Jessica Pishko at The Nation asks: "Is Angela Corey the Cruelest Prosecutor in America?" You may know her as the Florida prosecutor who charged 12-year-old Cristian Fernandez with murdering his two-year-old brother, or as the prosecutor who tried to put Marissa Alexander in jail after she fired a gun to scare her abusive husband (no "Stand Your Ground" law for her!), or as the prosecutor who somehow didn't charge Trayvon Martin's killer with manslaughter. But you may not know that her county, Duval County, puts a crapload of people in jail, a lot of them children -- this, while crime falls nationwide! -- or that her nominal counterpart as Public Defender, Matt Shirk, has (until recently) also left behind a trail of incompetence and corruption.
The Obama Administration begins an "aggressive push" to get the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" across the finish line. And, of course, despite boasting that he has the "better argument," he mischaracterizes his opponents as isolationists once again. No one opposes trading with other nations, but most Americans oppose "free" trade deals that outsource our jobs and let "investor-state tribunals" nullify our laws. Why does living in a "global economy" demand that we sacrifice the rule of law to corporations? And it sure would be nice if Politico didn't carry water for Mr. Obama by calling "free" traders "trade supporters" or entire states "trade-dependent," as if rhetorical hostage-taking were OK so long as it's not so obvious.
An Education Trust report finds that the top 138 private colleges -- which, together, control about 75 percent of higher education endowments -- "have mostly chosen not to prioritize educating students from low-income families." Well, they call them "hedge funds with colleges attached" for a reason. Colleges complain that a lot of their endowment money comes with restrictions, but (as the Education Trust suggests) it's not like it doesn't take two to tango there. So we can call this another data point suggesting that enabling absurd wealth does not "free" the rich to be super-generous -- if anything, it traps them in a cycle of greed.
A Breitbart poll -- promising to unskew mainstream polling showing Hillary Clinton ahead of Donald Trump in the Presidential race -- finds Hillary Clinton ahead of Donald Trump in the Presidential race. But liberals shouldn't gloat about that -- surely Breitbart's playing a long game here, and at the very least they're playing a long enough game that they'll put out a bunch of polls solidly agreeing with the mainstream, and then put out a bunch of polls "showing" movement toward Trump or even outright Trump leads, thus lending "data" to the theory that the whole thing was "rigged" if Mr. Trump loses. I suspect they're playing a longer game, of course: they're certainly trying to get their street cred in advance of what should be a historically brutal 2018 midterm for Democrats.
Finally, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani actually said that "before Obama came along, we didn't have any successful radical Islamic terrorist attack in the US" and that "(t)hey all started when Clinton and Obama came into office." It's not the first time he's done this, but I'm still scratching my head trying to figure out what the Mayor of 9.11 could possibly have meant. Does he think 9.11 wasn't a plot of "radical Islamic terrorists"? Were they just guys who flew planes into buildings and killed 3,000 people? Or does he deem the 9.11 attack somehow "unsuccessful"? Perhaps people like Rudy Giuliani just say awful things because the only alternative would be to confess your spiritual corruption before the world.
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