Setting a precedent, no matter how carefully considered, always reveals unintended consequences.

Or, we are meant to believe that is true.

The writer in me wants to believe that FBI Director James Comey is way smarter than people want to believe and that he is playing a very deep, deep game. Here’s my tin-hat conspiracy take: Comey wanted to fry the bastards who nearly pushed the United States over a financial cliff and ruined the lives of tens of millions of American lives, but couldn’t, for whatever reasons. So, Comey figured out how to use the Hillary Clinton emails—essentially a non-crime that hurt no one—to crack a legal door that Senator Elizabeth Warren (maybe with Comey’s direct assistance, maybe not, Warren is that smart) could drive a bus through. Just saying.

David Dayen, writing in Chatty FBI Director to Explain Why DOJ Didn’t Prosecute Banksters for The Intercept offers a much more sane and reasonable examination:

On Thursday, Warren released two highly provocative letters demanding some explanations. One is to DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz, requesting a review of how federal law enforcement managed to whiff on all 11 substantive criminal referrals submitted by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, a panel set up to examine the causes of the 2008 meltdown.

The other is to FBI Director James Comey, asking him to release all FBI investigations and deliberations related to those referrals. The FBI typically doesn’t release investigative details about cases that DOJ chooses not to pursue, but Warren pointed out that in releasing information about presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server in July, he had pretty much shattered that precedent, and set a new one.

“You explained these actions by noting your view that ‘the American people deserve those details in a case of intense public interest,’” Warren wrote to Comey. “If Secretary Clinton’s email server was of sufficient ‘interest’ to establish a new FBI standard of transparency, then surely the criminal prosecution of those responsible for the 2008 financial crisis should be subject to the same level of transparency.”

In other words, if Comey can spend hours relating FBI decision-making about State Department emails, he can do the same for the activity that made millions jobless and homeless.

Hearings, possibly on the level of Watergate, I’m sure are to follow.

Brunswick football player accused of making
racist remarks promoted to team captain?

Denise Zarrella, a reporter at television station WOIO in Cleveland posts:

Brunswick City Schools Superintendent Mike Mayell says he won’t be saying anything more right now about claims of racist remarks and threats being made against Brunswick High School Senior and football player, Rodney Axson, Jr.

Police said they were at the high school today interviewing students about the racially offensive remarks and a threat of lynching made towards Axson after he said, he told his fellow teammates not to use the “n” word in the locker room before a Sept. 2 game.

Axson then kneeled in protest during the National Anthem.

“Once he took the knee, he had a lot of backlash from it, to the point where we had messages sent to us for his lynching, for others calling him an ignorant “n.” He’s doing things to make the black race look worse than what they are,” said Rodney Axson Sr., during a press conference outside the Police Department on Monday.

Rodney Axson Jr.’s father said his son has been attending school and playing football while the allegations are being investigated, but the elder Axson says, it’s hard, because one of the accused has since been promoted to team captain.

“One of the kids that was involved in this or dropped the “n” word. That happened on Thursday. They played on Friday. The kid that was involved in it still played in the game and was promoted to team captain,” added Axson Sr.

So, a white high school football player calls members of an opposing team niggers and he gets promoted to team captain. Please tell me I have that wrong.

So, I finished reading Jesse Ball’s latest—How To Set A Fire And Why—this morning. I had ordered the book from my local library after reading Aditi Sriram review in The Atlantic and I’ll leave that piece to paint the broader brush, but two passages, both late in the book, stayed with me.

The first comes on page 246 when the narrator muses:

From where I sat I could see the whole high school building opposite. Different scenes were framed in all the windows, and along the arterial of the front drive, cars came and went. The whole thing was a vulgar facsimile of something useful, but a false version, one that does no good. Imagine if someone would show you a beehive that doesn’t make honey. What’s the point of it, you say? Oh, it’s just to keep the bees busy. We love it when they learn to like what’s given them. That’s what the voice would say if it decided to reveal itself to you. But usual it keeps quiet.

A dozen pages later Ball uses the narrator to capture why the story, the book I’m holding, exists:

A person writes down what has happened in order to know it. Then a person can find the way forward.

As insightful as the first passage is, these two sentences are much more so. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why we resist writing. Maybe we can’t bear knowing and prefer to leave the past out in a cloud somewhere, and this is why we’re stuck in that cloud.

Sometimes the wealthy and privileged have to take an action to shine a bright light on those who aren’t. If there had not been a Colin Kaepernick, there might not have been a Rodney Axson and an important conversation might have died before a syllable escaped our collective lips.

I live in the greatest country in the world. For all that greatness, however, my country is still imperfect, deeply flawed with tremendous potential to grow. Growth never happens unless we can see where there is room for growth. Colin Kaepernick has helped us to see that and imagine what we might do.

Lindy West, writing in Colin Kaepernick’s anthem protest is right: blanket rah-rah patriotism means nothing for The Guardian, explains”

The Kaepernick conflict illuminates a cleft in America’s self-image that has grown especially deep since September 2001. In one camp are the flag-waving jersey-burners who believe that “patriotism” means unconditional, unconsidered cheerleading for anything “American” (ie, anything that enforces the white, traditionalist status quo — Donald Trump’s “great” America of yore), while tarring any dissent as “un-American”. This version of patriotism is more a sport than a political philosophy: root for the home team, even if we’re cheating.

The rest of us believe that our country is a collective that we have a duty to shape; that patriotism is earned, not owed; that if our nation is going to demand worship and supplication from its inhabitants, it needs to fulfil its mandate to protect and care for all of them. If you love something, you want it to be better, and you work for it to be better. Patriotism doesn’t preclude protest; it demands it. “I love America,” Kaepernick said. “I love people. That’s why I’m doing this. I want to help make America better.”

