Michael Eric Dyson:
The problem is you do not want to know anything different from what you think you know. Your knowledge of black life, of the hardships we face, yes, those we sometimes create, those we most often endure, don’t concern you much. You think we have been handed everything because we have fought your selfish insistence that the world, all of it — all its resources, all its riches, all its bounty, all its grace — should be yours first, and foremost, and if there’s anything left, why then we can have some, but only if we ask politely and behave gratefully.
So you demand the Supreme Court give you back what was taken from you: more space in college classrooms that you dominate; better access to jobs in fire departments and police forces that you control. All the while your resentment builds, and your slow hate gathers steam. Your whiteness has become a burden too heavy for you to carry, so you outsource it to a vile political figure who amplifies your most detestable private thoughts.
Whiteness is blindness. It is the wish not to see what it will not know.
If you do not know us, you also refuse to hear us because you do not believe what we say. You have decided that enough is enough. If the cops must kill us for no good reason, then so be it because most of us are guilty anyway. If the black person that they kill turns out to be innocent, it is an acceptable death, a sacrificial one.
Powerful piece. Well worth a NYT click.
Vox:
Conservative writers explain why they’re now more skeptical of police
Vox:
I'm a black ex-cop, and this is the real truth about race and policing
On any given day, in any police department in the nation, 15 percent of officers will do the right thing no matter what is happening. Fifteen percent of officers will abuse their authority at every opportunity. The remaining 70 percent could go either way depending on whom they are working with.
Politico:
Clinton: 'There is something wrong in our country'
She pledges $1 billion in her first budget as president toward research for police training aimed at eliminating bias in law enforcement. She also promises nationwide guidelines for use of force.
I have been heartened by some surprising positive responses from conservatives. Not Dan Patrick (somehow his comment wasn’t surprising. I mean, it’s only his state this Dallas thing happened in), and it’s obviously not unanimous. But for example:
The Hill:
Former Speaker Newt Gingrich on Friday said white Americans "don't understand being black in America" as he reflected on a series of shootings across the nation this week.
“It took me a long time and a number of people talking to me over the years to begin to get a sense of this: If you are a normal, white American, the truth is you don’t understand being black in America and you instinctively underestimate the level of discrimination and the level of additional risk," Gingrich said.
Do not assume that [x] event means good news for Donald Trump. So far, every untoward event has, if anything, helped Hillary Clinton appear more presidential. That’s why there’s been some crude attempts to blame Hillary from his camp. They know it’s a vulnerability. The divisiveness of Trump’s politics brought to a head is horrifying to most people and they need to shift the topic.
Bloomberg:
Obama administration officials said the tragedy was heightened because Dallas has worked aggressively to improve relations between its police and minorities and to address concerns about racial disparities within the criminal justice system. The attack threatened to inflame debate over relations between police and minority communities, as well as partisan disputes over Obama’s response to the deaths of unarmed black civilians at the hands of law enforcement.
The Dallas department is “a role model for community policing,” Jerry Abramson, director of intergovernmental affairs at the White House, said on Twitter on Friday.
Jonathan Bernstein:
First, there’s a lack of competence…
A second explanation for the Republicans’ behavior is the conservatives’ closed-information loop. Within the loop, Hillary Clinton is obviously a crook, and an indictment has been in the offing for more than 20 years…
The third factor, and the most important one, may have less to do with being trapped within that loop than it does with Republican pandering to those who get most of their information from conservative media. So even if Republicans on the Oversight Committee realized that what they were doing wasn’t the best way to hurt Clinton, they had strong incentives to behave that way anyway, because they are terrified of not appearing to be tough enough on her before the party’s most committed voters in their districts.
We’ve seen this over and over. The goal for Republican politicians isn’t to carry out conservative policy, or even to win advantages for the party over the Democratic opposition. It’s to make sure there is as little space as possible between themselves and other conservatives, to head off primary challenges within the party.
Alex Seitz-Wald:
The hearing also risks politicizing Clinton's emails, which should be a clear winner for the GOP, by turning them into another Benghazi-like issue — a political controversy that only hardcore partisans care much about.
