PBO addressed the findings of the DOJ’s Ferguson report in a radio interview. Here’s an excerpt of an AP story (published on the local rag’s website):
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama said the type of racial discrimination found in Ferguson, Missouri, is not unique to that police department, and he cast law enforcement reform as a chief struggle for today’s civil rights movement.
Obama said improving civil rights and civil liberties with police is one of the areas that “requires collective action and mobilization” 50 years after pivotal civil rights marches brought change to the country. The president made his first remarks about this week’s Justice Department report of racial bias in Ferguson, which found officers routinely discriminating against blacks by using excessive force.
“I don’t think that is typical of what happens across the country, but it’s not an isolated incident,” Obama told The Joe Madison Radio Show on Sirius XM radio’s Urban View channel. “I think that there are circumstances in which trust between communities and law enforcement have broken down, and individuals or entire departments may not have the training or the accountability to make sure that they’re protecting and serving all people and not just some.”
President Obama will be a relatively young man when he leaves office in a couple of years, and he’ll have a high profile the rest of his life, as all former presidents do. He could do a lot worse than to use that spotlight to promote law enforcement reform as a civil rights issue.
Comments sections of local newspaper sites are generally cesspits of stupidity, and the one under the above article is no exception. Here’s a piece of one turd that bobbed to the surface:
Obama, undoing all Dr Martin Luther King’s progress in less than 8 years. Dr King wanted people to be judged by the content of their character, while all we ever hear from Obama and Holder is white police are violating black people’s rights.
Yeah, that’s the problem — an entire administration focused on oppressing white cops. The comment above would qualify as nut-picking if the sentiment expressed wasn’t so widespread.
The yawning gap between verifiable reality and morons’ perceptions is crazy-making sometimes — not just on this issue but, well, pretty much everything. Obama’s the REAL racist. It snowed so there’s no climate change. Tax cuts for rich people will improve the economy, etc., etc., etc.
No bombardment of lived experience, real-world outcomes or data can penetrate the concrete-and-steel reinforcements encasing these moronic beliefs. There’s no bunker buster of truth.
Oh well. At least it’s Friday. Any big plans for the weekend?
Bobby B.
Yes the police can do anything they want, and the State will protect them. This is the definition of a police state. I’ve been saying it for years and nobody’s offering me a six-figure grant.
chopper
yeah, MLK never complained about that at all, ever.
SatanicPanic
I got into with a conservative about MLK a couple weeks back and I posted a link to this, and asked- do you agree that black people should go to DC to get their check? I was, not surprisingly, met with silence. I’m just going to do this from now on, because it shuts them up.
Mr. Longform
Another area where the right wing meme seems impossible to overcome: any even slightly critical comment about the behavior of any person in a uniform is immediately pounced upon as proof of left-wing, rabid, communist, anti-law, pro-crime craziness. The media generally then treat it from that perspective – from the default position of “pro-cop” and “anti-cop” as opposed to pro-sanity and anti-sanity. It’s just like talking about guns. If the NRA-types don’t treat even the mildest criticism as “Obama wants to steal your guns and arrest you” then they lose.
beth
@SatanicPanic: Wow, I’ve never seen that MLK clip before. Thanks for posting it.
Archon
The nation crossed the Rubicon when Republicans got a critical mass of people to not only just accept but vote for a party that says cutting taxes for wealthy people is good for broad based prosperity.
If you can convince people of that then it means we have a very large number of historical ignorant people that can be convinced of anything.
WereBear
Plans for weekend… catching up on work, but doing it from bed makes it better, it really does.
And celebrating Mithrandir’s first birthday!
Here’s our work in progress.
So is he grown up? Not at all. He’s still, in all ways except size, a big ol’ kitten.
MattF
Got my cataract surgery rescheduled after snow cancellation yesterday, weather prediction is frigid today, then a bit warmer every day for the next week. I may take off early from work, then sometime over the weekend, take a deep breath.
schrodinger's cat
@WereBear: So pretty!
Iowa Old Lady
@MattF: Good idea. You need it.
SatanicPanic
@beth: Thanks! Happened upon it one day and I really like it because it’s a good short and sweet rebuttal to their claims that MLK was some sort of conservative.
Amir Khalid
@WereBear:
That is a very handsome boy.
I wonder if you’ve seen this story about music for cats (hat-tip to Salon), and if so what you think of it.