I love so much about America. It’s my home. It’s beautiful and wild, and I don’t want to live anywhere else. I am proud to have roots in a place that, at least on paper (however spectacularly we may fail), holds sacred the balance of personal freedom and social equality.

There’s a particular exuberance to the people here – an audacity. At our best we are outlandish and daring and optimistic and guileless and absurd. We are fun. I love that.

But at our worst we’re murderous and proud, incurious and spiteful. We tell marginalised people to sit down (unless that slave guy’s special song is playing) and wait for equality. We insist their oppression is their fault because they refuse to chase the perpetually shifting goalposts of the “right” way to protest—ie, in any way that never disrupts or disturbs any white people whatsoever; ie, in any way that is actually effective; ie, in any way at all. We threaten Kaepernick’s career in retaliation for his dissent, as though it’s reasonable to expect black people to choose between their dreams and their humanity. Our citizens hang Hillary Clinton in effigy for not knowing her place, howl for the mass deportation of Muslims, demand a wall to keep out immigrants, insist to this day that Barack Obama isn’t a “real” American, and do it all without shame on stolen land.

How could we feel pride in any of that?

To steal a sentiment from Winston Churchill: The United States of America is the worst nation on Earth, except for all the others.

We can fix that.

Last time I wrote here I reported on a document that noted Cuyahoga County was more than $1 billion in debt ($1,082,395,000). ¶That’s a lot of money. A scary figure. ¶The Plain Dealer followed quickly with the same story, based on William Tater’s Community Solutions report on the County debt. ¶But it got short shrift coverage. ¶In the old days such a large figure would have been shocking news. The story would have rated an alarming banner headline. These days only sports seem to merit that kind of attention.

Taxes, which the PD almost automatically supports, don’t merit too much close attention. The PD follows the Greater Cleveland Partnership almost religiously. Chris Quinn, vice president of content at the PD, noted recently on a radio program that he attended the GCP’s annual meet up. Hobnobbing with the big boys.

Now it is time to report on some of the spending causing these daunting debt figures and tax income that has already or will be required to be collected to meet those bonded debts.

The quarter percent sales tax hike since January 2015 has brought in $36.2 million to August this year from county taxpayers. In 2015 the tax raised $51,434,292. That’s some $87 million total thus far.

Those pennies at the grocer’s add up.

Total expenses and debt service for both years was $81 million.

Debt service on the convention center and med mart totaled $32.1 million. Debt service on the new hotel was $3.7 million, starting only in March of this year. It will Continue Reading »

So, where are the fans tearing up their season tickets or using their official NFL jerseys to clean their cars in protest over Colin Kaepernick’s taking a knee? Where are the true lovers of the game demanding that anyone daring to protest at a gawd-damned American tradition be arrested for disrespecting the Star Spangled Banner like the Constitution says they should be?

I’ll tell you where they are. They’re creeping back into the shadows where they can piss and moan anonymously because they’ve looked around and realized they’re a minority and we all know how minorities get treated in these United States of America.

Guardian sport reports in Colin Kaepernick continues anthem protest and is joined by opponents:

Colin Kaepernick finds himself a less isolated figure these days. A few weeks after deciding to sit out the national anthem during the pre-season, the San Francisco 49ers quarterback made his protest against racial oppression in the United States at a regular season game for the first time.

Kaepernick was joined by team-mates Eric Reid, Antoine Bethea and Eli Harold. Kaepernick and Reid knelt while Bethea and Harold raised their fists, as did two of their opponents, the Los Angeles Rams’ Robert Quinn and Kenny Britt. The 49ers went on to shut out the Rams in a 28-0 victory.

A number of players knelt or held up their fists during Sunday’s games on NFL opening weekend and while there is a risk the message behind the protests may get lost as viewers become accustomed to them, Kaepernick gained valuable publicity on the nationally televised Monday Night Football.

Kaepernick lost his starting place last season, and is now back-up to Blaine Gabbert, but that hasn’t stopped his jersey becoming a top seller. He has said he will donate his cut of profits from the sales to community projects, along with an additional $1m.

The 49ers chief executive, Jed York, told ESPN on Monday that he supported Kaepernick. “I’d just say that human rights is a philosophy that everybody should hold dear,” York said. “It’s not easy to make a stand and to do something that’s not popular that’s everybody and I think that’s what Colin has done but I think he’s done it in a respectful way. He’s trying to bring a voice to people that he doesn’t feel have one and I think we want to do the same thing and try to help.

“I’m not going to tell the guys what to do,” York added. “I’m not going to get into that. That’s not my place. The locker room will take care of itself. I think even with this when everybody wants to talk about, is this a distraction, what’s going on, it’s been something that I think has been an issue that most people haven’t discussed openly in locker rooms and quite honestly most places. And I think our locker room is one of the places where guys can find a way to actually have a conversation about it as opposed to looking and having a pre-conceived notion of what does this mean and then kind of going their own separate ways.”

Les Carpenter, writing in Kaepernick’s anthem protest is perfect way to highlight America’s race problem for The Guardian, broadens the discussion:

The protest overwhelming the start of the NFL season began not with a shout or raised fist but an act so passive it was all but invisible to the thousands who were there. On the night of 26 August, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick refused to stand for the national anthem before the team’s pre-season game against the Green Bay Packers. His defiance was nearly impossible to discern as he sat surrounded by Gatorade containers on the team’s bench. It might have been missed altogether had a reporter from the NFL Network not noticed and asked him about it after the game.

“I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color,” Kaepernick told the NFL Network that night. “To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.”

A firestorm ensued, igniting a national debate about racial inequality, police brutality and the meaning of the American flag. Kaepernick, a fading football star who had never seemed political, instantly became a nationally polarizing figure, much as Muhammad Ali had been when he refused to fight in the Vietnam war.

