Politics

The senior Senator from Louisiana talks hardball politics and Keystone XL at a campaign stop in New Orleans

Mary Landrieu did not look like a politician on the brink of extinction as she arrived at the National World War II Museum’s crowded Veterans Day get-together in her hometown of New Orleans on Tuesday. With the hulks of retired warplanes suspended overhead, the senior Senator from Louisiana made her way toward the stage through a sea of smiles, handshakes and hugs from old friends. She stopped for a chat with the New Orleans Maritime Marine Academy Band before taking a seat on stage next to the mayor, who is also her little brother.

But as the Senate Democrats’ final flag-bearer in the Deep South, Landrieu is every bit the last of an endangered political species. In a three-way contest on Election Day earlier this month, she finished first with 42% compared to 40% for Republican Rep. Bill Cassidy and 14% for Tea Party favorite Rob Maness. Landrieu and Cassidy now go head-to-head in a runoff Dec. 6, and many of Maness’ supporters are expected to back her Republican opponent.

Landrieu has been all but abandoned by the national Democratic Party ahead of the runoff. Cassidy and his supporters have paid for 96% of the ads aired since the runoff began, while the national Democratic campaigns have pulled virtually all of their money out of the race.

But Landrieu is putting a brave face on it. Democrats throughout the South took an Election Day beating in part because voters saw the midterms as a referendum on President Obama, Landrieu says. With the GOP soon to be in control of the Senate, the Republican majority is no longer at stake and Landrieu hopes that fact will give her space to focus the race back on Louisiana. “We have the race that we want!” she declared after results came in election night.

The magic number for Landrieu to win that race is “30″, say campaign aides. Black voters, a solidly Democratic constituency, must comprise 30% of the electorate and she’s got to win 30% of white votes, the aides say. She has a ways to go to make those numbers. On November 4, she took just 18% of white votes—if she hopes to keep her job she’ll have to win over the rest.

To get there, Landrieu is playing up her more than 18 years as a moderate deal-maker in the Senate and her lengthy record of bringing home the proverbial bacon. Among the projects she has managed to bring to Louisiana, Landrieu reminded the crowd on Veterans Day, was the National World War II Museum in which they were all gathered.

After speeches from Landrieu, her brother Mitch the mayor, Republican Sen. David Vitter and Marine Corps Colonel Bradley Weisz (who was the only speaker all day to mention President Obama), Landrieu sat down with TIME to discuss her uphill political battle.

TIME: You mentioned after the election that this is the campaign you’ve always wanted. Why? The numbers are daunting—

Sen. Mary Landrieu: Hold on. The campaign I wanted is a campaign against Bill Cassidy. Not against the entire anger at the national government. And the first race was so much anger about gridlock in Washington, now that that race is over the Republicans have taken control of the Senate. Mitch McConnell is now going to be the Majority Leader. Barack Obama has been in some ways repudiated by the voters nationally. Not personally, but some of his policies. I think now voters here can focus on what’s best for Louisiana. So this is the race that I’ve wanted to run, between Mary Landrieu and Bill Cassidy. Running on my record against his record. And if we can get voters to focus on that I’m confident of a victory.

In recent days you’ve been highlighting things like the gender gap, the minimum wage, issues that particularly affect women.

OK, yes but what you need to be corrected on is that I’ve been highlighting those issues since the first day of the campaign. You would write it wrong. This is not a recent switch. I’ve been talking about minimum wage, pay equity, Lilly Ledbetter, since the first day of this campaign because economic issues are really at the heart of what Louisiana voters want to focus on. Oil and gas jobs, worker training, the skills gap, fair wages and benefits. I’ve talked about that since the first day of the campaign.

Now, a lot of that’s been drowned out by my opponent who won’t discuss that in any way, shape or form. All he wants to talk about is the President. And, as I’ve said, I’ve now worked with three presidents, six governors and four majority leaders. The race that I want to run is a race about: Has Mary Landrieu delivered for Louisiana? And what has she done? And what kind of teams has she built? What kind of record does she have versus Bill Cassidy. If I can get that race, we will win. I will win.

With Republicans in control of the Senate is Keystone XL going to go through?

That’s a good question. We’re actually very close to getting Keystone passed right now. I’ve been working very hard on a stand alone vote on Keystone. You might think that it’ll be easier in January but you would be jumping to a conclusion that’s not yet proven, because in order to get Keystone passed, remember, it has to be passed by the House and the same bill by the Senate and then signed into law by the President. So, if you think about getting a clean bill, like my bill, like the one I have with Hoeven, it’s a Hoeven-Landrieu bill, it has 45 Republican co-sponsors plus a few Democrats. A clean stand-alone Keystone bill could potentially pass right now.