Glidwrith
Our littlest dragonet is turning nine, NINE, years old this Sunday. She’s planning out cupcakes, Sky High (trampoline place), where we will have lunch and a possible visit to her karate dojo. She has already chosen an orchid for one birthday present, we’ll see what else she wants.
Mike J
I think Obama ought to announce an AR-15 for every black person in Ferguson. Call it a civil rights militia. Watch the gun fondlers try to decide if they like guns more than they hate black people.
Patrick
How the heck was Obama responsible for what happened to Trayvon Martin as an example? Is Obama now supposed to be in every jury room to talk sense to white jurors who are clueless?
skerry
@SatanicPanic: What a great link! I hadn’t seen that before. Thanks.
the Conster
I overheard the grumpy old white guy tax attorney in my office telling one of his fellow conservatives here how he thinks Obama is deliberately trying to ruin America. I slammed my office door shut, and they went away because calling him out may get me fired. He’s a dinosaur and he kind of knows it – he works with 2 gay law partners – one whom has a husband, and a pregnant married lesbian associate – so he’s projecting his anxiety about white men not being the boss of everybody anymore, but, given the chance I will tell him that conservatism died the day that Hank Paulson darkened George Bush’s door asking for a trillion dollar handout. If there’s more evidence of failure of conservatism than September of 2008, I’d like to know what it is. In what world can these conservatives look back to that time and see how far back we’ve come, and think that Obama is deliberately ruining America? I just can’t even.
WereBear
@Amir Khalid: Seen it, loved it, wrote a post on it:
Music and Cats, I told you so!
Violet
I hope President Obama works on things like a good community organizer would. Helping Dems build strong state organizations–building the bench. It’s the best way he can protect his legacy and promote better legislation in the future.
Along with that, I hope he works on voting rights. That’s also key to protecting his legacy and, again, better legislation and improving lives of Americans. I think voting rights are a huge civil rights issue.
Police reform and related to that prison reform are also areas he could do great work.
D58826
I assume this fool did not notice that the cop – Wilson – is not being charged with any civil rights violations by DOJ. And the DOJ report seems to come down more in line with Wilson’s version of the events then the ‘hands up don’t shot’ version. But then those Obama types are real sneaky
Belafon
@Patrick: Obama reminded white people that blacks could take their jobs, even ones they would never be able to get on their own. Blacks were supposed to let white people ignore the fact that they are white.
Iowa Old Lady
@the Conster: What kills me is that people like this guy feel free to spout that stuff good and loud at work. That shows how much the guy has strayed from common sense. I swear they’ve all lost their minds and are encouraging one another to run around saying any damn hateful thing OUT LOUD.
scav
I don’t know. Perhaps ever so many commenting ‘merkans are indeed expressing their true selves. embodying all their patriotic jebus-fearing mommas and poppas taught them by precept and example. “Kindness, compassion and care for others in word and deed is ungodly PC socialism.” “If others differ from you, they are dangerous and have no right to be in this here land of freedom and liberty.” “You know what God thinks on all matters and how he will judge others and must execute his judgment now, on eath, immediately.” Mottos such as these were loving cross-stitched by pious wimminfolk and hung above dinging room tables. “Shut up and do whatever the boss tells you and take what he gives you in compensation, no questions asked: it’s all you deserve if not more.” “Whatever a person in uniform tells you is to obeyed without question — it’s the complete embodiment of our Founding Fathers intentions.” Father’s everywhere rustled their son’s cowlicks as they passed along these time-honored bootstrap-levitating maxims. Norman Rockwell really should have left us little cartoon bubbles of these fine sentiments so people would be less confused at the moment.
Gex
@Mr. Longform: That’s exactly what the media let them do on abortion. They let one side claim to be pro life even if their policies lead to the deaths of women and they let the other side, which wants to prevent abortion but not ban it get painted as killers.
The media will accept the right wing frame instead of explain why it is inaccurate. And from that point on the discussion is completely screwed up because we are never talking about reality.
Villago Delenda Est
The power of presidentin’ while blah is awesome!
El Caganer
@the Conster: Failure of conservatism? Excuse me, but at least George Bush isn’t a Negro. And that’s not being racist, it’s just a fact.
JPL
@Glidwrith: Aah! Happy Birthday. I hope she has a wonderful time.
JPL
So how long before the right wing news media, loses their collective shit over the latest comments from the President.
