Baltimore

Speaking of leadership, or lack thereof, am I the only one who isn't all that impressed that Ray Lewis screamed at a camera for five minutes? I've seen this shared so many times on Facebook. "Ray Lewis speaks the truth to Baltimore!!!" If Ray Lewis cared he would he an would have been out on the streets when this went town, not armchair quarterbacking from his home like the rest of us did. Baltimore did a lot for Ray, it's time to return serve. He had a perfect chance when all of the religious leaders were out IN THE STREETS pleading for calm.

Everyone Google "Willie Horton, Detroit Tigers" and read what he did during the Detroit riots in '67. That's what someone who gives a damn looks like.

 

Or what Jim Brown has done any one of a dozen times over the years.

 

Have you been drinking?

 

But, he's skipping the draft!

Ray Lewis will remain in Baltimore area to calm violence, won't work draft for ESPN - Baltimore Sun

John McCain approves.

 

Sounds reasonable:

(T)he department began sweeping the streets of the inner city, taking bodies on ridiculous humbles, mass arrests, sending thousands of people to city jail, hundreds every night, thousands in a month. They actually had police supervisors stationed with printed forms at the city jail – forms that said, essentially, you can go home now if you sign away any liability the city has for false arrest, or you can not sign the form and spend the weekend in jail until you see a court commissioner. And tens of thousands of people signed that form.

David Simon on Baltimore’s Anguish | The Marshall Project

 

City Council President already apologized for using the term. Will the Mayor?

On Tuesday’s edition of “Out Front with Erin Burnett,” Erin Burnett really tried to defend Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake’s description of protesting kids as “thugs.”Unfortunately, this probably wasn’t the wisest time to defend a local politician using a pretty problematic term.

“Isn’t it the right word?” Burnett asked Baltimore city councilman Carl Stokes.

“No, of course it’s not the right word to call our children ‘thugs.’ These are children who have been set aside, marginalized, who have not been engaged by us. No! We don’t have to call them thugs–”

“But how does that justify what they did? I mean that’s a sense of right and wrong. They know it’s wrong to steal and burn down a CVS and an old person’s home. I mean, come on.”

“Come on? So calling them thugs? Just call them niggers. Just call them niggers,” Stokes replied. “No. We don’t have to call them by names such as that. We don’t have to do that.”

CNN guest slams media for saying protesters are “thugs”: “Just call them n***ers” - Salon.com

 

Protester to media: We protested peacefully for six days and no one cared.

Baltimore Woman: "Why Does It Take A Catastrophe Like This For America To Hear Our Cries?" | Video | RealClearPolitics

 

Does someone have a plan for this?

It's easy to say, but what's the plan?

“We need a true national debate about how to reduce our prison population while keeping our communities safe,” she said.

Clinton has often been accused of being too close to Wall Street, and many have wondered if she will be able to speak to the many Americans who have been attracted to the message of economic populism that has been defined by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). Her speech Wednesday saw her put poverty and income inequality at the center of her discussion of criminal justice reform.

“I don’t want the discussion of criminal justice to be siloed,” she said. “The conservation needs to be much broader, because that is a symptom, not a cause, of what ails us today.”

She linked America’s massive prison population, the largest in the world, directly to income inequality, saying that “without the mass incarceration that we currently practice, millions fewer people would be living in poverty.”

Clinton links police, justice reforms to income inequality | TheHill

 

This is a serious question. When did "thug" become a racial term? I honestly never thought of it as one until people started making a big deal about it very recently. I always thought it meant a vicious criminal and have heard it applied to whites just as much as blacks. Hell, hockey goons used to routinely be referred to as thugs.

 

Probably since the early '90s, when people first misunderstood Tupac's music.

 

Abracadabra?

 

I remember Bill Laimbeer frequently called a "thug" during the Detroit Bad Boys days.