“So, women had more rights fifty years ago than today?” — Asked my wife this morning after hearing of the leaked Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v Wade. Brilliant at math, she dislikes figuring in her head. She asked, “How old would Roe be today?” “Forty-nine,” I replied. “So women had more rights fifty years ago than they do today?” I…

Is it really time to take out the trash? — “The US Constitution is not good,” says Harvard-educated legal correspondent for The Nation and frequent MSNBC contributor Elie Mystal. It was “hastily edited in the margins” by slave-owning white men who shared power with only the greatest parsimony, if at all. “Why, he asks, should he give a fuck about…

New Mexico cops weaponize medical procedures — On the early evening of January 2, 2013, 53-year old David Eckert drove his Ford pick-up truck out of the Deming, New Mexico Walmart parking lot. …

Lincoln and the Dakota War of 1862 — Three members of the San Francisco Board of Education were recalled by a vastly greater number of votes than put them into office in the first place. …

Anti-racist writers race the SF Board of Ed & Neo-Confederates for gold in the silly stakes — I’m writing in response to an article by one of Medium’s best and most prolific anti-racist authors, and also the growing tendency of progressives in general to downplay Lincoln’s contributions to the liberation of slaves. The Medium article argued Lincoln wasn’t a white savior. Why the qualifier? We know he…

Was the SCOTUS’s most infamous ruling really off the mark? — …They had no rights the white man was bound to respect… I see this quote a lot, especially in the writing of anti-racists. But far-right, “race realists” cite it, too. It’s from paragraph 36 of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney’s infamous 1858 rejection of Dred Scott’s bid for freedom. That…

Yes, the Nazis made it about race, but must we? — Whoopi Goldberg apologized for insisting that the Holocaust had nothing to do with race. For her trouble she was granted a two-week suspension from her talk show, The View. For what purpose? Is it intended she take this time to read, or reread, Maus (if so, I know where she…

Or none, if you prefer — Filmmaker Adam Kesher gets it from all sides in David Lynch’s hypnagogic noir, Mulholland Drive. Mobbed up financiers demand he cast an unknown actress for the lead in his forthcoming movie. “It’s no longer your movie,” one tells him. He’s thrown out of his own house by a pool guy…

Is it time to return to our roots? — Although I’m taking the Crumbley family’s lethal handgun clusterfuck as the inspiration to finish this article, I know I’d need only wait for the yeast to activate in my bread-maker before another, more egregious, mass killing comes along. Sure, what follows is fantasy. It would require a single, central authority…