So when you ask me is it going to be easier, I can’t say yes because in January the Republicans may put a bill together with Keystone and let’s say five other things. See that? And then it passes the House and then it fails in the Senate, or it passes the House, the Senate and the President vetoes it. So my answer is: it is possible right now, right now, I think, to get a clean Keystone bill passed that the President to the United States could actually sign.

You were chatting with the kids in the Marine band over there. What were you talking about?

Well, I’m a huge supporter of the creation of this school. I’ve led the fight here in Louisiana on charter schools. I’m an elected leader on public charter schools. I’ve helped to create more charter schools per capita than anywhere else in the nation. So I visit them frequently and I was just saying that I’ll be there to see them again. Their school is growing. As I said in my speech, we have two charter military schools, first in the nation, and we’re really proud of that. The Pentagon and the military are really interested in using that model all over the country for other schools.

More than a month after they were established, the city's main protest camps are still going strong

“I have never seen Hong Kong this organized, this nice, this united,” says Jamie Yai, a 34-year-old flight attendant, as he watches his two small children toddle through the city’s largest protest site in the downtown Admiralty district.

The mostly student demonstrators who have been camped out here since late September have no single leader, nor are they agreed on how long to continue their occupation of three key areas of Hong Kong in their campaign to press Beijing for freer elections. The protests haven’t been without rancor or violence, either. But one would never know that from looking at the camps.

The Admiralty camp has been named Umbrella Square by the protesters after their movement’s symbol. Though nobody is in charge, Umbrella Square and the two other tent communities run as well as anything else in this city of 7.2 million. Many of the hundreds of tents have addresses, like “2 Democracy Avenue” or “Tent #22, Occupation Zone” (to which the post office actually delivered a letter). Slippers are tidily lined up beside door flaps. In the evenings, protesters pass around curries and cakes to friends and strangers. Guest lecturers, piped over a speaker system, talk about politics or whatever else they feel like.

Protesters need not bring their own residences. Pat, a graphic designer who declined to give her last name, opens registration at 8:30 p.m. each night for 100 tents in a part of Umbrella Square called the Freedom Quarter. The tents are run like a hotel—minus the maids. Checkout is at noon, and cleanliness is a must. The Freedom Quarter is consistently full on weekend nights—and even then, “they’re still coming,” Pat says.

Longer-term residents have spontaneously taken on different roles: recycling bottles and cans, tutoring high school students for the upcoming college-entrance exam or building the study areas and other amenities that are making this village a model of the sort of autonomous society that Beijing says Hong Kong is not yet ready for.

“I haven’t done this before,” says Cheng, 48, a cybercafé owner who gave just his surname, as he hammered and sawed wooden pallets that will be used to keep sleeping mats off the wet road. “But it needs doing. I just do it.”

Supply stations are overflowing with cookies and bananas. In the Organic Guerrilla Garden of Plurality, pro-democracy gardeners are growing kale and tomatoes under the watch of an alien scarecrow with alarmingly long toes. And art abounds. Leung Chun-ying, Hong Kong’s unpopular leader, has been imagined in posters as everything from a turtle to a vampire. The Umbrella Man statue—a large wooden sculpture of a figure holding an umbrella aloft—is an Instagram fixture.

Still, no one knows how much longer the camps will last. Any day now, the police are expected to enforce court injunctions to clear part of the Admiralty site and another across Victoria Harbour in the blue collar Mong Kok district, where retailer Wing So, 20, sums up the feelings of many impatient business operators. “The bus can’t come here, we can’t sell shoes,” she says, looking wearily at the tent village across from her footwear boutique. “I do not like these people.”

Government talks have stalled and the Hong Kong Federation of Students, which sometimes takes a de facto leadership role, cannot announce a next step for the street occupations because it does not have a real mandate. (Its one attempt to canvas the wishes of those camped out in Umbrella Square collapsed in disagreement over methodology and ended with federation leaders bowing to protesters in apology.) This is the political quandary in which the leaderless demonstrators now find themselves. Some, like Kel Lee, 23, believe “we should take the occupation to another level.” Others, says Ming Sing, professor of politics at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, will start leaving “as they feel the pinch of public opinion. The protests have become much more polarized.”

Back at Umbrella Square, flight attendant Yai is still enjoying the scene with his children. “I want them to see Hong Kong like this,” he says. “I want them to know this Hong Kong.” But the more time passes, the more disagreements arise over how long “this Hong Kong” should last or even what its aims are.

