Matt Taibbi in Colin Kaepernick and Forcing Love of the Flag writes:

You can insist all you want that people pledge allegiance to the flag, but it seems like the more important thing would be making all Americans want to do so, and we’re a long way from that. You can’t regulate people’s feelings.

Reading Taibbi this morning made me think of the fictional rant of Officer Newton and the comment of a panelist on the Diane Rehm Show yesterday that the post WWII Los Angeles Police Department was modeled on the Marine Corp.

I know from 11 years of serving my country that military personnel are taught to respect the uniform and the rank, and that is right and necessary because service members may be thrown into situations where they fall under the command of commissioned and non-commissioned officers that they have never met. That is not true of the police. Police in America are not military personnel and the citizens of the United States do not serve under their command.

Police, indeed all public servants, do not deserve respect. They must, to steal a phrase from John Houseman, earn it.

This was one of the topics of discussion during my lunch yesterday at Tommy’s on Coventry.

In Gun inequality: US study charts rise of hardcore super owners, Lois Beckett writes:

Americans own an estimated 265m guns, more than one gun for every American adult, according to the most definitive portrait of US gun ownership in two decades. But the new survey estimates that 133m of these guns are concentrated in the hands of just 3% of American adults – a group of super-owners who have amassed an average of 17 guns each.

The unpublished Harvard/Northeastern survey result summary, obtained exclusively by the Guardian and the Trace, estimates that America’s gun stock has increased by 70m guns since 1994. At the same time, the percentage of Americans who own guns decreased slightly from 25% to 22%.
Large increase in handgun stock

The new survey, conducted in 2015 by public health researchers from Harvard and Northeastern universities, also found that the proportion of female gun owners is increasing as fewer men own guns. These women were more likely to own a gun for self-defense than men, and more likely to own a handgun only.

In a companion piece for The Guardian, Meet America’s gun super-owners—with an average of 17 firearms each, Beckett ledes with:

For years, Rich, a refinery operator from Wilmington, Delaware, was a typical American gun owner. He had only one or two guns, including a handgun he stashed in a bottom drawer in his bedroom. He never took it out and never fired it.

Then, in December 2012, 20 first-graders were murdered in a school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, sparking renewed calls for a ban on the AR-15 military-style rifle the shooter had used.

Worried that a ban was coming, Rich joined the crowd of people at a local gun store and paid roughly $2,000 in cash for an AR-15 – about twice what the gun is worth today.

“I never really wanted one before,” he said, “but at that time there was the fear that if you don’t buy it now, you may never, ever get one.”

One purchase followed another. Three months after the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting, Rich owned 10 guns. Today, he says, it’s at least 43, and he asked that his last name not be published, for fear that publicizing too many details might attract thieves.

The 39-year-old is now one of America’s firearms super-owners – part of the 3% of American adults who collectively own 130m firearms, half of the nation’s total stock of civilian guns.

The collection in his safe includes three AR-15 lower receivers that will allow each of his three children to customize their own rifles when they come of age, whether an assault weapon ban is passed or not. But Rich said semiautomatic AR-15s had become a little boring to him. He’s much more excited about historic military weapons, and dreams of someday owning a fully automatic weapon. That’s “a grail gun”, he said. “It’s like a whole other arena of firearms ownership.”

Meet Donald Trump’s strongest voting block.

The article announcing the sale of Cleveland’s historic Terminal Tower by Forest City may start a new merry-go-round of tax abatements and other subsidies downtown.

Not that there’s been a slow down.

But we see a second round of tax gifts on the same building from back in the early 1990s.
Subsidies have been flowing to developers. And no one’s adding up the count.

Talk of the 57-story Key Center sale would include the Marriot Hotel, a 900-space garage beneath Mall A (city property), all of which received tax abatements in the 1990s. Question: What kind of subsidy could a new owner now squeeze from the city? (See old subsidies below).

Round and round we go with little attention paid to public revenue losses.

We don’t have a free press in Cleveland because we have a subservient press in Cleveland. Or should I just say a corporate press. Or a sleepy press. A sleepy press is a dangerous press.

It should be the responsibility of a vibrant press to tote up the score so that the public can determine whether there is fairness in the taxing system.

I fear there isn’t. I know there isn’t.

