alarm. While Democrats rallied in Oshkosh, the state’s GOP lieutenant governor, Rebecca Kleefisch, urged Republicans at a local party office several blocks away to guard against complacency, saying victories by Schachtner and Dallet were “not OK.”

“We spent a long time turning the Titanic around,” said Kleefisch, touting Wisconsin’s unemployment rate of less than 3 percent and a “terrific story of prosperity” she said Republicans could tell.

Offering a variation on a criticism that Walker has leveled against Democrats in Wisconsin – that they are motivated by anger, suggesting an inability to govern – Kleefisch said of the Democrats down the street, “They’re mad just to be mad. They’re mad for mad’s sake.”

Mark Morgan, executive director of Wisconsin Republican Party, scoffed at Democrats’ organizing efforts, saying the GOP is “signing leases as we speak” on field offices throughout Wisconsin, with close to 20 already open.

Yet Republicans are aware that they are now on defense in Wisconsin, with a Marquette University Law School poll in March quantifying an enthusiasm gap that political consultants of both parties acknowledge: Nearly two-thirds of Democratic voters in Wisconsin say they are very enthusiastic about voting in this year’s elections, compared to 54 percent of Republicans. In the midterm elections in 2014, the advantage went the other way.

“There’s no doubt we are trying to overcome a lethargic base and a gap in enthusiasm among Republican voters here in Wisconsin,” said Luke Hilgemann, a Madison-based Republican consultant and former chief executive officer of Koch brothers-supported Americans for Prosperity.

Hilgemann, who worried Republicans had been “lulled to sleep” by successful elections in recent years, said that in the special Senate and Supreme Court elections, “I think the base didn’t show up … We just can’t allow this to happen again.”

Still, Hilgemann and other Republicans point to signs the GOP in Wisconsin will be difficult to break. In the latest Marquette poll, Walker’s public approval rating stood at 48 percent, while Trump’s approval rating in the state ticked up incrementally from 2017, to 43 percent.

Baldwin’s public approval rating, meanwhile, dropped to 37 percent. While delegates at the state convention screamed “Tammy, Tammy” as the senator walked on stage to speak, political consultants in Wisconsin have become fearful of a massive influx of Republican spending opposing Baldwin. Outside groups so far have spent more than $3 million against her re-election, according to the Center for Responsive Politics — a stark reminder to Democrats of Republicans’ ability to raise and spend money in the state.

In a call and response with Democratic Congresswoman Gwen Moore at the weekend convention, delegates screamed “Yes!” when Moore asked, “Are you ready for a blue wave?” But she cautioned them that first, “We’ve got to part the Red Sea.”

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[sethground]

Liberal Rebecca Dallet Wallops Conservative Opponent in Wisconsin Supreme Court Race

Liberal Rebecca Dallet Wallops Conservative Opponent in Wisconsin Supreme Court Race

Rebecca Dallet, a Milwaukee County judge who received the backing of Vice President Joe Biden and got support from former attorney general Eric Holders National Democratic Redistricting Committee, has been declared the winner in a state Supreme Court race in Wisconsin on Tuesday night. With more than 40 percent of precincts reporting, she led Sauk County Judge Michael Screnock by more than 10…

[uwebset]

International Business Times

Who Is Rebecca Dallet? Liberal Judge Wins Wisconsin Supreme Court Elections International Business Times Liberal candidate and a Milwaukee County judge, Rebecca Dallet who received the backing of former Vice President Joe Biden and support of former attorney general Eric Holder's National Democratic Redistricting Committee, was proclaimed the winner in ... and more »

from Top Stories - Google News https://ift.tt/2q6eP80

[denimbex1986]

'Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, which tells the story of the titular “father of the atomic bomb” J Robert Oppenheimer, is a three-hour epic populated by a dozen characters whose lives warrant a film of their own. We’re only given minor glimpses of physicists like Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh) and Richard Feynman (Jack Quaid), and two of the major women in Oppenheimer’s life, Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh) and Katherine “Kitty” Oppenheimer (Emily Blunt). Despite her limited screen time, Kitty was a tremendously important figure in Oppenheimer’s life, and in a film with many exceptional performances, Blunt’s is a definite highlight, getting the chance to deliver some of Oppenheimer’s most hard-hitting lines.