Nov. 12, 1954: Ellis Island shuts down

By the time Ellis Island closed its doors, on this day, Nov. 12, in 1954, three decades had passed since it had welcomed waves of newcomers to America.

Its active years, from 1892 to 1924, had nonetheless been so active that more than 40% of Americans can trace their ancestry back through its terracotta-ceilinged registry room, where 12 million immigrants entered the United States.

At its peak, the immigration station processed people with assembly-line efficiency, sometimes doubling its maximum daily capacity of 5,000. The scene looked less like efficiency than like chaos, however, according to a 1985 report in TIME.

“Given the confusion and the size of the mobs, it is astonishing that 80% got through within hours,” writes TIME’s Gregory Jaynes. “They were jostled, pulled, pushed and misunderstood. There is the story of the Jew who cried out ‘Shoyn fargessen!’ — already forgotten — only to have his name set down upon his documents as Sean Ferguson.”

After entering through the baggage hold, would-be Americans climbed a flight of stairs to Ellis Island’s Great Hall, where inspectors were waiting to assess their fitness, according to Jaynes. He adds:

They would mark them “H” for heart disease, “X” for dementia or perhaps just for looking stupid, “E” for eye problems. The immigrants were entitled to an interpreter. “Name? Where were you born? Have you ever been to the United States before? Do you have any relatives here? Where do they live? Who paid for your passage? Do you have any money? Let me see it. Do you have any skills? Do you have a job waiting for you here? Are you an anarchist? Are you a polygamist?”

By the 1920s, however, it had ceded its position as “Island of Hope” and become almost exclusively a place where unwanted immigrants were detained and processed for deportation.

The reversal began with a 1924 law that restricted immigration and required newcomers to register at overseas consulates rather than Ellis Island. This was followed by Depression-era belt-tightening that made the U.S. less welcoming to the tired, the poor and the huddled masses. By 1950, when a post-WWII policy banning anyone who had ever been affiliated with a totalitarian party excluded an estimated 90% of Germans and more than half of Italians, among others, Ellis Island had become the notorious holding area for those who tried to sneak through — so much so that Communist newspapers referred to it as a concentration camp.

The last immigrant to walk the halls of Ellis Island was Arne Peterssen, a Norwegian sailor who was detained for overstaying his shore leave. On their final day of work, the station’s civil servants cut Peterssen some slack: he was released on parole and told to catch the next boat back to Norway.

Read TIME’s 1985 take on America’s immigration history: American Scene: From Ellis Island to LAX

He was diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder, adrenal fatigue, and Addison's disease, among other ailments

Glenn Beck has revealed a shocking secret he has kept for five years: He’s battling several serious medical conditions that have wreaked havoc on his brain functioning.

The conservative pundit came clean about his health problems on his network, TheBlaze TV, on Monday night, explaining why he was slowly slipping away from the spotlight – and how he has miraculously recovered.

“I was told by doctors just this last spring … that I could no longer work the way I had been working because it was literally killing me,” he said, tearing up.

About five years ago, Beck, now 50, began “to have a string of health issues that quite honestly made me look crazy,” he said. “And quite honestly, I have felt crazy because of them.”

The right-wing media personality was plagued by vocal cord paralysis, couldn’t sleep but never felt tired and struggled with his eyesight (one symptom he did disclose publicly). He’d forget names and faces and suffered from seizures.

“We didn’t know at the time what was causing me to feel as though, out of nowhere, my hands or feet or arms or legs would feel like someone had just crushed them,” he said, “or set them on fire, or pushed broken glass through my feet.”

After countless medical tests and consultations with the country’s top doctors, Beck moved his family from New York to Texas, discovering a local rehab facility, Carrick Brain Centers. He was diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder, adrenal fatigue, and Addison’s disease, among other ailments.

But now, he seems to be back on track.

“After months of treatment and completely changing the way I eat, sleep, work and live, along with ongoing hormone treatment and intensive physical therapy, I have reversed the process,” he said. “Some of the physical scars will be with me for the rest of my life … but my brain is back online in a big way.”

This article originally appeared on People.com

“We're here because we believe that our shared future is here in Asia”

25 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a divide remains in Germany that threatens the stability of the European continent—the separation between native and non-native Germans

Twenty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a different wall has taken its place. But instead of separating East and West, this other “wall” is the partition between those who are in German society and those who are on its fringes – namely, non-Western immigrants.

Understanding the origins of this modern wall, which undermines cultural and social stability in Germany as well as in other parts of Europe, requires a look back at the past few decades.