Ali was banned from boxing for three-and-half-years.

We have grown as a nation since then.

We still have far to go.

Reading Bill Moyers’ speech this morning reminds me of the message that Roldo Bartimole has shared with his readers for decades: that the rich and privileged think that their wealth and power is somehow a right and lesser beings just have to accept that reality.

Moyers, writing in We, the Plutocrats vs. We, the People: Saving the soul of democracy for Moyers & Company, explains:

In one way or another, this is the oldest story in our country’s history: the struggle to determine whether “we, the people” is a metaphysical reality—one nation, indivisible—or merely a charade masquerading as piety and manipulated by the powerful and privileged to sustain their own way of life at the expense of others.

The story he’s writing about concerned 15 housewives who protested in his small hometown of Marshall, Texas, over the federal government’s impudent demand that they, women of position and power in their town, be required to pay the social security taxes of their housekeepers. Their protest became known as The Housewives Rebellion and, as a 16-year-old cub reporter for the local paper, Moyers was hooked.

Those housewives were white, their housekeepers black. Almost half of all employed black women in the country then were in domestic service. Because they tended to earn lower wages, accumulate less savings and be stuck in those jobs all their lives, social security was their only insurance against poverty in old age. Yet their plight did not move their employers.

The housewives argued that Social Security was unconstitutional and imposing it was taxation without representation. They even equated it with slavery. They also claimed that “requiring us to collect [the tax] is no different from requiring us to collect the garbage.” So they hired a high-powered lawyer — a notorious former congressman from Texas who had once chaired the House Un-American Activities Committee — and took their case to court. They lost, and eventually wound up holding their noses and paying the tax, but not before their rebellion had become national news.

The stories I helped report for the local paper were picked up and carried across the country by the Associated Press. One day, the managing editor called me over and pointed to the AP Teletype machine beside his desk. Moving across the wire was a notice citing our paper and its reporters for our coverage of the housewives’ rebellion.

I was hooked, and in one way or another I’ve continued to engage the issues of money and power, equality and democracy over a lifetime spent at the intersection between politics and journalism. It took me awhile to put the housewives’ rebellion into perspective. Race played a role, of course. Marshall was a segregated, antebellum town of 20,000, half of whom were white, the other half black. White ruled, but more than race was at work. Those 15 housewives were respectable townsfolk, good neighbors, regulars at church (some of them at my church). Their children were my friends; many of them were active in community affairs; and their husbands were pillars of the town’s business and professional class.

So what brought on that spasm of rebellion? They simply couldn’t see beyond their own prerogatives. Fiercely loyal to their families, their clubs, their charities and their congregations—fiercely loyal, that is, to their own kind—they narrowly defined membership in democracy to include only people like themselves. They expected to be comfortable and secure in their old age, but the women who washed and ironed their laundry, wiped their children’s bottoms, made their husbands’ beds and cooked their family’s meals would also grow old and frail, sick and decrepit, lose their husbands and face the ravages of time alone, with nothing to show from their years of labor but the crease in their brow and the knots on their knuckles.

Only We The People have the power to change that.

I wondered how much time might pass before the take-a-knee movement started by Colin Kaepernick reached a Friday night, high school football game.

I take great pride in a young man playing for a team one suburb over from where I live in Northeast Ohio. A week ago this past Friday, Rodney Axson took a knee. He did so, he said because:

…[H]e overheard two white teammates in the locker room using the “N-word” to describe members of the opposing team.

Axson says that when he confronted his teammates, they said that the word “wasn’t meant for you” despite his objections.

Says Axson, “I do feel it was meant for me because I am an African-American.”

Moments later Axson would become the 4th athlete in 2016 to protest as it came one day after NFL players Eric Reid and Jeremy Lane took a knee.

Axson was the first, but he is now joined by high school players across the nation. Bob Cook, writing in High School Athletes Join Colin Kaepernick In Anthem Protest; Angry PA Announcers Don’t for Forbes, elaborates.

The protests are happening at the high school level, as young players are joining Kaepernick in kneeling. Football players for Woodrow Wilson High School in Camden, N.J., kneeled, following the lead of their coach. Football players for Watkins Mills High in Montgomery County, Md., kneeled. So did football players at Maury High in Norfolk, Va. Then there was Auburn High football in Rockford, Ill., and a youth team in Beaumont, Texas. In these cases, players came from schools that were majority African-American, and not everyone kneeled.

Rodney Axson (No. 1, front row center) and his 2016 Blue Devils teammates.

The fallout for Axson has not been good.

While Axson’s protest would go unreported for a week, the reaction to his protest was vitriolic.

Axson says he was called the N-word by teammates multiple times both verbally that day and in subsequent text messages.

Later in the week, a Snapchat post surfaced with a photo of a hand-written piece of paper with four “N-Words” preceded by “Fuck Rodney” and followed by “Lets Lynch Niggers.”

“We made the decision to move to Brunswick to provide a better life for our kids,” says Rodney’s mother Danielle Axson, “he didn’t always feel this way, but his reality has changed. He couldn’t even wrap his head around this.”

His father, Rodney Axson Sr., told Cleveland 19 news, “I thought moving to a community like Brunswick will be safe to keep away from the gun violence and then you have to come out here and deal with the racial thing.”

According to the 2010 census, Brunswick, Ohio, a Cleveland suburb about a 30-minute drive south of downtown, is 96% white and only 1.2% African-American. This dynamic is reflected on the team as Axson is one of only three African-American players on a squad of over 100 whites coached by an all-white staff.

