| GOP Congressman Justin Amash's Impeachment Call Boosts Pressure on Pelosi
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 Kevin Lamarque/Reuters Republican congressman Justin Amash's support for impeachment proceedings against President Trump ratchets up the pressure on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to call for the same. Citing "multiple examples of conduct satisfying all the elements of obstruction of justice" uncovered in the Mueller report, the iconoclastic Michigan lawmaker spared no one in a lengthy Twitter thread on Saturday—calling out Trump, Attorney General William Barr, and other lawmakers he says put partisanship above their own allegiance to the Constitution. Many were quick to wonder aloud why it was a Republican lawmaker making the case for impeachment rather than top Democrat Pelosi, who has called Trump "unfit" for the presidency but come out against impeachment, saying it'd be too "divisive" for the country. Read more at The Daily Beast.
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| Is This the Future of Aquariums?
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 Frederic J. Brown/Getty Some of my fondest memories as a child were family trips from home in Rhode Island down to Mystic Aquarium in Connecticut. A fan of fantasy fiction, beluga whales always seemed to be more out of a fairy tale than real life. Over the years, I've made my way to world-class aquariums in Osaka, Baltimore, Monterey, Atlanta, and Medellin. And while I often feel conflicted about the creatures trapped behind the glass, I also always appreciate the educational value that comes along with the wonder they inspire. That love of aquariums is why I was excited to experience the massive multi-million dollar expansion of the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, California, which will open to the public on May 24, 2019. Promising to be a game-changer in how aquariums operate in an era in which aquatic life around the planet is under assault, the new wing of this already-popular destination seeks to use technology, not tanks filled with exotic creatures, to inspire. It's "not about bigger tanks ...
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| America's Schools Are War Zones Now
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 Joe Raedle/Getty When I was growing up, my father believed in preparing his children for possible disasters, so that if one occurred, we wouldn't have to think what to do—we'd already know. He turned it into a sort of game, a what-would-you-do-if game. "What would you do if there were a fire in your bedroom, right at the door?" he asked me one day. Having seen way too much unrealistic television, I said I'd put my arm in front of my face and run through the flames. Bluntly, he told me I'd be dead. My second choice was to break out the window and climb out into the yard. "Break it with what?" he asked. "A chair," I answered. Nope – I'd be cut by the jagged shards of glass. Read more at The Daily Beast.
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| 'Detour' Still Takes the Fast Lane to the Dark Side of Life
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 PRC Pictures The Film on the Cutting Room Floor 'They are literature's cold cases, the Missing and Presumed Dead. They are the unlucky novels and stories that inspired movies so successful that they eclipsed the originals almost completely. Some books weather a subsequent movie's success. Gone With the Wind survives as a classic film and a classic novel. But how many people know that before it was a movie, The Birds was an extraordinary novella by Daphne Du Maurier, or that Forrest Gump is based on the novel Forrest Gump? Good fiction deserves a better fate. By way of a modest corrective, this series seeks out and showcases those obscured, forgotten novels and stories that gave their lives that movies might live, stories that were always at least as good as the well-known films they inspired and in more than a few instances, a lot better. Read more at The Daily Beast.
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| The Nazis Called Kurt Schwitters a 'Degenerate' Artist. His 'Merzbau' Was a Living Work of Art.
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 Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/Getty It was the work of a lifetime, an evolving masterpiece created over 10 years. One can imagine the day in the early 1920s when German artist Kurt Schwitters, maybe while taking a break from crafting his distinctive collages and sculptural assemblages, looked around his home and realized he was living in the biggest canvas of all. And so the work he would dedicate the rest of his life to, the 'Merzbau,' began. Then with the high-pierced whistle of an Allied bomb in 1943, his Hanover masterpiece-cum-family home was reduced to rubble. Read more at The Daily Beast.
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| James Madison Played Politics and Gave Us the 2nd Amendment
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 Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Getty/WikiCommons In 2018, President Donald Trump addressed the NRA's annual conference for the second time as a sitting president. He was only the second sitting president to do so. In 1983, then President Ronald Reagan became the first. Both Reagan and Trump had at one time supported a ban on military-style assault weapons, a completely rational policy that the gun lobby views as a gun grab. Reagan came out for the reform ten years after he addressed the NRA; Trump endorsed it before he entered national politics. Reagan delivered his remarks with trademark passion and conviction; Trump rattled off a list of platitudes before launching into a recitation of his political conquests. But both men delivered a similar message 35 years apart, and both distorted history. Read more at The Daily Beast.
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| SNL Season 44 Finale: Alec Baldwin's Trump and Robert De Niro's Mueller Reunite for Epic Queen Duet
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 NBC He hadn't been seen on the show for nearly two months, but Alec Baldwin's Donald Trump just had to show up to the Saturday Night Live season finale this week. Speaking from his Oval Office set, President Trump boasted about his many achievements and predicted that he's on "cruise control to a second term and there's nothing the Democrats in Congress can do about it." And with that, he broke into a full-on parody of Queen's "Don't Stop Me Now" with Melania Trump (Cecily Strong), Mike Pence (Beck Bennett), Sarah Huckabee Sanders (Aidy Bryant), Kanye West (Chris Redd) and more. Read more at The Daily Beast. Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast here
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