Portside

Reading the majority opinion in Garner is a bracing experience. Justice White’s extended discussion of the common law standard of police use of force makes clear on many levels that he did not merely want to replace the common law rule: he wanted to bury it.That police could use any amount of force, including deadly force, to “seize” a fleeing felon—the common law rule which at issue in Garner—was not only constitutionally infirm, it made little sense as a policy matter.

Adopted by the Eighth United Nations Congress on the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Offenders, Havana, Cuba, 27 August to 7 September 1990

Cohn said, "The same way that the Obama administration uses unmanned drones in other countries to kill people instead of arresting them and bringing them to trial, we see a similar situation here....

With a statewide referendum looming in November, Massachusetts voters will have to decide just how much school privatization they're willing to bear.

When it came time to fight, the Sanders forces tried two tactics. The first was an amendment to the compromise plank, tweaking it to say "and that's why we oppose the TPP." The second was a separate amendment that would have put the party on record against a TPP vote this year.

Once-fraught ideas and symbols are now a routine matter of partisan combat. This is scary.

Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are both on record against the TPP. So why does the draft Democratic platform only say that “there are a diversity of views in the party” on the TPP? This weekend Texas populist Jim Hightower will present the Democratic Party platform committee with a Bernie Sanders-sponsored amendment to make a clear statement against a lame-duck vote on TPP.

As the head of Fox News, Ailes has deployed his survival skills frequently to weather scandals of career-ending proportions and a bitter power struggle with Rupert Murdoch’s oldest son, Lachlan. But in the wake of Gretchen Carlson’s shocking sexual-harassment lawsuit against Ailes, there are signs that the 76 year-old’s luck may have finally expired.

Fatal shootings by police are up by 6 percent during the first six months of 2016, compared with the same period last year. Fatal encounters are strikingly similar to last year’s shootings: Blacks continued to be shot at 2.5 times the rate of whites. But many more are being captured on video.