On the one hand, Germany isn’t all that different from other European countries in grappling with growing right-wing populism, which often targets immigrants and has racist undertones. But on the other hand, it is, and in a very obvious way: No other country in Europe knows better than Germany does how racially motivated hatred can lead to violence.

That’s partly why the latest resurgence in anti-immigration and anti-Semitism is surprising, especially to outsiders. Between 2000 and 2007, the neo-Nazi terror cell National Socialist Underground (NSU) carried out a series of racist crimes, including murdering eight Turks and one Greek, all of whom were living in Germany. Thilo Sarrazin’s 2010 runaway bestseller Germany Does Itself In let the genie further out of the bottle, cautioning that immigrants have been steadily destroying German society. In September of this year, Germany’s upper house of parliament approved tighter rules for immigrants from Balkan states, which critics argue will hurt the Roma, also called “gypsies,” who still face government-sanctioned discrimination all across Europe. And this year has already seen more anti-Semitic crimes committed than in 2013, leading some commentators to dub these the worst times since the Nazi era.

So why, in a country that has long since regained respectability in the international political system by coming to terms with National Socialism’s destructive racism, is discrimination against and the exclusion of supposedly “non-German” others still so problematic?

Unsurprisingly, the answers to this question are anything but clear-cut, but they perhaps begin with what was largely poor forethought on the part of policymakers in the mid-twentieth century.

Germany didn’t expect its guest workers, chiefly Turkish laborers who were brought in for the booming post-war economy, to stay permanently. Because Germany kidded itself into believing that it’d never become a country of immigration, there was no serious attention paid to how to integrate immigrants and, eventually, their families. And after the fall of the wall, East Germans, who had lived in a regime that sought to keep contract workers and immigrants separated from civil society (despite the fact that East Germany had a professed commitment to global solidarity), were suddenly expected to have an eye to multiculturalism under an imperfect West German model. So, the government’s focus on the return readiness of its foreign laborers, coupled with the historical burden of even putting a name to racial abuses, have provided some of the necessary ingredients for racist sentiments to take root.

But on a more fundamental level, structural racism, or the normalization of cultural as well as institutional dynamics that privilege whites over people of color, is at play. This isn’t to suggest that Germany doesn’t take the issue of racism seriously; in light of how its dark past still guides and shapes its political culture, this is decidedly untrue. Laws forbid anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial, and Holocaust education is required in all German schools. But is Germany effectively confronting racism, including, in particular, day-to-day racism, both in word and in deed?

The answer is a resounding “no.”

For instance, one would be hard-pressed to chalk up the fact that the violence that was perpetrated by the NSU went unchecked for as long as it did to the incompetence of the police. Rather, the issue is a widespread but rarely discussed problem: For those who don’t fit the bill of what it means to be (or, as is more often the case, look) German, racist tendencies still abound. Indeed, it was an undercurrent of racism against the non-white victims that blinded the police, who believed that the victims were probably criminals themselves, to a lack of evidence for their faulty logic. As for the perpetrators, the police stated in a report that “against the background that the killing of people is a strict taboo in our culture, you can assume that, with regard to their behavioral patterns, the perpetrators must have been socialized far from our local system of norms and values” and that they were likely “from eastern or southeastern Europe (non-Western European background).” It wasn’t until two members of the NSU killed themselves in a chance joint suicide pact near their German hometown of Zwickau that the police connected the dots.

Prejudice aimed at Germans who aren’t of discernable Western European descent isn’t only limited to the criminal justice system, however. Germany’s tiered school system and housing market also draw criticism for discriminating against minority groups. In short, racist assumptions, reflected in state institutions and often sustained by government officials’ lack of political will to limit racial discrimination in multiple arenas, haven’t yet been remedied, and they hardly take center stage on the national agenda – even when they produce murder sprees.

Racism doesn’t just happen on the fringes, and it isn’t merely an individual phenomenon. Even though the German government has worked for decades to own its racist history, racism doesn’t need to be overt to be systemic. Structures are perpetuated in daily culture, education, and media and fuel people to view certain groups of people as “not like us.” Germany, as Europe’s de facto hegemon, has made great strides since the fall of the Berlin Wall only 25 years ago. But only by seeing and confronting the very real problem of racism can it start creating a culture of acceptance and breaking this other wall to tiny bits.

Brandon Tensley is an M.Phil. candidate in European Politics & Society at the University of Oxford, where his research focuses on minority politics and nationalism in Europe. This piece was originally published in New America’s digital magazine, The Weekly Wonk. Sign up to get it delivered to your inbox each Thursday here, and follow @New America on Twitter.