It kind of makes sense, in a twisted sort of way. If your life was on the line every time you stepped foot into your office, and if there was a regimen of drugs you could take to intimidate or perhaps overpower those who were trying to kill you, wouldn't you be tempted to take ...read more
(Photo: Lucas Jackson/Reuters) Let's just get this out of the way right off the bat and not even try to delude ourselves. If a bunch of black guys showed up in the middle of Ferguson, Missouri carrying assault rifles they'd either buried under every cop within a mile radius or ...read more
35 years later, the scars on the outside of Miami have mostly healed. When you think of a hellish summer in the city, when it felt like the apocalypse had arrived and the world was being torn asunder, you usually think of New York City in 1977. That was the Summer of Sam, when ...read more
On Sunday afternoon, St. Louis county prosecutor Bob McCulloch held a press conference to announce that a suspect, 20 year-old Jeffrey Williams, had been arrested, and has allegedly confessed to the shootings of two police officers in Ferguson, Missouri last week. Williams says ...read more
As winter's last gasp blankets much of the country in snow, this week's news cycle continues to be dominated by a blizzard of news about former Secretary of State and future Madame President Hillary Clinton's email account. While the story is not nothing, closer examination of ...read more
President Obama is steadily becoming the personification of "twice as good, half as much," the 21st century equivalent to the "Jackie Robinson effect" that observes how much more exceptionally a black person must perform to get even half of the credit that others receive. ...read more
On Saturday afternoon, 28 year-old Ismaaiyl Brinsley shot and killed NYPD Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos as they sat in their patrol car in Brooklyn, in what Brinsley said was an act of revenge for the killings of Eric Garner and Michael Brown. Brinsley had warned of his ...read more
Somebody call Webster's, because Joe Scarborough has rendered its definition of "white privilege" obsolete. On Tuesday morning's Morning Joe, Scarborough and his diverse panel (Howard Dean was once voted for by black people) tackled LeBron James' "I can't breathe" protest ...read more
As one of my Twitter friends noted yesterday regarding the decision not to indict NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo in the chokehold death of Eric Garner: James Holmes, who shot and killed 12 people while wounding 70 others in an Aurora movie theater, was apprehended alive. But ...read more
Back when I was a wee child of 11 years, a cop visited my fifth grade class to talk to us about drugs for the DARE program. He was a young, friendly man with a brown mustache and he played the guitar and sang a song at our graduation assembly. He made our moms cry with joy. I ...read more
Line up four white guys in a row. According to a poll I cited yesterday, one of those four white guys thinks he's smarter than black people. Based on his genetic whiteness alone, he thinks he's automatically smarter than the apparently less evolved black population. Around the ...read more
(Photo: Robert Cohen/St Louis Post-Dispatch) It's raining in L.A. If you know anything at all about this city, you know that it very rarely rains here and given the drought most of California has been suffering through over the past few years this is especially true right now. ...read more
The violation was known as "vagrancy." If you were a black man in the South following Reconstruction, and you were unable to show proof of employment on-demand to the police, you could be arrested and delivered into what Douglas Blackmon, author of Slavery by Another Name, ...read more
In the wake of the disastrous rioting and looting that hit Ferguson last week after Officer Darren Wilson was exonerated for Mike Brown's death, much attention has been paid to the speed with which protesters turned to violence. But less attention has been paid to the speed with ...read more
Perhaps at some point early in its development, the addition of comments under YouTube videos was probably seen as a positive societal advancement in which consumers were encouraged to help sculpt content via accompanying feedback -- to idealistically form a community where ...read more
(Photo: Samuel Corum/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images) When you consider the nature of the spark that began this conflagration, everything that went up in its flames may not seem like a very big deal. A young man was shot dead, his body left on a street for hours; the system that ...read more
(Photo: Larry W. Smith/European Pressphoto Agency) So, that's it. As far as the possibility of Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson being tried in criminal court for the killing of Mike Brown, there is none. A grand jury has decided there isn't enough evidence to move forward ...read more
