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Urge President Obama to Grant Clemency to Leonard Peltier

Portside
It is not too late for President Obama to grant clemency to Leonard Peltier, imprisoned for past forty years. Peltier was a member of the American Indian Movement (AIM), which promotes Native American rights. In 1975, during a confrontation involving AIM members, two FBI agents were shot dead. Peltier was convicted of their murders, but has always denied killing the agents. The judge who authored the decision denying a new trial, has since voiced support for his release.

Tidbits - November 24, 2016 - Reader Comments: Not a Revolution - Yet; Slavery, Democracy, the Electoral College; The U.S. Working Class; This Was Not a Working Class Revolt; Labor Leaders Deserve Their Share of the Blame; and more....

Portside
Reader Comments: Not a Revolution - Yet; Hamilton; Enabling Neo-Fascists; Slavery, Democracy, the Electoral College; Understanding the U.S. Working Class; This Was Not a Working Class Revolt; Remembering Tony Mazzocchi; Social Security is NOT Going Broke; Labor Leaders Deserve Their Share of the Blame; Honor the Thousands of Undocumented Workers; Venezuela; Flu Shots: Facts & Fallacies; and more.. Announcement: What Happened? What Now? - Labor Forum with Bill Fletcher

Winning at Russian Roulette

Scott McLemee Inside Higher Ed
McLemee looks at 30 academic studies of Hillary Clinton, finding interest in her focusing either as a user of some form of communication media or as an object of media representation. Like the campaign's news coverage, where personality trumped policy, research tended to focus on how Clinton challenged or was constrained by traditional female roles or implicit assumptions about the proper connect between public and private identity than in her work as a public official.

Welcome Home

Courtney Stewart The National Reentry Network for Returning Citizens
Many of our returning citizens are ill prepared for the tough road ahead of them, meeting conditions of their release, reuniting with family and loved ones, securing employment and stable housing. The prison system normally releases them to a parking lot miles away from where they are from and expects them to figure the rest out on their own.

What About the Black Working Class?

Tanzina Vega CNN
Amid all of the talk about economic populism this election cycle, one group has been largely left out: working class Americans of color.

To Resist a Trump Presidency, Ask: “What Would the Abolitionists Do?”

Linda Hirshman The Washington Post
What can anti-Trump liberals and progressives actually do? With his party in control of the White House and Congress, and with Trump about to tip the balance of the Supreme Court, it’s easy to despair over how little leverage the Democrats seem to have. One episode from history reveals reasons to hope. In 1850, like the Democrats and their allies in 2016, the abolitionists took a terrible hit...

Were the Framers Democrats?

Cass Sunstein The New Rambler
This book, says reviewer Cass Sunstein, "might well be the best book ever written on the founders and their handiwork." It is the kind of book that helps provide useful context for this complex political moment. Readers interested in this topic might also look at America's Constitution: A Biography, by Akhil Reed Amar (Random House, 2005).