It’s rather amazing how commercial property downtown sheds property taxes so that homeowners will pay more to keep the county, city and city schools financed. (As I have said before, in the 1950s commercial/industrial property, which was taxed more heavily, became equal to homes. It means business already had property taxes reduced. This was before the state tax abatement legislation of the late 1970s. And you don’t get to depreciate as business does.)

Subsidies add the frosting.

Mayor Frank Jackson, a reliable source tells, has told business leaders that he’s the guy who can keep these gifts flowing. So a vote for his payroll tax increase and Continue Reading »

This is for Razorback, Deplorable, Col Kurtz* and the rest of the cowardly bigots frightened by strong Americans standing up by taking a knee for justice.

Here are the panels leading up to today’s: 160919, 160920 and 160921.

[Update on 25 Sept @ 0531: here are the panels that follow the above—160923 and 160924.]

*Col Kurtz’s comments seem to have disappeared after 23 August. You can still see a screen shot of his xenophobic bile here.

Five-hundred-fifty-five years before my birth, my Welsh ancestors made a final push against the occupiers of their land. Owain Glynd?r, the last real prince of Wales led the rebellion.

Glyndŵr was a descendant of the Princes of Powys through his father Gruffydd Fychan II, hereditary Tywysog of Powys Fadog and Lord of Glyndyfrdwy, and of those of Deheubarth through his mother Elen ferch Tomas ap Llywelyn. On 16 September 1400, Glyndŵr instigated the Welsh Revolt against the rule of Henry IV of England. The uprising was initially very successful and rapidly gained control of large areas of Wales, but it suffered from key weaknesses – particularly a lack of artillery, which made capturing defended fortresses difficult, and of ships, which made their coastlands vulnerable. The uprising was eventually suppressed by the superior resources of the English. Glyndŵr was driven from his last strongholds in 1409, but he avoided capture and the last documented sighting of him was in 1412. He twice ignored offers of a pardon from his military nemesis, the new king Henry V of England, and despite the large rewards offered, Glyndŵr was never betrayed to the English. His death was recorded by a former follower in the year 1415.

Glyndŵr is portrayed in William Shakespeare’s play Henry IV, Part 1 (characterised as Owen Glendower) as a wild and exotic man ruled by magic and emotion.

With his death Owain acquired a mythical status along with Cadwaladr, Cynan and Arthur as the hero awaiting the call to return and liberate his people. In the late 19th century the Cymru Fydd movement recreated him as the father of Welsh nationalism.

Cymru am byth!

I launched Have Coffee Will Write, the blog, on Tuesday, 9 November 2004 with LEARNING FROM HISTORY… The Republican ’20s (you’ll have to scroll to the bottom of page, this was before permalinks). A dozen years later I may be tired of all the glamor and ready to move on.

Cal Newport makes the case in Quit Social Media:

I recently gave a deliberatively provocative TEDx talk titled “quit social media” (see the video above). The theme of the event was “visions of the future.” I said my vision of the future was one in which many fewer people use social media.

Earlier this week, Andrew Sullivan published a long essay in New York Magazine that comes at this conclusion from a new angle.

Sullivan, as you might remember, founded the sharp and frenetic political blog, The Daily Dish (ultimately shortened to: The Dish). The blog was a success but its demands were brutal.

For a decade and a half, I’d been a web obsessive, publishing blog posts multiple times a day, seven days a week…My brain had never been so occupied so insistently by so many different subjects and in so public a way for so long.

In recent years, his health began to fail. “Did you really survive HIV to die of the web?”, his doctor asked. Finally, in the winter of 2015, he quit, explaining: “I decided, after 15 years, to live in reality.”

This might sound like an occupational hazard of a niche new media job, but a core argument of Sullivan’s essay is that these same demands have gone mainstream:

And as the years went by, I realized I was no longer alone. Facebook soon gave everyone the equivalent of their own blog and their own audience. More and more people got a smartphone — connecting them instantly to a deluge of febrile content, forcing them to cull and absorb and assimilate the online torrent as relentlessly as I had once. Twitter emerged as a form of instant blogging of microthoughts. Users were as addicted to the feedback as I had long been — and even more prolific.

As he summarizes: “the once-unimaginable pace of the professional blogger was now the default for everyone.”

As I noted in my talk, one of the most common rationales for social media use is that it’s harmless—why miss out on the interesting connection or funny ephemera it might occasionally bring your way?