Roger Moore
@Mike J:
The NRA would love it. Nothing will boost gun sales among racist whites more than knowing there are well armed blacks out there. The NRA’s primary goal is to trigger an arms race, since the big winners in any arms race are arms manufacturers.
bemused
@Iowa Old Lady:
I think Republicans like him are consumed with terror and anger. They are the ones who spout off loudly in public places while shopping, sitting in a doctor/dentist office, standing in line, wherever, because they are constantly worked up that white people like him are being “persecuted”.
Big ole hound
I really hate to say this but it appears that those who do not believe in the equality of all people will never change. Even worse, they will impart this bias to some their offspring so it is up to teachers, friends, coaches et al to change this but sadly this hatred has just gone underground. Opinion of race or nationalities cannot be legislated.
fuckwit
Couple things. First of all, the Ferguson police were committing economic violence on a far more widespread scale than using excessive force. Why do articles by our corporate grifting media never focus on this? The cops were running a mob racket, basically, shaking down poor black people for whatever they had left.
Secondly, I had a bizarre experience waiting in a long line: a random retired woman from MIssissippi (who has been here in California her whole adult life) started complaining to me about Obamacare and “illegals” (in a store ull of Asian and Latino people– this is California). How this came ot pass was baffling. I had been talking to someone else in line, mentioning the metric system, and how it was an artifact of the French Revolution, and that got her enthusiastic and she started sharing her bigotry about immigrants, minorities, the horrors of Obamacare, public employees who she thinks live like kings, her raging jealousy, and just generally whole litany of right wing talking points. It was disturbing how we lived in totally different worlds and right next door to each other practically. The amusing thing is how she thought I was one of her right-wing companions and was so eager to let down her guard and start sharing what I considered some pretty vile political opinions. But I couldn’t understand what caused this conversation to start in the first place.
Finally I figured it out. It was mentioning the French Revolution (by way of giving us the metric system) which prompted her. I realize I was the first to sneak in a political snark that I thought was very left-wing and Occupy-ish: I mentioned that the income inequality we have now is at about ancien regime levels, and of course tumbrels. Thought it was a bit risky, but she didn’t get angry or take opposition to my lefty view, she thought that meant I was on her team! I found it bizarre. Apparently this Southern grandmother is walking around California thinking there will be some kind of white revolution where all the oppressed great-great-grandchildren of slaveowners will rise up to throw off their Obamacare shackles and take to the streets with pitchforks and torches and behead all the “overpaid” government employees and expel all the “illegals” or something… just weird. To her, the people who run this country and steal everything that isn’t nailed down aren’t Wall Street MOTU’s, they’re government employees with big pensions and immigrants. Somehow I just managed to smile and disagree with her while trying to mantain her misapprehension that we were in agreement. That’s how I amused myself at least. But it was very strange.
Happily, towards the end we both agreed that soshulism has saved us from any upheaval that extreme: at least there are bread and circuses. She made a face when I said we have FDR to thank for that. And happily, her number got called next so I didn’t have to continue the conversation.
Roger Moore
@the Conster:
Just remember, conservatism can never fail, only be failed. TARP was the triumph of big government over True Conservative® principles. If we had let The Invisible Hand® take care of things in 2008, we’d have full employment and unicorn ponies today. Instead, Bush and company sold out True Conservative® values, which is the ultimate cause of all our problems today.
Villago Delenda Est
@JPL: Probably already happened. If not, within the next hour, for sure. O’Reilly and Hannity will sound off on their shows this evening.
Villago Delenda Est
@fuckwit:
The answer to your question is contained within it.
bemused
@fuckwit:
My guess is that she wasn’t really listening. She couldn’t hear what you said over the blaring, incessant noise of resentments that occupy her every waking moment. It wouldn’t matter anyway because what she imagined she heard just gave her an opportunity to vent from cauldron of bile in her head.
SatanicPanic
@fuckwit: I’ve noticed a lot of these Tea Party types are angry about corporations and love to rant about mom-and-pop shops being closed, etc. It’s a huge, weird disconnect. I’m actually more or less agnostic on the subject- some corporations are great, some are terrible, just like small business owners (like the one that fired my friend because she got cancer), so I’m always tempted to be like “shut up you hippie!” just to see the reaction.
WereBear
An excellent point I will file away for future reference.
I KNOW that President Obama kept us from another Great Depression, but that is a very difficult concept to get across to people. A disaster that was avoided does not sink into thick skulls.