Who Is Kitty Oppenheimer?

Born in Germany but raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Kitty Puening studied at several universities throughout her life but ultimately graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in botany. She married three times before she met Oppenheimer, her fourth and final husband. While Kitty was in the midst of pursuing graduate studies at UCLA, she met Oppenheimer at a garden party in Pasadena. Still married to her previous husband Richard Harrison, she and Oppenheimer began dating just months after they first met, and Kitty eventually divorced Harrison once she became pregnant with her and Oppenheimer’s first child.

Kitty first joined the Communist Party during her common-law marriage to communist organizer Joe Dallet, who later died fighting in the Spanish Civil War. She even planned to join him but received the news that he had been killed before she ever left for Europe. Her relationship with Oppenheimer overlapped with his on-again off-again affair with Jean Tatlock, a member of the Communist Party USA, who plays a small yet significant role in Nolan’s film. Kitty’s previous affiliations with communism would later put her under scrutiny during Oppenheimer’s security hearing by the United States Atomic Energy Commission, as he too had a history with communism via his relationship to Tatlock.

Why Kitty’s Story Matters in 'Oppenheimer'

Nolan has often faced criticisms over the lack of nuanced female characters in his films, who are often confined to gendered tropes. In some ways, Oppenheimer is a step in the right direction. Though Jean Tatlock's role is largely reduced to one of a mysterious temptress whose political affiliations and untimely death haunted Oppenheimer for the rest of his life, Kitty has a different fate. She was one of the most important relationships in Oppenheimer's life, supporting him and providing some much-needed reality checks, a representation of the maxim "behind every great man is a great woman." This adage is particularly true to the time period, when women, even highly educated ones like Kitty, were afforded very limited opportunities outside domestic work.

Kitty even briefly worked as a lab technician at Los Alamos, but the film focuses on her unhappiness with being largely stuck at home doing housework and raising their two children, using alcohol to cope. In an interview with MSNBC, Blunt expressed her empathy for Kitty's plight, saying, "There were many women who sort of went to waste at the ironing board back then, and I think she was meant for greater things and I think drove herself insane in that isolation and loneliness of living in Los Alamos with nothing else to do but to drink and have children.”

It's true that Kitty's character isn't given the depth she deserves, but in a film that's so densely populated with characters based on real historical figures with equally interesting lives, it would be impossible to dig into all of them without completely losing focus. For much of the film, Kitty remains quite literally at the periphery, sitting stoically in the background as Oppenheimer is questioned by the United States Atomic Energy Commission, but when it's finally her turn in the hot seat, she doesn't back down. Despite her interrogators believing they could intimidate or outsmart her, Kitty is purposeful in her answers, and nothing seems to shake her, providing one of the most captivating scenes in the film.

Emily Blunt's Performance as Kitty Is a Standout in 'Oppenheimer'

Oppenheimer is chock-full of impressive performances across the board, like Cillian Murphy's haunting portrayal of the troubled physicist which acts as the film's driving force, Robert Downey Jr's riveting turn as Lewis Strauss, and Matt Damon as General Leslie Groves, who brings rare but effective moments of levity to such a somber film. In a huge ensemble cast of heavy hitters like the aforementioned stars and an abundance of talented supporting actors, Blunt's performance still manages to stand out. She also gets to deliver two of the most impactful lines of the film, both of which help reframe Oppenheimer's actions and internal conflicts. As Oppenheimer shuts down after learning of Jean's death, Kitty, who already knew of their affair, reminds him of the turmoil he himself brought to Jean's life, telling him, "You don't get to commit sin, and then ask all of us to feel sorry for you when there are consequences."