According to Cleveland 19 News, who broke the story on Friday, the district’s superintendent Michael Mayell, released the following statement:

We are still investigating various incidents of inappropriate and racially motivated conduct by students at Brunswick High School. We are cooperating fully with law enforcement as well. As such, we will not comment further until such time as we have a reasonable grasp on all the facts. However, let me say that a statement which has circulated on social media connected with this investigation is reprehensible and I am deeply disappointed that any of our students would participate in its publication. Racial slurs and hate speech have no place in the Brunswick schools and those found complicit in such misconduct will be dealt with accordingly.
This is a statement I have never even conceived that I might need to release. I am saddened to have to do so.

Nathaniel Cline, writing in Brunswick High football player joins national anthem protest, receives backlash for kneeling for Cleveland’s Plain Dealer concluded this way:

Rodney Axson Sr. said his son will continue playing football and taking a knee for future games. Brunswick’s next game is at home against conference opponent Solon on Friday.

“In our eyes, we don’t want our kids to quit on anything,” Axson Sr. said.

Axson has continued to attend his classes [where he carries a 3.5 GPA, the highest on his team, JH] in the past week.

He added that the family remains active in the investigation and has received support from the Cleveland NAACP Chapter.

“Rodney has a bright future,” chapter president Mike Nelson said. “It’s important that we eliminate all the variables in his way.”

Mr. Axson has a son any father would be very proud of.

Previously…

This is another true situation. There were times when I was so engrossed in writing or drawing the strip that I was oblivious to everything else around me. My kids could talk to me, ask for things, say stuff that didn’t make sense, and I’d simply nod and smile. An entire day could go by and I’d forget to eat or even get up and walk around. It was like being in a sound sleep. There were times when people would have to distract me from my work, look me in the eye, make sure I was absolutely focused on them, and then say what they wanted me to hear! —Lynn Johnston

This is, of course, a lesson we continuously attempt to impart–-Stay Alive! Don’t text and drive!—to those navigating a ton of metal and plastic at speed down our streets and highways, but the same can be said about how we now walk through life. I wonder how many budding writers are begin crippled by always looking down at the screens of their phones and not paying attention to the human interactions around them?

Philip Hensher, in Pay Attention, writes:

Think about how people reveal themselves through behaviour, and focus on the externals of gesture, expression, dialogue and settings. It’s tempting, given the limitless power of the omniscient novelist, to plunge into a character’s head and write, baldly, “Laura felt painfully envious”. But what has more energy is the analysis of how a character in the grip of painful envy carries herself, speaks, looks, and even dresses. We always know, if we are observant, how a person who is desperately, secretly in love with another behaves. The trick of fiction is to extract the ways in which other emotions affect the outer crust, too, and by observing the characteristic walk of a human being overcome with happiness, say, making the reader feel observant, and not just laboriously informed.

How this carriage affects the characters around her, too: because fiction does not amount to much if it is just one character standing in a stairwell, pondering gravely about past events. If the first lesson of fiction is about the leakage of the abstract into the world of the physical, the second ought to be that fiction is about the way one character’s desires will crash into another’s, and a third, and a fourth, when all that seems to be happening is four friends meeting in a pub, or working together in an office, or finding themselves thrown together by chance. The episode that consists of one person alone leads to nothing much: the episode of four different characters with their own ways of life moves in multiple directions.

To do this, the beginning writer is going to have to undertake some systematic observation, notebook in hand. No novelist worth reading ever sat at home, entranced with the words spooling out. They paid attention to the life of the streets, to the mannerisms of their friends, to the way a small child speaks when he is hoping not to get found out. Fiction looks outwards.

You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people—now 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks—they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America. —Hillary Clinton

I don’t like Hillary Clinton. I won’t be voting for Hillary Clinton. I requested my absentee ballot yesterday and I’ll be voting for Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka when my ballot arrives.

All of that does not prevent me from saying that Clinton is demonstrably correct in her assessment and attacks on her statement such as that by Ron Fournier, writing in Clinton Was Wrong to Generalize About Trump’s Supporters for The Atlantic are flat out wrong.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, writing in Hillary Clinton Is Right About Trump’s Supporters And Prejudice, also for The Atlantic explains:

One way of reporting on Clinton’s statement is to weigh its political cost, ask what it means for her campaign, or attempt to predict how it might affect her performance among certain groups. This path is in line with the current imperatives of political reporting and, at least for the moment, seems to be the direction of coverage. But there is another line of reporting that could be pursued—Was Hillary Clinton being truthful or not?

Much like Trump’s alleged opposition to the Iraq War, this is not an impossible claim to investigate. We know, for instance, some nearly 60 percent of Trump’s supporters hold “unfavorable views” of Islam, and 76 percent support a ban on Muslims entering the United States. We know that some 40 percent of Trump’s supporters believe blacks are more violent, more criminal, lazier, and ruder than whites. Two-thirds of Trump’s supporters believe the first black president in this country’s history is not American. These claim are not ancillary to Donald Trump’s candidacy, they are a driving force behind it.

When Hillary Clinton claims that half of Trump’s supporters qualify as “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic,” data is on her side. One could certainly argue that determining the truth of a candidate’s claims is not a political reporter’s role. But this is not a standard that political reporters actually adhere to.

I disagree with Ta-Nehisi here. In the age of pseudo-objectivity and faux fair and balanced reporting, determining the truth has gotten lost, but truth must be the very light by which any journalist guides themself. When truth is lost we are left with marketing.

Given the opportunity corporations with the sole mandate to increase shareholder value have proven time and time again that they will play the numbers of consumer harm as a percentage of profits wherever and whenever they can. The only barrier standing between this drive for profit is government regulation, yet Republicans have repeatedly done their best to cripple, if not outright abolish, government agencies ability to protect the consumers.

