Portside

Prince was Prince. He kept on being his eccentric, sexy, unapologetic self, and kept on making the art he wanted to make.

I was not expecting to be cracked wide open by this project. I was not expecting to shed a lifetime of tears. But I did.

"To my Democratic Party: you cannot show up in churches before election day, you cannot sing the first and last verse of 'Lift Every Voice and Sing,' you cannot join hands and walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and call that post-racial and inclusion," Donna Edwards told supporters after her Senate campaign loss.

"He's not moving a party to the left. He's moving a generation to the left," Della Volpe said of the senator from Vermont. "Whether or not he's winning or losing, it's really that he's impacting the way in which a generation - the largest generation in the history of America - thinks about politics."

The new Mapplethorpe film begins with the voice of Senator Jesse Helms exhorting everyone to, "Look at the pictures!" He was protesting an exhibit of Mapplethorpe's work that he viewed as pornographic, and we see the conservative politician waving what he viewed as smut, seeking to inflame the culture wars, despite the fact that Mapplethorpe had died just a few months prior at the age of 42 of AIDS. That protest turned out to solidify the artist's legend.

Corporate trolls; Verizon strike; ISPs' eye on you; Bum Rush; Local media to the rescue

The WFP just confronted the biggest test of its 18-year existence, and came through with colors flying. And that’s not all. Just as importantly, some units of our normally hidebound union movement stuck with the Party despite short-term incentives to defect. When the history of class politics in our time is written, the choices made both by the Party and by its loyal union affiliates may figure importantly.

“Teamster pensions are in trouble because of greed, incompetence and corruption,” Rita Lewis told In These Times. Excessive pay to plan administrators and outlandish fees to financial advisors have drained the fund, she says, echoing Warren’s emphasis on Wall Street malfeasance, and a first step should be to clean house at the offices of Central States Pension Fund, the organization that collects and distributes pension monies for some 400,000 union members and retirees.

When Sanders questions Clinton about her funding from Wall Street, her speeches to big banks and other interests that brought her millions personally, and her array of super PACs, she charges Sanders with making “false character attacks.” But the influence of campaign contributions isn’t about character, it is about association, gratitude and access.

When you study successful transformational movements, you see that the key to success is to establish a certain identity between your analysis and what the majority feels.” — Pablo Iglesias, General Secretary of the Spanish Podemos Party