Coates in the Atlantic:

And this was the summer of Jordan Davises, the summer of bodies when every day, a black parent could log on to the Internet and see the bodies of black people choked into oblivion, beaten on the side of the road, stalked and raped, tased for straying too long, pistol-whipped for running too fast, shot down for mental illness, shot down for cos-play, shot down for allegedly ignoring orders, shot down for too quickly obeying orders.

“I’m still watching,” McBath told me. “It might be a different circumstance, but it all brings back to my mind what happened with Jordan. This is what certain individuals believe about black people. Our forefathers have spent a lot effort trying to get rid of these prejudicial ideas.”

I asked her about Trayvon Martin. And she told me again that Jordan had been horrified by Martin’s shooting. “Jordan kept saying, ‘Mom, that could have been me. Mom, that could have been me.’ We talked at length,” she said. “He said, ‘He didn’t even do anything wrong.’ And I told him, ‘Jordan, you don’t have to be doing anything wrong. You are a young black male and they are certain people who will never give you respect.'”

via To Raise, Love, and Lose a Black Child – The Atlantic.

“For these people, The Cosby Show was just amusement,” McBath said. “They don’t know that in the black community the Cosbys exist. They don’t know that we educate our children, we train up our children, we have fathers, nurturing, and supporting. We have that. But that’s the America that a lot of people don’t know exists, and they don’t know because they don’t want to see it.”

But American blindness had not dissuaded her, and when I asked about the path forward she spoke mostly (like the president she supports) of communal self-improvement. “We’ve become apathetic and comfortable, thinking we have arrived,” she said. “A lot of us know we have an African-American president, but they don’t know how he got there. They don’t know what our forefathers did to get him there. And you can’t fault our children. Shame on us, the parents. Shame on us.”

In this I heard the essential problem of 21st-century black philosophy. Black people are a minority in the country they built. The legacy of that building has remanded them to the basement of America. There are only two conscious ways to escape the basement: (1) Appeal to the magnanimity of white people. (2) Become super-human.

via To Raise, Love, and Lose a Black Child – The Atlantic.

When your son is murdered for being a teenager, all the cold hard rationalizations go out the window. We want to focus on what we could have done to protect them. She didn’t do anything wrong. Her son didn’t do anything wrong. Our kids being historical experts and deferential to our parents that won’t save them from murderous bigots. The shame should lie with the killers.

Obama isn’t a schmoozer but to get background, the New York Times quotes two Senators who are members of the Democratic caucus without noting their specific willingness to oppose the President:

“Maybe if something isn’t working, you’d say, ‘What can I do better?’ ” said Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, expressing dismay that the president seemed to have little interest in taking a warmer approach with Democrats. “Maybe we wanted something different. But it kind of is what it is.”Asked to characterize his relationship with the president, Mr. Manchin, a centrist Democrat who has often been a bridge builder in the Senate, said: “It’s fairly nonexistent. There’s not much of a relationship.”Few senators feel a personal connection to the president.“In order to work with people, you need to establish the relationship first before you ask for something,” said Senator Angus King of Maine, an independent member of the Democratic caucus. “And I think one of the things the White House has not done well and the president has not done well is the simple idea of establishing relationships before there is a crisis.”

via Obama Is Seen As Frustrating His Own Party – NYTimes.com.

King may caucus with GOP after these coming midterms.
Manchin sued President Obama over EPA regulations before Boehner did.

They aren’t the people Obama needs to caucus with first. The biggest deal in this article is Harry Reid’s disappointment in the President. All the rest is centrism for centrism’s sake. King will probably caucus with the majority party and Manchin is a very conservative Democrat. Not the core of the Democrats senate base.

“systematic weaknesses”

Revelations that the government’s largest post-conviction review of forensic evidence has found widespread problems counter earlier FBI claims that a single rogue examiner was at fault. Instead, they feed a growing debate over how the U.S. justice system addresses systematic weaknesses in past forensic testimony and methods.

“I see this as a tip-of-the-iceberg problem,” said Erin Murphy, a New York University law professor and expert on modern scientific evidence.

via Federal review stalled after finding forensic errors by FBI lab unit spanned two decades – The Washington Post.

Let’s see how far this goes.

Who could have guessed:

In July 2013, No Labels held a rally where lawmakers of both parties crowded a park outside the Capitol, stood on a grandstand and one by one declared themselves “problem solvers.” The government shut down a few months later as Republicans, including some who appeared on that stage, refused to allow a budget to pass unless it defunded the president’s health care law.

[…]

It turns out that for a group that consistently bills itself as above the partisan politics and the corrosive culture of Washington, No Labels has come to exemplify some of the most loathed qualities of the town’s many interest groups.

[…]

Among those donors are a former top Enron employee, John Arnold, and his wife; Alfred Taubman, a real estate magnate who spent 10 months in prison for antitrust violations, and his wife; and No Labels’ own legal counsel. Top GOP donor John Canning Jr., a private-equity chairman, hosted a June luncheon for the group in Chicago to familiarize other prospective supporters and is himself a donor, though neither he nor No Labels would disclose how much he has donated.

via No Labels? No results? No problem. – Yahoo News.

No Labels = More donor access, less constituent service. The Republicans in the group got to call themselves “problem solvers” and went right back to obstruction they said they were committed to. The Democrats in the group seem to have taken their word for it.

Fourth, and most important, the history of the electric power industry teaches that the presence or threat of competition from the public sector is one of the best and surest ways to secure quality service and reasonable prices from private enterprises involved in the delivery of critical public services.

via Joho the Blog » Municipal nets, municipal electric power, and learning from history

Read the whole article from 1994. Applies to every utility we know.