Ruckus
@bemused:
they are constantly worked up that white people like him are being “persecuted”.
Seems like white people like him may need persecution.
Ben Cisco
Tapper posted a link to an article referencing the fact that no CURRENT member of the GOP leadership would be in attendance for #Selma50.
I told him that once they realized it wasn’t going to be a reenactment…
Violet
@fuckwit: You are so much more patient than me. When the racist woman started spouting off her beliefs I would have said something like, “I could not disagree with you more. What gave you the impression I agree with what you’re saying?” Watching her sputter would be a bit of a popcorn moment.
I’m still battling Fox News being on the larger wall-mounted TVs in the gym I go to. I asked again what had been done to address the situation. In the various conversations I’ve had with the people in the gym I’ve called Fox News a racist, misogynistic propaganda channel. I love watching their jaws drop when I say that out loud. Heh.
WereBear
@SatanicPanic: I think they just love to rant.
They suffer from a form of PTSD (scratch a conservative and you’ll uncover a loveless and abusive childhood 90% of the time) that prevented them from thinking or maturing and so they are overgrown toddlers screaming “You’re not the boss of me” and sugar-rushing on more grownup substances like alcohol, guns, prejudice, envy, and bile.
Kryptik
Question, since I haven’t gotten around to reading the Wilson report, because the larger Ferguson report was just too much by itself to swallow at once: was it as much a total vindicatin of Wilson as people have said? Most of the crazies I’ve dismissed, sure, but even TNC, someone I fully respect, said the report pretty much called him outright innocent (with the intended weight of ‘innocent’ over “not guilty” or “not charged”).
fuckwit
@SatanicPanic: I was stunned by the fact that that line has gotten completely buried by historians, especially given the huge applause and cheers it got, perhaps more than any other in that whole speech! Then I realized how incendiary it was, and how dangerous to the existing order, and how subtle it must have appeared to white historians up until very recently. The line was something of a code designed to be clearly understood by black people but far enough under the radar so as to not be understood or to alarm white people.
And then I re-read TNC’s great article on reparations. And, after reading some more on the history of the post-war South, it became sinkingly clear to me: without land reform, nothing was going to ever change. No 40 acres, no mule, and guess what, you’re still a slave to the white landowner you work for and rent your house from. The South remained a company town, owned by white people, and run by white people. Backing away from land reform was a disgrace, perhaps a blind spot of the Abolitionists, and a huge failure of moral will by the postwar USG.
The plantation owners should have been at least partially expropriated by the Reconstruction governments, and the land should have been parceled out to the black families who had worked it for generations. It would have outraged the white slaveowners, but they’d just lost a bloody war; the time to have done something so dramatic would have been right after they were defeated and their cities still in smoldering ashes.
bemused
@Ruckus:
Yes. They are deeply offended to even be told they have white privilege let alone that they just said something racist, sexist, homophobic or xenophobic. So offended that they have to rant-whine all the more.
bemused
@Ben Cisco:
Win.
J R in WV
Will be watching the 10-12 inches of snow melting. 6 degrees last night, way cold, clear as a bell by 3 or 4 am.
By this time next week it is supposed to be nearly 60 in the afternoons, and above 32 at nights. So the things now nearly frozen will thaw, slowly.
No suffering here, warm and cozy, plenty of food, etc. didn’t even need to recruit puppies into bed for help staying warm. Although cats visited whenever their feet got cold, sitting on a tummy or chest, purring and getting warmer.
raven
I took Lil Bit to her eye doc and she has a fatty tumor on here eyelid. No biggie, just watchful waiting.
bemused
@WereBear:
I’ve thought so too but the Republicans I know quite well who were raised by non-abusive parents who were firm Democrats with siblings who grew up to be liberals puzzle me.
Ruckus
@Violet:
Being nice has not worked. Keeping quite has not worked. Unfortunately not being nice tends to create some very unpleasant moments. But that is looking like the only thing that will work, unpleasant moments. The haters and the misinformed have taken to shouting and showing their true colors, maybe it’s time for us to do the same.
Carolinus
Yeah, it’s a weirdly common sentiment from the Right in comment sections and Right-wing media. The idea seems to be Obama has undone a generation of improvement in race relations by talking about racial issues too much (at all?). An odd undercurrent of that sentiment, even as Right-wingers are loath to acknowledge racism, they also seem to suggest racial animus and stereotyping is on the rise, but at the same time entirely the fault of Obama, Holder and Al Sharpton.
