At Counterpunch, Doug Johnson Hatlem has a good breakdown of the manufactured myth of violence by Sanders supporters at the Nevada Democratic convention. Nobody threw chairs, nobody made death threats, and there is a legitimate grievance at the root of it. If you had any doubt that the corporate media has had an anti-Sanders bias all along, their coverage of this clusterfuck ought to put that doubt to rest.

The Faux Fracas in Nevada: How a Reporter Manufactured a Riot (www.counterpunch.org)

Fifty-eight Sanders supporters were denied entry to the Nevada Convention and were told they weren’t Democrats. Other than the one guy who acknowledged he switched his registration on his own, this is ludicrous. Nevada had onsite registration for the original caucuses in February, and no one could participate in them unless they were registered as a Democrat.

It's a Fox poll, so, take with salt. But still, good job Democrats on picking the candidate who consistently polls worse against Trump.

Trump leads Clinton in Fox News poll (POLITICO)

Presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump leads Hillary Clinton in a hypothetical general election matchup, according to a Fox News poll released Wednesday evening.

Trump leads Clinton 45 percent to 42 percent, within the poll’s 3-point margin of error. In the same poll conducted in April, Clinton led by 7 points — 48 percent to 41 percent.

...

More than seven in 10 — 71 percent — said the phrase “will say anything to get elected” describes Clinton, while 65 percent said the same of Trump.

Clinton holds double-digit advantages among women (50 percent to 36 percent), African Americans (90 percent to 7 percent), Latinos (62 percent to 23 percent) and those under the age of 35 (46 percent to 35 percent).

Trump, meanwhile, has the upper hand among independent voters (46 percent to 30 percent), men (55 percent to 33 percent), white voters (55 percent to 31 percent), those without a college degree (45 percent to 40 percent), and varying majorities of voters 35 and older.

You sometimes hear about "intersectionality", the ways in which systems of oppression like patriarchy and racism overlap, and so the interests of those working against them also intersect. You almost never hear about the intersectionality of economic class. It's as if today's "liberals" (so-called) and Democrats don't actually care whether society is built as an oppressive hierarchy, just so long as being an oppressor is an equal-opportunity position. It's no wonder that since the days of the Reagan Democrats -- indeed, going back to the 1960s -- the Republicans have been able to catch this demographic "on the rebound" as it were, after the Democrats dumped the to pursue identity politics.
(Contrast this with how the radical Black Panthers reached out to work with poor whites; and for interesting history, read Kenneth D. Durr's Behind the Backlash: White Working Class Politics in Baltimore, 1940-1980.) The reunion that Sanders suggests would be a powerful thing -- and those in power now sure as hell don't want that.

Burying the White Working Class | Jacobin (www.jacobinmag.com)

These kinds of statements are the name of the game for today’s Democratic elite. The party has established a clear line on the white wage-earning class: they’re all either dying (demographically or literally), irrelevant in an increasingly nonwhite country, or so hopelessly racist they can go off themselves with a Miller High Life-prescription-painkiller cocktail for all they care. As liberal hero and Sanders nemesis Barney Frank put it a couple of weeks ago, “the likelihood that fifty-eight-year-old coal miners are going to become the solar engineers of the future is nil.”

The problem with this line is not just that it’s gross and elitist — it’s that it’s not even true. The working class is bigger than ever, is still really white, and is broadly supportive of a progressive populist agenda.

It just turns out that the Democratic Party outside of Sanders isn’t too interested in that agenda. And it’s even less interested in that specific chunk of the working class that forces liberals to confront head on the naked brutality of the economic system they cherish.

...

After decades of being told white workers would never support socialism because they’re racist, we’re now told that they support the socialist candidate because they are racist. Yes, this is where liberals are in the year 2016.

From the "the more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers" department:

In Internet age, pirate radio arises as surprising challenge (hosted.ap.org)

In the age of podcasts and streaming services, you might think pirate radio is low on the list of concerns of federal lawmakers and broadcasters. You'd be wrong.

...

Helped along by cheaper technology, the rogue stations can cover several blocks or several square miles. Most broadcast to immigrant communities that pirate radio defenders say are underserved by licensed stations.

The Olympics are one of those things that I used to think were really neat but that I learned later were fundamentally exploitive. Add in a country just emerging from a (US-backed, of course) dictatorship and you've got the makings of a horrorshow.

