They left that young man’s body lying in the street for more than four hours,” Anthony Bell said on a sweltering August afternoon on West Florissant Street in Ferguson. The crowd was beginning to build for the nightly protests on what passes for Main Street in Ferguson’s black community, a four-lane stretch of bottom-dollar […]

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  If you are very attentive, and live in one of those places where regular state and local political news coverage survives, you may catch snippets of information about state legislative races in your area. More likely, you will see paid advertising or receive direct-mail involving such contests. That’s a shame. Thanks to ideological polarization […]

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  And don’t let the door hit you on the way out. Last week, Detroit’s mayor and city council unanimously voted to fire the city’s emergency manager Kevyn Orr 18 months after Michigan’s Governor Rick Snyder appointed him to run the bankrupt city’s affairs. The Republican governor and Michigan’s Republican Legislature had already pushed the […]

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  More than 400,000 climate protestors marching through Manhattan yesterday turned out because, as Bill McKibben, Eddie Bautista, and La Tonya Crisp-Sauray, wrote last week, the world has left the Holocene behind: scientists tell us that we’ve already raised the planet’s temperature almost one degree Celsius, and are on track for four or five more […]

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  Each of the three judges on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals panel that upheld Wisconsin’s voter ID law last Friday bore the Federalist Society seal of approval when they were appointed to the federal bench. So the decision to toss District Judge Lynn Aldeman’s 70-page opinion that found Wisconsin’s voter ID law in […]

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