Violet
@Ruckus: I don’t generally shout but I do express my opinions. Especially when it comes to things like Fox News being played in public places. If no one speaks up then nothing changes.
the Conster
@Iowa Old Lady:
Obama by virtue of existing has literally made old white guys unmoored from reality. I’ve seen it over and over, and it would be fun to watch if they still weren’t so dangerous. My sister’s Florida rich white retiree group contains several extreme examples. One in particular kept insisting that Obama would cancel the US currency last July 1. Literally, Obama would personally collapse the economy by making the currency worthless. This guy was a CEO at IBM – not a toothless idiot yet he suffers from ODS enough that this actually made sense to him. He got this information from some investment company brochure, that for $125.00 would help him “protect” his money. LOL.
boatboy_srq
@Archon: “Supply-Side Economics” is the political version of the get-rich-quick scheme. Always prettier in theory than practice. SSE has the added benefit of hinting that a little hard work is required, so it appeals to the folks who think poverty is the fault of the people who experience it and “entitlements” are for “takers”: PWE plus GRQ plus ??? equals WEALTH!!11!1!
Botsplainer
@Mike J:
And do it in tandem with a badge bounty-adding a bonus if they have holes in them.
Ruckus
@bemused:
Some kids rebel. Some follow obediently. Some become their own person. In my small family we have all three. Was it one issue or happenstance, or many? Or is it just humans being human?
J R in WV
And naps, I forgot to mention the snowed-in napping factor! We will turn on the classical radio in the bedroom and cuddle up under quilts and feather comforters and nap …
Cacti
I think the POTUS was trying to spare law enforcement officers’ feelings.
The racial bias present in Ferguson’s law enforcement activities is bog standard police practice in the US of A. If you’re black or brown, you’re presumed guilty until proven innocent.
Ruckus
@the Conster:
He got this information from some investment company brochure, that for $125.00 would help him “protect” his money. LOL.
Worked didn’t it?
lol
It really is uncouth and impolite for Obama and Holder to call out Ferguson police officers like this. Don’t they realize these are people with important feelings that must be respected at all times? I’m sure if they had just privately spoken to Ferguson officials all of this could have been amicably resolved in no time.
Instead, like a terrorist, Obama is publicly shaming them and now, we’re all uncomfortable and I don’t even want to think about black people anymore. Thanks for nothing Obama!
boatboy_srq
@fuckwit: There’s quite a lot of that running around CA. Take a look at construction, public-sector contracting, and several other fields and you’ll see the latte-sipping, avocado-peeling crowd is a lot smaller than casual observation makes it. It’s nothing like what you see in the Deep South, or even NoVA, but it’s there. It doesn’t help that the wingnuts have dogwhistle definitions for most English terms, and not a few French ones, as you saw: what to us would be a normal conversation discussing real things is to them codespeak describing all the horrors they imagine. There has to be an English-to-dogwhistle phrasebook out there somewhere, but I haven’t seen it yet.
boatboy_srq
@the Conster: So much money, to be made from so many wingnuts. Just too few of us sufficiently amoral to give the rubes the just fleecing they not only deserve but demand.
brantl
It’s funny how, if there’s only one thing you listen for, you will eventually hear it, even if it’s only something you imagine in the whispering of the wind.
WereBear
@bemused: My own brother is a wingnut, and our parents were not abusive. But I was the oldest and pressured to grow up too fast. While that has its own problems, whining ain’t one.
While he seemed born with a chip on his shoulder, and still broods about resentments decades later. He never lets anything go.
Betty Cracker
@Kryptik: From what I read, yes it was.
Mike J
@Botsplainer: I would never make an explicit call for violence, But I would reiterate the principle that everyone is entitled to defend themselves from violence.
gelfling545
Taking my semi-feral cat to the vet today. I was finally able to catch him & stuff him in the carrier. It’s half an hour until we have to leave but there’s no telling where he’d be off to by then. He’s really not happy about this.
Paul in KY
@fuckwit: Sad. A lot of old people have mental problems, brought on by that old age.