In the more than two decades Clinton has spent in Washington, the same story has repeated itself over and over again: Hillary Clinton or her husband, former president Bill Clinton, push the law just short of the breaking the point, only to be bailed out by Republican overreach and self-sabotage.
From Dan Burton, who once chaired the same committee that grilled Comey Friday, shooting a pumpkin (or melon) to make a point on Vince Foster's death in the 1990s, to House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy revealing that the Select Committee on Benghazi was created to damage Clinton last year, Republicans seem to walk into their own trap every time.
Brian Beutler:
If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting different results, then Republicans lost their minds chasing the Clintons down rabbit holes years ago.
They spent the 1990s turning every gnat fart in the Clinton White House into a six-part inquiry, and at the end of it, Bill left office historically popular. They’ve spent the better part of the 2010s doing the same thing to Hillary, and though she is emphatically not historically popular, Republicans have, in the process, tended to humiliate themselves and abet Donald Trump—the one person politically incorrect enough to call her crooked and accuse her of playing the woman card, at last, at last.
What we witnessed Thursday was part of a pattern that goes back more than 20 years. A Clinton does something—in some cases innocuous, in this case worthy of criticism—and her political nemeses respond completely out of proportion. They’ve invested so heavily in the fantasy that she’s one email or utterance away from complete self-destruction that they can’t bring themselves to accept anything less than the highest return. A sunk cost fallacy of power politics and partisan score-settling.
The Comey and Benghazi hearings were a sight to behold. If you missed them, prosecuting the case why Clinton must be in jail (as your raison d’etre) is a far cry from objective fact-finding. To the public, it looks like partisan witch-hunting complete with Republican melt-down when it doesn’t go their way. That’s because that’s what it is.
Sam Stein:
Why Donald Trump’s Defense Of His Star Of David Tweet Is Truly Disturbing
He must know that racists and anti-Semites are watching his every move — but he doesn’t seem to care.
Ned Resnikoff:
Given the composition of Donald Trump's fan base, the Republican National Convention promises to be awfully awkward. On the one hand, Trump's right-wing nationalist message has roused white supremacist groups previously confined to the margins of polite society. On the other hand, some of Trump's loudest advocates and closest advisers are Jewish.
The latter category includes his son-in-law, New York Observer publisher Jared Kushner, who now finds himself in an uncomfortable position. After Jewish Observer employee Dana Schwartz publicly accused Kushner of "giving [Trump's] most hateful supporters tacit approval," the publisher defended his father-in-law with a tepid variation on the old "he doesn't have a racist bone in his body" defense.
"My father-in-law is not an anti-Semite," Kushner wrote in an op-ed at theObserver. "It's that simple, really. Donald Trump is not anti-Semitic and he's not a racist."
This may well be true. But it's still an acrobatic feat of point-missing.
Julie Roginsky:
These are troubling times in our country, with strains of bigotry that many of us had hoped were buried with the passing of the 20th century.
Earlier this week, I debated Trump spokeswoman Katrina Pierson on "The Kelly File" about the controversy generated by a tweet her campaign had sent out of Hillary Clinton’s face next to a six-pointed star atop a pile of cash.
The Trump campaign insists that the six-pointed star represents a sheriff's badge. But for those of us familiar with 20th century anti-Semitic tropes, this image was reminiscent of the bigotry Jews had experienced in Europe, and which they continue to experience there again today.
For my Jewish friends who saw the tweet over the weekend, the image brought immediate recoil. Even those whose families had lived here for generations experienced a visceral reaction when seeing the image of what they construed to be a Star of David atop a pile of cash.
As soon as I left the studio Tuesday night, my Twitter feed began to explode. Many of the comments were from Trump supporters who felt that his tweet was innocent and not emblematic of any bigoted sentiment. Perhaps – but in that case, the least we could hope for is a presidential candidate who has a modicum of historical knowledge and would anticipate the response this imagery would evoke from those who are familiar with the history of anti-Semitism.
Other messages were less political in nature. One told me that if Trump were really racist, he would be burning crosses outside my house. Another called me a “kike” – a term I hadn’t heard directed at me since leaving the Soviet Union almost forty years ago. Another threatened to put a bullet through my “Jew spine.”