Ralph Nader, writing in Federal Regulation Saves Millions of Lives, explains:

Fifty years ago this month (on September 9, 1966), President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety laws that launched a great life-saving program for the American People.

I was there that day at the White House at the invitation of President Johnson who gave me one of the signing pens. In 1966, traffic fatalities reached 50,894 or 5.50 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled. By 2014, the loss of life was 32,675 or 1.07 fatalities per hundred million vehicle miles traveled. A huge reduction!

This was an astounding success for a federal safety program that included mandatory vehicle-safety standards (seat belts, airbags, better brakes, tires and handling among other advances) and upgrading driver and highway-safety standards.

When the crashworthy standards were first proposed in 1967, Henry Ford II warned that they “would shut down the industry.” Ten years later on NBC’s Meet the Press he conceded, “We wouldn’t have the kinds of safety built into automobiles that we have had unless there had been a federal law.”

At the White House signing ceremony, I distributed a brief statement, requested the previous day by the New York Times, which said “To translate potential into reality will require competent and vigorous administration of the laws and new manufacturing priorities by the auto industry.”

Over the years, the political pressure of the almost always resistant auto industry stalled, slowed and sometimes shut down National Highway Traffic Safety Agency initiatives. Toady administrators taking orders from the auto companies’ friends in Congress, such as Congressman John Dingell (D, MI) and the White House all slowed auto safety advances. Nonetheless, based on the comparative yardstick of fatalities per motor-vehicle miles traveled over the years, the Center for Auto Safety estimated 3.5 million lives saved between 1966 and 2014 in the United States.

Of course, the number of injuries prevented or diminished is even greater. The savings in hundreds of billions of dollars spent on crash consequences—such as property damage, medical expenses, wage losses and less tangible costs such as family anguish and disruption are major additional benefits from rational regulation.

If the auto company bosses had liberated their own engineers and scientists and cooperated with the federal regulators, who early on were physicians and engineers, even more casualties would have been prevented.

Today, the challenges remain in the upgrading of the operational and safety aspects of motor vehicles, especially large trucks, improvements in highway infrastructure and handling drivers distracted by cell phones or under the influence. Much is being written of futuristic self-driving, autonomous vehicles. Don’t be taken in with the hype, or the arrogant reliance on algorithms. It will be many years, if ever, until the entire vehicle fleet is converted into unhackable, driverless machines.

Meanwhile, modest semi-autonomous braking systems, with drivers still at the steering wheel, are here and will improve. There will be other systems inviting the dependency of drivers which will raise questions of ultimate control of a fast-moving vehicle.

Recent disclosures – the GM ignition switch defect crime and the VW criminal manipulation of software regarding toxic emissions—demand the passage of a criminal penalty amendment to the 1966 safety law. Senators Richard Blumenthal (D, CT) and Edward Markey (D, MA) have introduced such a bill—S. 900—but it is blocked by soft-on-corporate-crime Republicans.

The consumer advocates’ struggle to save lives on the highway, including those of pedestrians and motorcyclists, continues. Despite many innovations (see Rob Cirincione’s report) by the automotive suppliers, the bureaucratic auto companies still have that old “not-invented-here” syndrome bedeviling them.

Can a young person today, writing a book exposing an industry’s chronic abuses, experience such a level of Congressional action and recurrent media attention as was accorded me and my book Unsafe at Any Speed?

Very doubtful, without a brand new Congress. The Congress doesn’t have enough Senators and Representatives like Senators Warren Magnuson, Abraham Ribicoff, Gaylord Nelson and Congressman John Moss, who took on the auto giants and persisted until enactment of the necessary legislation. There is less perceived rumble from the people than in the nineteen sixties.

Also a more corporate media gives us celebrity stories, sports, natural and man-made violent disasters, political horseraces and just plain fluff. News by citizen groups is not a media priority.

Democracy and its result—a more just society—is not a spectator sport. People have to organize to challenge the forces of injustice. As the great abolitionist, Frederick Douglass said for the ages: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. Never has and never will.”

Christian Christensen, writing in Welcome to Your Local NFL Stadium: Home of the Sensitive and Easily Offended: Given the norms of behavior in the stands, the brouhaha over Colin Kaepernick’s dignified protest seems like championship hypocrisy. for Moyers & Company, explains:

A new NFL season starts tonight, and I’m going to let you in on a little secret: sporting arenas can be a rancid soup of racism, misogyny, homophobia, jingoism and all-around alcohol-soaked nastiness. So much so that the NFL and other major league sports have had to initiate “fan conduct classes.” Which is what makes the criticism of Colin Kaepernick’s principled refusal to stand the national anthem at NFL games so laughable. If what goes on in sporting arenas represents some kind of benchmark for the exhibition of respect and national pride, well, sorry…our country is in deep, deep trouble.
When the national anthem is playing at stadiums, fans don’t immediately drop what they are doing and stand to attention.

Here’s another secret: When the national anthem is playing at stadiums, fans don’t immediately drop what they are doing and stand to attention. Many unsubtly check their phones. Many are out buying hot dogs and beer (and don’t flinch in the line when the song begins). Many use the anthem as a chance to go and take a leak before kickoff. So, what? They’re all Kaepernick-esque traitors? (And, while we’re at it, let’s ask TV stations to zoom in on the owner’s luxury skyboxes during the national anthem to see exactly what is going on in there. Is the level of patriotism among NFL brass acceptable? Do we need some more deportations?)

I write this with a certain authority: I am a lifelong sports fan, especially of the San Francisco 49ers. I also write this piece as a person who has attended professional and college football games (at my alma mater, the University of Texas at Austin) and heard fans hurl the most vicious abuse at players in the interests of nothing more than getting a laugh from those around them and/or venting some hetero-macho steam. When called out by fellow fans for their actions, it was common for these guys (and they are almost always guys) to respond, “Hey man, I paid for this ticket, and I can say what I want.” It’s their right.