Linnaeus
@Cacti:
What’s interesting is how folks like Tyler Cowen are generalizing this to a problem with government overall and saying “this is what governments do”. What tends to follow from that is a denial that race plays a role at all. I was just reading a Facebook discussion and while all of the participants agreed that what Ferguson was doing was awful, they then went on to say that, well, it’s not specific to minority communities because, “hell, I’ve been pulled over for frivolous reasons too when I lived in a majority white community but now I live in a more racially mixed community and the police don’t bother us.”
Liberty60
The latest turn of the screw, this report on Ferguson and TNC’s acidic commentary, has gotten me into a serious case of despair.
Is it that racism has increased, or was it always dormant, waiting for a spark? I don’t know.
The hopeful part of me sees the grumpy old white people’s bitterness as the last gasp, the Ghost Dance of a vanishing world.
Paul in KY
@bemused: Had to separate themselves from their parents/siblings somehow & they decided to be asswipes.
bemused
@Ruckus:
I have noticed that some of my Republican friends have more fear of what I think of as small stuff and life in general so maybe the amygdala theory has legs.
Paul in KY
@Ruckus: Included protection from being squashed by a whale too!
beth
@Liberty60: I wish I could be as hopeful as you but what I’m seeing from rightwing friends are Facebook postings asking when Wilson will get an apology and his job back. That’s all they’re focusing on. We were wrong and they were right. I don’t see how anyone can read that report and not see how the whole atmosphere on the Ferguson PD contributed to the Mike Brown incident.
bemused
@boatboy_srq:
That would definitely be helpful! As much as we are exposed to wingnut buzz words, we just can’t keep up unless we are wallowing in it 24/7. I have asked a Republican on occasion what exactly he/she is talking about because it sounds like a foreign language.
Betty Cracker
@Liberty60: It’s just more visible now because the president is black. If a woman is ever elected, all the latent misogyny will come gushing out. But the trajectory is toward less racism, misogyny, homophobia, etc., in the long term. It might suck to be a black person in the US in 2015, but it sucked a lot worse in 1965.
fuckwit
@Paul in KY: Well she wasn’t THAT old, nor did she seem out of it or disabled. She seemed perfectly lucid, even polite, just steeped in white privilege, fear, resentment, and right-wing talking points.
ruemara
@lol: if he had just spoken to them quietly. With love.
Kryptik
@Betty Cracker:
Did they at least mention bits about how long investigators took to actually look at the crime scene? Wilson being allowed to clean himself and his equipment off unsupervised and all that shit? I know there’s shit that we’re not privy to, but there seemed to be a lot of stuff before leading toward a slanted investigation and evidence collection from the very start.
Liberty60
@Betty Cracker:
True that- I don’t have any illusions of how things were in the pre-New Deal, pre civil rights era. Some of the lynchings and murders then make ISIS look noble. (E.g.- In Edmund Morris’ biography of Teddy Roosevelt, he details how a young black man was dragged by a mob and thrown onto a bonfire to burn to death- twice he crawled off, and twice was thrown back on- Jesus God, those people.)
I think sometimes we liberals underestimate the power of tribal thinking and the ease with which hard times cause us to lose our better, more generous selves. I won’t Godwin the thread, but I don’t see anything in American culture that definitively prohibits us from veering into the worst forms of ethnic hatreds, except our constant vigilance and hard work.
fuckwit
@Liberty60: Racism was, I think, never structurally corrected when and how it should have been (via land reform during Reconstruction), and was instead left to fester and get embedded deep into the culture for 150 years, ameliorated by long Civil Rights struggles all along that seem to have helped a lot, but are not yet complete. We’ve now got to work on intractable problems: black structural poverty, black incarceration rates, medical care inequality, education inequality, police brutality, police shakedowns of communities of color, racial profiling, mortgage redlining, etc… I guess just listening to Team Blackness right on this here blog, might be a good way to get a sense of the situation.
I’d be optimistic we can fix it all, if if weren’t for the panicky white folks with the guns and the right-wing media talking points, and their current control of Congress and most of the statehouses. That’s a big problem.
SatanicPanic
@Liberty60: Places like Ferguson notwithstanding it absolutely has. And more importantly, I think we’re seeing people understand a lot of the issues that cause places like Ferguson to exist from multiple angles- old inner ring suburbs are the result of terrible planning decisions that had disastrous results. In that case, racism combined with a need for tax dollars (because property values are too low to sustain government operations) for this predatory police system. That’s not going to be the case in a lot of places going forward. For instance, California law is now explicitly anti-sprawl because people are worried about climate change, which removes at least one economic reason for racism. Will California police still be racist? Sure, some will. But it’s one thing to be personally racist and another to be a racist person who is economically rewarded for being racist. The former is at least a marginal improvement.