Anti-Semitism was never gone. It was just hiding. A reminder of what “anti-PC” really means.
Pew has a ton of data to peruse (Clinton +9):
The 2016 campaign has attracted a high level of interest from voters. Several key measures of voter attention and engagement are currently as high – or higher – than at any point over the last two decades.
However, there is no difference between white (75%) and black (74%) voters in the share who say that it really matters who wins the election; 67% of Hispanic voters say the outcome of the election really matters.
And for a deep dive, look at June ‘08 vs June ‘12 vs June ‘16.
Philip Bump:
New data from the Pew Research Center offers a neat little bookend for our analysis Thursday morning showing that Hillary Clinton was outperforming Donald Trump in nearly every swing state, especially compared with how President Obama was doing against Mitt Romney at this point in 2012. The Pew data offers a different bit of detail, breaking down how a wide variety of demographic groups — age, geography, ideology, education — felt about the candidates four years ago and how they feel about them today.
Matt McDermott of Whitman Insight Strategies picked out the most remarkable shift over that time period. White women with college degrees were about evenly split between Romney and Obama in June 2012, according to Pew's numbers. Now, Clinton leads Trump by 31 points.
Ed Kilgore:
Pew has a very good reputation in the polling world. But an even better one belongs to the Field Organization, which polls California. And Field's first post-primary survey of the Golden State has some even worse news for Trump than he's getting from national polls.
Clinton leads Trump by a 75-12 margin among California Latinos. In a three-way race with Johnson included, Trump falls into single digits among Latinos: 71-9-5. That's within shouting distance of Clinton's 80-5-4 performance among African-Americans.
Now, you may think: This is California, a place where Republicans have alienated Latinos for years, and it's not a seriously contested state, either. The latter point is true (though Trump has made noise about contesting California), but also irrelevant at this early point in the general-election campaign. As for the former point, California Latino voters have actually behaved pretty much like Latino voters nationally in recent presidential elections. In 2012, Romney took 27 percent of the California Latino vote, exactly his national percentage, even though Obama was annihilating him in the California electorate as a whole by a 60-37 margin. So Trump winning less than half of Romney's share of the Latino vote there in the most authoritative poll around could be a very bad sign, even if you don't hear about it from Dick Morris.
Latino USA:
Latest Latino Voter National Tracking Poll: Clinton 80%, Trump 13%
Guardian:
King Philip II of Spain, the dominant ruler of 16th-century Europe, sent thearmada to its defeat, lost the Spanish Netherlands to the Dutch and spent large parts of his reign persecuting heretics. Yet it was said of him that “no experience of the failure of his policy could shake his belief in its essential excellence”.
Listening to Tony Blair on Iraq this week, one heard the same undeflected certainty in defiance of the facts. Say what you will about Blair, but he is at least consistent. He gave essentially the same defence of the invasion of Iraq this week as the one he gave to MPs and the public 13 years ago. But at its heart, just as with Philip II, was the same political flaw: the obdurate belief of a leader that the virtue of the policy, as he saw it, transcended its all too evident failure.
The author of this piece was flagged by Dan Balz as being generally favorable to Blair in the past, so it’s especially notable for its criticism.
Modern Healthcare on the medical folks who treat the gunshot injuries. It’s the other side of this Meteor Blades piece on the injuries, and a good read:
The financial toll of these types of gun cases weighs heavily on the healthcare system. Just the hospital costs of firearm assault injuries totaled $630 million in 2010, theUrban Institute estimates. Gun-related deaths and injuries cost $52 billion in 2013 when factoring in lifetime medical and work-loss costs, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Those who make it out alive may need to receive nutrition through an IV for a year or more. Others need follow-up operations or are prescribed pain medication for the rest of their lives. And those are just the costly physical problems.
What about people who can’t easily return to the hospital for their follow-up visits? What about their jobs and income? What happens to them psychologically when they go back into the neighborhood that incubated the problem?
So Republicans, if you can’t do gun legislation because it’s the right thing to do, do it because it saves money.