Portside

It shows the limits of party politics—and the necessity of social movements to challenge those limits.

“There’s clearly a different Constitution being employed in poor neighborhoods where most of the people are black and brown than in our white neighborhoods, On an absolute regular basis police are stopping and searching people of color in this city with no legal justification to do it.”

For years, the medical community has treated autism as if it was a “white person’s” disease. Research and therapy have been geared toward affluent, white people and families, creating serious racial and ethnic disparities in all areas of autism. The autism community has made tremendous strides in educating the general public about neurodiversity and the ways different brains work. It needs to make a similar effort to embrace the racial diversity of people with autism.

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.