As St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch concluded his press conference announcing the grand jury decision not to indict Officer Darren Wilson for the killing of Michael Brown, the White House announced that President Obama would be delivering a statement. Amid ...read more
Update: 9:30PM ET St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch has announced that Officer Darren Wilson will not be indicted in the shooting of Mike Brown. The grand jury made its decision today. More to come. Here's live streaming video of a protest going on in ...read more
The decision by Governor Jay Nixon (D-MO) to declare a state of emergency in his state ahead of the grand jury decision in the killing of Michael Brown has been a hot topic this week, and resulted in a very clarifying moment on NBC's Meet The Press Sunday morning. In discussing ...read more
Updated Below For the moment, we're all still waiting for a grand jury decision on whether Ferguson, Missouri police officer Darren Wilson will face a trial in the killing of 18-year-old Mike Brown. It would seem, though, that one local Fox affiliate either has insider info the ...read more
As America waits for a grand jury in Missouri to decide whether Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson will stand trial for the killing of unarmed 17 year-old Michael Brown, a steady stream of one-sided leaks from that secret proceeding makes it pretty clear that there will be no ...read more
One of the big pieces of "news" that dominated this weekend was a New York Times report on Officer Darren Wilson's account of the Michael Brown killing that was only slightly more fair and credible than right-wing radio host Dana Loesch's August interview with an anonymous ...read more
A Republican official in the county just south of Ferguson, Mo., is treading hot water over a Facebook post in which she wondered why the United States military "has taken no action" against President Obama, whom she describes as a "domestic enemy." Jefferson County Recorder of ...read more
Republican Senator and 2016 presidential hopeful Rand Paul (R-KY) gets a lot of credit from the media for allegedly reaching out to black voters, but when it comes to Republican voter suppression measures, Rand is still a good ol' boy at heart. In an interview following a ...read more
Just as the National Association of Black Journalists decries the exodus of black talent away from CNN, the network has invited conservative Blacksphere host Kevin Jackson on to tell protesters in Ferguson that their protesting might make cops not want to protect them. In a ...read more
The Summer of Ferguson has, if nothing else, provided White America with a mountain of evidence that black America really is being terrorized by police brutality, and this week, another bit of that evidence surfaced. Surveillance video obtained by DNAinfo New York shows the tail ...read more
Tensions in Ferguson, Missouri flared anew Thursday night, as peaceful protesters marching and chanting in protest of the Mike Brown killing were met by a local business owner whom police confirm pulled a gun on the marchers. An Argus News livestreaming camera was there to ...read more
A poll released this week shows what the media likes to call a Racial Divide® on whether the shooting of unarmed 17 year-old Mike Brown was justified, but just how many area white people think it was? Well, a lot. Despite the fact that every single eyewitness says that Brown ...read more
Former Secretary of State and current 2016 Democratic Freight Train Hillary Clinton has been facingmounting criticism over her silence on the killing of Mike Brown, and its aftermath. On Thursday, Clinton finally broke her conspicuous silence on the events in Ferguson with four ...read more
For several weeks now, the nation's attention has been focused on Ferguson, Mo., and in particular, the militarized response of police to mostly-peaceful protests of the killing of 18 year-old Mike Brown. On Wednesday, a considerably less-tragic reminder of overboard police ...read more
Last week, Banter readers helped us do something very few other outlets could ever dream of: they funded our foray into on-the-ground reporting in Ferguson, Missouri by generously donating towards the cost of plane tickets, hotels and car rentals. While we have done some ...read more
California-born, Tokyo-based Dexter Thomas, Jr is a scholar of music and Internet culture at Cornell University. He is finishing his book on Japanese hip-hop this year. He tweets at@dexdigi. For a moment there, things were looking pretty good. A boy shot multiple times with his ...read more