And so we are back to rights…and we do love our rights. That’s our rights, of course, not their rights.

My favorite bit is the part about having all the television cameras (and the jumbotrons) zoom in on the luxury boxes to see what’s going on in there during the playing of The Star Spangled Banner.

Lois Beckett, writing from New York in Ferguson protest leader Darren Seals shot and found dead in a burning car for The Guardian, reports:

Ferguson protest leader Darren Seals was found dead early Tuesday morning in a car that had been set on fire. Seals had been shot, and St Louis County police said they were investigating his death as a homicide.

The 29-year-old’s death sent waves of shock and grief through the community of activists in Missouri who protested the police killing of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson in 2014.

“We have lost a great champion of civil rights in our community,” said Bassem Masri, a friend who had live-streamed the Ferguson protests, sometimes with Seals walking behind him to protect him as he filmed.

“He didn’t go out to the national level like many of the organizers. He stayed home and tried to fix Ferguson first,” said Keith Rose, another St Louis activist.

More than 100 people gathered Tuesday night for a candlelight vigil at the site where Seals’ body was found, friends said. Activists who attended the vigil said they were furious to find that police had not taped off the crime scene, and that there were still bullet casings on the ground they thought police should have collected as evidence.

We have to ask ourselves: who murders an activist and community leader and then burns the car with the body inside?

As I have been hoping, and doing my small part to encourage, San Francisco Quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s protest of first sitting out and then taking a knee during the singing of the Star Spangled Banner as part of the pregame ritual at NFL games is about to make the leap to a national movement.

Writing in Seattle Seahawks consider team-wide national anthem protest at NFL opener for The Guardian, Guardian Sport reports:

The Seattle Seahawks are considering following Colin Kaepernick and making a protest of their own before their NFL opener against Miami on Sunday.

A number of Seahawks players said they had been discussing their options, and suggested they might be prepared to take a team-wide stand before the weekend’s game.

Seahawks cornerback Jeremy Lane, who sat for the national anthem during the Seahawks-Raiders pre-season game last Thursday, said he will continue not to stand, while receiver Doug Baldwin and linebacker Bobby Wagner said they had discussed a protest in the locker room.

Wagner said nothing had yet been decided. But he added: “Anything we want to do, it’s not going to be individual. It’s going to be a team thing. That’s what the world needs to see. The world needs to see people coming together versus being individuals.” He added: “Whatever we decide to do will be a big surprise.”

African American football players (and those choosing to act in coordination with them) are not a bunch of docile house niggers and the Bartholomew’s of the corporate world may be about to learn that lesson.

I haven’t watched a football game in decades. That will change this weekend.

Zuckerberg had this photo deleted from Facebook because: “Any photographs of people displaying fully nude genitalia or buttocks, or fully nude female breast, will be removed.”

Mark Zuckerberg just gave people yet another reason to ditch their Facebook accounts; but they won’t. Facebook is not a public utility or a government service. Facebook is a corporation selling a service—access to and information about users—to advertisers and as such is under no obligation to anyone not paying their fare. Zuckerberg’s house, Zuckerberg’s rules. If you don’t like Zuckerberg’s rules then you should (as I did a long time ago) leave.

If you want to be able to publish photos like that of Associated Press Photographer Nitu Ut’s iconic shot of children running away from a napalmed village in South Vietnam—or for that matter (WARNING, THESE ARE GRAPHIC AND DEEPLY DISTURBING ) photos like these which would also trigger the ire of Facebook—then you should stop sucking at Zuckerberg’s teat and pony up the annual fees (as I do) to own and operate your own website.

Julia Carrie Wong, writing in Mark Zuckerberg accused of abusing power after Facebook deletes ‘napalm girl’ post for The Guardian, explains further:

Norway’s largest newspaper has published a front-page open letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, lambasting the company’s decision to censor a historic photograph of the Vietnam war and calling on Zuckerberg to recognize and live up to his role as “the world’s most powerful editor”.

Espen Egil Hansen, the editor-in-chief and CEO of Aftenposten, accused Zuckerberg of thoughtlessly “abusing your power” over the social media site that has become a lynchpin of the distribution of news and information around the world, writing, “I am upset, disappointed – well, in fact even afraid – of what you are about to do to a mainstay of our democratic society.”

“I am worried that the world’s most important medium is limiting freedom instead of trying to extend it, and that this occasionally happens in an authoritarian way,” he added.

The controversy stems from Facebook’s decision to delete a post by Norwegian writer Tom Egeland that featured The Terror of War, a Pulitzer prize-winning photograph by Nick Ut that showed children – including the naked 9-year-old Kim Phúc – running away from a napalm attack during the Vietnam war. Egeland’s post discussed “seven photographs that changed the history of warfare” – a group to which the “napalm girl” image certainly belongs.

Egeland was subsequently suspended from Facebook. When Aftenposten reported on the suspension – using the same photograph in its article, which was then shared on the publication’s Facebook page – the newspaper received a message from Facebook asking it to “either remove or pixelize” the photograph.

“Any photographs of people displaying fully nude genitalia or buttocks, or fully nude female breast, will be removed,” the notice from Facebook explains.

Before Aftenposten could respond, Hansen writes, Facebook deleted the article and image from the newspaper’s Facebook page.

Hansen and Egeland are on the wrong side here. They shouldn’t demand that Facebook change the rules. They should start a worldwide campaign convincing users to stop giving away their personal information for the privilege of liking and being liked by closing their Facebook accounts. Nothing less will ever convince a corporate entity to stop stomping around like a spoiled child.

