TPM Reader SB shares a story you will want to read …
I wanted to add a potentially unusual perspective on your questions about the movement sparked by the police murders: I’m a white millennial (28 years old) whose first cousin, a 16-year-old Hispanic male (adopted by my aunts in New Mexico shortly after birth) was shot dead by a policeman early this summer in then-mysterious circumstances. (Some Googling will get you to the story quickly enough; for your sake, here’s an article.) Let me tell you, the questions NEVER go away, even in this case, where we have a pretty clear sense of what happened and it’s intellectually easy to understand why it happened. I’m confident that everyone in my extended family is somewhere on a spectrum from “isn’t there some other way the officers could have handled it?” to “this is absolutely murder in cold blood.” And I think we all to a certain extent ask: isn’t there a reasonable case that a jury should decide the answers in public?
I’ve mentioned a few times the stories we’re running this month in advance of the launch of the new section of TPM in January. This morning we have another, which I really recommend, a deeper, very different kind of look at mass incarceration in the United States.
We seem to be at that point (again) where a Republican committee chair has to defend a congressional report from attacks from fellow Republicans because the reports didn’t match what they were hearing on Limbaugh or Breitbart.com.
Reading Maya Schenwar’s arresting piece on the humanizing power of prison pen pals, just posted in TPM’s new features section, I couldn’t help but think of Serial, the wildly popular podcast that follows a 1999 teen murder case in Baltimore.
While no one was paying attention (or maybe caring?) House Republicans nixed part of Obamacare in the ‘CRomnibus’ bill.
O’Reilly’s ambush reporter gets bounced from de Blasio presser. Watch.
“At first, I questioned my assumption that black people in America generally don’t go off into the forest to pitch a tent and cook beans over a fire. I am an urban negro, a man of the cities, but what of blacks in rural areas or blacks with high concentrations of white friends?”
Brandon Harris looks straight at the unbearable whiteness of camping.
I’m fascinated by the budding cultural politics of shirts, as we’re seeing it play out over the last few days in professional sports. As you’ve no doubt seen, a growing number of African-American professional athletes have either worn the Garner-related “I Can’t Breathe” shirt or in the case of the St Louis Rams and others the “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” gesture tied to the death of Michael Brown.
Cromnibus (yes, they’re still calling it that) passes in a 219-206 vote in the House.
House GOP sets vote just three hours before shutdown on a long-shot spending bill.