Portside

How can we understand the 2016 presidential election in a broad context of American history? This is a question that many Americans, pundits, and historians have been thinking through for the past month. To address it, we assembled a panel of experts.

A call for solidarity for justice for Walter Scott from Black Lives Matter-Charleston, South Carolina in response to the trial of former South Carolina police officer, Michael Slager, who shot and killed Scott ended in a mistrial this week.

Somebody's got to be the first state to free the weed through the legislature. Here are the most likely prospects.

Acclaimed Native American novelist Erdrich's fifteenth novel is a "multigenerational tale," writes reviewer Round, that "stretches across two centuries of life on the Northern Plains."

The author says Hillary Clinton talked about the working class constantly. She had plans to help coal miners and steelworkers. She had plans to help those getting out of prison get jobs. She promoted clean energy jobs and spoke of the dignity of manufacturing jobs. The author argues that white Trump voters might just have been more interested in his attacks against Muslims and Hispanics.

Bravo's film was commissioned by Channel 4 in Britain, and won the Distinguished Achievement for Excellence in Documentary Filmmaking from the Urbanworld Film Festival in New York, and played the Toronto International Film Festival to sold-out crowds despite the fact that it opened three days after the September 11th attacks. It has played in arthouses throughout the U.S. It and several other films about Castro, can now be viewed on YouTube and are also listed below.

How the right commandeers Google; Facebook censorship by algorithm; PropOrNot 1 and 2; Media Trumped; #Trumpgrets

Now, after the wave of new protests in the late Obama era, the Sanders campaign, and the post-primary mess that resulted in the election of Trump, there are signs of a new direction. As the shock of November 8 drives a turn toward left politics, many new converts are looking for orientation and training. The left has plenty of passion, but lacks a coherent organizing strategy or analysis of how power is defined by social relations from top to bottom.

When native American protesters sat down in front of bulldozers to try and protect ancestral graves, they were met with attack dogs – the pictures looked like Birmingham, Alabama, circa 1963. But it went back further than that: the encampment, with its teepees and woodsmoke hovering in the valley, looked like something out of an 1840s painting. But this was not just one tribe. The flags of more than 200 Indian nations lined the rough dirt entrance road.

At this late date, what might a president frightened by his successor actually do, if not to hamper Trump's ability to create global mayhem, then at least to set the record straight before he leaves the White House? Unfortunately, the answer is: far less than we might like, but as it happens, there are still some powers a president has that are irreversible by their very nature. Here are nine recommendations for action by the president in his last 40 days.