The saga of Colin Kaepernick continues with the decision by the owners of the Washington Spirits—Washington’s National Women’s Soccer League team—to move the singing of the Star Spangled Banner so that Olympic gold medalist and Seattle Reign midfielder/winger Megan Rapinoe could not take a knee a second time in protest of inequality and xenophobia in the country the song purports to represent.

The Associated Press, in Washington Spirit move anthem to avoid Megan Rapinoe ‘hijacking’ reports:

“We decided to play the anthem in our stadium ahead of schedule rather than subject our fans and friends to the disrespect we feel such an act would represent,” the Washington Spirit said in a statement.

On Sunday before the Seattle Reign’s game in Chicago, Rapinoe knelt during the national anthem “in a little nod” to NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick—the San Francisco quarterback whose refusal to stand for the anthem to protest racial injustice and minority oppression came to public notice when he remained seated on the bench before a pre-season game against Green Bay.

“We understand this may be seen as an extraordinary step, but believe it was the best option to avoid taking focus away from the game on such an important night for our franchise,” the Spirit said in the statement. “While we respect every individual’s right to express themselves, and believe Ms Rapinoe to be an amazing individual with a huge heart; we respectfully disagree with her method of hijacking our organization’s event to draw attention to what is ultimately a personal — albeit worthy — cause.”

Earlier Wednesday, the Reign said they are standing by Rapinoe. In a statement, the team said it recognizes Rapinoe’s action “was offensive to some and a source of inspiration to others.”

“We will continue to encourage all Reign FC players to participate in the pre-match ceremony, which honors those who have served and made sacrifices on our behalf,” the Reign said. “We will also continue to allow players to participate in the pre-match ceremony in a manner consistent with their personal beliefs, reflecting our respect for the rights earned and defended by those fighting for our nation.”

In a related story, Scott Adams set out his take on Kaepernick and makes an proposal to the quarterback in: The Time I Took Sides with Black Lives Matter. And Colin Kaepernick. Adams begins:

Every few years you see a news story about a monk setting himself on fire in a public square to protest some sort of injustice. I always have two reactions to that sort of thing. On one hand, I think that monk was an idiot. Surely there are better ways to communicate a message.

But on the other hand, when someone sets himself on fire to make a point, I have to say I take it more seriously than I would if I saw the same message in a Tweet. In other words, the monk succeeded in being heard.

This is the same internal conflict I had when quarterback Colin Kaepernick first refused to stand for the national anthem because he was protesting the way African-Americans are treated in this country. This was nothing less than self-immolation of a reputation and a career. Kaepernick won’t be recovering from those burns anytime soon.

Adams wrote that he is deeply offended by Kaepernick’s actions (to avoid those pesky death threats Scott?) but Adams also wrote that: [I]f Kaepernick had tweeted a similar message, I would have ignored it. And so, much like the monk, Kaepernick sacrificed himself for the sake of the message, in service to those less fortunate.

Which leads Adams to suggest a proposal:

So here’s my offer to Colin Kaepernick. I know from recent experiences that nearly all of the major news media read this blog. If you can put together your top five recommendations for change (as opposed to protest) I will publish them here to give them some attention.

Moreover, I will act as your unpaid attorney and make the case – as persuasively as I can – in favor of your suggested changes. Just to make it challenging, be sure to include slavery reparations in the top five. (I already have an argument in favor of that, and it will surprise you.)

If possible, suggest changes that can be tested in a specific school or city, for example. I can defend any suggestion that is testable on a limited scale.

I know from observing the reactions to Kaepernick’s protests that most citizens don’t recognize the severity of the situation he is pointing out. To many people, the problem seems like perception, not reality. But I would argue here that perception is reality for all practical purposes. That’s why people take meds for various mental conditions, such as depression and anxiety. The pills don’t change the outside world, but they do change how you perceive it, and how you interact with it. Science has guided us out of the time when we thought brains were magic. We no longer believe that with the proper “thinking” all people can cure their own depression and anxiety.

Likewise, it doesn’t matter that African-Americans might see a problem as bigger than others see it. For all practical purposes, that’s their reality. You wouldn’t want to live in a world in which you perceive that the police are likely to shoot you for no good reason. Why would anyone want that?

That sounds like a plan to me and I hope Kaepernick takes Adams up on his proposal

I think Matt Taibbi may be engaging in more that a little bit of hopeful thinking, but he was there in Manchester, New Hampshire, and I was not. I know Taibbi to be an insightful political observer and writer so I’ll hold my tongue for now and see what happens.

Here was the bit in Taibbi’s How Donald Trump Lost His Mojo for Rolling Stone that made me sit up.

The Manchester crowd of sunburned white guys in jean shorts and Celtics gear looks on, mute and mystified, as Trump moves from the Clinton Foundation rant into his new “theme”: Donald Trump as civil-rights champion!

The crowd whoops and hollers at first as Trump repeats the tried-and-true Republican trope that minorities are the victims of patronizing Democratic Party politics.

“Every policy Hillary Clinton supports is a policy that has failed and betrayed communities of color!” he begins, to cheers.

But the crowd grows more and more quiet as Trump lingers on the theme of black and Hispanic suffering.

“Nearly four in 10 African-American children live in poverty!” he says. “Fifty-eight percent of African-American youth are not working! More than 2,700 people have been shot in Chicago this year alone!”

And he just keeps going. There’s no punchline about the failure of personal responsibility in inner-city homes, no lecture about the breakdown of two-parent families, no tirades against “free stuff.” The crowd waits for a dog whistle that never blows. Instead, Trump just reads off one line after another about suffering in minority communities, almost like that’s the point or something.

Trump’s old stump speech was a blunt appeal to the frustrations of flyover America. It was a promise from a would-be strongman to clear out corrupt elites who, Trump said, had fattened themselves with donor cash as they shipped the regular workingman’s job abroad, or handed them to minorities climbing the walls.

