So far I've only heard "Ultralight Beam," and it hit me like almost every other Kanye song.

Kramer's next line is a great "Wait, did they just say that on 1998 network television" moment.

McGovern won Massachusetts in '72, while Nixon won every other electoral vote…except for one "faithless elector" from Virginia who voted for the Libertarian candidate.

Nixon took 49 states in '72 and Reagan took 49 states in '84, but that's the closest anyone's come yet.

And her cooking explains yours! Hey-o!

That's racist!

That's not a reference to their mental attitudes, but to their behavior. I don't think, for example, that the cops who killed Freddie Gray necessarily hated his blackness. I think they behaved in the manner of rough people - a/k/a the sort of people the Baltimore PD can afford to hire - who had never been shown any…

So there's no intent to shoot when you draw and point a gun?

I'll just have to let this semantic difference rest here.

You're really comfortable using "they" to refer to the mental attitudes of nearly a million people. I'm not, so I probably can't help in a discussion of their monolithic thought.

I'm not generally in the habit of listing towns where I've lived on Disqus, so you'll have to settle for "rural Vermont."

Oh, well if hundreds did, they obviously must not only be indicative of the other hundreds of thousands, but also proof that those police who have spoken out against police brutality and in favor of healing community relations are…what, lying? I'm not sure.

You'd lose that bet. I've lived in multiple rural communities where the police are armed with pistols and shotguns, where any serious crisis situation requires backup from the state police.

I'm just glad that we've narrowed the window from "anti-civilian" to "guilty of racial profiling to varying degrees," which is a true statement.

If they were not anti-civilian, then they'd treat everyone equally

All police departments are armed with fucking tanks and assault rifles? And all police, by virtue of not being civilians, are necessarily anti-civilian?

Google "police officers against police brutality" and get back to me on that one.

I would say that there are police departments that have responded positively to charges of racial profiling and discrimination, and many more that have not.

Being wealthy or well-connected doesn't take one out of the "civilian" category, though. Being anti-poor puts the police in the same company as almost every group of Americans who aren't poor, including many groups who are really into solving the problems of the abstract poor while finding lots of the actual poor…

Sometimes use of the definite article makes statements so broad as to be meaningless. In a country with literally thousands of jurisdictions, making blanket statements about "the" police guarantees that those statements can be only partially correct.