Nolan presents Oppenheimer's thesis from the get-go, opening with the striking quote, "Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to man. For this, he was chained to a rock and tortured for eternity." Oppenheimer is consistently haunted by the catastrophic consequences his actions brought upon the world, shown visually through various hallucinations. During his security clearance hearing, he has to be prodded into answering questions and isn't particularly forthcoming with his answers, in contrast to Kitty's bluntness during her own hearing. The film itself doesn't let Oppenheimer off the hook just because he's plagued with guilt, and Kitty is quick to confront him about his martyr complex, saying "You think because you let them tar and feather you that the world will forgive you? They won't."

Kitty Oppenheimer's character plays a small but meaningful role in one of Nolan's most ambitious films, and Blunt deserves any accolades coming her way during awards season. Still, Kitty's story could undoubtedly stand to be told on its own (as could Jean Tatlock's, to be fair). She was a well-educated, well-traveled woman, perceived as unlikeable by many at Los Alamos, but with a story worth being told from her perspective, as she struggled with motherhood and alcoholism all while watching the Manhattan Project unfold from the sidelines.'

[automaticdreamenthusiast]

International Business Times

Who Is Rebecca Dallet? Liberal Judge Wins Wisconsin Supreme Court Elections International Business Times Liberal candidate and a Milwaukee County judge, Rebecca Dallet who received the backing of former Vice President Joe Biden and support of former attorney general Eric Holder's National Democratic Redistricting Committee, was proclaimed the winner in ... and more »

from Top Stories - Google News https://ift.tt/2GzA9Nt

[newsintodays-blog]

Liberal judge Rebecca Dallet wins Wisconsin Supreme Court race: AP

New Post has been published on https://newsintoday.info/2018/04/04/liberal-judge-rebecca-dallet-wins-wisconsin-supreme-court-race-ap/

Liberal judge Rebecca Dallet wins Wisconsin Supreme Court race: AP

(Reuters) – Liberal judge Rebecca Dallet cruised to victory in race to serve on the Wisconsin Supreme Court for a 10-year term, the Associated Press reported late on Tuesday.

Dallet defeated conservative judge Michael Screnock who was endorsed by Wisconsin’s Republican governor, Scott Walker, narrowing conservative control of the court to 4-3 from 5-2, AP said.

The candidates were backed by partisans with Screnock supported by the National Rifle Association and the state GOP which backed him with a $400,000 contribution. Dallet received the support of former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, according to the report.

Dallet, who has been a Milwaukee County circuit judge since 2008, will join the higher court in August, AP reported.

The Democrats scored an upset in a Wisconsin state Senate special election in January, capturing a conservative district held by Republicans since 2000.

A judge had ruled in March that Governor Walker must hold special elections in two state districts in Wisconsin after Democrats said he was putting off the votes over fears of losing the formerly Republican-held seats.

Wisconsin was among the handful of battleground states that helped Trump win the presidency over Democratic rival Hillary Clinton in the 2016 elections. Trump carried Wisconsin by 22,748 votes.

Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Gopakumar Warrier

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[denimbex1986]

'As one of the most talked about films of 2023, you’d expect Oppenheimer to have a cast brimming with Hollywood A-Listers.

And you’d be right: as well as Cillian Murphy, who plays the titular character in the film, fans can also expect to see the likes of Florence Pugh, Matt Damon, Sir Kenneth Branagh, Rami Malek and Robert Downey Jr in the blockbuster, which has been created by writer and director Christopher Nolan.

Also starring in the movie is British actress Emily Blunt, who will play Oppenheimer’s wife, Kitty.

As the biopic thriller prepares to battle it out with Barbie next Friday (in what fans have hilariously dubbed ‘Barbenheimer’), just who was Kitty, and when did she marry Oppenheimer? Read on to find out more.

