Portside

An antidote to anti-immigrant sentiment, Seattle poet Jed Myers generously welcomes newcomers to this nation of immigrants, offering empathy and greeting from our ancestors: "what we’ve secured/only a few breaths before..."

If, as Cornel West says, 'justice is what love looks like in public,' then Freedom Square is an embodiment of practicing justice....With grace, imagination and courage, Freedom Square offers a glimpse into a new future and is boldly showing the world how to make Black lives matter.

The reason for today's powerful and persistent insistence that Black lives matter is based on the irrefutable evidence throughout American history that Black lives have never mattered. Black lives that were enslaved for 250 years never much mattered beyond the kind of economic concern held for livestock. Black lives that suffered a hundred years of brutal segregation and discrimination following slavery's abolition never mattered until Black people raised their voices...

"History is watching: - former CBS News anchor Dan Rather on Facebook rips Donald Trump's veiled assassination threat against his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton. Trump in a bid to his followers, who also oppose gun control, said his "Second Amendment people" might be able to stop Hillary Clinton's appointment of Supreme Court justices. This is a new level of the GOP's war on women, where the right has fueled attacks on women and the murder of abortion providers.

Reader Comments: 2016 Elections, Supreme Court, All In To Defeat Trump; Nagasaki - The World Did Not Need US's Experiment; A.J. Muste - An Inspiration for Today; Labor Must Take on Capital; Black Lives Matter takes on Education and Police Unions; Jewish Support for #BlackLivesMatter; Palestine Removed from GoogleMaps - What You Can Do; Announcements: New Book - Women Fight the Islamic State;Rock Against the TPP Concerts - Seattle, Portland and San Francisco; and more.

"This movement is bigger than $15 and a union. This movement shows that no matter what’s going on in America, no matter what it is that we’re fighting for, if you want change for your city, for your community, for your country, we as a people can’t be silent anymore.

As the Olympic Games go, the reviewer says, it's time to ask the big question: which were the worst Olympics ever? David Goldblatt's The Games is a history of the tarnished Olympics, from Avery Brundage to, yes, London 2012. The evidence shows indisputably that it was Hitler's Berlin games of 1936, which set the stage for spectacle and nationalist-racialist sentiment.

Deaths like that of Darius Robinso at the hands of prison guards underlie the lethal risk faced by those who are incarcerated.

How has Trump managed to attract substantial support among white men without college degrees? According to Raymond Hogler, "The answer is an interlocking set of changing economic and cultural conditions in the U.S. that has undermined middle-class incomes and values. And it starts with the steady erosion of the American labor movement."

Although this book is two years old, and this review is over a year old, the relevance of A. J. Muste still resonates in this political season, where the always essential questions of war and peace should take center stage. Muste helped shape the modern peace movement in a host of ways. This book, and this review, offers a window into the life and times of this important movement figure.