In places like Manchester, a moonscape of closed mills and industrial ruins, his furious “throw the bums out” speeches used to bull’s-eye every audience.

But general-election Trump’s new speech is like a bizarre Mad Libs exercise in which someone mass-inserted references to African-Americans where the old white-misery applause lines used to be.

In the crowd, there’s slow clapping, and confusion. Finally, Trump wraps up by making a bold promise about the future under a Trump presidency.

“African-American citizens and Latino citizens,” he promises, “will have the time of their life!”

What is this, the musical climax to Dirty Dancing? Has a stranger civil-rights speech ever been delivered?

Shortly afterward, a mumbling and bewildered crowd files out of the Radisson ballroom where the event had predictably been held (the Manchester Radisson will someday be preserved as a monument to presidential-campaign tedium). Nobody complains or anything, but a sense of letdown hangs over the whole building.

What the hell just happened? What was that speech about? Who was it for? And who kidnapped the old Donald Trump?

Then Taibbi gets whiplash two days latter when, in The Unconquerable Trump: Seemingly imploding on the trail, Trump gains in a national poll. WTF, America? he ledes:

A stunning new CNN poll came out this week, showing Donald Trump in the lead against Hillary Clinton, 45-43 percent. Naturally, the release of this new survey coincided with my own Rolling Stone feature describing Trump in a “freefall,” having “lost his mojo.”

What can I say? Sometimes in journalism, you can’t help looking like a buffoon.

Mano Singham, writing in his own analysis of Taibbi’s take on Trump—The perils of covering Donald Trump—gave his take and predicted the seemingly impossible snap pivot:

There seem to be two standard rules of political reporting when it comes to US presidential elections. One is that the media has a vested interest in a close race because that generates more interest in the news and thus more readers and viewers. Hence there is always more breathless reporting generated by positive news and polls favoring the candidate who is behind and negative news about the one who is ahead. So in the current race, where Donald Trump is behind, any poll that shows him close to or tied with Hillary Clinton gets wide coverage. But statistically, when two candidates are within three or four points of each other, there will always be some polls that show them to be tied or the one who is behind on average to be even ahead slightly, and the number of polls that show this in this race are what one might predict purely on statistics.

The other is that analyses of the state of a campaign depend less upon objective factors about how it is being run and more upon whether the polls show a candidate doing well or failing. If one week we see polls that show the fortunes of a candidate declining, this spawns a whole series of news items about what is wrong with his campaign and its messaging, of fighting among advisors and staff, and the candidate sounding unsure. Then when the following week brings news of fortunes improving and the polls tightening, we get a fresh set of reports as to how the campaign is working smoothly, the message consistent, and the candidate sounding confident.

One can be forgiven for not noticing this pattern because in most election campaigns the fortunes do not fluctuate wildly so the narratives remain fairly stable. But one of the weird things about the current election campaign has been its mercurial nature, especially when it comes to Donald Trump. His fortunes go up and down almost on a daily basis. Hence any reports of the state of the Trump campaign require a careful look at the date stamps because otherwise one can easily get whiplash from the seemingly contradictory narratives.

So, what’s a writer to do? Taibbi blames Murphy’s Law.

The recent rebrand is a transparent effort to rehabilitate Trump’s image as a racist loon. Bannon’s play has been to wheel Trump out at campaign events shackled, Hannibal Lecter-style, to teleprompters. At each stop, the candidate tries to focus just long enough to read out a robotic script offering “minority outreach,” while also signaling a “softening” and a “pivot” on his chief issue, immigration.

In person, watching Lecter-Trump labor to push this “minority outreach” script up a hill for 45 minutes or so is embarrassing to the point of being physically uncomfortable.

His “What do you have to lose?” appeals to African-American voters recall the cringe-inducing “My heart is as black as yours” routine of infamous New York Democrat Mario Procaccino, whose 1969 mayoral run has been described as the most incompetent campaign in American history.

It seems impossible that Trump’s Dr. King act would convince an educated person of anything. Just try to picture the mind that would be persuaded by these speeches. It’s not an easy image to conjure.

But in perhaps the ultimate demonstration of Murphy’s Law, it seems to have worked.

I think Taibbi would have done better to ignore the polls as irrelevant and too close to be useful in any real sense.

Then, however, Taibbi pivots again and takes up a message I heard aired yesterday on my local PBS station: even if Trump looses big—gets about 40 percent of the popular vote—he’s still going to have more than 50 million voters casting their ballots for him. That’s a shit load of disaffected, conspiracy-believing Americans capable of rendering the United States a very unpleasant place to live, let along govern.

Taibbi concludes:

[I]n the face of plummeting poll numbers and mocking headlines, [Trump] panicked and emerged from a campaign reorganization tethered to an insane plan to walk all of this damage back by singing homilies to African-American despair in front of all-white crowds.

It should have been fatal. It wasn’t. Whether the CNN poll taken at the end of this incredible sequence of events that shows him in the lead is accurate or not, is irrelevant. The fact that it’s even close is an awesome indictment of us all.

It’s also a testament to Trump’s uncanny inability to fail even when he seems to be trying his hardest to do so. Not even the most exaggerated view of Hillary Clinton’s deficiencies as a candidate explains it. It feels a lot more like Idiocracy coming powerfully to life at exactly the wrong moment.

I still don’t think Trump really has a chance, but we’re sure headed toward a scary ending.

We are headed for a very scary ending, regardless of who wins in November. The question is simply, who is scarier?

I do disagree with Taibbi, although I sincerely hope I’m wrong: I think Trump will win in November, and win big, and then we’re going to have to figure out how we escape the maelstrom we’ve created.