Who was Kitty Oppenheimer? Oppenheimer's Emily Blunt role explained

Early Life

Born Katherine Puening on 8th August 1910 in Recklinghausen, Germany, Kitty and her family - who were from a noble background, meaning she often received letters as a child addressed to ‘Her Highness, Katherine’ - moved to America when she was two years old.

Kitty entered university a few times in the early 1930s, but dropped out and married her first husband Frank Ramseyer in 1932. However, the marriage did not last, and Kitty received an annulment from the state of Wisconsin just a year later.

Her second marriage was to a young Communist named Joe Dallet in 1934. The couple moved to France, and Dallet joined the Communist forces fighting in the Spanish Civil War. He was sadly killed in combat three years after they tied the knot, which spurred Kitty to return to the United States and pursue a degree in botany at the University of Pennsylvania, which she completed in 1939.

She met Oppenheimer that same year - while inconveniently married to her third husband, a British doctor named Richard Harrison! Their love overcame the obstacle, though, and Kitty divorced her husband and married J Robert Oppenheimer on 1st November 1940.

The couple lived in the Californian city of Pasadena, before moving to Los Alamos in New Mexico for the Manhattan Project.

Life in Los Alamos

After Oppenheimer was appointed scientific director in Los Alamos, Kitty worked briefly as a lab technician there under the supervision of Dr Louis Hempelmann, but quit after a year.

As a trained botanist, Kitty felt her professional life was stagnant professionally at Los Alamos, and instead she thrived socially. She often hosted cocktail parties for small groups of women to provide a distraction from the high-pressure environment of Los Alamos.

Kitty was also an important confidante for her husband, as Oppenheimer trusted his wife completely and frequently sought her advice on a host of issues facing the Manhattan Project. Kitty and her husband relied on each other for a solid foundation in the chaotic years of the Project and in their newfound celebrity in the years to come.

The couple also had two children, named Peter and Toni. Toni, the younger child, was born in Los Alamos in a seven-room hospital that had been dubbed ‘RFD’, for ‘rural free delivery’, due to the high number of births that occurred within the Project’s first few years.

Kitty’s own fiery personality was tested by raising her two children in the unique setting of Los Alamos, before the family moved to Princeton, New Jersey, following the war.

Later Years

In the Oppenheimer security hearing in 1954, Kitty’s chequered past became an important consideration. She had been questioned and monitored by security personnel at Los Alamos, and was the most obvious link between her husband and Communism.

Both Robert and Kitty Oppenheimer affirmed their loyalty to the United States in testimony to the Atomic Energy Commission, but in the end, Oppenheimer was forced to forfeit his security clearance, effectively ending his career in government.

Robert and Kitty leaned on each other after the trial, as Robert maintained his academic life at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and from 1954, the Oppenheimer family spent a few months every year on the island of St John in the Virgin Islands.

After a decade of relative peace, Robert developed throat cancer and passed away in early 1967. Kitty held a private ceremony for her husband, and spread his ashes in the sea outside of their home in St John, an area known today as ‘Oppenheimer Beach’.

Following the death of her husband, Kitty decided to move in with long-time family friend Robert Serber, and the two planned a round-the-world sailing trip in 1972.

However, shortly after embarking on the expedition in October of that year, Kitty became seriously ill and passed away in Panama City, Panama, due to a pulmonary embolism.

Oppenheimer opens in UK cinemas on Friday 21st July.'

[investmart007]

Some see bitter Wisconsin race as next midterm barometer

New Post has been published on https://goo.gl/GCL8Bs

Some see bitter Wisconsin race as next midterm barometer

MADISON, Wis. /April 1, 2018 (AP)(STL.News)— Eric Holder came to town to campaign for the liberal candidate, and his group dumped $165,000 into the race. Joe Biden, Corey Booker and Gabby Giffords endorsed her, and more money came from a fundraiser in San Francisco.

Meanwhile, Wisconsin Republicans poured in $400,000 to support the conservative candidate, the state’s largest business group tripled that and the National Rifle Association publicly backed him.