Sullivan’s essay is a 6000 word refutation of this belief. Social media is not harmless. It can make your life near unlivable.

While I would never shut down HCWW, if only for the reason that continuing to publish Roldo Bartimole’s essays is important to me, but now, in my 61st year, I’m going to do some thinking. Tomorrow I’m having lunch with another long-term blogger who went silent about a year ago. I’m thinking this whole topic will be an important conversation.

I have no problem with sponsors pulling funds from athletes (or anyone for that matter) when the bought puppet fails, or outright refuses, to dance as instructed. That’s just business. Corporations never give money to anyone without expecting a return on their investment, to do so would simply be naive if not stupid.

All of which makes the heroism of those willing to stand up—by taking a knee—and oppose those who love and spread injustice. That’s just being an upstander instead of a bystander.

Brandon Marshall is a case in point as Adam Chandler, writing in Kneeling for the Anthem but Not Bowing to Sponsors for The Atlantic, explains:

Earlier this week, Brandon Marshall, a starting linebacker for the defending Super Bowl champion Denver Broncos and who followed the lead of the 49ers back-up quarterback Colin Kaepernick by kneeling in protest during the national anthem, had his endorsement with CenturyLink, a cable and internet services company, rescinded. “We completely respect Brandon Marshall’s personal decision and right to take an action to support something in which he strongly believes,” a CenturyLink statement read. “America is anchored in the right of individuals to express their beliefs. While we acknowledge Brandon’s right, we also believe that whatever issues we face, we also occasionally must stand together to show our allegiance to our common bond as a nation. In our view, the national anthem is one of those moments. For this reason, while we wish Brandon the best this season, we are politely terminating our agreement with him.”

Not as polite was the Air Academy Federal Credit Union, which ended its relationship with Marshall last Friday morning a little more curtly (“his actions are not a representation of our organization or its members”), just hours after he decided to kneel during the pre-game festivities. “I’m still doing what I believe in,” said Marshall following CenturyLink’s decision. “It’s not going to make me lose any sleep.”

Coincidentally, CenturyLink also owns the naming rights to the stadium where the Seattle Seahawks play, a sponsorship that might have been complicated by other players’ protests. The Seahawks were at one point rumored to be considering taking a collective knee before last Sunday’s game, but lacking a team consensus and facing the emotionally-fraught 15th anniversary of the September 11th attacks, the team modulated its plans by linking arms during “The Star-Spangled Banner” instead. Meanwhile, rumblings that the entire Miami Dolphins team might participate in the protest raised questions about potential fan boycotts of the team as well as the loss of endorsements for high-profile players. (Ultimately, four Miami players kneeled during the anthem on Sunday.) These scenarios point to another component of the endorsement dynamic—advertisers are keeping their target audiences in mind, and what plays one way in Peoria might play differently in Miami or Seattle.

Corporate sponsors get in the game for the purposes of visibility, but, despite what they may desire, sports and its athletes simply aren’t neutral.

I wish that I was a user of the products from any of these companies just so I could stop being a user.

Previously…

No words. Sorry. I simply have no words.

Thankfully, David Sims, writing in Seth Meyers Proves He’s the Anti-Fallon for The Atlantic, does:

When Jimmy Fallon talked to Donald Trump on The Tonight Show last week, he ruffled the presidential candidate’s hair. Seth Meyers, the host of Fallon’s former show Late Night, had a slightly different message for the Republican presidential candidate last night. “Obama was born in the United States, period?” he asked mockingly, repeating Trump’s recent specious assertion that he was no longer a believer in the “birther” movement. “Fuck you, exclamation point!”

Tragically, the only fuck you likely to bring about change, is coming from the Republican Party’s Right- and Center-wings.

The best way to send a message? vote for Jill Stein in November.

Presidential debates televised and scripted theatrical performances in America are to governance as a Burger King Whopperrito is to healthy eating: initially tasty and satisfying but ultimately slowing blood flow to the brain while simultaneously roiling the bowels.

The scheduled cage matches between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton will be as real as a Saturday night professional wrestling match at the local armory.

Bill Moyers and Michael Winship explain in There’s No Debate:

Let’s call the whole thing off.

Not the election, although if we only had a magic reset button we could pretend this sorry spectacle never happened and start all over.

No, we mean the presidential debates—which, if the present format and moderators remain as they are, threaten an effect on democracy more like Leopold and Loeb than Lincoln and Douglas.

