I Can't Breathe

Like Kari said, I'm pretty much at my end on this without more time to reflect, but for now I think looking at Eric Garner's words is pretty important.

No Justice for Mike Brown

The government story is this: Mike Brown gets shot, runs 148 feet away, and then decides to kill himself by running into a hail of bullets.
— Shaun King (@ShaunKing) November 25, 2014

Causality/Correlation

These lines from this very good Matt Stoller piece stood out as obvious but also very important and often misunderstood:

The only time the question even comes up now is in an inverted corroded form, when a liberal activist gnashes his or her teeth and wonders — why can’t Democrats run elections around populist themes and policies? This is still the wrong question, because it assumes the wrong causality. Parties don’t poll for good ideas, run races on them, and then govern. They have ideas, poll to find out how to sell those ideas, and run races and recruit candidates based on the polling. It’s ideas first, then the sales pitch. If the sales pitch is bad, it’s often the best of what can be made of an unpopular stew of ideas.

How the Rich Stay Rich

Good stuff in this Guardian piece,  but this chart in particular shows how the super rich stay richer: (via this tweet)

Romney Unleashed

In a article about Mitt Romney considering another presidential run (lol), I honestly find these quotes at the end kind of incredible:

Romney himself told the New York Times several weeks ago that “circumstances can change.” He also suggested that if he ran again, he would focus on avoiding off-the-cuff remarks, like the notorious “47 percent” line that dogged his campaign in 2012.

“I was talking to one of my political advisers and I said: ‘If I had to do this again, I’d insist that you literally had a camera on me at all times,” Romney told Leibovich. “I want to be reminded that this is not off the cuff.”

If Romney thinks he lost because he let down his weird pseudo-human persona to often...

Arm Everyone, Let God Sort it Out

CNN BREAKING: Another Iraqi base falls to ISIS: military base 50 miles NW of Baghdad; ISIS has seized a large weapons cache
— Vaughn Sterling (@vplus) September 30, 2014

This does seem to be our basic policy. I find it kind of crazy that the proponents of arming people are never really forced to acknowledge that this isn't like changing money between bank accounts. When you give guns to people in failed states, there is a very good chance those guns will end up in someone else's hands.

Selling The War

I'm kind of surprised that more hasn't been made of this:

NEW YORK –- President Barack Obama met with over a dozen prominent columnists and magazine writers Wednesday afternoon before calling for an escalation of the war against the Islamic State, or ISIS, in a primetime address that same night.

The group, which met in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in an off-the-record session, included New York Times columnists David Brooks, Tom Friedman and Frank Bruni and editorial writer Carol Giacomo; The Washington Post's David Ignatius, Eugene Robinson and Ruth Marcus; The New Yorker's Dexter Filkins and George Packer; The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg and Peter Beinart; The New Republic's Julia Ioffe; Columbia Journalism School Dean Steve Coll; The Wall Street Journal's Jerry Seib; and The Daily Beast's Michael Tomasky, a source familiar with the meeting told The Huffington Post.

National Security Advisor Susan Rice, Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes and White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough also attended the meeting, according to the source.

I understand there is some amount of this stuff going on all the time that we don't hear about, but the formality of it and the number of people seems particularly gross. Not to mention it includes some of the dumbest "journalists" we have out there in David Brooks Tom Friedman and Jeffery Goldberg. But then again, that is the point. You're not inviting people here to question their actions, you're bringing them in so they can help sell your war.