SatanicPanic
@Betty Cracker: we used to be worse! is my general response to this
Betty Cracker
@Kryptik: I’m not sure. It’s an 85 page report, and I didn’t read all of it. The whole thing is here if you want to take a look. It appears to be a pretty exhaustive report.
NorthLeft12
@Carolinus: I think it is pretty obvious why they think that relations between whites and all other races have deteriorated……NO, not that reason [although maybe that is part of it].
Cognitive dissonance? Conservatives believe what they want to believe, and as long as the fallacy of their beliefs is not thrown back into their faces every day on the news or by their kids, they are more than happy to believe that all is well and everybody knows their place.
I believe the last time they realized there was a problem, was back in the sixties. Mainly because of those rabble rousing trouble makers who refused to accept the status quo. The cons are extremely upset that those pushy, uppity people are demanding equal rights……..again.
Roger Moore
@Linnaeus:
Is this a surprise? We all see the world through the filter of our preconceptions. People who don’t believe that government can do good will interpret any government misdeed as proof that government is inherently evil. People who don’t want to believe in racism will claim it’s a generic problem rather than a specifically racist one.
Kryptik
@Betty Cracker:
Guess I’ll have to, much as I feel like it’ll be as much a gutpunch as the Ferguson report is. Something I might need to mull over a stiff drink.
catclub
@Ruckus: Also got a rock that keeps tigers away thrown in for another $50.
Roger Moore
@Liberty60:
I think it’s a mix of things. Some of this is dormant racism that’s become active when the worst of racists’ fears- a black placed far above them- has come true. Some of it is the news being more willing to publicize it. But a huge amount of it is people like you and me finally opening our minds to what minorities have always known about how this country works. This shit has been going on for ages, but it’s taken something as dramatic as all the hatred Obama has received for us to realize just how bad things have always been.
Keith G
I hope I’m wrong, but I really do not see President Obama working on anything overtly controversial, divisive, or partisan as a former president. There is a model to be followed and follow it I think he will.
First off out of office,he will be building a library and begin writing several volumes of memoirs. He then will probably be putting together an organization as Carter Clinton, and, GWB have done which focuses on rather large non controversial issues. This is important because the more controversial or partisan the issue is the harder it will be to raise money for that organization. Raising money for the organisation allows there to not only be an organization built, but also allows for a generous stream of income for a former First Family.
Police reform as mentioned above is a great issue. Unfortunately, it is a bit too small bore for to serve as a focus for a former president’s organization. Also, it can be controversial enough it can be seen as a divisive issue that limits the amount of donations which will come in. Note, I am NOT saying it is a divisive issue, I am just saying that it can be argued thusly and that could limit the amount of large-scale corporate contributions that fund such organizations.
It’s easier to monetize the fight against disease, poverty, or poor education then it is to monetize overtly (domestic) civil rights issues. Still, I guess if anyone can do it….
Linnaeus
@Roger Moore:
No, it’s really not a surprise. It’s interesting from the standpoint of political analysis, at least for me.
WereBear
@Keith G: I disagree.
I think he’s been restraining his community organizer impulses as a function of his position… and the need to get re-elected. As a lame duck, he’s gotten a lot more outspoken, seems to me.
Freed of the office, I think he will be even more so.
Keith G
@WereBear: Being a smart man, I think he will go where the money is. He was a community organizer as a fresh face out of college. That was quite a while ago now.
I don’t doubt his sincerity, but I do understand the constraints that are put upon him by age, family responsibilities, and being a historically important person.
Roger Moore
@SatanicPanic:
Climate change may be important, but you can’t ignore the problem of lack of easily developable land out there. The population is big enough and the space is constrained enough that sprawl can only happen unsustainably far from the city centers. Denser, less sprawly development is a practical necessity for land use reasons.
Plantsmantx
@SatanicPanic:
When they bring up Jeremiah Wright, I like to hit them with this MLK quote:
That’s anger. I like it.
KS in MA
@Ruckus:
This.
Patricia Kayden
@beth: If Wilson gets his job back, how long before he’s physically assaulted or shot? My guess is that a cop who shot and killed an unarmed Black man under suspicious circumstances would be a target. Just my opinion though.