We had a humiliating sneak preview Sept. 7, when NBC’s celebrity interviewer Matt Lauer hosted a one-hour “Commander-in-Chief Forum” in which Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump spoke with Lauer from the same stage but in separate interviews. The event was supposed to be about defense and veterans issues, yet to everyone’s bewilderment (except the Trump camp, which must have been cheering out of camera range that Lauer was playing their song), Lauer seemed to think Clinton’s emails were worthy of more questions than, say, nuclear war, global warming or the fate of Syrian refugees.

Of course, that wasn’t a debate per se but neither are the sideshows that we call the official debates, even though the rules put in place by the nonprofit Commission on Presidential Debates are meant to insure a certain amount of fairness and decorum—unlike the trainwreck of “debates” during the primary season, which were run solely by the parties and media sponsors with no adult supervision.

But despite the efforts of the commission, the official presidential debates coming up also are dominated by the candidates and the media, and therein lurk both the problems and the reasons to scrap this fraudulent nonsense for something sane and serious.

Prior to 1988, this was not the case, as I’ve written before:

From 1976, when President Gerald Ford faced off against Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter, the three presidential debates and one vice presidential debate were administered by the League of Women Voters, which did an admirable job under trying circumstances. But then, as historian Jill Lepore writes in an excellent New Yorker article on the history of presidential debates, the Reagan White House wanted to wrest control from the League and give it to the networks. According to Lepore:

During Senate hearings, Dorothy Ridings, the president of the League of Women Voters, warned against that move: ‘Broadcasters are profit-making corporations operating in an extremely competitive setting, in which ratings assume utmost importance.’ They would make a travesty of the debates, she predicted, not least because they’d agree to whatever terms the campaigns demanded. Also: ‘We firmly believe that those who report the news should not make the news.’

Ridings’ prescience proved correct and then some. In 1988, the League pulled out of the Bush-Dukakis debates, declaring in a press release, “It has become clear to us that the candidates’ organizations aim to add debates to their list of campaign-trail charades devoid of substance, spontaneity and answers to tough questions. The League has no intention of becoming an accessory to the hoodwinking of the American public.”

Walter Cronkite agreed. That same year, he wrote,

The debates are part of the unconscionable fraud that our political campaigns have become. Here is a means to present to the American people a rational exposition of the major issues that face the nation, and the alternate approaches to their solution. Yet the candidates participate only with the guarantee of a format that defies meaningful discourse. They should be charged with sabotaging the electoral process.

But as Ridings said, it’s not just the candidates involved in this criminal hijacking of discourse. The giant media conglomerates—NBCUniversal (Comcast), Disney, CBS Corp., 21st Century Fox, Time Warner—have turned the campaign and the upcoming debates into profit centers that reap a huge return from political trivia and titillation. A game show, if you will—a farcical theater of make-believe rigged by the two parties and the networks to maintain their cartel of money and power.

Watching the debates has become about as entertaining as the Superbowl, but without the ads.

I won’t be watching. No one should be watching. If there’s no money in the show for advertisers, there’s no money in the show for the corporations. That’s how we kill this beast, and we get the added benefit of not having to suffer through a Whopperrito commercial.

I wrote earlier that party platforms are not worth the paper they’re written on and once again Hillary Clinton demonstrates that you can’t trust her any further than you can toss a wonk.

Karl Mathiesen, writing in Hillary Clinton ‘dropped climate change from speeches after Bernie Sanders endorsement’ for The Guardian, tells us:

Hillary Clinton has dropped the words “climate change” from most of her public addresses since winning the endorsement of her party rival Bernie Sanders, according to Climate Home analysis.

While the presidential candidate talks regularly about her plan for the US to become a “clean energy superpower”, in recent months she has rarely made reference to the planetary crisis that necessitates it.

On Monday, when she launched her pitch to millennials online, she could find no room for an issue that will affect that voting cohort more than any other.

The rhetorical shift undermines hopes that climate change might emerge as a key campaign issue in 2016. Boosted by the disparity between Clinton and her Republican opponent Donald Trump, a self-professed non-believer in climate change.

Indeed, the signs were there. During the last six months of Clinton’s primary campaign against Sanders, the transcript log of her speeches shows she was talking about climate change at one out of every two speeches she gave.

