Whoo wee. It’s been a week. Not to get too personal, but I’m writing this while on the bus for my third trip to see my family in a week. That’s too many.
Which will surely go down in history as the slogan for the 2016 Republican primary campaign. The luckless David Graham over at the Atlantic was tasked with keeping a presidential campaign cheat sheet. Poor guy; probably didn’t know that he was going to be keeping track of 16 Republicans.
This has been the week when the Democratic primary was forced to face racial issues qua racial issues. If you’d like to sign Bay Area for Bernie’s petition asking Bernie to make racial justice an item on his agenda, you can go over here. But in the meantime, let’s take a look at what happened:
Tough Love of the Week: Black Lives Matters activists interrupted the speeches by Martin O’Malley and our man Bernie at Netroots Nation, a meeting of progressives last weekend. This article over at Vox gives some context for what happened.
Hero of the Week: Tia Oso, the woman who got on stage at Netroots and demanded that the Democratic candidates speak about race. Upshot: “The strength, strategies and success of African-Americans leading the civil rights movement laid the foundation for all progressive movements today.”
Podcast of the Week: “A National Conversation” by On The Media, which has some interesting information about the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Politics Makes Strange Bedfellows: Salon.com, the premier source of poorly punctuated summaries of articles published on other sites, has two really interesting personal essays from a former libertarian who will be voting for Bernie. (I should note that I’m actually a big fan of Salon.com – it’s just that there’s a lot of chaff with the wheat.)
Number of the Week: 11,000. Bernie has officially held the largest meeting of the 2016 presidential race.
Wonky Research Paper of the Week: I got a little nervous reading this article, because it brought to mind vivid memories of word problems in math (if the real compensation for the bottom 80 percent of wage earners fell or stagnated over a seven-year period, how long does it take a train to reach its destination, assuming that real profits among the top 5 percent of earners were going at 112 miles per hour). At any rate, things aren’t looking all that good.
Administrative News: We are working hard on getting a fancy new events calendar up in the next week, as well as resource and issue pages. Stay tuned!
What’s Next: The biggest thing is that on Wednesday, July 29, Bernie is urging all of us to find a party and watch some TV. Since my plan on Wednesdays generally is to watch TV, I will be joining. There are also a couple of tabling opportunities, one this weekend and one on Tuesday.
Enjoy your weekend!