Terrence Heath at the OurFuture blog explores the influence of "structural racism" in the Freddie Gray murder. Folks who think structural racism doesn't exist, well, first off, have never talked to a real estate agent, and second off, don't know their history -- not just the part where a modern-day police sergeant tells a reluctant subordinate to "make up" a reason to stop a few black men, but the part where our government, all the way back in 1937, literally redlined which neighborhoods would get federal subsidies and which wouldn't, and guess which ones didn't. (Spoiler alert: those would be the neighborhoods with residents like Cab Calloway, Thurgood Marshall, and Billie Holliday.)
Weren't we worrying, not too long ago, that Hillary Clinton's choice of transition team head would be telling-and-not-in-a-good-way? Well, now we're here, with the news that former Senator and Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar will head the Clinton transition team. Ken Salazar is not exactly Bernie Sanders, as you know -- he was pretty good at keeping the uranium miners out of the Grand Canyon, but otherwise he's a pro-fracking, pro-Keystone "free" trader, and he'll likely steer a Clinton Administration (if there is one, of course!) toward folks like himself. Now, that doesn't mean we just throw our hands up and go home -- it means we understand the obstacles we must hurdle. This is one of them. And our duty is unchanged.
The incomparable Jim Naureckas at FAIR catches the New York Times extolling "American power" in training Honduran cops to help reduce violence -- without mentioning that you have all this violence in Honduras in the first place because a right-wing regime overthrew a democratically-elected (but inconveniently liberal) President back in 2009 while our State Department got all Hamlet about the precise definition of "coup." When the Honduran government is the biggest murderer in Honduras, it's hard not to achieve a murder reduction at some point -- "ah, listen, fellas, could you maybe stack the bodies in the soccer field two-deep this month instead of three-deep? Bad press, you know? K thanks bye" -- and I can't help but think that the Times has come out with this article to answer the agitation by good Americans against our government's continued funding of Honduran police.
Uh oh: former Indiana Senator/current Senate candidate Evan Bayh now faces questions about his residency in Indiana, after CNN reports that he's usually used his Washington, D.C. address to buy homes, donate to candidates, and get fishing licenses. Residency issues felled Richard Lugar in 2012 after 36 years in the Senate, and though Mr. Lugar's issues were more pronounced, Mr. Lugar was also more popular -- but then Mr. Bayh has been sitting on over $10 million in campaign funds for six years. I still wish an actual populist, rather than a fake "moderate," would prove that a liberal populist is exactly the fellow who can win in a red state like Indiana. You know, like Byron Dorgan did in North Dakota for three terms.
Finally, you might have heard that Michael Moore told Bill Maher a few weeks back that he thought Donald Trump would win the Presidency, but after the last few, ah, difficult weeks Mr. Moore now believes Mr. Trump doesn't really want to be President and may now be actively sabotaging his campaign. He says it was all a negotiating ploy to extract more money from NBC, home of The Apprentice, and sadly that's far from implausible. He even says Mr. Trump would rather drop out than be a "loser," but that ship has pretty much sailed. Of course I still fear that Mr. Trump will win, because candidates who can present themselves as "outsiders" will always have an advantage over candidates who can't.
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