But since Sanders endorsed Clinton on July 12, the full focus of the Clinton campaign has swung to Trump. In 38 speeches since that date, Clinton mentioned climate change specifically eight times. Just once every five public addresses.

For Hillary Clinton, promises aren’t promises unless a sizable check is involved.

Despite any media hopes that Colin Kaepernick’s Take-A-Knee protest movement might quietly go away, Lindsay Gibbs at ThinkProgress suggests that that isn’t going to happen anytime soon.

In Tracking the Kaepernick Effect: The anthem protests are spreading, A movement has begun, she writes:

On Monday night, hours after video of another unarmed black man being shot and killed by police was released, four players on the Philadelphia Eagles raised their firsts in front of a national television audience during the national anthem.

The action was clearly a continuation of the movement Colin Kaepernick started three weeks ago when he remained seated during the national anthem as a way to protest police brutality and racial injustice in America.

In fact, since Kaepernick first stood up for the cause by refusing to stand, 21 NFL players have joined his protest, as have athletes in high schools, youth leagues, and colleges all across the country.

Gibbs takes note of Brunswick High School senior Rodney Axson here in the southwest corner of Cuyahoga County:

Ohio’s Rodney Axson didn’t plan on becoming the first high school athlete to join Kaepernick’s protests, but when he heard his teammates using the “N-word” to describe players on the other team, he changed his mind and took a knee during the anthem.

The Brunswick High senior has received racist threats ever since.

Axson says he was called [nigger*] 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 [niggers] preceded by [fuck] Rodney and followed by Lets Lynch [Niggers].

Since Axson’s initial protest, he hasn’t had a chance to take a knee again, because the anthem has been played while his team is in the locker room on game day. Brunswick police are reportedly investigating the threats. On September 16, supporters from around Ohio came to Axson’s game.

*While ThinkProgress (and possibly Gibbs) chose to use safe phrases like N-Word and F—K, I choose not to for two reasons, first because we hear the actual words in our heads and second, these usages are so egregious that circumstances demand that they not be sugar coated.

On 17 September, the anonymous (and based on his long history of comments) bigoted xenophobe Col Kurtz left the above comment and I left the response immediately below.

This morning, responding to another anonymous troll on the same story, I noticed that Kurtz’s comment (and my response) have been taken down. I can only hope that someone at the Plain Dealer found Kurt’s comment as offensive as I did. (This may not be the case, however, since his other bigoted and offensive comments remain on other stories.

I glad that I long ago developed the habit of taking screen shots of my comments and enjoy the freedom of owning a press–Have Coffee Will Write—where I can later post those images.

Meanwhile, Colin Kaepernick’s Take-A-Knee protest continues:

Congressman Unwittingly Launches “You Are Welcome Colin Kaepernick” Meme

Why Colin Kaepernick’s silent protest is catching on

Panthers’ anthem performer on Kaepernick: ‘I understand and applaud his stance’

Here’s hoping Colin Kaepernick’s protest movement can teach schools a lesson in the 1st Amendment

Will Colin Kaepernick, NFL take talks to barbershops?

Hate on Colin Kaepernick If You Want, But You Can’t Force Love of the Flag

And the list goes on and on…

Oh, I almost forgot, white corporate types are really, really hoping Kaepernick goes away.

I respect Bernie Sanders. I think that Bernie is the closest we’ve come in a very long time to what I think a progressive politician should be. I do not doubt that Bernie is focused on stopping the election of Donald Trump by supporting the deeply flawed candidacy of Hillary Clinton. I am confident that Bernie believes—although I do not—that Hillary will fight for climate change legislation and a $15 per hour minimum wage and further health care reform and free college educations for all children whose families make under $125,000 per year and all the rest.

None of that is likely to matter because the President of the United States of America is at the mercy of the 535 individual agendas in the congress.

We all need to remember that for the first two years of the presidencies of both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, the Democratic Party held majorities in both the Senate and the House of Representatives but both men failed to accomplish real change.

Only an lotus eater could believe that a second president Clinton would accomplish any goal without even that dubious advantage.

All of this is a long-winded way of saying that I’m still voting for Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka. If Hillary loses, the Democratic National Committee will have only itself to blame.

[Update at 0549 on 20 September: the deciding factor? High Fructose Corn Syrup. Campbell’s uses the sugar, Amy’s uses organic cane sugar. I know, I know, HFCS gets a bad rap, sugar is sugar, but there is this.]