The Los Angeles Police Department's killing of unarmed 25 year-old Ezell Ford has been overshadowed, nationally, by the events surrounding the Ferguson, Mo. killing of Mike Brown, but the police in Los Angeles are paying close attention to the real danger it poses: finger-gun ...read more
Live From Ferguson: Chez Broadcasts Live from Ferguson, Missouri on the Bubble Genius Bob and Chez Show podcast. Bob and Chez are joined by The Daily Banter founder Ben Cohen in Washington, DC where they discuss the story on the ground, police militarism; Chez being ...read more
In case you're still on the Megyn Kelley superfan bandwagon following her not-so-challenging interview with Dick Cheney, you might want to take a look at this video. Today on Fox News Channel during a segment about the ISIS beheading of journalist James Foley, the producers of ...read more
The turmoil in Ferguson, Mo. that began 12 days ago with the shooting of 18-year-old Mike Brown finally got to former Hercules star and conservative celebrity Kevin Sorbo last night, when he took to his Facebook page to call the people of Ferguson "animals" who blame "everyone ...read more
Conservatives are gleefully rimfiring in their jeans over a clip of CNN's Don Lemon arguing with conservative pundit and Guy Who Always Dresses As Baby New Year For Halloween Ben Ferguson over the meaning of "automatic weapon." But a surprising source says the gun nuts are the ...read more
That took longer that I thought. After nearly two weeks of tensions in Ferguson, MO, far-right radio has finally shoehorned the crisis into its ongoing Benghazi and IRS narratives. I'm seriously shocked that it didn't happen sooner, a sign that perhaps the screechers are feeling ...read more
The footage of the St Louis police shooting and killing Kajieme Powell, a 25-year-old black man, has highlighted yet again the extreme measure American police officers take against the public when there is a perceived threat. On Tuesday, Powell was filmed by a passerby wielding ...read more
Earlier Wednesday, St. Louis County Police raided a school building attached to Greater St. Mark Family Church in Ferguson, which was open for use by injured protesters known as the Dream Defenders. In a video recorded by Reconciling Ministries Network, organizer Phillip Agnew ...read more
The memory of last night's peaceful protest ending in a police crackdown on remaining stragglers was juxtaposed against a much quieter day on West Florissant. The main thing to note has been that there isn't much to note. Throughout the early evening, the march wasn't much of a ...read more
People have guns for two reasons. The first reason is because they’re scared and having a gun makes them feel less scared. The second is because they’re angry and they want to make themselves less angry by killing who ever they’re angry at. The problem with both fear and anger ...read more
The indispensable Pew Research Center is out with a new poll that shows what they call a "racial divide" on perceptions of, and interest in, the story of Mike Brown's killing by Ferguson, Mo. police, and the subsequent turmoil. A closer look, however, shows that the only divide ...read more
Whenever a crisis involving police brutality against black people arises in America, you can be sure that an old white Republican will weigh in on the situation with something so transparently racist and insensitive that it's hard to believe we are living in the 21st century. ...read more
CNN International anchor and icon to overly-religious chefs, Rosemary Church is the subject of a major backlash over comments she made during a broadcast late Monday night/Tuesday morning. While interviewing CNN The Lead anchor Jake Tapper, who is on the ground in Ferguson, Mo., ...read more
As I explained earlier, I hardly ever actually watch Fox News, by which I mean turning the channel on my TV to the dreaded 820. Most of my Fox News commentaries are based on clips I have dug up myself through research, seen somewhere else, or been sitting in the actual space ...read more
Most of the commentaries I write about Fox News are not the result of me actually watching Fox, but of specific research, tips, or other means. Every once in a very long while, though, I decide to take a break from the reality-based community, and actually turn on Fox News. This ...read more
Ezra Klein's formerly useful explainer site Vox.com now appears to be chiefly devoted to explaining how President Obama ruins everything. Last week, Obama was "breaking politics," and this week, he's narrowly avoiding dividing the nation by toning down his remarks on the killing ...read more
Over the weekend, NSA author and journalist for The Intercept, Glenn Greenwald posted a tweet in which he claimed the St. Louis County police chief visited Israel "to learn about police tactics from the Israelis." Greenwald linked to a tweet from Iranian-American activist and ...read more