Oh, Bakersfield. Now it’s in the Atlantic. Of course you heard about Bakersfield and Kern County here first, back in April. And even gave Bakersfield an honorary mention, back in 2014, too.) The actual reporting is going on in the Guardian, the only paper, and an English paper, that seems to honestly care about investigating…
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Why don’t anti-abortion politicians who say #BlackLivesMatter-rhetoric endangers cops take responsibility for Officer Swasey’s murder at Planned Parenthood? If anti-abortion rhetoric doesn’t have any relation to the murder of Officer Swasey and innocent women at Planned Parenthood, how could anti-cop rhetoric have any relation to people attacking cops? On the flip side, if anti-abortion rhetoric…
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Especially to everybody working today!
The video is out. Finally. After long attempts to sweep it under the rug failed. This Sun-Times editorial provides good background. It’s a bad shooting. (Though honestly I was expecting even worse, like an unarmed rationally behaving victim.) The mayor (now, at least) and the police chief have said the officer is at fault. The…
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Shouldn’t this be biggernews? This is shocking (at least to me). Sure, “all of the gunshot wounds are non-life-threatening.” OK… but… that doesn’t make it OK. I don’t get it. Do we not care just because, I don’t know, white people be crazy? Imagine the outcry had the shooters been Muslim. Or black.
Dan Baumwrites about what the Drug War was really about: In 1993, I was researching my first book, Smoke and Mirrors, which is the tale, starting in the 1968 Nixon presidential campaign, of how drugs were turned into a political weapon. I tracked down as many people as I could who had been involved in…
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There’s something that’s starting to scare me about Trump and his supporters. I mean, is it really inconceivable that he will win the Republican nomination for president? Here’s a doozy of a Tweet posted by Donald Trump: Leaving aside the racist imagery, Trump’s numbers aren’t even close to being true. Here are the (approximate, but…
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Apparently an officer in Sanford FL (pop 57,000, 30% African American) was fired for this (and quit before termination). I don’t know if he was on duty of off duty (or why it would matter). A cop with a clean record gets on stage at a concert and shouts, best I can tell, “Let the…
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My friend Annia Ciezadlo wrote this piece for the Washington Post. How come when innocent Parisians were killed by terrorists, everybody shed a tear? (as they should) But when innocent Beirutis get killed by terrorists, they’re described as living in an “Hezbollah stronghold.” If you’re too lazy to click though, here’s a chunk of it:…
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Another good piece by Leon Neyfakh at Slate.com. This one on the “Ferguson Effect.”