*Nutritional information in grams per can of soup.

Brands of soup after the jump… Continue Reading »

I’ve been reading The Guardian’s My Writing Day series for a few week now and, while I think the personal essays are interesting, none has yet spoken to me as has that by Tracy Chevalier. She struck a nerve with her frankness and insight.

Chevalier, in Writing is a magic trick that still surprises me when I perform it for The Guardian, writes:

Much of the joy of writing historical novels comes from doing the research: holed up at the library reading about 19th-century techniques for grafting apple trees, or medieval plant symbolism, or the journals of gold rush miners. Or, better yet, being out on the road, standing next to giant sequoias in California, or fossil hunting on the beach at Lyme Regis, or walking from Soho to Spitalfields imagining it is 1792. Research is what gives me ideas, what helps me make up characters and plots.

Research is easy. It’s sitting down to write that’s hard. It’s hard partly because it’s often dull.

Ah yes, the sitting down, the firmly placing your butt in the chair and working, as Chevalier so aptly describes process, the magic.

Often I have to leave my study, with its tempting computer and the window with its view of my neighbours’ lives, and sit in the living room or at the kitchen table. Best of all – and where I’m writing this, in fact—is the British Library. I lock my phone away, I bring my notebook or manuscript, and sit in the concentrated silence of the reading rooms there, the others around me focused, intent. There is nothing so galvanising as being around other people already in the zone.

What happens when I manage to block out the distractions, when I land on the blank page at last? I write one sentence, then the next, then the next. Paper and pen first (pencil in the British Library)—computer is for later. Surprisingly quickly, I accumulate 1,000 words, the empty pages that terrify me every day are filled and I’m done—for that day.

I can’t write with a pen or pencil on paper. My mind moves too quickly and my scrawl is illegible. I am fond of telling people that I only learned one lesson in High School that my teachers intended for me to learn and that was how to touch type. Even that I learned for the wrong reason: my friend Mickey and I figured out that we would be the only boys in a classroom full of girls. (Sadly, the ploy did not work out for either of us.)

When I type I can almost keep up with the thoughts as they come gushing out of my subconscious. I cannot begin to imagine what writing 1,000 words with a pencil would feel like.

Does this put the lie to Cleveland’s resurgence? Does this mark Cuyahoga County as seriously troubled? ¶A school system (Cleveland) with four Fs. Ignore it, say city leaders by their ease in avoiding it. ¶Will the Atlantic magazine send one of its top editors to lead a stacked panel to lift banners of Cleveland as the resurging example of the comeback of cities? It did. What nerve. What nonsense.

No. They’ll ignore the dead body in the middle of the room.

Three local city school systems finished among the bottom four in the latest State of Ohio grading of all its school systems.

At the bottom were Cleveland, of course, Warrensville Heights and East Cleveland.

All in Cuyahoga County. How’s that County Executive Armond Budish? Where are you hiding?

It’s a shame. But the Cavs won a championship and the Indians could win, too. So all’s not so bad.

Plain Dealer reporter Patrick O’Donnell pulled no punches in a front page article about the state’s schools grading with this reminder quote:

‘If we’re going to ask for a significant levy, we better show results if we’re going to ask people to renew that levy,’ Gordon said when he and Jackson first proposed the 15-mill tax increase.

Gordon is the Cleveland school district’s CEO (superintendent) and Jackson, of course, is Mayor Frank Jackson. O’Donnell tells it straight.

The report could not have come at a worse time for Cleveland as it Continue Reading »

Woody Allen famously said that 80 percent of success is showing up. In this moment for our nation, I can’t think of any action more important than that espoused by the group: Showing Up For Racial Justice:

[A] national network of groups and individuals organizing White people for racial justice. Through community organizing, mobilizing, and education, SURJ moves White people to act as part of a multi-racial majority for justice with passion and accountability. We work to connect people across the country while supporting and collaborating with local and national racial justice organizing efforts. SURJ provides a space to build relationships, skills and political analysis to act for change.We envision a society where we struggle together with love, for justice, human dignity and a sustainable world.

I volunteered locally and contacted the Cleveland organizer Bridget Walland to find out what more I can do. You should do the same.

Of particular interest to me, of course, is the group’s position on Colin Kaepernick, and by his corageous association, Rodney Axson.

