I saw a report of this on tv the other night, and aside from noticing that it was painted with a “the foster family is being ripped apart” brush, the one thing that stood out to me was what a circus it was. There’s the child, clutched to the foster mom’s chest, and the dad, sobbing and making tearful statements...

Boyfriend and I looked into becomign foster parents a few years back. We didn’t due to jobs that we lost, but while we were going through the information sessions, one thing the social workers kept saying was “this is never a system to adopt a child. The gol is always to return the child to relatives. Only if…

Not knowing any further details of the case, my instinctive reaction is to be upset with the foster parents for truly making this girl part of their family when they were told from the outset that this was supposed to be a temporary arrangement, period.

The media has purposefully mis-reported this case from the beginning to perpetuate a lie. The Pages should be re-evaluated as foster parents. They created an unnecessary media circus which caused the girl trauma only to bring attention to themselves.The Pages knew as early as 2011 the girl was NOT ADOPTABLE. They…

Apparently I made a huge mistake by writing two sentences rather than a tome that outlines all racist acts/policies/legislation by all political parties from the Lincoln era to the present! Also, I should have included a history of drug prohibition in the US!

My only question is, will textbooks fifty years from now teach any of this, or will this sanitized version of colorblind history i grew up remain the status quo?

I don’t think you can draw as neat a circle as that around it. This was also a way to ensure that wealth and influence stay where they are, which is to say, to intentionally harm these groups that were opposed to the establishment.

While I agree that the legalization of marijuana would put a HUGE dent into the nature of the War on Drugs, and see a certain end to many of the social problems that accompany it (such as mass incarcerations), I add one caveat that no one seems to have a good answer for:

It’s not the information that’s shocking. What’s nice is that it’s an admission needed to exemplify to stupid white people who don’t believe or understand that white privilege still exists and that these aren’t just urban legends. Which sadly, many white clueless bro dude types believe they are.

I believe the harm done is incidental, though truly, truly terrible.

Progressive black people don’t care whose calling card it is if Democrats are still along for the ride and the end result is that we’re still getting shitted on.

I’m reminded of when a dying Lee Atwater went public with the Southern Strategy, and absolutely no one in the mainstream press cared.

You know what, though? I’m glad he admitted it. Because you know there are denialists to this day who will be all “NO IT WASN’T, NO HE DIDN’T” and all you have to do at that point is just wave the admissions in their face.

I know everyone’s all not-shocked, but it never ceases to amaze me just how insidious institutional racism is. Yeah, the data was indisputable. Yeah we had context clues.

Ehrlichman just shrugged. Then he looked at his watch, handed me a signed copy of his steamy spy novel, The Company,and led me to the door.

...y’now, i was wondering if they applied the minimal ‘breakage’ to the door. Nice.

I have two major takeaways from this:

This feels a lot like Lee Atwater’s famous admission about dog whistles except cranked up to 1 million.

Racism was part of the drug war since the beginning. Billie Holiday was basically stalked by the founder of the drug war.

And invest heavily in Nabisco, Little Debbie and Hostess.