The race drawing so much heat isn’t for Senate or even Congress. It’s for Wisconsin Supreme Court — a supposedly nonpartisan office that is the latest election to be treated as a barometer of voter attitudes heading into the fall midterms.

“As the first statewide race in the nation, this is our chance to set the tone for 2018,” read an invitation to the San Francisco fundraiser for Rebecca Dallet, the liberal-leaning Milwaukee judge.

A Dallet win “is a critical first step in proving our values can prevail in swing states across the country,” it added.

Dallet faces Michael Screnock, a county judge who was appointed by GOP Gov. Scott Walker and has received Walker’s endorsement, in Tuesday’s election.

Conservatives are trying to keep their 5-2 majority on a high court that has been a reliable ally for Walker and his legislative agenda. The court upheld Walker’s signature 2011 law that effectively ended collective bargaining for most public workers and more recently stopped a secretive probe into Walker and conservative groups over alleged illegal campaign coordination.

Democrats feel emboldened after a surprise win in January for a state Senate seat held by a Republican for 17 years in a district Donald Trump won by 14 points. Democrats hope to keep the momentum going with a Dallet win ahead of two special legislative elections this summer.

“It seems like people are looking everywhere for signs of what may happen in November,” said Douglas Keith, an attorney with the Brennan Center for Justice, which tracks spending on court races nationwide. “I have no doubt whatever the outcome of this race, that’s how people will talk about it afterward.”

Wisconsin’s Supreme Court elections have been expensive and partisan battles for more than a decade. Spending on TV ads in the race likely will end up around $4.5 million, about what was spent on the 2016 race, according to the Brennan Center.

While there’s no doubt that Democrats this year are more energized than Republicans, it’s dubious whether one election can be an accurate bellwether of what’s to come in November, said Ryan Owens, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin who heads the Tommy G. Thompson Center on Public Leadership.

The race’s predictive ability for the November midterms could be tempered by low turnout. In seven contested elections for Supreme Court since 2000, average turnout was 21.5 percent — less than half of the 50 percent average for the past four midterm elections.

Mark Graul, a Republican strategist, pointed to Supreme Court elections in 2007 and 2008 where conservative candidates won, victories that came in between huge Democratic wins in the fall 2006 and 2008 elections.

“These Supreme Court races always come down to the candidate. In general, the candidate with the better profile wins every time,” Graul said.

Dallet, 48, has run as a tough-on-crime judge, focusing on her 11 years of experience as a prosecutor followed by 10 years working as a judge in Milwaukee. She’s argued the conservative-controlled court is “broken,” and she’s criticized the justices for not adopting a recusal rule forcing them to step down from cases involving large campaign donors.

Screnock, 48, has branded Dallet a hypocrite for taking donations from attorneys arguing cases before her court in Milwaukee, something state law permits. Dallet argues those donations, which totaled about $21,000, are small in comparison to the roughly $1.3 million being spent by the Wisconsin Chamber of Commerce to help Screnock. He’s declined to promise to step aside in cases involving the chamber.

He’s also refused to promise to step aside in abortion-related cases, although he was twice arrested for blocking access to a Madison abortion clinic during his college days in the 1980s.

Screnock has said he’s devoted to the rule of law and a strict interpretation of the Constitution. He argues that his experience overseeing the finances in Ashland and running city government in Washburn and Reedsburg, together with his nearly nine years’ experience as a private practice attorney before Walker appointed him in 2015, sets him apart from Dallet.

As an attorney, Screnock defended Walker’s collective bargaining law and political boundary maps drawn by the Republican-controlled Legislature that are now subject to a U.S. Supreme Court case alleging they amount to unconstitutional partisan gerrymandering.

The winner of Tuesday’s election will be on the state court during the next round of redistricting that follows the 2020 census.

By SCOTT BAUER ,By Associated Press – published on STL.News by St. Louis Media, LLC (R.A)