On 8 December 2004, Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) slipped Section 111 of Title I, Division J, of the Fiscal Year 2005 Consolidated Appropriations Act (Pub. L. 108-447) and a new national holiday into our collective consciousness: Constitution Day. Our Constitution is the single most important document in Human History; read it all.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. Please keep reading…

I never leave home without my pocket-sized copy of our Constitution.
Celebrate Constitution And Citizenship Day.
A Day Set Aside for the Constitution.

The scene above from the Scandal episode The Lawn Chair, aired on 5 March of last year is, of course, fiction. Like all good fiction, however, the writers take us closer to reality than we often like to go, and that is what good writers must do.

In the real world we would never see a scene like the above. Lawyers and fixers would keep that part of the story out of the public eye and leave the rest of us to wonder and speculate. I didn’t see this when the episode first aired, I’m watching on Netflix, but current events have smashed the power of that scene into our collective faces.

Ciara McCarthy, reporting in Columbus police fatally shoot 13-year-old boy carrying BB gun for The Guardian, writes:

Police in Columbus, Ohio, on Wednesday shot and killed a 13-year-old boy who was carrying a BB gun, authorities said.

The air gun which Tyre King was holding had a laser sight. An officer mistook it for a lethal firearm, police said. The boy was shot multiple times and died in a Columbus children’s hospital.

Authorities said officers were responding to a report of a robbery in which several people, one carrying a gun, approached a man and demanded money. Police said officers spotted three people, including Tyre, who matched a description of the robbers.

The officers approached the group and Tyre and one of his companions fled, police said. Tyre was shot multiple times after allegedly pulling the BB gun from his waistband.

The city’s mayor and police chief spoke to reporters on Thursday morning, promising a thorough investigation.

Columbus mayor Andrew Ginther called the boy’s death “troubling”.

“Any loss of life is tragic but the loss of a young person is particularly difficult,” he said.

Police chief Kim Jacobs confirmed the basic police account of the shooting and said Tyre was carrying a gun that looked “practically identical” to the guns carried by Columbus police. The shooting will be investigated by Columbus detectives and presented to a grand jury by a local prosecutor, officials said. The grand jury will decide whether to charge the officer involved.

I had a conversation the other day about what actions we ought to be taking in the wake of this death toll that just keeps rolling. Here are two that I think would be good starting points:

No. 1: No police involved shooting should be handled by internal affairs or a local district attorney with a pet grand jury. Only an independent prosecutor should be allowed to investigate and, if found appropriate, prosecute those involved. So far this year, The Guardian’s The Counted project has listed the names of 761 people killed by police in our nation. Tyre King has not yet been counted.

No. 2: Every county ought to have a police review board with the power to fire police chiefs. The panel should consist of elected volunteers representing the diverse communities in the county. I would recommend no more than five members on such a board. The board must have subpoena power to compel testimony at open meetings. The board must not be allowed to meet in private in any sense. The volunteers would be elected annually and serve for no more than two years.

I’m sure that others more closely involved with such boards will have smarter ideas but I think these are good starting points.

Our problems run deep. They are complex and cannot be fixed in 43 minutes. We cannot escape into our fantasies as IMBD commenter elizabeth_rose324 would seem to desire.

I don’t watch entertainment television to have politics pushed on me. I understand that much of this show is politically based, but including true world politics, such as the modern day issues between the black community and police officers is truly uncalled for. It’s almost despicable. Scandal, why must you push such a political agenda? I don’t want to see an entire episode wrapped around cop hating. Just stop. I feel like I can’t watch TV anymore without a political message nowadays. This episode included a white police officer shooting a young black boy and this inevitably becomes a real world situation, obviously reflecting that of Trayvon Martin. Please, for goodness sakes, just avoid actual politics in a TV show and just create new story lines.

I understand Elizabeth’s pain; reality has overwhelmed her. I have a friend who won’t go see sad movies because the real world is too sad. Maybe that is Elizabeth’s case. We don’t know. Or, perhaps, shows like this overwhelm her cognitive dissonance and she just wants to live in her fantasy of when America was great.

We the people don’t have that luxury.

I’ve only included the beginning and end of a very long—22,000+ years, duh!—timeline. Please take your time to view the entire history so that you can more fully understand the dastardly lies the fossil fuel industry are spewing out their smokestacks so that they can acquire more toys.

You can so find a detailed explanation and description of this 12 September post at Explain XKCD.