AP: S. Korea covered up mass abuse, killings of 'vagrants' (The Big Story)

Choi was one of thousands — the homeless, the drunk, but mostly children and the disabled — rounded up off the streets ahead of the 1988 Seoul Olympics, which the ruling dictators saw as international validation of South Korea's arrival as a modern country. An Associated Press investigation shows that the abuse of these so-called vagrants at Brothers, the largest of dozens of such facilities, was much more vicious and widespread than previously known, based on hundreds of exclusive documents and dozens of interviews with officials and former inmates.

The nostalgia for the Clinton years, the ignorance and amnesia about Bill Clinton's presidency, continues to confound me. I wonder how the 2000 elections would have turned out if Clinton hadn't helped imprison and disenfranchise potential African-American voters with this bill.

Bill Clinton's crime bill destroyed lives, and there's no point denying it | Thomas Frank (the Guardian)

All of a sudden, Bill Clinton looks like a monster rather than a hero, and he now finds himself dogged by protesters as he campaigns for his wife, Hillary. And so the media has stepped up to do what it always does: reassure Americans that the nightmare isn’t real, that this honorable man did the best he could as president.

...The reason the 1994 crime bill upsets people is not because they stupidly believe Bill Clinton invented these things; it is because they know he encouraged them. Because the Democrats’ capitulation to the rightwing incarceration agenda was a turning point in its own right.

One of the reasons that we haven't heard much about Americans in the Panama Papers scandal is because they don't need to go to Panama. We have Delaware. It's not illegal for the Clinton's to use a on-shore haven to dodge taxes, but it's their usual hypocrisy to do so while promising to go after other millionaire tax dodgers.

The Clintons are using 5 shell companies to save on taxes in Delaware (theweek.com)

The Clintons and their family foundation have at least five shell companies registered to the address 1209 North Orange Street in Wilmington, Delaware — which is also home to some 280,000 other companies who use the location to take advantage of the state's low taxes, limited disclosure requirements, and other business incentives.

Surprise surprise, the critics -- Bernie Sanders among them -- were right, and Clinton and Obama were wrong. Yet again.

Panama Papers: Obama, Clinton Pushed Trade Deal Amid Warnings It Would Make Money Laundering, Tax Evasion Worse (International Business Times)

Soon after taking office in 2009, Obama and his secretary of state — who is currently the Democratic presidential front-runner — began pushing for the passage of stalled free trade agreements (FTAs) with Panama, Colombia and South Korea that opponents said would make it more difficult to crack down on Panama’s very low income tax rate, banking secrecy laws and history of noncooperation with foreign partners.

Two bad guys attack an ill old man on oxygen in his home to steal his medication. He defends himself with a gun. If you are opposed to citizens being armed, what's your alternative here? Fight them hand-to-hand? The guy's on oxygen full time. Give up his meds and pray they don't beat him to the point of serious injury or death? (And that he can afford to replace them and won't need them until he can?) Relying on the mercy of someone who's in the middle of a violent act is not a sound strategy. Call the cops? You can be dead several times over before the cops show up -- if they do at all, several court cases have found that they have no legal responsibility to do so.

What would you do? What would you have someone physically weaker do? Your feeling that "guns are icky" is not a reason to let this man be beaten or killed, is it?

The Shattucks did their level best to follow Michigan's medical cannabis laws in setting up a dispensary, working closely with the local planning commission and inviting the sheriff's Drug Task Force to inspect the place. For their trouble, the local scumbag cops busted into their house, pointed guns at them, and stole their stuff under the pretense of asset forfeiture. The courts have thrown out all criminal complaints; the Shattucks still don't have all their stuff back, nor an apology from the criminal cops. (Any cop who take part in a violent raid on a home on suspicion of a non-violent offense is, ipso facto, a violent criminal; in a sane society everyone involved in perpetrating a rain like this would be in jail on charges of assault with a deadly weapon.)

What life is like after police ransack your house and take ‘every belonging’ — then the charges are dropped (Washington Post)

The Shattuck family has experienced this harm first-hand. Beyond the financial burden, the raids have left the family with considerable emotional trauma as well. When the task force raided her home, Shattuck's mother was babysitting her four children, who were all under age 10 at the time. "During the dynamic entry, armed DTF officers wearing ski masks separated the children from their grandmother at gunpoint, shouting at her to get the dog under control or they would shoot it," a court briefing filed by the Shattucks' lawyer alleges. "The deputies kept the children lined up on the couch at gunpoint, refusing even to remove their masks to help calm the kids."